Reclaiming Literacies as Meaning Making

Book excerpt: Whitmore and Meyer bring together top literacy scholars from around the world to introduce the concept of manifestations: evidence of meaning making in literacy events, practices, processes, products, and thinking. Manifestation are windows into literacy identities, and serve as affective and sociocultural signifiers of learners’ understanding at a point in time and in a specific context. The volume reclaims progressive spaces for understanding reading, writing, drawing, speaking, playing, and other literacies. It grounds manifestations of literacies in the discourse of meaning making and demonstrates how literacy learners and educators are active agents in this complex, social, political, emotional, and multimodal process. Ideal for preservice teachers, graduate students, and researchers in literacy education, this book shifts the conversation away from treating literacies as acquired commodities and illustrates how educators engage with learners to deepen understanding of literacy learners’ experiences. Organized by five pillars of literacy—teaching, learning, language, curriculum, and sociocultural contexts—each section covers critical and cutting-edge topics and offers examples, tools, and strategies for research and practical applications in diverse classroom settings. Each chapter includes a range of examples and is followed by a short, complementary reading extension to engage the reader.