Literacy researchers interested in how specific sites of learning situate students and the ways they make sense of their worlds are asking new questions and thinking in new ways about how time and space operate as contextual dimensions in the learning lives of students, teachers, and families. These investigations inform questions related to history, identity, methodology, in-school and out-of school spaces, and local/global literacies. An engaging blend of methodological, theoretical, and empirical work featuring well-known researchers on the topic, this book provides a conceptual framework for extending existing conceptions of context and provides unique and ground-breaking examples of empirical research.

Literacy researchers interested in how specific sites of learning situate students and the ways they make sense of their worlds are asking new questions and thinking in new ways about how time and space operate as contextual dimensions in the learning lives of students, teachers, and families. These investigations inform questions related to history, identity, methodology, in-school and out-of school spaces, and local/global literacies. An engaging blend of methodological, theoretical, and empirical work featuring well-known researchers on the topic, this book provides a conceptual framework for extending existing conceptions of context and provides unique and ground-breaking examples of empirical research.

This book asks researchers what uncertainty means for literacy research, and for how literacy plays through uncertain lives. While the book is not focused only on COVID-19, it is significant that it was written in 2020-2021, when our authors’ and readers’ working and personal lives were thrown into disarray by stay-at-home orders. The book opens up new spaces for examining ways that literacy has come to matter in the world. Drawing on the reflections of international literacy researchers and important new voices, this book presents re-imagined methods and theoretical imperatives. These difficult times have surfaced new communicative practices and opened out spaces for exploration and activism, prompting re-examination of relationships between research, literacy and social justice. The book considers varied and consequential events to explore new ways to think and research literacy and to unsettle what we know and accept as fundamental to literacy research, opening ourselves up for change. It provides direction to the field of literacy studies as pressing global concerns are prompting literacy researchers to re-examine what and how they research in times of precarity.

The Routledge Handbook of Literacy Studies offers a comprehensive view of the field of language and literacy studies. With forty-three chapters reflecting new research from leading scholars in the field, the Handbook pushes at the boundaries of existing fields and combines with related fields and disciplines to develop a lens on contemporary scholarship and emergent fields of inquiry. The Handbook is divided into eight sections: • The foundations of literacy studies • Space-focused approaches • Time-focused approaches • Multimodal approaches • Digital approaches • Hermeneutic approaches • Making meaning from the everyday • Co-constructing literacies with communities. This is the first handbook of literacy studies to recognise new trends and evolving trajectories together with a focus on radical epistemologies of literacy. The Routledge Handbook of Literacy Studies is an essential reference for undergraduate and postgraduate students and those researching and working in the areas of applied linguistics and language and literacy.

With the surge in electronic access to the library’s resources, there has been an ongoing discussion about the need for a physical library building. On a college or university campus, the library is a destination for its users. Students, faculty and staff go to the library for various reasons. Their usage makes the academic library a valuable learning space on campus. However, not much is known about how the library space contributes to user learning. In Assessing Library Space for Learning, chapters discuss library usage at academic institutions and how that usage is an integral part of the student learning experience. Included are the perspectives of an architect who is tasked with designing library spaces with learning in mind, a psychologist whose professional research focuses on the concept of place, and a dynamic group of academic librarians who are dedicated to making the library conducive to the needs of their learners. This book is a combination of theory, practical and research based chapters with an overall focus on the intersection of library space and learning. The authors demonstrate the importance of the library space in our users’ lives. In addition, the authors discuss the importance of determining ways to learn how library space contributes to user learning. Readers will gain an understanding of the library space as a valuable learning space and the steps librarians need to take to assess learning in the academic library.

Novice and early career researchers often have difficulty with understanding how theory, data analysis and interpretation of findings “hang together” in a well-designed and theorized qualitative research investigation and with learning how to draw on such understanding to conduct rigorous data analysis and interpretation of their analytic results. Data Analysis, Interpretation, and Theory in Literacy Studies Research demonstrates how to design, conduct and analyze a well put together qualitative research project. Using their own successful studies, chapter authors spell out a problem area, research question, and theoretical framing, carefully explaining their choices and decisions. They then show in detail how they analyzed their data, and why they took this approach. Finally, they demonstrate how they interpreted the results of their analysis, to make them meaningful in research terms. Approaches include interactional sociolinguistics, microethnographic discourse analysis, multimodal analysis, iterative coding, conversation analysis, and multimediated discourse analysis, among others. This book will appeal to beginning researchers and to literacy researchers responsible for teaching qualitative literacy studies research design at undergraduate and graduate levels. Perfect for courses such as: Literacy Research Seminar | Introduction to Qualitative Research | Advanced Research Methods | Studying New Literacies and Media | Research Perspectives in Literacy | Discourse Analysis | Advanced Qualitative Data Analysis | Sociolinguistic Analysis | Classroom Language Research

This timely, edited volume brings together interdisciplinary perspectives on space and spatiality in inclusive education discourses. With research from an international range of scholars, the book explores the intersections, boundaries, and intermediary spaces of inclusion and exclusion within educational contexts. It advances thinking in inclusive education research and links discourses of the spatial turn in inclusive education with a call for thinking spatially. Instead of defining one spatial approach as the overarching framework for analysis, it considers the potential of combining spatial approaches from diverse disciplines, including social sciences, educational science, and geography. The book systematically identifies and links the relations between a diversity of spatial theoretical perspectives and phenomena of inclusion/exclusion. This volume provides invaluable, transdisciplinary readings and reflections on space and spatiality in inclusive education, and will be highly relevant for academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of inclusive education, educational theory and the sociology of education.

In recent years there has been increasing interest in issues of space and spatiality in the social sciences and humanities generally, if less so in the study of education. This relative lack of interest is surprising given the importance of space and time in the organization of teaching, learning and research. For instance, the timetable and project timeline are central to the organization of learning and knowledge production whether in schools, colleges or universities. Classrooms, workshops and laboratories have different spatial layouts, which support certain forms of interaction and communication. When we add to this, the increasing distances across which knowledge, understanding and competence are being distributed through the use of information and communications technologies, the fact that issues of space have not been taken up seems more than an oversight. This relative lack of interest in space becomes even more surprising when one considers the extensive use of spatial metaphors in the discussion of education and pedagogy. For instance, the notions of open, distance and distributed learning and student-centredness, border crossing, and communities of practice all have a spatial dimension to them. Notions of a spiral curriculum act as a spatial imaginary. Indeed some metaphors, such as flexibility seem to be suggestive of the possibility that all constraints of space and time can be conquered in the provision of learning opportunities throughout life. This collection of chapters from researchers around the world attempts to address these issues, to examine the significance of space for curriculum, learning and identity.

During his lifetime Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991) was renowned in France as a philosopher, sociologist and activist. Although he published more than 70 books, few were available in English until The Production of Space was translated in 1991. While this work - often associated with geography - has influenced educational theory’s ‘spatial turn,’ educationalists have yet to consider Lefebvre’s work more broadly. This book engages in an educational reading of the selection of Lefebvre’s work that is available in English translation. After introducing Lefebvre’s life and works, the book experiments with his concepts and methods in a series of five ‘spatial histories’ of educational theories. In addition to The Production of Space, these studies develop themes from Lefebvre’s other translated works: Rhythmanalysis, The Explosion, the three volumes of Critique of Everyday Life and a range of his writings on cities, Marxism, technology and the bureaucratic state. In the course of these inquiries, Lefebvre’s own passionate interest in education is uncovered: his critiques of bureaucratised schooling and universities, the analytic concepts he devised to study educational phenomena, and his educational methods. Throughout the book Middleton demonstrates how Lefebvre’s conceptual and methodological tools can enhance the understanding of the spatiotemporal location of educational philosophy and theory. Bridging disciplinary divides, it will be key reading for researchers and academics studying the philosophy, sociology and history of education, as well as those working in fields beyond education including geography, history, cultural studies and sociology.

Digital literacy practices have often been celebrated as means of transcending the constraints of the physical world through the production of new social spaces. At the same time, literacy researchers and educators are coming to understand all the ways that place matters. This volume, with contributors from across the globe, considers how space/place, identities, and the role of digital literacies create opportunities for individuals and communities to negotiate living, being, and learning together with and through digital media. The chapters in this volume consider how social, cultural, historical, and political literacies are brought to bear on a range of places that traverse the urban, rural, and suburban/exurban, with emphasis placed on the ways digital technology is used to create identities and do work within social, digital, and material worlds. This includes agentive work in digital literacies from a variety of identities or subjectivities that disrupt metronormativity, urban centrism (and other -isms) on the way to more authentic engagement with their communities and others. Featuring instances of research and practice across intersections of differences (including, but not limited to race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and language) and places, the contributions in this volume demonstrate the ways that digital literacies hold educative potential.