Social Scholarship | W8 Q1 | Forum

Working with in the definition of literacy provided by Mills (2010, p.247), literacy is evolving skillset of communication practices that exist in multiple social and cultural contexts. These literacies are co-constructed within varying social groups and as a result are constructed around particular symbol systems, epistemologies, and cultural systems (Gee, 1996). New literacies include navigating electronic environments, interpreting and representing ideas, understanding new textual and genre features (including multimodal texts), rapid consumption and dissemination of information, producing digital media, and effectively navigating and responding to cultural and linguistic diversity in globalized networked contexts (Mills, 2010). All of these skills, and many more not identified here, are important for the modern work environment scholar-teachers are entering.
I feel that these literacies and practices are important because the world is becoming more and more connected. These literacies are “practices for communicating purposefully in multiple social and cultural contexts.” Our work can’t just speak to our own familiar groups, but must extend and expand outward to engage others. Our work and participants do not exist in a vacuum, and we should consider this as we work. One way we can do this is through rethinking what research looks like in a connected world.
Greenhow and Gleason reconceptualize the four dimensions of scholarship through a lens of social scholarship “in light of widespread social media adoption and trends in scholars’ usage of social media.” Increasingly digital technologies are being used for communication and call for meanings in multimodal presentations to be accounted for (cited in Greenhow and Gleason, 2014; Kress, 2003). Scholars can disseminate information in various ways and on various platforms, reaching a wider network of peers and giving more open access to practitioners. Open access necessitates a new, expanded form of expertise and understanding in a connected world. This particular point is captivating to me as it challenges the dominant notions of who holds knowledge. Greenhow and Gleason expertly point out how the social reconceptualizing of research problematizes the dichotomies we have setup about expertise and knowledge construction (p. 18). This breakdown of traditional binaries allows for a multidirectional flow of information that is situated in local and globalized cultural contexts.