Which New Literacies? Dialogue and Performance in Youth Writing

Measurements of literacy learning in schools, the authors argue, have settled into static and individualized understandings of what should be the most invigorating and social aspect of schooling for youth. By contrast, this article explores the place of aesthetic, dialogic, and performative forms of literacy in the adolescent classroom by excavating ethnographic data from an urban multicultural high school. Close examination of student writing, field notes, and teacher interviews illustrates how the space of the drama classroom creates a laboratory for experimentation with many forms of “new literacies” through rich engagements with the lives inside and the worlds beyond the classroom. The authors reason that drama pedagogies are both creative and critical forms of literacy that offer empirical weight to newer theories of literacy and lead to new modes of theorizing the multiple acts of literacy in schools.