Artifactual Literacies

To re-engage students with literacy, teachers need an entry point that recognizes and honors students’ out-of-school identities. This book looks at how artifacts (everyday objects) access the daily, sensory world in which students live. Exploring how artifacts can generate literacy learning, the book shows teachers how to use a family photo, heirloom, or recipe to tell intergenerational tales; how to collaborate with local museums and cultural centers; how to create new material artifacts; and much more. Featuring vignettes, lesson examples, and photographs, the text includes chapters on community connections, critical literacy, adolescent writing, and digital storytelling.

Book Features:

• A theoretical framework for teaching literacy that unites the domains of home and school and brings students’ passions to the forefront.
• A fresh, integrated synthesis of the fields of New Literacy Studies, multimodality, material cultural studies, and literacy education.
• New field-tested ideas for creating lessons that improve literacy standards.

Kate Pahl is a senior lecturer in education in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of Sheffield, UK. Jennifer Rowsell holds the Canada Research Chair in Multiliteracies at Brock University, Canada.

“This engaging book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of how artifactual knowledge and practices cross borders in ways that can lead to powerful learning.”
—Rebecca Rogers, University of Missouri–St. Louis

“Pahl and Rowsell provide a rich framework for approaching and engaging everyday artifacts as potential sites of story, community building, and identity performance….They open significant new avenues to literacy educators.”
—From the Foreword by Lesley Bartlett and Lalitha Vasudevan, both at Teachers College, Columbia University