Abstract
Literacy is changing in theory and practice at a head-spinning rate in sync with the rapid evolution of digital technologies, and transforming urban geographies. Literacy at the coalface of early childhood learning is under tremendous pressure to understand how to incorporate children’s preschool digital socialization into classroom learning where entrenched legacy media conventions still dominate literacy pedagogies. Literacy, media, technology: Past, present and future offers a 360° vista on past, present and future directions in literacy and childhood media culture.
The volume is a beautifully organized collection of chapters from researchers in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and the United States, each contributing a piece to the puzzle of how we justify past understandings of literacy, media and technology with the expanding possibilities of today’s multidimensional digital canvasses. Distinguished research professor Donna Alvermann introduces the collection in her foreword, looking at the past in the present, hinging on the metaphor of pentimento from Hellman’s (1973) book on painting. Alvermann recollects how a canvas can reveal a past choice that the artist subsequently changed, showing up as a ghostly presence as the paint thins with time. In this, she makes an analogy to how new literacies reveal something of older ideas and practices.
Literacy, media, technology: Past, present and future is ingeniously sectioned by conventional media player buttons, signalled iconically: 
sets the historical stage with three studies of 20th century media trends, followed by 
, in which three researchers examine literacies in everyday lived experiences. 
, in which three studies detail changing notions of craft in literacy activities. 
offers a fascinating glimpse into the postdigital, examining the virtual-meets-embodied world of digital play. The collection culminates with 
, in which the editors sum up the sweeping vista of the volume. The treatment is multidimensional, in keeping with the scope of change in childhood media literacies.
sets the stage with chapters by three established scholars: Julia Gillen, on the postcard as a forerunner to Instagram; Margaret Mackey on television culture, detailing programmes I watched myself as a child in Atlantic Canada (e.g. Howdy Doody); and Jackie Marsh, on media play from Davy Crockett to Frozen. Marsh, in her chapter on historical changes in media consumption, invokes Lévi-Stauss’s (1966) notion of bricolage, describing children as bricoleurs to reinforce the notion that children appropriate what is available in their creation of play. She introduces the concept of the viral playground, foregrounding the fickle nature of the trendy in media culture, as well as a notion that runs throughout the pages of the volume: digital play as assemblage.
Susan Jones starts with an ethnographic examination of everyday literacies and inequalities, putting the politics of class under the microscope in the context of a British government-built housing estate. Her chapter is followed by Tisha Lewis Ellison’s look at three African American mothers’ family stories in a digital storytelling project. In the following chapter, Christian Ehret outlines a schizoanalytic cartography of an adolescent’s new media-making, bringing place into mobile literacies by mapping ‘moving embodied experiences’ (p. 99). The entanglement of the embodied and the mobile in digital practices is a theme that recurs throughout the volume.
The importance of the mobile in emerging digital literacy trends is featured in 
with John Potter and Theo Bryer’s chapter on children and youth filming with mobile devices. The authors note how mobile film-making challenges the stability of legacy film-making practices in the emergence of the haptic, which they conceptualize as ‘finger flowment’ (p. 123). Natalia Kucirkova details a project on intergenerational digital literacies in which British children used a storytelling app on iPads to engage meaningfully with family histories.
In , Becky Parry describes a small-scale story rewriting project based on the 1960s television series Doctor Who, framing her analysis with the landmark 1996 article by the New London Group. This is followed by Clare Dowdall’s doctoral study on children’s text production on a social networking site, in which she suggests a digital update on the English functional competence framework for writing towards a holistic approach enabling ‘the potential for children to be constructed as critical and agentive designers’ (p. 179). In light of our own longitudinal action research with children composing plurilingual, multimodal textual products at an elementary school in Canada (Lotherington and Paige, 2017), I could not be more supportive of this shift in mindset. In his chapter, Julian McDougall examines how students read a videogame. Boy 17 is metaphorically based on Williamson’s (1982) Girl Number 20; it represents not just one boy, but a trend. This chapter underlines a substantial difficulty facing many educators today: the brick-wall effect on teachers attempting to foster creativity and teach multilayered digital texts in the face of political insistence on backward-looking curricular objectives and assessment measures. McDougall’s studies cross diverse English contexts; the issues he raises, however, apply broadly across political borders.
The relationship of the digital and the embodied re-emerges in . I note with interest that the icon used signifies fast forward to the end in contrast to the rewind button, which can also reflect a beginning stop point () but, in the case of this book, does not. Thomas Apperley, Darshana Jayemanne and Bjorn Nansen describe interwoven digital-material play in the term postdigital, and note the importance of this enlarged framework for understanding gaming literacy, bringing the concept of assemblage into play again. They describe complex contexts of postdigital play as invoking an ‘aesthetics of recruitment’ (p. 207), speaking to asymmetries in play experiences. Cathy Burnett and Guy Merchant continue the discussion on the mobile and embodiment, assemblage and virtual play, focusing on the construction of, play with and in and eventual digital loss of the virtual English town, Barnsborough, enmeshing the concept of assemblage with ‘enchantment’ (p. 224) in digital play.
In , the editors reflect on the old in the new in evolving digital media literacies, as does Alvermann in her Foreword, embracing the eerie shadow of déjà vu in the potential to think differently about enduring dilemmas in literacy.
This is an excellent collection. The only niggle is the lack of engagement with multilingualism in the literacy classroom, which is a very real aspect of literacy education around the globe, given the rapid movement of cultural flows transforming urban geographies. This may, in part, reflect the volume’s skew towards studies contextualized in England, a country which does not extend an official political welcome to languages apart from the one we all use that takes its name from the land: English.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.