Adolescents’ New Literacies with and through Mobile Phones

Julie Warner

Adolescents’ New Literacies
with and through Mobile Phones

PETER LANG

New York • Bern • Frankfurt • Berlin

Brussels • Vienna • Oxford • Warsaw

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Warner, Julie, author.
Title: Adolescents’ new literacies with and through mobile phones / Julie Warner.
Description: New York: Peter Lang, 2017.
Series: New literacies and digital epistemologies; vol. 79 | ISSN 1523-9543
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016023382 | ISBN 978-1-4331-4407-3 (hardcover: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4331-4408-0 (paperback: alk. paper) | ISBN 978-1-4331-4413-4 (ebook pdf)
ISBN 978-1-4331-4414-1 (epub) | ISBN 978-1-4331-4415-8 (mobi)
Subjects: LCSH: Composition (Language arts)—Study and teaching—United States.
Mobile communication systems in education—United States.
Literacy—Technological innovations—United States.
Education—Effect of technological innovations on—United States.
Social media. | Smartphones.
Classification: LCC LC151 .W29 2017 | DDC 808/.0420712—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016023382
DOI 10.3726/b11221

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data are available
on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/.

© 2017 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York 29 Broadway, 18th floor, New York, NY 10006

www.peterlang.com

All rights reserved. Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm, xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited.

About the author

Julie Warner holds a doctorate of education from Teachers College, Columbia University. She is 2015 Presidential Management Fellow and works as an Education Research Analyst at the United States Department of Education. She is a Nationally Board Certified Teacher and former high school teacher. Julie is also a fellow of the National Writing Project.

About the book

This book provides a deeper understanding of the phone-based composing practices of youth and their implications for literacy learning. In the United States, smartphone use among teens is nearly universal, yet many youth who are avid digital composers still struggle with formal schooled literacy. The widespread and rapid embrace of smartphones by youth from all income levels has had a substantial impact on the way that young people approach the act of composing, yet to date, little to no work has explored digital photography and text curation through popular apps like Twitter and Instagram and their impact on literacy, including formal schooled literacy. As more schools are moving to Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) models and lifting classroom bans on cellphones, classroom teachers need information about the affordances of phones for formal literacy learning, which this book provides.

This book will also be of interest to those in courses in the fields of education, new literacies, cultural studies/youth culture, literacy studies, communication arts, and anthropology of education/social sciences. This book could be used in a course on online/Internet ethnography. It could also be used in a more general research methods course to illustrate the combination of online and offline data collection. Outside of research methods courses, it could be used in courses on literacies, digital literacies, youth culture, popular culture and media, or mobile learning.

“Julie Warner’s Adolescents’ New Literacies with and through Mobile Phones is timely and important. It is timely because many young people’s most pervasive literacy practices today seem trivial to many adults. It is important because these new practices can, in fact, lead to twenty-first-century skills and seriously compete, in depth and impact, with school-based literacy practices…Warner’s book is crucial today.”

—From the Foreword by James Paul Gee, Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies, Regents’ Professor, Arizona State University