Exploring Repurposing Across Contexts: How Adolescents\u27 New Literacies Practices Can Inform Understandings about Writing-Related Transfer

This project examines how middle school students engage in new literacies practices and how they repurpose across contexts. With the use of screencast software and interviews, this project analyzes six case study participants\u27 new literacies practices and the way they use and change ideas and strategies across physical and digital contexts. Drawing from transfer methodology, this project looks at how broadening conceptions of transfer and contexts to include repurposing increases the possibilities for finding transfer in literacies practices. Applying new literacies theory, this project explores how literacies practices that are chronologically and ontologically new (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006) are often repurposed across contexts. In addition, employing rhetorical invention and arrangement theories, this project examines how contemporary invention is repurposing and how arrangement aids in meaning making in new literacies practices. It also explores concerns over increased repurposing across collapsed contexts for literacies