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In the context of growing cultural and linguistic diversity, rapid changes in school and societal demographics, meaning-making systems, and digital technologies are reshaping social, cultural and intellectual potentials. However, these changes also increasingly create mismatches between teacher and student populations-especially mismatches of cultures and technologies-which can cause teachers to see diversity as deficit and student digital expertise as hindrance. The NLG is committed to preparing teachers, researchers, and future professors in theoretical, empirical, and practical understandings of why and how to access students' rich funds of knowledge developed outside of school as multimodal tools for mediating in-school learning in the 21st century. The NLG vision is built on the assumption that literacy, language, culture, and technology integration are all social processes shaped by and situated in multiple contexts, discourses and meaning-making systems. With our focus on New Literacies, we are committed to putting powerful tools of inquiry and communication into the hands of diverse students, teachers, and teacher educators. Such developments promoted in the innovation hub of NLG can change significantly the educational ecology of schools (from preschool to professional school) and prepare teachers and students to participate critically in an increasingly diverse and digital democracy. Specifically, this interdisciplinary scholarly community across the University at Buffalo includes undergraduate, graduate, and teacher education in the Departments of Communication and Library Science in the School of Informatics, as well as the Departments of Educational Leadership and Policy, and Learning and Instruction in the Graduate School of Education. The 16 Ph.D. faculty comprising the New Literacies Group create cutting-edge, high-quality research and development in New Literacies and amplify this work through scholarly exchange, collaboration, and integration. Faculty teaching and scholarship focus on the creative and functional uses of new digital and information technologies in formal (e.g., public schools), as well as less formal (e.g., libraries) educative sites. Projects include research on the ways young people are mobilizing popular media cultures and digital technologies in new and creative forms, and the ways new literacies and more traditional print-based literacy can be used to meet the goals and needs of new generations of diverse youth. Since 2000, the group has produced 182 publications, including 21 books, and 161 journal articles and book chapters. There are several new centers of research in the educational community that include a new literacies research agenda, but NLG is the only one of its kind to bridge the gap between research and practice from a multidisciplinary perspective so often missing in higher education. In
all, we realize our mission through our commitment to developing
a knowledge base of theory, research, and practice about New Literacies
in cultural environments in the university, PreK-12 schools, and
the community. Through member research and publication; pioneering
New Literacies courses; a national speaker's series; affiliations
with national groups; university-, school- and community-based
New Literacies projects; mentoring of doctoral students; and other
collaborative activities, the NLG works to develop, promote, and
study transformative New Literacies' teaching and learning as
catalysts for school/community change and social justice. |
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