The appearance of literacy in new communicative practices: interrogating the politics of noticing

This conceptual article examines how ready-made assumptions about literacy both frame and limit understandings of new communicative practices in educational contexts. Proposing a tripartite heuristic that interrogates the appearance of literacy in terms of emergence, semblance and performance, it uses stories from a study of touchscreen tablets in one early years setting to illustrate the social-material arrangements associated with moments when...