Editorial: English as mediated literacy: Revisiting mode and medium

This issue of English Teaching: Practice and Critique focuses on English as Mediated Literacy: Revisiting Mode and Medium with an international collection of articles related to the integration of new literacy tools, texts and media in the English curriculum. The rapid and ubiquitous proliferation of new media literacy tools and texts create opportunities for widespread innovation, and challenges the traditional English, Language Arts analysis and description of the processes of literacy in a digital world. The authors of this issue address these changes in articles that draw upon their personal experiences, research, teaching, and participatory responses to the tools, texts and discourses of new media in both formal and informal contexts around the world. Since the introduction of moving image media in the late 1800s and through the midcentury introduction of computing, there have been numerous attempts to integrate new media tools and texts in the learning environment, first those in the analogue age, then those of the digital age. More often than not, these have been framed as transparent content delivery vehicles or as motivational attractions to spark student interest in tasks related to reading, writing, listening and speaking. When positioned as opportunities for the critical examination of media as parallel to literature studies, media literacy has often been marginalized in the classroom as adventures in popular culture. Alternatively, it has been confined by official curricula within the realm of the factual, framed by a discourse of suspicion. Literature is routinely approached in a mode of reverential appreciation; media texts in a mode of suspicious interrogation. At the same time, the creative production of media texts by students has not been well represented in English curricula internationally, only rarely seen as an extension of the cultural production usually occupied exclusively by “writing”. As video editing software became freely available on every computer, then, no wholesale move has been forthcoming at national or state policy level to include the “writing” of media texts in English curricula, either in the Anglophone world or anywhere else. Nevertheless, contemporary literacy practices permeate the school environment. There is a growing acknowledgement among practitioners, researchers and the general public that the tools, texts and discourses of new media represent muchneeded pathways to personal growth, social capital, workforce development, and civic engagement. The widespread uses of digital tools for production, global distribution and remix of “amateur” media challenge every aspect of the formal learning environment from discipline-based education, to the role of the teacher, to the actual design of school classrooms and buildings. In the process, it is clear that the participatory practices of new media have also changed the pedagogies and other classroom design elements needed to leverage students’ literacy practices in the world outside the school walls. The authors in this volume contribute ideas to bridge the