New Media & New Literacies

www.deviantart.com T his week's readings deepened my understanding of what it means to design learning that goes beyond the screen, especially in early childhood settings like Pre-K. At this age, learning is deeply sensory, physical, and social. While digital tools have their place, young children need experiences that allow them to explore, move, talk, and create with their hands. As Leander, Phillips, and Taylor (2010) explain, learning happens across spaces, not just on devices, but through interaction with people, objects, and environments.  This perspective was echoed in the Alki Journal (Tolliver, 2020), which emphasized that digital literacy in early childhood should always be paired with physical engagement and social interaction. Tolliver argues that screens should enhance, not replace, the fundamental ways children make sense of their world through play, exploration, and storytelling.  Hsu & Wang (2017) also contribute a crucial view: rethinking how language lear...

  Reframing Literacy as Social Practice Knobel & Lankshear (2007) invite us to expand what we mean by literacy. They define literacy not as isolated reading and writing skills, but as "socially recognized ways of generating, communicating and negotiating meaningful content through a medium of encoded texts withing contexts of participation in Discourses". In other words, literacy isn't just about mastering letters, it's about belonging to communities, sharing meaning, and creating together.  What strikes me most is their distinction between the "new technical stuff", digital tools, and the "new ethos stuff", values like participation, collaboration, remixing, and distributed expertise. This shift reminds us that simply having access to technology does not automatically transform learning, it is how we use these tools within a culture of shared meaning making that truly matters. It challenges educators to move beyond surface-level integration an...

 As a Universal Prekindergarten (UPK) Director, I witness firsthand how young children come into our classrooms with a rich variety of experiences, languages, and ways of communicating. Every day, I see children using gestures, storytelling, drawings, songs, and play to make sense of the world around them. These are not just moments of creativity, they are powerful acts of literacy. In both my professional and personal life, the concept of new literacies has deeply shaped how I think about communication, learning, and the purpose of early education.    https://www.beginlearning.com/parent-resources/learning-through-play/  (LeVos, 2022) New literacies go beyond reading and writing in the traditional sense. They encompass the many ways people understand, interpret, and express meaning through digital tools, visual arts, oral language, movement, and culturally rooted practices. In my personal life, I rely on new literacies daily, from using voice memos to communicate qu...