1st Edition

Literacy Practices and Perceptions of Agency Composing Identities

By Bronwyn T. Williams Copyright 2018
    218 Pages
    by Routledge

    218 Pages
    by Routledge

    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.

    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

    Biography

    Bronwyn T. Williams is Professor of English and Director of the University Writing Center, University of Louisville, Kentucky, USA.