Literacy and Life

"In Literacy and Life Colin Lankshear delivers an extraordinary, soul-stirring account of an iconic intellectual journey. The book demonstrates that true scholarship is never just about words on a page, but about serving communities, honoring lived experience, and understanding literacy as a vital social practice."

James Paul Gee, Regents Professor, Retired, Arizona State University

"Lankshear makes a rare and distinguished contribution to our understanding of literacy studies over changing times. Lankshear’s gift is his ability to show how equality and justice in education might yet prevail. His reflections are first hand: he has lived literacy and has something wise and humane to say in eloquent prose. A book that has both breadth and depth, Literacy and Life is an absorbing read from beginning to end."

Ilana Snyder, Emeritus Professor, Faculty of Education, Monash University, Australia

"During a week when I already had more than enough to do, I could not put down Literacy and Life—a masterclass in storytelling about how ideas and the people who make them co-emerge. If it is possible to write an intellectual biography that reads like a novel, Colin Lankshear has done it."

Dennis Sumara, Professor of Literacy Education, University of Calgary

"The New Literacy Studies have taken up many forms of self-understanding and representation: maps, comics, games, charts, stories, arguments. What Lankshear offers us in this case is a beautifully crafted poem. This epic account stitches together, simultaneously, an expansive social world of literacy scholarship that is also personally intimate and courageous. In Lankshear’s odyssey, we encounter all manner of literacy “stuff” through his ever-questioning eyes: Monte Fresco, the new basics, fast capitalism, Paulo Freire, Space Invaders, text as carĩno, attention structures, zines, Discourse, memes, and covert war. The complexities of Lankshear’s landscape, and the transformations of his personal understanding and responsive work while on the journey are saturated with deep insight, wit, and the generous grace of a seasoned scholar and poet."

Kevin Leander, Professor, Southern Denmark University

"This book should be guaranteed a hands-off policy that makes manipulation by Generative Artificial Intelligence tools illegal. The author’s account of his own pathway into and through the New Literacy Studies movement is unique. From the first chapter onward, it reads like a novel, but I recognize the facts it documents because I lived through the same slice of history and interacted with Colin Lankshear both personally and professionally. His grounded stance on the politics and culture of literacy remains fresh in my memory of how a paradigm shift took place that is still alive and well. I have a sense this book will lead to a sequel, written in the same style. In the meantime, enjoy Colin’s gift of communicating with his readers, be they longtime friends or new acquaintances."

Donna E. Alvermann, Ph.D., Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus of Language and Literacy Education, University of Georgia, Athens, USA

Acknowledgments

Foreword James Paul Gee

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Bibliography

About the Author

Index

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).