Languages and Literacies as Mobile and Placed Resources


Book Description

Languages and Literacies as Mobile and Placed Resources explores how languages and literacies are implicated in the complex relationship between place and mobility. It is a book that represents the next wave in literacy studies in which theories of mobility, networking and globalisation have emerged to account for the dynamic landscape of globally circulating communication resources. Authors in this volume take up a more complex way of thinking about resources, applying it to consider languages and literacies as assemblages or as parts of assemblages that are involved in learning, teaching and meaning-making. The book addresses forms of text and mobility that arise in contexts outside of formal education including marketing, charity, journalism, community organisation and parenting. It also addresses school contexts and higher education settings. Key topics explored include: Consequences of workplace confinement Literacies as placed resources in the context of rural communities Literacy, sustainability and landscapes for learning Documenting networked knowledge on tablets Mobilising literacy policy through resources Global Englishes as placed resources Languages as contextualised resources Shaping a digital academic writing resource in a transcultural space With an international range of carefully chosen contributors, this book is a must read text for all academics interested in semiotics and literacy studies.




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The Common School Awakening


Book Description

A statue of Horace Mann, erected in front of the Boston State House in 1863, declares him the "Father of the American Public School System." For over a century and a half, most narratives about early American education have taken this epithet as the truth. As Mann looms over the Boston Common, so he has also loomed over discussions of early American schooling. Other scholarship has emphasized economic factors as the main reason for the emergence of public schools. The Common School Awakening offers a new narrative about the rise of public schools in America that counters these conceptions. In this book, David Komline explains how a broad and distinctly American religious consensus emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century, allowing people from across the religious spectrum to cooperate in systematizing and professionalizing America's schools in an effort to Christianize the country. At the height of this movement, several states introduced state-sponsored teacher training colleges and concentrated government oversight of schools in offices such as the one held by Mann. Shortly thereafter, the religious consensus that had served as the foundation for this common school system disintegrated. But the system itself remained, the legacy of not just one man, but of a whole network of reformers who put into motion a transatlantic and transdenominational religious movement - the "Common School Awakening."