Chasing Literacy: Reading and Writing in an Age of Acceleration

by Daniel Keller

Arguing that composition should renew its interest in reading pedagogy and research, Chasing Literacy offers writing instructors and literacy scholars a framework for understanding and responding to the challenges posed by the proliferation of interactive and multimodal communication technologies in the twenty-first century. Employing case-study research of student reading practices, Keller explores reading-writing connections in new media contexts. He identifies a culture of acceleration—a gathering of social, educational, economic, and technological forces that reinforce the values of speed, efficiency, and change—and challenges educators to balance new “faster” literacies with traditional “slower” literacies. In addition, Keller details four significant features of contemporary literacy that emerged from his accumulation and curricular choices; literacy perceptions; speeds of rhetoric; and speeds of reading. Chasing Literacy outlines a new reading pedagogy that will help students gain versatile, dexterous approaches to both reading and writing and makes a significant contribution to this emerging area of interest in composition theory and practice.

203 pages, Paperback

First published December 2, 2013

Reviews

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a great study that looked at exactly how practices of reading and writing are changing, particularly amongst high school and college students. Keller provides rich, ethnographic evidence of several students that helps to contextualize what often is presumed about the habits (and the meaning behind them) of students today.

[Cate · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an excellent contribution to composition & literacy studies. It's an academic monograph, so friends who are in the field or are curious about it would find this a great starting point. People looking purely for recreational reading may save this for another time. I found Keller's arguments, analysis, and evidence insightful and interesting. Keller argues that in an age of acceleration, teachers need to carefully consider polarizing binaries between "fast" and "slow" and look at a continuum of fast and slow rhetorics--tweets aren't evil and books aren't the pinnacle of human success; each has a different rhetorical function, which is linked to its ephemeral or permanent state, and to its distribution and circulation.

Keller also argues that scholars and teachers in composition need a reading pedagogy--we need to offer students strategies for reading and for doing more with their reading instead of piling more on the plate. Keller's careful study of how high school seniors, then college freshmen, read for school, for fun, and for other purposes (foraging, oscillating, multi-tasking) put names to behaviors I've engaged but not examined. I do think it's important to talk about! Viewing the decisions we make in how we read as choices and talking to students about how to make decisions about the reading is so important that I can't believe I didn't think it through before. I was really impressed by the book!