Page 25 - Literacy in the New Media Age

14 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

and its cultures in a particular way – mid-teenage, immigrant, ‘German’ with all
its meanings in an only just post-war Australia – gave me a felt sense of what that
difference is about. That is the source of my interests and of the line that I have
followed in my academic work. The question I have asked for myself is, ‘what
knowledge do we need to produce and what resources do we need to make
available, openly and explicitly, so that such issues can be handled productively
by all?’ In time, there was for me the sharper version of that question: how could
transparency lead to wider social change? Knowing, as experience, the effects of
culture – feeling it in my body even now in the move, say, from one language to
another, from one style of writing to another – has given my academic work its
shape and purpose: trying to understand how we as humans come to be who we
are in our cultural and social environments. Of course, all the modes of
communication are implicated in this, not only those which our cultures treat as
the major modes.
My emphasis on work, throughout the book, is meant as more than a rhetorical
flourish. Intellectual endeavour is work, and work always in the company – at
times close, at times too distant – of others. Much of what is in this book
continues work in the past with David Aers, Bob Hodge and Tony Trew. I am
sometimes told that I have moved from the interest of that earlier work, with its
political edge and with its eye on social change. That is not how I see it. I also
see the book in one line with my earlier writing on questions of ‘literacy’ –
though I thought of it then as ‘writing’. But I have learned some things along the
way. Over recent years that learning has been first and foremost in constantly
pleasurable work and conversation with Carey Jewitt. Theo Van Leeuwen and I
have talked and worked for many years now on such things. Both will no doubt
recognise much here as theirs; all I can say is ‘thank you’. The term
‘affordances’ – as well as much else – I took from Jon Ogborn; it has become
central in how I think about representation. I owe much to Mary Scott’s subtly
theorised writing in academic literacy. In my work environment I have been
fortunate in colleagues and fellow researchers – Bob Cowen, Anton Franks,
Lesley Lancaster, Di Mavers, Charmian Kenner, Paul Mercer, Kate Pahl, Euan
Reid. I owe to them more than just the pleasure of collegial challenge. More
distantly now but always present, and over a long period, I have benefited from
the friendship and the ideas of Bill Cope and of Mary Kalantzis. Much that is
now part of ‘my’ thinking about economic environments and their effects I
learned from Jim Gee. Jim Martin’s friendship and generous intellectual support
for what at times seemed, even to me, wilder thoughts, often proved an essential
prop. In 1990 I attended a lecture given by David Barton at the University of
Lancaster, in which he outlined his ideas and those of others working ‘in’
literacy at Lancaster – Romy Clark, Mary Hamilton, Roz Ivanic – in which
literacy practices, a term not then in my repertoire, are tracked in the micro-
histories of everyday lives. Strangely, given that ‘the social’ had been an overt
concern in the work I had done before, it proved a most fruitful moment for me. I
saw differently from then on. Now, by what is for me a delightful coincidence, I