Colin Lankshear

Colin Lankshear is an independent educational researcher, writer, and teacher based in Mexico, where he has lived primarily since 1999. He is currently an adjunct professor at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Canada. Lankshear worked in the Education Department of the Faculty of Arts at Auckland University, New Zealand between 1976 and 1991, where he first became interested in literacy and found a research ‘home’ in the new literacy studies. From 1993 to 1998, Lankshear was a professor and research director at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. He was a Heritage Fellow of the Mexican Council of Sciences and Technologies during 2000 and 2001, and subsequently held part-time visiting scholar and professorial research fellow positions in Australian and Canadian universities.

He has published works individually and collaboratively on wide ranging aspects of literacies as social practices within school, communities, workplaces, and online environments. For over 20 years, Lankshear researched and published with Michele Knobel in the area of new literacies. He continues to teach on a contract-by-contract basis in a masters of education literacy specialism at Mount Saint Vincent University. In his spare time, he enjoys riding motorcycles and producing coffee by hand from beans grown on an acre of land on the outskirts of Coatepec, Veracruz, the “coffee capital” of Mexico.

His books include Literacy, Schooling and Revolution; Critical Literacy: Politics, Praxis and the Postmodern (edited with Peter McLaren); The New Work Order; Behind the Language of the New Capitalism (with James Paul Gee and Glynda Hull); Changing Literacies; Teachers and Technoliteracy (with Ilana Snyder and Bill Green); A Handbook for Teacher Research (with Michele Knobel); New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Social Learning (with Michele Knobel); and Data Analysis, Interpretation and Theory in Literacy Studies Research (edited with Michele Knobel and Judy Kalman).