Artifactual Literacies

To re-engage students with literacy, teachers need an entry point that recognizes and honors students’ out-of-school identities. This book looks at how artifacts (everyday objects) access the daily, sensory world in which students live. Exploring how artifacts can generate literacy learning, the book shows teachers how to use a family photo, heirloom, or recipe to tell intergenerational tales; how to collaborate with local museums and cultural centers; how to create new material artifacts; and much more. Featuring vignettes, lesson examples, and photographs, the text includes chapters on community connections, critical literacy, adolescent writing, and digital storytelling. This book features: a theoretical framework for teaching literacy that unites the domains of home and school and brings students’ passions to the forefront; a fresh, integrated synthesis of the fields of New Literacy Studies, multimodality, material cultural studies, and literacy education and new field-tested ideas for creating lessons that improve literacy standards.