Research Guides: ENGL1010: Instructor Resource Guide: Learning to Read and Write

Understanding Literacy

Literacy is All Around Us
The National Writing Project uses a wordless video as a discussion prompt to help students engage with and understand the complexity of their own literacy. What does it mean to read, and can you read in more than one way? This idea might be worth duplicating.
The Many Forms of Literacy
Another lesson idea from the National Writing Project. This one uses the building blocks of music to illustrate how literacies build on each other to create a more complex definition.
New Kinds of Literacy, and the World of Visual Understanding
Can we learn something about literacy by exploring visual understanding? An exploratory paper by Conrad Taylor.
Literacy Mid-South
Show your students that literacy-learning reaches beyond grade school. Organizations like Literacy Mid-South organize for literacy learning in youth and adults through tutoring and fund-raising as well as support reading by organizing events like the annual Mid-South Book Festival.

The Digital Archives of Literacy Narratives - The Digital Archives of Literacy Narratives (DALN) is a publicly available archive of personal literacy narratives in a variety of formats (text, video, audio) that together provide a historical record of the literacy practices and values of contributors, as those practices and values change.
Stories That Speak to Us - A collection of online exhibits by guest curators that present and analyze selected personal literacy narratives from the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (DALN). A great way to both understand the DALN and to see how literacy narratives are valuable as tools to further the understanding of literacies across culture, gender, race, and literacy modes.

From Story to Analysis: Reflection and Uptake in the Literacy Narrative Assignment
Full text access to this essay that studies and reflects on "core composition features that stimulate instructor uptake" when using the literacy narrative pedagogy.

Multi-Literacy and the Digital Environment - The National Writing Project wants to introduce you to the ways in which we "read" across texts, situations, environments, and spaces.
Digital Poetry: What Happened Here? - Poet and digital literacy advocate Kevin Hodgson experiments with digital writing and poetry.
The Meaning and Relevance of Video Game Literacy - "Jeroen Bourgonjon argues that video gaming deserves scholarly attention as a social practice and a site for meaning-making and learning." From Purdue University Comparative Literature and Culture.
Can you read movies? - Here are ten tools to "reading" film.

Graphic Encounters by Dale Jacobs
Call Number: LB1044.9.C59 J33 2013eb
ISBN: 9780826444240
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud
Call Number: PN6710 .M335 1994
ISBN: 006097625X
Publication Date: 1994-04-27
Multimodal Literacies and Emerging Genres by Tracey Bowen (Editor); Carl Whithaus (Editor)
Call Number: PE1404 .M86 2013eb eBook
ISBN: 0822962160
Decoded by Jay-Z
Call Number: ML420.J29 A3 2010 c.3
ISBN: 9781400068920

The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies