Full Description
In this book, Bronwyn T. Williams explores how perceptions of agency—whether a person perceives and feels able to read and write successfully in a given context—are critical in terms of how people perform their literate identities. Drawing on interviews and observations with students in several countries, he examines the intersections of the social and the personal in relation to how and, crucially, why people engage successfully or struggle painfully in literacy practices and what factors and forces they regard as enabling or constraining their actions. Recognizing such moments and patterns can help teachers and researchers rethink their approaches to teaching to facilitate students' sense of agency as writers and readers.
Contents
Preface
Chapter One: Introduction: Perceiving Agency in Literacy Practices
Chapter Two - A Feeling for Literacy: Emotions and Dispositions
Chapter Three - We Are Our Stories: Literacy, Memory and Narrative
Chapter Four - Writing for the World: Motivation, Control, and Meaning
Chapter Five - Respect and Response: Literacy, Relationships and Community
Chapter Six - Strange New Worlds: Rhetorical Knowledge
Chapter Seven - A Sense of Where You Are: Literacy, Place and Mobility
Chapter Eight - The Stuff that Literacy Practices Are Made Of: Technology
Chapter Nine - Metamorphosis Hurts: Literacy, Transformation and Resistance
Chapter Ten - Agency in, and Beyond, the Literacy Classroom
Index
