Power and Identity in a Community of Academic Literacy Practice

In the past two decades ethnographic studies on literacy have become an important strand of literacy research (Baynham 2004). Some of the earlier and most significant studies called for greater emphasis to be given to out-of-school literacies (e.g. Scribner and Cole 1981; Heath 1983) while others focused on social literacies (e.g. ulick and Stroud 1993; Street 1995). However there are now calls for new directions in the research on literacy to bring the study of literacy back to pedagogy (Baynham 2004; Rodgers 2004) and its material consequences (Luke 2004) within the postmodern context of multilingualism and multimodal communicative practices (Street 2004).