Literacy and pedagogical routines in the 21st century

This article assumes that literacy practices are social practices. Based on the New Literacy Studies (Street, 2005) this view of literacy provides an understanding that the ways a person reads and writes change, depending on that person's identity, the type of texts that are involved and the context in which those texts and identities are located. This article also assumes that the use of new technologies has changed both the types of texts and the contexts for using these texts (Leu et al., 2009) and that these changes have impacted on the purposes of schooling. These ideas have informed the analysis of data collected in 2008 in Queensland, Australia around the use of digital texts in classrooms. A philosophical framework that uses the work of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987) within educational research contexts has been used to develop the analyses. Using Deleuze's figuration of a rhizome to explain the production of discourses within particular texts enables an account of the linkages and connections between discursive plateaus operating within texts. In the complex rhizome of this data these connections were formed by the omnipresence of the rituals and normative practices of literacy classrooms that obstruct engagement with new texts and new literacy practices. Teachers and students constitute themselves as competent members of classrooms through their engagement with these pedagogical routines while simultaneously attempting to engage with digital texts