Chapter 9: Teacher Knowledge-In-Action

Literacy practices have changed in the 21st century digital world. Ways of using and creating texts have moved from print-only forms to print-mixed forms like vlogs and mashups, wikis and Nings, and games and virtual environments, as adolescents increasingly create content embedding visuals and music for Web 2.0 environments. Millennial students (born after 1980) carry these new literacies to school, but often have to leave them outside the classroom door (Gee, 2004). Providing teachers with opportunities to learn these social literacies and use them as learning tools in the classroom is an obvious solution that, it turns out, is quite complex (e.g., Coiro, 2005; Leu, 2002; Miller, 2007). School contexts, curricula, time constraints, testing, and teacher beliefs about what counts as knowing—all serve as impediments to such integrations. Even professional development can be a hindrance.