New Literacies, New Agencies?: A Brazilian Perspective on Mindsets, Digital Practices and Tools for Social Action In and Out of School (New Literacies and Digital Epistemologies)

From students as teachers’ pets to teachers as Second Life avatars, or from being ridiculed for not knowing your syntax to ridiculing others through multimodal remixing, something has changed in the way people are acting and being acted upon through literacies. From parallel text processing «under a cloud» to text-as-process enhanced by cloud computing, or from one laptop per child to several laptops left behind by children in creative spoken interaction, learners and educators’ actions through and around texts and technologies provide quite a telling example of such changes. From writing as technology to blogging as a tool for fostering critical mindsets within complexity, or from automatized knowledge acquisition routines to new forms of relating to knowledge and new perspectives on autonomy, social ordering and Self constitutional processes defy binaries such as agent/structure, global/local, social/technical, virtual/real, or even human/non-human. In this volume a team of scholars from some of the most prestigious Brazilian universities address these issues, and illustrate them with findings from research on the interplay between new literacies, digital technologies and social action in and out-of-school. The chapters introduce, or revisit, an array of theoretical constructs from education, sociology, linguistics and media studies, while presenting a new inside perspective about how research on new literacies is being carried out in Brazil. Altogether, they provide a very useful set of ideas, tools and analytical frameworks for researchers, teachers, and students of Education, Language and Arts and Communication worldwide, especially those concerned with technology-enhanced education and social inclusion. Cover Contents Chapter 1. New Literacies in the Context of Brazilian Historical Social-economic Inequality: Past, Present, and Future Trends Eduardo S. Junqueira & Marcelo El Khouri Buzato 1 Chapter 2. Mapping Flows of Agency in New Literacies: Self and Social Structure in a Post-social World Marcelo El Khouri Buzato 22 Chapter 3. Peer-based Work and Agency in the School Computer Lab: Learning New Literacies as a Collective Practice Eduardo S. Junqueira 50 Chapter 4. Distributed Agency in Avatar-based Learning Vilson J. Leffa 69 Chapter 5. If You Can’t Play, Don’t Come Down to the Playground! Agency in Brazilian Humor: Parody and Verb-visual Remix Luiz Fernando Gomes 88 Chapter 6. Agency, Collaborative Writing, and ICTs: A Brief Analysis of Three Cases of Textual ProductionUsing Google Docs Ana Elisa Ribeiro & Carla Viana Coscarelli 105 Chapter 7. The Development of Agency in a New Literacies Proposal for Teacher Education in Brazil Walkyria Monte Mór 126 Chapter 8. Interactivity, Agency, and Mediation in 3D Virtual Worlds Edméa Oliveira dos Santos & Tatiana Stofella Sodré Rossini 147 Chapter 9. Afterword: Brazil Meets Brasil: Being, Communicating, and Learning in Times of Change Marcelo El Khouri Buzato & Eduardo S. Junqueira 165 Contributors 175 Index 179 The chapters in this book introduce an array of theoretical constructs from education, sociology, linguistics and media studies, while presenting a new inside perspective on new literacies research in Brazil. They provide a useful set of ideas, tools and analytical frameworks for researchers, teachers, and students concerned with technology-enhanced education and social inclusion.