Spring, 2006
Dana Wilber Cammack
Early Childhood, Elementary, and Literacy Education
College of Education and Human Services
Inquiry questions:
The literacy research community has long known the discrepancy between the practices of schooling and those reading, writing, and language activities outside school walls. From the work of Heath (1986), to Street (1996) and many others, the differences in school language and literacy use have been explored in detail – for the implications in terms of power (particularly when it comes to terms like literate/illiterate), access, and education. As multiple languages and diverse communities enrich the United States, issues of language and literacy become more complex and more fascinating. A new wrinkle has been the invention and addition of new technological tools (Lankshear & Knobel, 2003). Computers and the Internet have had an impact on literacy and language far beyond what we could have imagined – and a new field of literacy research, termed “new literacies,” explores how these tools shift the ways in which we use language and literacy to fit new technologies and spaces. Just think of the ways in which we read online or use language in email or a teenager uses Instant Messenger – just those short instances illuminate the kinds of changes this field explores. Yet most of this work has been done with children and teenagers – particularly teens high-school aged and younger. Little to no work has concerned the new literacy practices, or even the general literacy practices of college students. While recent, wide-scale studies (NEA, 2005; AIR, 2005) have made claims about the decline of literacy among college-graduates, very little is known about either the specific literacy practices of college students or their “new literacies.” Therefore, my research questions target this gap in the research.
They are: 1) What are the literacy practices of college-age students, across a variety of spaces? 2) Are they truly “new”, and in what ways? 3) How are they related to the practices expected and sanctioned by the university? 4) How do the practices of college students interrelate with issues of power, access, and the Digital Divide?
General foci:
1. Reviewing what we know – not just from the literacy research community, but through the lens of technology research and higher education history through the development of a comprehensive literature review
2. Conducting original research of a mixed design methodological frame: first, an ethnographic study over an academic year (2006-07) of a group of five to seven friends at MSU and, second, a larger-scale survey and assessment of the literacy practices and abilities of second-semester freshmen at MSU
Specific themes of this research:
• Very little is known in a historical sense not only about the literacy abilities of college students, but about their literacy practices more specifically, especially since the introduction of new technologies. The assumption is that college students are proficient and avid readers, yet recent surveys by the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Institutes for Research (both 2005) suggest otherwise. The aim of my research is to collect data to either support or contest these findings through the experiences of the students themselves.
• College admissions are changing, both demographically and academically. More and more colleges admit diverse groups of students and are implementing increasing numbers of basic skills and remedial courses, one of which I teach at MSU – Basic Reading Skills 053. I would like to know how the practices of my students correlate with their abilities and how their uses of different technologies as they develop new literacy practices might be used to improve both their reading and the basic skills course.