Adolescents’ New Literacies with and through Mobile Phones

“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
“Easily the most anticipated book of 2017 when it comes to understanding young people’s steadfast commitment to learning on, through, and with their mobile phones. Julie Warner knows firsthand of which she writes.” Donna E. Alvermann, Distinguished Research Professor, The University of Georgia
“Adolescents today are writing more than ever and in spaces that we never before knew existed. These new digital and portable writing spaces are as dialogic as they are distinct. So it seems today’s youth hold the world quite literally in their hands. They palm the future of literacy, newer literacies, in ways that translate cultural practices of old into meaningful social practices anew. In this most important contribution to the new literacy studies, Julie Warner takes us into the life of youth through mobile phones, hashtags, and ‘digital curation’ practices that illuminate an exciting and critical digital world of words to which we should become more attuned.” David E. Kirkland, Director, New York University Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools, and Professor of English Education
“There is so much more to mobile phones than calling friends and family. Mobile phones are portals to diverse, engaging, and creative practices. Julie Warner invites us into this rich world of phoned-centered literacy practices with respect and wonder for the young people who enact them. Sometimes playful, sometimes affect-laden, sometimes intellectual, the literacy practices that young people apply in their use and enjoyment of cell phones prominently display their everyday multimodal and discursive competencies. Taking a landscape view of mobile phone knowledge work, Adolescents’ New Literacies with and through Mobile Phones examines mobile phones across spaces; social mediation of phone content and images; chronotopic explorations; and digital curation as telling examples of younger generations’ often invisible repertoires of practice and ways of knowing.” Jennifer Rowsell, Canada Research Chair, Brock University
“Smartphone use is likely the most pervasive form of embodied digital capital for youth. They are constantly integrating and adding new elements to their repertoires from each other, the environment, and in the quietude of their beds at night. Their coded speech or digital discourse, though, is under constant scrutiny and threat for extinction when schools put digital discourse on silent or mute. Julie Warner understands this, and provides pedagogical strategies and roadmaps for teachers to mediate this threat by unsilencing, unmuting and unlocking this digital capital in the classroom. For every teacher who has perceived smartphones as disruption, this book is your answer for powerful and innovative ways to unleash coded speech as a motivator for learning. In fact, by the time you finish reading this book, selfies will take on an entirely different meaning in your life and in classrooms. Snap and type away!” sj Miller, Deputy Director of Educational Equity Supports and Services, Metropolitan Center for Research and Equity and the Transformation of Schools, New York University