Popular Culture And Representations of Literacy

Most movies are filled with scenes of people of all ages, sexes, races, and social classes reading and writing in a wide variety of contexts and for a wide variety of purposes. In the literacy practices represented, class and gender are marked, institutional hierarchies identified and reinforced, cultural power hoarded or shared, individual and social desire enacted or denied. Yet scenes showing reading and writing on film go largely unnoticed even by literacy, composition, and popular culture scholars, despite the fact that these images recreate and reinforce pervasive concepts and perceptions of literacy, perceptions that inevitably influence both how we teach reading and writing and how our students respond to print literacy and to writing classes.This book addresses how everyday literacy practices are represented in popular culture, specifically in mainstream, widely-distributed contemporary movies. If we watch films carefully for who reads and writes, in what settings, and for what social goals, we can see a reflection of the dominant functions and perceptions that shape our conceptions of literacy in our culture. Such perceptions influence public and political debates about literacy instruction, teachers' expectations of what will happen in their classrooms, and certainly student's ideas about what reading and writing should be.Williams, Bronwyn Thomas is the author of 'Popular Culture And Representations of Literacy ', published 2007 under ISBN 9780415360951 and ISBN 0415360951.