Changing engagement of youth in old and new media literacy: patterns, functions and meanings

The goal of this dissertation is to examine the changing engagement of youth in the large variety of out-of-school literacy practices, including uses of old and new media. The main focus is on Dutch youth from the lower tracks of prevocational secondary education, who often struggle with the literacy demands of the school curriculum. In line with a socio-cultural perspective on literacy this dissertation moves away from a research tradition that approaches literacy as a set of individual reading and writing skills. An alternative way of conceptualizing literacy is proposed in terms of family resemblances, a notion borrowed from the German philosopher Wittgenstein: Literacy activities do not share one common set of features, but throughout activities similarities – great and small – crop up and disappear. From this perspective, which underpins the research presented in this dissertation, literacy is a broad and complex concept that encompasses traditional print-based media, new (digital) media and their various but sometimes interrelated uses. In the general introduction of the dissertation features associated with literacy are discussed, each influenced greatly by new technologies, which have increased the different ways of engaging in literacy. These features form the building blocks of the literacy concept adopted in the research presented. Guttman’s Facet Theory was used to implement this definitional framework in research. To examine the changing literacy engagement of youth, four empirical studies were conducted. A recurrent theme throughout each of the studies is engagement in epistemic literacy, which is a concept borrowed from Wells (1987) to denote more ‘detached’ and reflective uses of old and new media that transcend the immediate context of our personal experience and are strongly related to the goals of schooling. Given the concerns that exist over the rising engagement of youth in the new media, the studies address to what extent the youth under investigation exploit the epistemic potential of new media. In the first study, literacy engagement patterns were investigated of 70 seventh grade students from the lower tracks of Dutch prevocational secondary education. In the second study the diversity of media lifestyles adopted by 503 eighth grade students from all educational tracks were examined. A longitudinal approach was adopted in the third study in order to investigate possible shifts in the literacy practices of the same group of youth included in the first study. Finally, in the fourth study the quantitative research is complemented with data from in-depth interviews, which were used to investigate the motives and possible shifts in the motives youth mentioned for engaging in literacy when in grade 7, compared to when they were in grade 9