Third new book in our series! "English Teaching and New Literacies Pedagogy"

It's raining riches all down around us at the moment in terms of new books coming out in our "New Literacies" series. Len Unsworth and Angela Thomas have put together a wonderful collection of chapters in their edited volume, English Teaching and New Literacies Pedagogy. Both Len and Angela have an international track record in researching, thinking about and theorizing English/literacy education and digital media and they've brought together authors who write about a wide, innovative range of new media and how they can be taken up in classrooms.

From the back cover:

[This collection] is about the fusion of media and narrative, and explores theoretical and practical dimensions of young people’s engagement with contemporary forms of text. It showcases a range of critical interpretative approaches for integrating multimedia narratives into English teaching contexts, including animated films such as Shaun Tan’s The Lost Thing, digital novels such as Inanimate Alice and 5 Haitis, and a virtual treatment of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. English teachers across grade levels will recognize the valuing of literature and will appreciate the practical pedagogy and fostering of creativity as students are encouraged to explore new forms of narrative. In the context of developing expertise in knowing how multimodal texts work, students can apply that knowledge in their own authoring of digital multimedia narratives.

Contents include:

• Len Unsworth: Toward a Metalanguage for Multimedia Narrative Interpretation and Authoring Pedagogy: A National Curriculum Perspective from Australia
• Angela Thomas: Using Contemporary Picture Books to Explore the Concept of Intermodal Complementarity
• Angela Thomas: Digital Fiction
• Thomas Apperley & Catherine Beavis: A Model for Critical Games Literacy
• Paul D. Chandler: Enabling Students to Be Effective Multimodal Authors
• Len Unsworth: The Image/Language Interface in Picture Books as Animated Films: A Focus for New Narrative Interpretation and Composition Pedagogies
• Annemaree O’Brien: Using Focalisation Choices to Manipulate Audience Viewpoint in 3-D Animation Narratives: What Do Student Authors Need to Know?
• Martin Waller: Social Media, Education, and Contentious Literacies
• Angela Thomas, Jenny White & Ros Lippis: Teaching Inanimate Alice
• Julie Bain & Len Unsworth: Empowering Older Adolescents as Authors: Multiliteracies, Metalanguage, and Multimodal Versions of Literary Narratives
• Winyu Chinthammit & Angela Thomas: Augmented Reality in the English Classroom
• Angela Thomas,  Kerreen Ely-Harper & Kate Richards: Virtual Macbeth: Using Virtual Worlds to Explore Literary Texts.

The collection as a whole emphasizes authoring/producing by means of new media and how teachers can engage with new literacies meaningfully in school contexts.