Serafini, F. (2018, February 21). Review of Literacy, media, technology: Past, present and future, by B. Parry, C. Burnett, & G. Merchant. Education Review, 25. February 21, 2018 ISSN 1094-5296 Parry, B., Burnett, C., & Merchant, G. (2017). Literacy, media, technology: Past, present and future. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Pp. 272 ISBN: 9781474258005 Reviewed by Frank Serafini Arizona State University United States The new book by Parry, Burnett and Merchant entitled Literacy, Media, Technology is part of the Bloomsbury Academic series featuring new and innovative approaches to educational issues, in particular literacy education. This edited volume contains 15 chapters written by noted scholars and educators across the fields of literacy, media, and educational technologies. The authors are predominantly from the United Kingdom, but also includes scholars from the United States and Canada. The focus of the book is on transgressing the boundaries of the three elements in the title, namely literacy, media and technology, highlighting changes across time and breaking down traditional assumptions of in-school and out-of-school literacies. The convergence of these three fields of inquiry is an essential element across the various chapters of the book. Emerging from a symposium for the United Kingdom Literacy Association’s annual conference in 2014, the volume as a whole connects the historical antecedents of literacy, media and Review of Literacy, media, and technology by F. Serafini 2 technology with the digital, social, visual, and transmedial culture that we now occupy. As with all edited volumes, some chapters speak to particular readers more than others, and there is a range of quality among the chapters gathered for any publication. I feel there are several strong chapters representing a wide array of literacy genres, platforms, and technological innovations. The chapters are eclectic in style, including histories, personal reflections, research studies, reviews of resources, ethnographic accounts, and other analytical genres. The chapters are separated by a series of “interruptions” labeled as pause, record, play, rewind, fast forward, and standby. These multimodal text markers make interesting comments connected to the various themes that cut across the chapters and sections. One of the important points made in the volume as a whole is the interconnectedness of the past, present, and future uses and social contexts of literacy, media and technology. Suggesting that these fields are always situated in the everyday, each chapter traverses time and space to make assumptions concerning educational practices and cultural institutions. From early 20th century postcards to post-digital literacies, the chapters in this volume address a wide array of topics connected to literacy, media, and technology. As stated in the opening chapter, “the literacy-media-technology nexus is continually recycling and modifying the sociocultural conditions of its time, making certain subject positions and available and others contested” (p. 6) The first section addresses postcards, television, and the cultural phenomenon of Davy Crockett from a historical perspective, offering a grounding for the chapters to come. The chapter on picture postcards makes interesting connections among print, multimodal, and digital technologies across time. The chapters on television and the cultural phenomenon of Davy Crockett are offered as personal reflections on the effects of new media (at the time) had one one’s life and the emerging consumer culture. Opening the second section is an interesting chapter on the interrelatedness of policy, literacy and inequality. Adopting a more academic tone, the chapter contests the simple ways policy and practices are often described and suggests two ways of reconsidering this relationship, first as the ways policy impacts practice, and second the ways sociocultural models of literacy impact digital, multimodal, and material literacy practices. The next chapters in this section focus on processes of multimodal composing, in particular digital storytelling and personal cartographies. As the authors in this chapter collectively point out, it is important to remember that media and technology affects the ways we produce and represent ideas and culture as much as they affect our interpretations and analyses. The next section includes two chapters focusing on digital tablets and digital applications or apps. The first contribution focuses on the literacy practices associated with filmmaking, while the second concerns the construction of personal digital narratives. Each of these chapters describes and situates current research on classroom and community-based literacy practices associated with new media and technologies, for example iPads, video games, social media, and smart phones. Both chapters work to make the case of the importance of children being able to use new technologies and the importance of these technologies in contemporary literacy instructional frameworks. The section entitled “rewind” focuses on the connections among media, technology and popular culture. The first chapter provides an analysis of the BBC television program Doctor Who, and makes the case for connecting popular culture with contemporary literacy approaches in classrooms. The analysis of the Script-to-Screen project detailed in the chapter suggests ways a multiliteracies project could play out in contemporary classrooms and how these innovations can support the acquisition Review of Literacy, media, and technology by F. Serafini 3 of traditional literacy skills. The second chapter draws upon a doctoral research project that analyzed a popular social networking site called Bebo, and reads like a more traditional academic article. Drawing upon children’s text production on this website, the study focuses on children’s writing in online and digital spaces. The chapter outlines four themes associated with children’s writing in digital contexts, including deriving pleasure, achieving social positions, achieving social control, and enacting a text-producing role from text production. Both chapters suggest that digital and multimodal spaces offer more opportunities for children to enact 21st century literacies than traditional classroom-based reading and writing activities currently being enacted in today’s schools. The third, and final, chapter in this section focuses on video games and children’s engagement with this new media. The last section of the book focuses on the future of literacy, media, and technology addressing post-digital literacies, materiality, and mobility and the potential effects of these technologies on children’s play in analog and digital environments. Gaming literacies and virtual play environments are an important aspect of literacies, media, and technologies, and these two chapters do a good job addressing the challenges of new media and its role in the classroom. Together, these chapters set forth a framework for incorporating these technologies in current instructional frameworks. The book addresses key issues in literacy, media and technology, but focuses more on how media and technology affect and support contemporary literacies and literacy education than the other way around. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed many of the chapters in the book, but that may be due to my interest in multimodality, new media and digital literacies. This is a tightly focused volume, but one that has a specific audience in mind. This would not serve well as a textbook for a general seminar on literacy education, but would be a good supporting text to select particular chapters from for a class on media and literacy. The technology aspects contributed to the discussions on media and technology, but would not work as well as stand-alone chapters on educational technology. In conclusion, the book challenges the reader’s assumptions about the intersections of these three dimensions and the histories of these three fields of inquiry in academic institutions. Though individual readers will connect more with some chapters than others, the book offers many different topics for considering literacy, media, and technology in a graduate seminar. About the Reviewer Dr. Frank Serafini is a Professor of Literacy Education and Children’s Literature in the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University. Frank is an award-winning children’s picturebook author and illustrator, and has recently been awarded the Mayhill Arbuthnot Award from the International Literacy Association as a Distinguished Professor of Children's Literature. Review of Literacy, media, and technology by F. Serafini 4 Education Review/Reseñas Educativas/Resenhas Educativas is supported by the edXchange initiative’s Scholarly Communications Group at the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University. Copyright is retained by the first or sole author, who grants right of first publication to the Education Review. Readers are free to copy, display, and distribute this article, as long as the work is attributed to the author(s) and Education Review, it is distributed for non-commercial purposes only, and no alteration or transformation is made in the work. More details of this Creative Commons license are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/. All other uses must be approved by the author(s) or Education Review. Education Review is published by the Scholarly Communications Group of the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University. Disclaimer: The views or opinions presented in book reviews are solely those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of Education Review. Connect with Education Review on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/pages/Education- Review/178358222192644) and on Twitter @EducReview https://www.facebook.com/pages/Education-Review/178358222192644 https://www.facebook.com/pages/Education-Review/178358222192644