Literacies and Language Education 3rd

Edition Brian V. Street

Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://textbookfull.com/product/literacies-and-language-education-3rd-edition-brian-v-
street/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Second and Foreign Language Education 3rd Edition

Nelleke Van Deusen-Scholl

https://textbookfull.com/product/second-and-foreign-language-
education-3rd-edition-nelleke-van-deusen-scholl/

Research Methods in Language and Education 3rd Edition

Kendall A. King

https://textbookfull.com/product/research-methods-in-language-
and-education-3rd-edition-kendall-a-king/

Digital Media, Culture and Education: Theorising Third

Space Literacies 1st Edition John Potter

https://textbookfull.com/product/digital-media-culture-and-
education-theorising-third-space-literacies-1st-edition-john-
potter/

Ethical Literacies and Education for Sustainable

Development: Young People, Subjectivity and Democratic
Participation 1st Edition Olof Franck

https://textbookfull.com/product/ethical-literacies-and-
education-for-sustainable-development-young-people-subjectivity-
and-democratic-participation-1st-edition-olof-franck/
Developing Materials for Language Teaching Brian
Tomlinson

https://textbookfull.com/product/developing-materials-for-
language-teaching-brian-tomlinson/

Fitting and Dispensing Hearing Aids 3rd Edition Brian

Taylor

https://textbookfull.com/product/fitting-and-dispensing-hearing-
aids-3rd-edition-brian-taylor/

How Linux Works 3rd Edition Brian Ward

https://textbookfull.com/product/how-linux-works-3rd-edition-
brian-ward/

Writing and Editing for Digital Media 3rd Edition Brian

Carroll

https://textbookfull.com/product/writing-and-editing-for-digital-
media-3rd-edition-brian-carroll/

Mastering Mountain Bike Skills 3rd Edition Brian Lopes

https://textbookfull.com/product/mastering-mountain-bike-
skills-3rd-edition-brian-lopes/
Encyclopedia of
Language and Education
Series Editor: Stephen May

Brian V. Street
Stephen May Editors

Literacies
and Language
Education
Third Edition
Encyclopedia of Language and Education

Series Editor
Stephen May
Faculty of Education and Social Work
The University of Auckland
Auckland, New Zealand
In this third, fully revised edition, the 10 volume Encyclopedia of Language and
Education offers the newest developments, including an entirely new volume of
research and scholarly content, essential to the field of language teaching and
learning in the age of globalization. In the selection of topics and contributors, the
Encyclopedia reflects the depth of disciplinary knowledge, breadth of interdisciplin-
ary perspective, and diversity of sociogeographic experience in the language and
education field.
Throughout, there is an inclusion of contributions from non-English speaking and
non-western parts of the world, providing truly global coverage. Furthermore, the
authors have sought to integrate these voices fully into the whole, rather than as
special cases or international perspectives in separate sections.
The Encyclopedia is a necessary reference set for every university and college
library in the world that serves a faculty or school of education, as well as being
highly relevant to the fields of applied and socio-linguistics. The publication of this
work charts the further deepening and broadening of the field of language and
education since the publication of the first edition of the Encyclopedia in 1997 and
the second edition in 2008.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/15111

Brian V. Street • Stephen May
Editors

Literacies and Language

Education
Third Edition

With 10 Figures
Editors
Brian V. Street Stephen May
Professor Emeritus of Language and Faculty of Education and Social Work
Education The University of Auckland
Department of Education and Professional Auckland, New Zealand
Studies
King’s College London
London, UK

ISBN 978-3-319-02251-2 ISBN 978-3-319-02252-9 (eBook)

ISBN 978-3-319-02253-6 (print and electronic bundle)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-02252-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017944720

1st edition: # Kluwer Academic Publishers 1997

2nd edition: # Springer Science+Business Media LLC 2008
# Springer International Publishing AG 2017
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the
material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation,
broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information
storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the
editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors
or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims
in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Printed on acid-free paper

This Springer imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Editor in Chief’s Introduction to the
“Encyclopedia of Language and Education”

This is one of ten volumes of the Encyclopedia of Language and Education

published by Springer. The Encyclopedia – now in this, its 3rd edition – is undoubt-
edly the benchmark reference text in its field. It was first published in 1997 under the
general editorship of the late David Corson and comprised eight volumes, each
focused on a single, substantive topic in language and education. These included:
language policy and political issues in education, literacy, oral discourse and edu-
cation, second language education, bilingual education, knowledge about language,
language testing and assessment, and research methods in language and education.
In his introductory remarks, David made the case for the timeliness of an
overarching, state-of-the-art review of the language and education field. He argued
that the publication of the Encyclopedia reflected both the internationalism and
interdisciplinarity of those engaged in the academic analysis of language and
education, confirmed the maturity and cohesion of the field, and highlighted the
significance of the questions addressed within its remit. Contributors across the 1st
edition’s eight volumes came from every continent and from over 40 countries. This
perhaps explains the subsequent impact and reach of that 1st edition – although no
one (except, perhaps, the publisher!) quite predicted its extent. The Encyclopedia
was awarded a Choice Outstanding Academic Title award by the American Library
Association and was read widely by scholars and students alike around the globe.
In 2008, the 2nd edition of the Encyclopedia was published under the general
editorship of Nancy Hornberger. It grew to ten volumes as Nancy continued to build
upon the reach and influence of the Encyclopedia. A particular priority in the 2nd
edition was the continued expansion of contributing scholars from contexts outside
of English-speaking and/or developed contexts, as well as the more effective the-
matic integration of their regional concerns across the Encyclopedia as a whole. The
2nd edition also foregrounded key developments in the language and education field
over the previous decade, introducing two new volumes on language socialization
and language ecology.
This 3rd edition continues both the legacy and significance of the previous
editions of the Encyclopedia. A further decade on, it consolidates, reflects, and
expands (upon) the key issues in the field of language education. As with its
predecessors, it overviews in substantive contributions of approximately 5000
words each, the historical development, current developments and challenges, and

v
vi Editor in Chief’s Introduction to the “Encyclopedia of Language and Education”

future directions, of a wide range of topics in language and education. The geo-
graphical focus and location of its authors, all chosen as experts in their respective
topic areas, also continues to expand, as the Encyclopedia aims to provide the most
representative international overview of the field to date.
To this end, some additional changes have been made. The emergence over the last
decade of “superdiversity” as a topic of major concern in sociolinguistics, applied
linguistics, and language education is now a major thread across all volumes – exploring
the implications for language and education of rapidly changing processes of migration
and transmigration in this late capitalist, globalized world. This interest in superdiversity
foregrounds the burgeoning and rapidly complexifying uses of language(s), along with
their concomitant deconstruction and (re)modification, across the globe, particularly
(but not exclusively) in large urban environments. The allied emergence of multilin-
gualism as an essential area of study – challenging the long-held normative ascendancy
of monolingualism in relation to language acquisition, use, teaching, and learning – is
similarly highlighted throughout all ten volumes, as are their pedagogical consequences
(most notably, perhaps, in relation to translanguaging). This “multilingual turn” is
reflected, in particular, in changes in title to two existing volumes: Bilingual and
Multilingual Education and Language Awareness, Bilingualism and Multilingualism
(previously, Bilingual Education and Language Awareness, respectively).
As for the composition of the volumes, while ten volumes remain overall, the
Language Ecology volume in the 2nd edition was not included in the current edition,
although many of its chapter contributions have been reincorporated and/or
reworked across other volumes, particularly in light of the more recent developments
in superdiversity and multilingualism, as just outlined. (And, of course, the impor-
tant contribution of the Language Ecology volume, with Angela Creese and the late
Peter Martin as principal editors, remains available as part of the 2nd edition.)
Instead, this current edition has included a new volume on Language, Education
and Technology, with Steven Thorne as principal editor. While widely discussed
across the various volumes in the 2nd edition, the prominence and rapidity of
developments over the last decade in academic discussions that address technology,
new media, virtual environments, and multimodality, along with their wider social
and educational implications, simply demanded a dedicated volume.
And speaking of multimodality, a new, essential feature of the current edition of
the Encyclopedia is its multiplatform format. You can access individual chapters
from any volume electronically, you can read individual volumes electronically
and/or in print, and, of course, for libraries, the ten volumes of the Encyclopedia
still constitute an indispensible overarching electronic and/or print resource.
As you might expect, bringing together ten volumes and over 325 individual
chapter contributions has been a monumental task, which began for me at least in
2013 when, at Nancy Hornberger’s invitation, Springer first approached me about
the editor-in-chief role. All that has been accomplished since would simply not have
occurred, however, without support from a range of key sources. First, to Nancy
Hornberger, who, having somehow convinced me to take on the role, graciously
agreed to be consulting editor for the 3rd edition of the Encyclopedia, providing
advice, guidance, and review support throughout.
Editor in Chief’s Introduction to the “Encyclopedia of Language and Education” vii

The international and interdisciplinary strengths of the Encyclopedia continue to

be foregrounded in the wider topic and review expertise of its editorial advisory
board, with several members having had direct associations with previous editions of
the Encyclopedia in various capacities. My thanks to Suresh Canagarajah, William
Cope, Viv Edwards, Rainer Enrique Hamel, Eli Hinkel, Francis Hult, Nkonko
Kamwangamalu, Gregory Kamwendo, Claire Kramsch, Constant Leung, Li Wei,
Luis Enrique Lopez, Marilyn Martin-Jones, Bonny Norton, Tope Omoniyi, Alastair
Pennycook, Bernard Spolsky, Lionel Wee, and Jane Zuengler for their academic and
collegial support here.
The role of volume editor is, of course, a central one in shaping, updating,
revising and, in some cases, resituating specific topic areas. The 3rd edition of the
Encyclopedia is a mix of existing volume editors from the previous edition (Cenoz,
Duff, King, Shohamy, Street, and Van Deusen-Scholl), new principal volume editors
(García, Kim, Lin, McCarty, and Thorne, Wortham), and new coeditors (Lai and Or).
As principal editor of Language Policy and Political Issues in Education, Teresa
McCarty brings to the volume her longstanding interests in language policy, lan-
guage education, and linguistic anthropology, arising from her work in Native
American language education and Indigenous education internationally. For Liter-
acies and Language Education, Brian Street brings a background in social and
cultural anthropology, and critical literacy, drawing on his work in Britain, Iran,
and around the globe. As principal editors of Discourse and Education, Stanton
Wortham has research expertise in discourse analysis, linguistic anthropology,
identity and learning, narrative self-construction, and the new Latino diaspora,
while Deoksoon Kim’s research has focused on language learning and literacy
education, and instructional technology in second language learning and teacher
education. For Second and Foreign Language Education, Nelleke Van Deusen-
Scholl has academic interests in linguistics and sociolinguistics and has worked
primarily in the Netherlands and the United States. As principal editors of Bilingual
and Multilingual Education, Ofelia García and Angel Lin bring to the volume their
internationally recognized expertise in bilingual and multilingual education, includ-
ing their pioneering contributions to translanguaging, along with their own work in
North America and Southeast Asia. Jasone Cenoz and Durk Gorter, principal editors
of Language Awareness, Bilingualism and Multilingualism, bring to their volume
their international expertise in language awareness, bilingual and multilingual edu-
cation, linguistic landscape, and translanguaging, along with their work in the
Basque Country and the Netherlands. The principal editor of Language Testing
and Assessment, Elana Shohamy, is an applied linguist with interests in critical
language policy, language testing and measurement, and linguistic landscape
research, with her own work focused primarily on Israel and the United States. For
Language Socialization, Patricia Duff has interests in applied linguistics and socio-
linguistics and has worked primarily in North America, East Asia, and Central
Europe. For Language, Education and Technology, Steven Thorne’s research inter-
ests include second language acquisition, new media and online gaming environ-
ments, and theoretical and empirical investigations of language, interactivity, and
development, with his work focused primarily in the United States and Europe. And
viii Editor in Chief’s Introduction to the “Encyclopedia of Language and Education”

for Research Methods in Language and Education, principal editor, Kendall King,
has research interests in sociolinguistics and educational linguistics, particularly with
respect to Indigenous language education, with work in Ecuador, Sweden, and the
United States. Finally, as editor-in-chief, I bring my interdisciplinary background in
the sociology of language, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, and educational
linguistics, with particular interests in language policy, Indigenous language educa-
tion, and bilingual education, along with my own work in New Zealand, North
America, and the UK/Europe.
In addition to the above, my thanks go to Yi-Ju Lai, coeditor with Kendall King,
and Iair Or, coeditor with Elana Shohamy. Also, to Lincoln Dam, who as editorial
assistant was an essential support to me as editor-in-chief and who worked closely
with volume editors and Springer staff throughout the process to ensure both its
timeliness and its smooth functioning (at least, to the degree possible, given the
complexities involved in this multiyear project). And, of course, my thanks too to the
approximately 400 chapter contributors, who have provided the substantive content
across the ten volumes of the Encyclopedia and who hail from every continent in the
world and from over 50 countries.
What this all indicates is that the Encyclopedia is, without doubt, not only a major
academic endeavor, dependent on the academic expertise and good will of all its
contributors, but also still demonstrably at the cutting edge of developments in the
field of language and education. It is an essential reference for every university and
college library around the world that serves a faculty or school of education and is an
important allied reference for those working in applied linguistics and sociolinguis-
tics. The Encyclopedia also continues to aim to speak to a prospective readership that
is avowedly multinational and to do so as unambiguously as possible. Its ten
volumes highlight its comprehensiveness, while the individual volumes provide
the discrete, in-depth analysis necessary for exploring specific topic areas. These
state-of-the art volumes also thus offer highly authoritative course textbooks in the
areas suggested by their titles.
This 3rd edition of the Encyclopedia of Language and Education continues to
showcase the central role of language as both vehicle and mediator of educational
processes, along with the pedagogical implications therein. This is all the more
important, given the rapid demographic and technological changes we face in this
increasingly globalized world and, inevitably, by extension, in education. But the
cutting edge contributions within this Encyclopedia also, crucially, always situate
these developments within their historical context, providing a necessary diachronic
analytical framework with which to examine critically the language and education
field. Maintaining this sense of historicity and critical reflexivity, while embracing
the latest developments in our field, is indeed precisely what sets this Encyclopedia
apart.

The University of Auckland Stephen May

Auckland, New Zealand
Volume Editors’ Introduction to “Literacies and
Language Education”

In this introduction to Literacies and Language Education, We attempt to survey

briefly some of the new directions evident in literacy studies. We begin with an outline
of the current theoretical frameworks, in particular work in New Literacy Studies, in
multimodality, and in theories of technology and artifact, before considering some of
the educational responses evident in different countries as they come to terms with
the challenges posed by new literacies. We also make some suggestions as to why it
is that policy in some countries – notably the USA and UK – seems to be facing in
the opposite direction to that which this research base tells us is needed.
Many of the chapters in this volume also work from this perspective. The volume
is divided into three parts: The first part of 11 chapters, entitled Literacies and Social
Theory, puts work in the field into theoretical perspective; the second part, entitled
Literacies and Social Institutions, includes a further 12 chapters that consider the
issues raised with attention specifically to the issues of “language,” classroom
literacy, and family literacy in relation to a number of social and cultural contexts,
such as in Nepal, Brazil, Australia, and the USA. In the third part, Living Literacies –
Social and Cultural Experience, a further 8 chapters cover many of these issues
across a number of different countries, Africa, USA, Latin America, and the UK.
The first part comprises chapters which cover topics such as technology, global-
ization, reading, critical literacy, gender, etc. Many of these issues are referred to in
the subsequent parts, where authors go into more detail on social institutions and
social and cultural experiences. Part 1, following the introductory piece on “New
Literacies, New Times: Developments in Literacy Studies” written by the first editor,
moves into specific accounts, beginning with “Critical Race Theory” by Arlene
Willis. She locates this perspective in historical debates under the heading of “Early
Developments,” noting how the notion of “Critical Race Theory” (CRT) emerged
among legal scholars in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s “in
response to the slow and deliberate enforcement of civil rights legislation and
antidiscrimination law in the USA.” The theoretical orientation and movement
emerged later when legal scholars sought to “re-examine the terms by which race
and racism have been negotiated in American consciousness, and to recover and
revitalize the radical tradition of race-consciousness among African-Americans and
other peoples of color.” This involved “oppositional scholarship,” emphasizing that
CRT “challenges the universality of white experience and judgment as the

ix
x Volume Editors’ Introduction to “Literacies and Language Education”

authoritative standard that binds people of color, and normatively measures, directs,
controls, and regulates the terms of proper thought, expression, presentment, and
behavior.” A key field here is that of education, where scholars who embrace CRT
“call for race, racism, and power to be squarely addressed, beyond the emphatic
fallacy that abounds in education.” This involved theorizing, methodologies, and
“analyses to comprehend and explain the realities of the lives and experiences of
people of color living in racialized societies,” an appropriate location for readers
beginning to engage with a volume on Literacies and Social Theory in the Encyclo-
pedia of Language and Education.
Appropriately enough, the next chapter is entitled “Literacy Myths” in which
Harvey Graff and John Duffy refer to the “belief, articulated in educational, civic,
religious, and other settings, contemporary and historical, that the acquisition of
literacy is a necessary precursor to and invariably results in economic development,
democratic practice, cognitive enhancement, and upward social mobility.” Literacy,
so defined, Graff and Harvey point out, in a view that is central to the whole volume
“has been invested with immeasurable and indeed almost ineffable qualities, pur-
portedly conferring on practitioners a predilection toward social order, an elevated
moral sense, and a metaphorical “state of grace,”” assumptions that have run through
the public and scholarly debates in the field. Indeed, they argue, such presumptions
“have a venerable historical lineage and have been expressed, in different forms,
from antiquity through the Renaissance and the Reformation, and again throughout
the era of the Enlightenment, during which literacy was linked to progress, order,
transformation, and control.” The summary of these presumptions provided by Graff
and Duffy offers the reader a background on which to make their own contemporary
judgments about the role and importance of literacy in contemporary society:
“Associated with these beliefs is the conviction that the benefits ascribed to literacy
cannot be attained in other ways, nor can they be attributed to other factors, whether
economic, political, cultural, or individual. Rather, literacy stands alone as the
independent and critical variable.” Taken together, these attitudes constitute what
Graff first termed “the Literacy Myth.” Many researchers and commentators have
since adopted this usage, a theme that Street signaled in the opening chapter of the
volume and that many authors address as they attempt to locate their account of
literacy in fields such as education, in continents such as Africa and Asia, and in
debates about globalization and new technology. In a statement that underpins many
of the accounts to follow, Graff and Duffy argue that “Such attitudes about literacy
represent a ‘myth’ because they exist apart from and beyond empirical evidence that
might clarify the actual functions, meanings, and effects of reading and writing. Like
all myths, the Literacy Myth is not so much a falsehood but an expression of the
ideology of those who sanction it and are invested in its outcomes.”
Working from these underpinning theoretical and methodological perspectives,
we can then consider the rest of the chapters in this part, covering technology,
reading and learning, gender, and critical literacy. The next chapter indeed addresses
“Literacy and Internet Technologies.” Kevin Leander and Cynthia Lewis link
the debates so far with the contemporary concern with how literacy is related
to new technologies. They explain that “Increasing access to and usage of
Volume Editors’ Introduction to “Literacies and Language Education” xi

Internet-networked tools around the world continue to shape and change literacy
practices within social and educational contexts.” It is these evolving literacies,
rather than the tools themselves, that ground and motivate their discussion in this
chapter as they “highlight historical innovations in Internet technologies and outline
major contributions foundational to understanding the changing nature of literacy:
multimodality, sociality, and critical digital literacies.” They link these “technolo-
gies” to such social issues as “transnational identities, literacy ecologies, and gaming
as fields-in-progress within the increasingly mobile and interconnected world,”
themes that again underpin many of the chapters in this volume (see also Thorne
and May’s volume in the Encyclopedia). This debate, then, includes “critical social
issues, including the digital divide and the ways in which the Internet continues to
drive and problematize the definitions and boundaries of education, communication,
and literacy.” Helpfully for readers at this stage of the Encyclopedia, they “consider
future directions for the field, including emerging implications for research, defini-
tions of literacy, conceptions of teaching in its relation to learning, new applications/
practices, statistical images of Internet access, and celebrated projects and research
studies.” These themes, they suggest, can help to “illustrate the contemporary wired
literacy landscapes of the world.”
An issue that will run through all of the debates and that we have already signaled
is how all of these issues can be related to contemporary approaches to education. In
a chapter entitled “BICS and CALP: Empirical and Theoretical Status of the
Distinction,” Jim Cummins offers an attempt to clarify the complex concepts
involved in many accounts of learning. The distinction between basic interpersonal
communicative skills (BICS) and cognitive academic language proficiency (CALP)
was, in fact, introduced by Cummins “in order to draw educators’ attention to the
timelines and challenges that second language learners encounter as they attempt to
catch up to their peers in academic aspects of the school language” (see also
Cummins in Garcia, Lin, and May’s volume in the Encyclopedia). He goes on to
explain the terms more fully: “BICS refers to conversational fluency in a language
while CALP refers to students’ ability to understand and express, in both oral and
written modes, concepts and ideas that are relevant to success in school.” In this
chapter, Cummins describes “the origins, rationale, and evolution of the distinction
together with its empirical foundations” and he then discusses “its relationship to
similar theoretical constructs that have been proposed in different contexts and for
different purposes,” a perspective that helps link this chapter with the wider debates
about literacy that scholars are addressing in this volume. For instance, Cummins
helpfully discusses the relationship of the distinction between BICS and CALP to the
emerging field of New Literacy Studies (NLS) that a number of authors address in
this volume.
A further piece on “reading” is provided by John Edwards under the title
“Reading Attitudes, Interests, Practices.” While most of the chapters in this volume
might be seen as rooted in social practice theories of literacy, Edwards reminds us of
the important role that the social psychology of reading offers. This perspective, he
suggests, “remains a relatively small part of a vast literature largely concerned with
skills acquisition and development.” As he argues, this is “curious for two reasons.
xii Volume Editors’ Introduction to “Literacies and Language Education”

First, it is obvious that both teachers and researchers do not want merely to facilitate
reading ability – they hope to form and maintain reading habits. Second, there are
regular laments – such as grumblings over the inadequacies of the younger gener-
ation – about low levels of reading, poor attitudes, lack of enthusiasm and so
on. Indeed, surveys often suggest a gulf between reading ability and reading
practices; in many contemporary societies, the essential problem seems to be
aliteracy rather than illiteracy.” On both counts, then, Edwards argues, “questions
of what people read, how much they read, and the purposes and effects of their
reading surely assume central importance.” Edwards, then, provides an alternative
view of what is involved in reading and literacy that can help put the chapters in the
volume into broader perspective. He links this account to some of the broader
international debates that a number of authors, such as Graff and Duffy, refer to;
for instance, as Edwards puts it “Although the proportion of illiterate people has
been in steady decline for some time, an increase in absolute numbers means that
one‐third of the world’s population can still neither read nor write.” Edwards refines
the statistical account by adding in the notion of “functional literacy,” used to refer to
the problems faced by many in “developed” societies, where “socially meaningful
ability goes beyond elementary skills.” For instance, “several surveys have
suggested that, in Europe and North America, as much as a quarter of the population
may have difficulty with mundane but important tasks like understanding road signs
or product‐warning labels” or, another way of putting this and that we might watch
out for in subsequent chapters, is that “in many modern societies, aliteracy is as
much an issue as functional literacy. It is certainly more compelling in a social‐
psychological sense, because the question here is why some of those who can read
don’t read. The term may be new but the phenomenon is old.” As a social psychol-
ogist, Edwards recognizes the social variability in analytic concepts associated with
literacy and does not just reduce it to formal skills, as many organizations and
especially those associated with schooling still tend to do.
This leaves four further chapters in the first part, which elaborate a number of the
key social issues associated with literacy that these earlier chapters have signaled,
and that chapters in later parts also pick up, such as gender, globalization, and critical
literacy. Gemma Moss, for instance, tackles head on the issues associated with
“Gender and Literacy.” Her chapter reviews the ways in which gender and literacy
have been linked in educational contexts and the different patterns of intervention
this has led to. In particular, she highlights “the switch in the literature from a focus
on the formation of (girls’) gendered identities to a focus on (boys’) gendered
patterns of attainment within the literacy curriculum.” And she links “the emergence
of boys in literacy as a policy problem . . . to the current dominance of performance‐
management cultures within governments, and the accompanying processes of large‐
scale education reform which they have led to around the globe.” As she states,
“often such interventions are designed with the aim of securing maximum homoge-
neity in outcomes from education.” This she suggests “provides a new context in
which to consider the range of social explanations for inequalities in educational
performance, their currency, and the challenges this new more managerial landscape
in education poses for a feminist politics.” To address these issues, she provides a
Volume Editors’ Introduction to “Literacies and Language Education” xiii

number of complex headings that we can bear in mind as we read other chapters,
such as “Feminism, Gender, and Literacy,” cross referring to a number of other
chapters in this volume, such as Robinson-Pant’s. The elaborate and complex
headings indicated here bring out the complexity and refinement of the field that
are central to the volume as a whole.
Indeed, in this spirit, Peter Freebody from Australia, in his chapter entitled
“Critical Literacy Education: The Supremely Educational Event,” outlines “how
historians, linguists, anthropologists, sociologists, and educators have contributed in
various ways to the study and practice of ‘critical literacy education’ (CLE).” CLE,
he explains, “is a project aimed at integrating knowledge about literacy into an
analysis of power-in-action, and knowledge about power into an analysis of texts-in-
action.” He summarizes “CLE efforts [as having] individuals and communities
understand more fully their current contexts, their histories, and how they, particu-
larly those traditionally not well served by current ways of teaching literacy in
school, may take more productive part in enhancing their societies.” Freebody
concludes that “these goals are best pursued through deeper understandings of
texts, the social practices they help to shape, and the social relations those practices
build and sustain,” an approach that is also central to this volume.
A further chapter along these lines, by Yvonne Foley, similarly argues that
“Historically, the term ‘literacy’ was defined as the ability to read and write.
However, this limited definition of literacy has been challenged through the emer-
gence of social theories, where it was recognised that literacy is more complex than
traditional perspectives allow.” Again she cites New Literacy Studies (NLS) as a
view of “literacy as a set of socially and culturally situated practices, rather than
simply as a range of technical academic skills that operate at an individual level.”
This shift in perspective, she explains, “has embraced the plural and discursive
nature of literacy and integrates ways of being and doing in the world.” For instance,
“Critical approaches to literacy recognise the link between meaning making, power
and identity.” While there are a number of orientations associated with critical
literacy, all share the perspective that “human action is mediated by language and
other symbol systems within particular cultural contexts. Language therefore plays a
key role in how we make sense of the world in which we live.”
This theme of the importance of underlying theory and method related to key
ideological and social issues runs through the volume and is also prominent in the
next chapter, by Kwesi Prah, entitled “Language, Literacy, and Knowledge Produc-
tion in Africa.” The contribution assesses the state of language and literacy studies in
Africa as Prah “traces the extent and record of African scripts and debates issues of
literacy development in African societies.” He poses questions that are relevant to
many of the chapters that follow, such as those “regarding the challenges ahead in
literacy enhancement on the continent.”
Finally, in this part, Viniti Vaish makes the link between the theoretical accounts
we have been reviewing and the broad social issue of “Biliteracy and Globalization.”
Vaish sees the “confluence of biliteracy and globalization as somewhat uncharted
water,” although many of the themes she addresses we will now be more familiar
with from the previous chapters. For instance, she asks the question “What text types
xiv Volume Editors’ Introduction to “Literacies and Language Education”

and practices does one find at the lifeworlds of this confluence and what implications
do they have for the bilingual classroom? Who are the main players at this meeting
place of texts (as in biliteracy) and processes (as in globalization): markets,
policymakers, teacher practitioners or finally the consumers and producers of lan-
guages? What does a biliterate text in our globalizing world look like both inside and
outside the classroom?” Vaish’s chapter explores some of the answers to these
questions and also lays the ground for subsequent parts. As with other authors, she
locates her account in the historical development of ideas, citing key authors such as
Hornberger. Vaish’s particular contribution is to draw upon data from two countries
where she conducted research – India and Singapore. Such data can help us to follow
through the complex theoretical concepts that we have been exposed to in Part 1 and
also prepares us nicely for the elaborations to be found in the next parts.
In Part 2, Literacies and Social Institutions, we will find another 12 chapters with
particular reference to how literacy in general and reading in particular are
constructed in classroom contexts with attention also to the issues of “language”
that were particularly signaled in the final chapters of Part 1. The second part of this
part also draws on a number of social and cultural contexts, such as in Nepal, Brazil,
Australia, and the USA. The first chapter in this part is by Mary Lea and addresses
the concept of academic literacies. She locates the concept in its historical context in
debates about writing at university, notably in the UK and the USA. The term
“academic literacies,” she explains, “provides a way of understanding student
writing, which highlights the relationship between language and learning in higher
education. It draws upon applied linguistics and social anthropology for its theoret-
ical framing and its orientation towards the social, cultural and contextualized nature
of writing in the university. The work on academic literacies sits broadly within a
body of research called New Literacy Studies, which takes a social and cultural
approach to writing, in contrast to more cognitive perspectives.” Lea explains, as
with other chapters in this volume, that “the use of the plural form, “literacies,”
signals a concern with social and cultural practices around reading and writing in
particular contexts, rather than individual cognitive activity.” Research findings
suggest that in order to understand more about student writing it is necessary to
start from the position that literacy is not a unitary skill that can be transferred with
ease from context to context. The research points instead to “the requirement for
students to switch between many different types of written text, as they encounter
new modules or courses and the writing demands of different disciplinary genres,
departments and academic staff.” Lea also draws attention to the methodological
issues involved in this field, where “ethnographic‐type qualitative case study” has
provided a way of looking at students’ and faculty experiences of writing for
assessment, and the gaps between their expectations of the requirements of writing.
In foregrounding the relationship between writing and learning (a concept addressed
explicitly in the subsequent chapter by Alan Rogers), writing is conceptualized in
terms of epistemology – rather than cognitive skill – and what counts as knowledge
in the different contexts of the academy.
Lea then provides a brief history and context for how the notion of “academic
literacies” has developed, including “freshman composition” courses in the USA and
Volume Editors’ Introduction to “Literacies and Language Education” xv

the College Composition movement there. These became established in the USA
from the 1960s, while, in the United Kingdom (UK) and other countries with similar
educational traditions, there was little systematic attention paid to student writing in
higher education before the mid‐1980s. However, toward the end of the 1980s, Lea
and Street introduced new theoretical frames concerning literacies as social practices
to a field that was, at the time in the UK, still predominantly influenced by
psychological accounts of student learning. One particularly significant aspect of
this approach is related to the ongoing attention being paid in tertiary education to
the use of reflective writing, particularly in professional and vocational courses. A
number of researchers are examining the nature of the writing that is required in
these contexts, both foregrounding and problematizing the supposedly self‐evident
relationship between “reflective practice and reflective writing.”
Next and also as part of the broader conceptual issue, Alan Rogers addresses the
issue of how to understand “learning.” In the chapter entitled “Learning: Embedded,
Situated, and Unconscious,” he suggests that “the current interest in ‘lifelong
learning’ has directed attention to ‘informal learning’ – that learning that takes
place throughout life outside of formal and non-formal educational and training
programmes.” However, he suggests that this terrain is “contested and uncertain, and
there is confusion around descriptors, with cross-over terms being used by different
fields of study.” He uses this chapter to examine three contemporary debates in
discussions of learning – embedded learning, situated learning, and unconscious
learning – to see what light they throw on formal and informal learning. Since all
learning, he concludes, “is firmly embedded in the social and emotional context in
which the learning takes place, embedded learning also occurs unobserved in formal
learning contexts, the so-called ‘hidden curriculum’ in which some things are learnt
which are not directly intended by the teachers or trainers, including the beliefs,
values, prejudices and norms of those who constructed the learning programme.”
Two kinds of learning, deliberative and natural, shade imperceptibly into one another
in a continuum of learning. Both include elements of embedded learning, situated
learning, and unconscious learning. Anthropologists have long seen this when
exploring how nonindustrial societies help members to learn the ways of their
culture.
Also building on the academic literacies and international dimensions of literacy,
Constant Leung links these themes to second language learning. In his chapter
entitled “Second Language Academic Literacies: Converging Understandings,” he
looks at how schools and universities in many parts of the world are expected to
serve ethnically and linguistically diverse students. “Scholarly discussions on lan-
guage and literacy education have, however, tended to maintain either a first
language or a second language stance in some mutually insulating way.” This
intellectual divide was perhaps fostered by the educational and intellectual climate
that prevailed in an earlier historical period. In the past 30 years or so, public
educational institutions have been made progressively more conscious of the need
and the obligation to serve diverse student populations under the aegis of marketi-
zation of educational provision for international students, and/or social integration
for all students, irrespective of their language backgrounds. It is recognized that
xvi Volume Editors’ Introduction to “Literacies and Language Education”

many linguistic minority students find the use of their second language for academic
purposes problematic. The ability to communicate informally for social purposes in a
second language, even at high levels of lexico-grammatical accuracy and pragmatic
familiarity, does not automatically translate into effective academic language use,
particularly in relation to reading and writing. A good deal of discussion in second
language curriculum and pedagogy is focussed on this “problem.” Leung also helps
the reader by unpacking some of the issues associated with the key terms signaled in
this field, such as “second language pedagogy” and “academic literacy,” “language”
and “literacy/literacies,” “language lexico-grammar system,” and “English for Aca-
demic Purposes” (EAP). And, of course, the term “language” itself, he suggests,
needs unpacking and he sees it “in the context of this chapter ‘in relation to observed
socio-cultural and pragmatic conventions in discourse’”.
Vivian L. Gadsden then links these broader debates to the theme of “Family
Literacy.” She sees family literacy as “a critical part of discussions on children,
parents, and family learning,” which she relates to “broad discussions of literacy in
and out of school” of the kind we have been considering. Such a view, she argues,
“encompasses a wide array of literacy practices and relationships between children
and parents, among adults, and within families” and while for many the term may be
interpreted as a single concept, she sees the focus on literacy “as a multidimensional
concept in which families and literacy are studied in tandem to inform and deepen
our understanding of the intersections between the two areas of inquiry.” She seeks,
then, “to understand families learning literacy in context – e.g., homes and commu-
nities, the relationships that foster learning in these contexts, and the role of the
family itself in creating and sustaining literacy learning and engagement.” As with
other authors in this volume, she addresses issues involved in “conceptualizations of
literacy as cultural and social practices, socio-contextual factors, and social change
versus discrete skills that assume universality of interests, needs, and backgrounds of
learners.” She uses a range of appropriate sources to review the issue of family
literacy “over the past 50 years; the persistence of tensions and problems; and the
possibilities that are emerging within and across language and literacy theory,
research, and practice.”
Anna Robinson-Pant in a chapter entitled “Women, Literacy, and Development:
An Overview” notes that the debates about women’s literacy have been seen as “the
key to development,” which “has informed government and international develop-
ment agency policy and programmes around the world.” For instance, “in the poorest
countries, there has continued to be a significant gap between male and female
literacy rates: UIS (2013) notes that 64% of the 774 million illiterate adults are
women. Within basic adult education, policy makers have focused on increasing
women’s as opposed to men’s access to literacy, through programmes designed
particularly around women’s reproductive role.” Over the decades, researchers
have been concerned to find statistical evidence indicating positive connections
between female literacy rates, health indicators such as decreased child mortality
and fertility rates, and economic participation.
However, in the 1980s there was a shift to a Gender and Development (GAD)
approach which meant that the impact of literacy programmes was no longer
Volume Editors’ Introduction to “Literacies and Language Education” xvii

measured only in relation to women. Men were also brought into the picture and
there was a “growing understanding that the linkages between girls’ schooling
(as well as women’s literacy) were in fact more complex than previously believed,”
a theme already signaled by Gadsden in her chapter on “Family Literacy.” The more
holistic approach to adult education in general has drawn attention to the importance
of supportive development and employment policies. Anna Robinson-Pant’s move
to a broader view of “Women, Literacy, and Development” is part of a series of new
and more wide-ranging issues being addressed in the literacy field. For instance,
“there has been long recognition of the need for improved access to services such as
credit, health care facilities and agricultural extension, if women are to be able to use
the knowledge and skills learnt in literacy courses; and the current policy shift
towards education and sustainable development points to the need to strengthen
inter-sectoral linkages and promote a more holistic approach.” The latter view she
highlights has begun to be adopted by UNESCO. She concludes: “As well as the
need to explore the links between women’s literacy and the economy, there is an
increasing interest in how societal discourses shape literacy and development pro-
grammes,” which include attention to “the resourcing and the status of women’s
literacy programmes.”
And in the spirit of international debate and tensions in the field, Nayr Ibrahim
makes the linking overview point with regard to “Developing Literacy, and Identi-
ties, in Multiple Languages.” Her account of this theme involves recognizing how
“[m]ajor socio-cultural and socio-political developments in the last century have
spread languages, literacies and identities throughout the world and accelerated the
advent of complex multilingual societies in the 21st century.” One effect of this has
been that “adults are confronted with alternative literacy practises in various social
contexts, where different languages and ways of meaning are learnt and new
identities are forged.” But in addition, this historical move has also affected new
generations, as “children are born into multiple language contact situations, in
binational families and multilingual communities.” This, then, has affected identities
and ways of living in “multiple and concurrent worlds.” Ibrahim, as with other
contributors to this volume, makes the link between these social changes and the
issue of ideology and what she terms “linguistic power struggles.” These involve
“individuals’ rights for self-expression in their languages versus the coercive power
of the majority language; access, or not, to different literacies; the need to negotiate
identities in these contested spaces.” In her chapter, then, she “traces the growing
importance of identity in the development of literacy in multiple languages, over the
last 60 years.” This journey, “not linear but overlapping and recursive, spotlights the
shift from a monoglossic to a heteroglossic approach in research and practise,
foregrounding the everyday practise of local, situated as well as transnational
literacies, and recognising and valorising the ensuing hybrid language identities.”
A number of chapters then address the issues raised above in relation to specific
national and cultural contexts, ranging from Brazil, to Nepal, Australia, the USA,
and Africa. For instance, Maria Lucia Castanheira from Brazil looks at Portuguese-
speaking African students in that country. She focuses on the experience of students
from Angola and their advisors in a graduate program in a Brazilian public
xviii Volume Editors’ Introduction to “Literacies and Language Education”

university, using this as a case study for highlighting the broader issue of examining
the situated nature of academic writing and the issues involved in how university
tutors and students navigate across contexts. She locates this account in the interna-
tional context of “academic literacies” research and then provides detailed research-
based accounts of students from Angolan backgrounds and of their tutors’ com-
ments. A group of Angola university teachers who came recently to Brazil to
enhance their academic literacy practices provide a case study of the issues involved
in this field and a comparative basis for further study across countries and cultures.
The Angolan teachers, who then became students in Brazil, had schooling experi-
ence at home during a period of civil war in refugee camps and local schools. They
applied to UFMG in Brazil to develop studies in various educational fields: e.g.,
language and education, history of education, educational psychology, math educa-
tion, and science education. A case study such as this, she concludes, focusing on
Portuguese-speaking African students in Brazil as an example of academic literacy
for minority but same language speakers, can help generate comparative studies that
enable us to draw larger conclusions regarding the social and linguistic issues
involved in students entering higher education, of the kind signaled by the academic
literacies approach.
Bryan Maddox, in a chapter on Nepal, also links the local context to the broader
debates we have seen, in this case regarding “Community Literacy.” By this Maddox
means “the idea that local meanings and uses of literacy should inform the design
and implementation of programmes and that literacy programmes should respond
and be flexible to people’s expressed needs.” The Community Literacy Project in
Nepal was informed by the sociocultural model of literacy developed within the
sociolinguistic and ethnographic studies of literacy, of the kind we have seen above.
This perspective assumes that literacy programmes can provide a public space for
debate over local “situated” meanings of literacy and provide practical mechanisms
to help people to learn and use literacy in real life situations. Maddox discusses some
of the tensions between the articulation of “local” meanings of literacy within the
wider national and international discourses of development and some of the creative
responses that emerged. For instance, “the concept of localised provision was
influenced by wider processes of change occurring within Nepal during that time
and by broader changes in development discourse and priorities. The national
context was in the process of rapid social change, involving a radical
democratisation of communication media including literacy practices, as silent
majorities claimed a voice in these processes of change, which included more
decentralised and democratic access to radio broadcasting and TV and the promotion
of language policy and practice in education, media and governance that recognised
linguistic diversity within the country.” He concludes by linking this local account to
the wider debates about power and inequality that the field of literacy now addresses.
Literacy and language, for instance, are “part of ongoing aspects of inequality and
social injustice, which the State and donor community have been either unable, or
unwilling to effectively tackle.” He concludes: “as Paulo Freire has reminded us,
literacy is essentially a political project . . . that challenges us to change the social and
cultural norms, patterns and relations” – a theme that runs throughout this volume.
Volume Editors’ Introduction to “Literacies and Language Education” xix

Also drawing on the concept of “Community Literacy,” Trevor Cairney’s chapter

on Australia is entitled “Community Literacy Practices and Education: Australia.”
He begins by taking on the “narrow” definition of “literacy” that has been opera-
tional in many contexts and instead wants to point out, along with many scholars in
this volume and in the tradition of literacy as social practice, that “literacy is
embedded in all of life and that institutional and formal literacy can never be truly
separated from the literacy practices of the world beyond school.” As he points out,
this idea has developed especially in the last 20 years, during which “we have
developed a richer understanding of what this might mean for literacy practices
sanctioned, supported and used within schooling.” Earlier discussions of the impor-
tance of community literacy by administrators, schools, and teachers were generally
framed by a recognition that the literacy experiences of home and community have a
significant impact on literacy success at school. But most interest has been in how
families and their literacy practices serve school agendas, with interest being driven
by limited definitions of literacy and, at times, deficit views of learning. This
restricted view of the relationship between literacy practices in and out of school
has limited many attempts to build stronger relationships between schools and their
communities. As Cairney states, and as many authors in this volume also concur,
“our students are never simply in school or out of school, for their identities move
with them and their practices are carried with them across contexts.”
The shift that Cairney notes in the perceived place of “community literacy
practices” involved researchers beginning to examine the literacy practices of
home and school more closely and noting increasingly that the way teachers shape
classroom discourse can be limited in scope and not reflective of the diversity of
student language and culture. He lists three related areas of inquiry that have since
begun to inform home and community literacy research: multimodality; critical
theory; and ethnographic perspectives. Cairney concludes by arguing that all three
of these areas of study help us to understand how children from varied cultural and
linguistic groups continue to have difficulty in achieving school success. Many
students struggle to cope with dominant pedagogical approaches that are based on
a “narrow understanding of school knowledge and literacy, which are defined and
defended as what one needs to know and how one needs to know it in order to be
successful in school and society.”
Maintaining the interest in literacies in and out of school, Kathy Schulz and
Glynda Hull write a chapter entitled “Literacies In and Out of School in the United
States.” As with other contributions, they see research on literacy practices as
“separated into two strands”: (a) “school‐based research,” which they argue “has
focused on reading and writing in formal classrooms, often by examining teaching
methods, curricula, learning, and assessment, its goal being to improve students”;
and (b) “out‐of‐school research” which “has documented the myriad literacy prac-
tices that occur in a range of institutions and social spaces with an interest in
expanding conceptions of what counts as literacy. Important theoretical and concep-
tual advances in literacy studies have come from research within the second strand.”
However, they point out, “a divide still exists between the engagement claimed for
many youth in terms of their out‐of‐school literacy practices in contrast with their
xx Volume Editors’ Introduction to “Literacies and Language Education”

school‐based reading and writing.” So, bringing these themes together, Schultz and
Hull “sketch the major theoretical traditions that have shaped research on the
relationships and borders of literacy in and out of school.” These include, as we
have seen, “the ethnography of communication and recent perspectives from cultural
geography.” Research on literacy out of school, they point out, “continues to be an
important and necessary corrective to unidimensional understandings of texts, pro-
cesses, and contexts,” again challenging the dominant narrow view of literacy and
learning that many institutions still adhere to. They argue that “the persisting
challenge in an age of accountability and testing, narrowing conceptions of literacy,
and growing socioeconomic disparities, is how to bridge out‐of‐school and in‐school
worlds in ways that make discernable, positive differences in youth’s present
circumstances and social futures,” a key theme for the whole of this volume. Indeed,
like many of the contributors to this volume, Schultz and Hull conclude by
suggesting ways in which we can still detail “differences in linguistic and social
practices and celebrating diverse literacies.” It will be for the reader, having perused
all of these chapters in the volume, to decide whether such a positive view is still
sustainable.
David Bloome, another well know researcher in the USA, along with his col-
league, SangHee Ryu, offers a chapter entitled “Literacies in the Classroom” that
does indeed reinforce this positive perspective. They see the phrase “literacies in the
classroom” as broader than it might at first appear, “indexing a series of debates,
discussions, and explorations of how written language is implicated in social,
cultural and political ideologies that have implications for what constitutes knowl-
edge, knowing, and rationality, for the relationship of classroom and non-classroom
contexts, and for how people relate to social institutions. From the perspective of
these deeper levels,” then, “the surface level conception of ‘literacies in classrooms’
is itself an ideological imposition, albeit one that has become naturalized.” Bloome
and Ryu “discuss some of the issues raised by this deeper level of defining ‘literacies
in the classroom’.” In doing so, they work through a number of key issues in
language and learning in such a context. They begin with the notion of
“Pedagogization of Literacy Practices. One of the key issues in locating literacy
practices and events in classrooms concerns the centrality of pedagogy in defining
literacy practices and events.” They then consider “The relationship of literacy
practices outside the classroom to literacy practices inside the classroom.” They
move on to examine “Knowledge, knowing, rationality, globalization and literacies
in the classroom” and then proceed to consideration of “the state and power
relations” with respect to literacies in the classroom. Bloome and Ryu conclude
with a positive view of how teachers and students deal with such an “extensive
apparatus of governmentality.” What they observe is the buy-in of many educators,
students, and others, in their daily lives in the classroom, as teachers and students
engage in what might be called a series of “tactics” that allow them to engage in
illicit literacy practices. They may engage students in literacy practices for exploring
their own communities, families, and histories (cf. the chapters on “Community
Literacies,” previously discussed), reconstituting what counts as knowledge and
personhood, side-stepping state-mandated language policies, mediating the official
Volume Editors’ Introduction to “Literacies and Language Education” xxi

knowledge of school texts, mediating official and unofficial literacy practices among
other tactics – an interesting list of ways of getting around the narrow views of
literacy and learning that might appear to be dominant.
And appropriately again, this part concludes with a chapter entitled “The Politics
of the Teaching of Reading” that brings together many of the themes we have been
following in Part 2 under the heading Literacies and Social Institutions.
Finally, Part 3 is entitled Living Literacies: Social and Cultural Experience and
allows for close descriptions across different countries and contexts signaling many
of the concepts and debates raised in the earlier parts. A further eight chapters cover
many of these issues across a number of different countries: Africa, USA, Latin
America, and the UK.
We begin with an overview of the field by Jabari Mahiri “Literacies in the Lives
of Global Youth.” He locates this in a brief historical perspective:

A period of approximately 40 years from the mid-1970s through 2015 frames this chapter’s
discussion of literacy practices in the lives of global youth. It reaches back to the 1970s to
connect the emergence of two intertwining forces that have significantly influenced the
literacy practices and perspectives of youth and young adults throughout the world – the rise
of the Internet and the rise of global hip-hop culture. . . Due to the Internet and other
technological influences as well as influences from hip-hop culture, this generation and the
Post-Millennial generation that followed it reflect a distinct shift in the forms and functions
of literacy – a shift from a static concept of literacy to dynamic one of multiple literacies.

The chapter, then, “delineates a number of considerations regarding this shift.”

These include conceptions of literacy prior to the Millennial generation and how
literacy scholars have significantly revised these conceptions in the 1980s, as we
have seen highlighted in a number of other chapters, especially concerning notions
of literacy as social practice. The chapter then shows how these developments too
have been transformed by scholarship in the present century. Finally, “it addresses
some of the challenges and future directions for research on literacy practices of
global youth as they turn from reading the world on pages to viewing and partici-
pating in it on screen.” This new experience has involved scholars exploring the
workings and implications of novel literacy practices connected to and often enabled
through the Internet and other digital technologies. As Mahiri sees it, “their work
reveals how Millennial and Post-Millennial youth and young adults engage in and
make sense of their worlds very differently from earlier generations. A key feature of
this age is that digital media has greatly increased the mobility and accessibility of
texts and signs while magnifying and simplifying processes for their production and
dissemination,” a theme that again is key to this volume as we find ourselves
engaging with these new movements and meanings (see also Thorne and May’s
volume in the Encyclopedia).
The remaining seven chapters in this part address these issues in specific cultural
and national contexts. Marcia Farr keeps open the cultural and ethnolinguistic issues
we have been addressing, as she considers literacy practices in a US city in a chapter
entitled “Literacies and Ethnolinguistic Diversity: Chicago.” Chicago, she points
out, “is in many ways an archetypal U.S. city; it is now a global city, its traditional
xxii Volume Editors’ Introduction to “Literacies and Language Education”

industrial economy having changed into an information and service-based econ-

omy.” As a global city, Chicago is linked to other places in the world economically,
culturally, and linguistically. Since its inception, of course, Chicago has been linked
to other places in the world through its large immigrant populations, but the rapid
pace of more recent globalization processes, primarily in transportation and com-
munication, has intensified these connections, along with the change in the economy.
Such intensified globalization leads, in some metropolitan areas, to complex migrant
communities comprised of populations from all over the world, a phenomenon
labeled “Superdiversity” (see also Higgins in McCarty and May’s volume in the
Encyclopedia). Although some neighborhoods in Chicago comprise heterogeneous
populations, in general, Chicago’s neighborhoods are still ethnically based. Even
most Mexicans and Puerto Ricans (the two largest Spanish-speaking groups in
Chicago) live in generally separate areas, although the sheer number of Mexicans
leads some to reside in other neighborhoods.
Following this contextualization, Farr then links her account to that we have just
seen by Mahiri, as she analyzes the “contemporary globalization processes” cur-
rently being experienced, which include issues of “transnational communication,
especially via mass media like satellite television.” One aspect of this shift as it
affects global youth is “the development of a global monoculture, e.g., among youth
worldwide who emulate African American musical and verbal style, thus spreading
English literacy in song lyrics. Yet global movements toward sameness simulta-
neously complement the marked differentiation of ethnic, class and other identities at
local levels.” At the same time, she points out that the research she has conducted in
Chicago communities “has shown the resilience of ethnolinguistic identities as well
as the languages and scripts that index them. Such ethnolinguistic identities encom-
pass oral and written verbal styles commonly associated with various identities.” We
have, then, both global influence and change at the same time as local identities and
cultures, both of which affect the kind of literacy practices that youth engage with, a
key theme in the field of literacy at this point.
Moving to South America but maintaining a similar interest in diversity, Inge
Sichra writes about “Language Diversity and Indigenous Literacy in the Andes.”
This area, she reminds us, stretches out along the entire South American continent
and is a cultural not just a physical descriptor. “The Andean space, as traditionally
referred to in social studies, especially in relation to languages and cultures present
there before the conquerors arrived, is restricted to the Incan Empire’s sphere of
influence.” She focuses, then, on “Andean languages that have managed to survive
Spanish language rule, which seeks to maintain certain functional spaces in national
societies.” An interesting literacy issue here is that “indigenous languages had some
sort of graphic or notational, albeit not alphabetical, system” and that for some time
this led to Andeans being called “illiterate,” a term that has frequently emerged in
attempts to characterize different features of literacy practice. Today, the emphasis
has shifted from deficit to identity as the speakers “increasingly hoist Andean
languages as symbols of ethnic and political vindication in an attempt to secure
prestigious and public spheres for these languages.” From this perspective, Sichra
suggests, “literacy acquires or could acquire a driving role in the social participation
Volume Editors’ Introduction to “Literacies and Language Education” xxiii

of sectors traditionally marginalized by these countries’ societies – in other words, it

could be an empowerment mechanism for the individual, the community and the
group,” a theme that recurs in many national contexts around the world. Sichra, then,
“focuses on the literacy of languages characterized by their orality, with a focus on
Spanish literacy,” recognizing ways in which “literacy comprises concrete social
practices with certain purposes that depend on previous political and ideological
factors.” In order to address these issues, Sichra provides a brief historical context for
these practices in the Andes, notably: the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century;
the complex changes in Quechua and Aimara in the eighteenth century; and, more
recently, the growing acknowledgment of diversity of Andean languages “as a
consequence of currents of political confrontation with authoritarian regimes,
established from Ecuador to Argentina from the 1960s to the 1980s . . . as well as
a result of the acceleration of the globalization phenomenon.” So, we can see the link
between languages and social and later ethnic vindication movements which
“questioned the state’s homogenizing and unifying nature, and its aims at building
nations based on one language and one culture.” The Andean data, then, provide a
key insight into the debates raised here regarding language identification, political
institutions, and cultural identities.
Then we move to Africa for the next two chapters. Firstly, there is a general
account of the continent entitled “Literacy and Multilingualism in Africa” by Kasper
Juffermans and Ashraf Abdelhay. Interestingly, Juffermans and Abdelhay point out
that “with the exception of South Africa,” on which there is a chapter next, “Africa is
not at the forefront of discussions in socio- and educational linguistics.” They argue
that “this marginality is greatly undeserved” and further point out that “African
sociolinguistic realities are among the world’s most complex and [that] there is much
to gain if it could inform literacy and multilingualism research more generally,”
which their chapter makes an important contribution toward. Indeed, they recognize
that things are changing and “in fact, this peripherality has recently been a produc-
tive source for a radical revision of some of the metropolitan epistemologies about
multilingualism and literacy,” which they address. African contexts, in fact, “present
some of the world’s most diverse, linguistically creative and vital multilingual
situations, but also feature in the world’s poorest literacy rates and are routinely
said to lack a literate tradition altogether.” This chapter, then, like many in the
volume “offers counter-evidence for this deceptive view.” Juffermans and Abdelhay
do this “by reviewing Africa’s literacy traditions and script inventions, but also point
at problems and difficulties in African multilingualism and literacies.” They outline
“two relatively young fields of practice and/or study that have begun to make major
contributions to literacy and multilingualism in Africa: digital literacy and linguistic
landscape.” A key issue they address in challenging dominant stereotypes is that
“with the exception of North Africa and only very few sub-Saharan countries, the
overwhelming majority of African populations are highly multilingual.” In urban and
rural areas alike, people speaking (and identifying with) three or more languages as
part of their everyday lives are much more likely to be encountered than monolingual
or even bilingual people. Multilingualism is so self-evident in much of Africa that
the word “bilingual” tends to be reserved for people in command of two former
xxiv Volume Editors’ Introduction to “Literacies and Language Education”

colonial languages, irrespective of their repertoire in African languages.

Metrolingualism or sociolinguistic superdiversity as a phenomenon is hardly spec-
tacular when compared to African sociolinguistic realities. Large parts of rural
Africa are characterized by similar patterns of intense diversity, sometimes thought
to be exclusive for metropolitan areas. In the chapter, they provide headings on
“African Digital Literacy” and “African Linguistic Landscapes” and in the light of
such rich accounts of what is actually going on they ask “how long it will take for
language in education to open up to these more dynamic and more African language
practices?”
Then we move to South Africa, where Mastin Prinsloo presents a selected
overview of research projects there, which investigate alternative ways of concep-
tualizing literacy learning and perhaps address some of the questions raised by
Juffermans and Abdelhay. Prinsloo starts with the complex framing that recognizes
“literacy is constructed as a multiple semiotic practice, used, inserted and trans-
formed by agentive human beings across local and global sites, contexts and spaces,
discourses, languages and genres.” In these multiple forms of crossings, according to
Prinsloo and many of the sources he cites, “the relationship between learning in
everyday lives and school learning, and what might be an effective relationship
between them, is explored.” In doing so, he “attempts to reconfigure taken for
granted assumptions about what constitutes rich locations for literacy and learning,”
of which, of course South Africa is one and indeed, as the previous authors noted, so
is the continent as a whole. Prinsloo provides an interesting update on educational
policy in South Africa as a number of important initiatives took place in the area of
literacy research. The post-apartheid South African government, for instance, set out
to adjust the assessment framework for education and training and a concern for
literacy and adult basic education was included. As Prinsloo observes, “[a] major
contribution to re‐thinking literacy education within a social practice perspective in
South Africa and influencing research traditions, was the path‐breaking Social Uses
of Literacy by Prinsloo and Breier (1996), a collection of ethnographic case studies
on the reading and writing practices of ordinary people in the Western Cape, who
had little or no schooling.” Such publications can help readers to follow through
many of the chapters in this volume as researchers move on beyond the narrow skills
based view of literacy to acknowledge that educational practice needs to take
account of the social and cultural context. Prinsloo, then, is able to point forward
to positive “future directions” in the field. “As researchers in the New Literacy
Studies have powerfully demonstrated, literacy learning is part of much broader
chains of sustainability.” He concludes by asserting strongly the importance of
recognizing such a view with respect to “a developing country like South Africa,
which straddles first and third world economies simultaneously.” It is important in
this context to “‘get everyone on board’ to raise public awareness around the value
and importance of literacy in sustaining democracy and human rights.”
As part of the global dimension of such literacy research, the next chapter looks at
what has been happening in the USA as people who went there as slaves from Africa
began to engage in education and literacy practices. Elaine Richardson, in a chapter
entitled “Africa American Literacies,” shows how this title “refers to the concept that
Volume Editors’ Introduction to “Literacies and Language Education” xxv

African American cultural identities, social locations, and social practices influence
ways that members of this discourse group make meaning and assert themselves
sociopolitically in all communicative contexts.” In the present era, as the reader will
by now recognize fully, such a definition goes beyond print and language in a narrow
sense “to include African American traditional contexts as well as the contemporary
context, wherein African Americans enact creative multimodal meaning making.”
As we saw in relation to Africa, and also in countries around the world as new
literacy practices emerge, “the term African American literacies encapsulates socio-
cultural approaches to African American literacy education advanced by the various
subfields: including sociolinguistics, critical pedagogy, reading, rhetoric and com-
position, and New Literacies Studies.” In this context, with a long migration history,
there has been a classic shift from “earlier prejudice and stereotypes about culture
and literacy, to more recent awareness of diversity and literacy as social practice.”
“Americans of African descent had been enslaved and marginalized within Ameri-
can society, the early scholarly thinking about Black language and culture reflected
the common prejudices of the time: Blacks were culturally and intellectually infe-
rior.” Since the 1940s, however, “scholars presented . . . the history and development
of what is currently referred to by mainstream linguists as ‘vernacular’ language,
with many language educators advocating inclusion of African American language
and literacy histories, structures, and discourse practices in critical conversation with
those of the dominant culture.” Literacy education, then, is seen as being more
“socially just by repositioning students as knowledge‐making agents of social
change.” Again, we might ask how far these progressive ideas about literacy and
education are actually being realized in practice – a key question that this volume
continues to raise.
Also in the Americas, but this time in the south, Judy Kalman writes a piece
entitled “Literacies in Latin America,” which addresses many of the themes we have
already seen but also signals specific features of this region. She sees it as “a
heterogeneous region with deep cultural, social, economic and linguistic differ-
ences.” In terms of how it is labeled, she points out that “International agencies
such as the World Bank and the Economic Commission for Latin America (CEPAL)
refer to the region as Latin America and the Caribbean in order to include not only
the land mass stretching from Mexico to Argentina but also the small English,
Spanish, and French‐speaking islands as well.”
In relation to a theme that has run through the volume, of the problems with
measurement of literacy rates, she argues that “despite region wide efforts to expand
access to schooling, the illiteracy rate for people 15 years of age or older is still 9%”
(Infante and Letier, 2013). That said, she also points out, in keeping with the
qualitative perspective of this volume, that “this measurement varies from country
to country, given the difficulties for agreeing on what constitutes literacy.” As
Kalman explains, “[d]isparities in class, race, language, and ethnicity shape literacy
and illiteracy in Latin America” and indeed the measurements of wealth are seen to
coincide to some extent with those of literacy. For example, “in Honduras and the
Dominican Republic, the poorest 20% of the population earns only an average of 5%
of total income while the richest 20% earns an average of 47% of the wealth” while
xxvi Volume Editors’ Introduction to “Literacies and Language Education”

“in these same countries, the illiteracy rate is 7.8% and 6.6% respectfully” (CEPAL,
2012). There are also cultural issues at stake, such as the fact that “indigenous
peoples are more likely to be illiterate than other groups, as illustrated by
Guatemala’s illiteracy rate of 14% and Ecuador’s 11.4%.” There is also a gender
issue, where for instance in this part of the world “indigenous women are more likely
to be illiterate than indigenous men and although illiteracy in urban centers tends to
be 6%, it is twice that in rural areas (UNESCO, 2006).” Kalman concludes with a
helpful summary of such complexity: “Any discussion of literacy in Latin America,
then, needs to contemplate its socioeconomic disparities, issues of gender and
locality and the role of schooling in the dissemination of reading and writing, and
education policies promoted by international agencies.”
And finally, we move to the UK where Eve Gregory uses the title “City Liter-
acies” to investigate many of the questions raised above as we look at the ways in
which literacy practices are being enacted in cities. While framing her account in
terms of the broader debates regarding “superdiversity,” taking account of migration
and movement between countries of the kind we have seen frequently in this
volume, she focuses on specific examples of “individuals growing up and becoming
literate at the beginning and the end of the twentieth century in London, one of the
largest and most ethnically diverse cities in the world.” Gregory “summarises
problems in this field and finally points to possible future directions for the research
on literacies in cities during the coming decades of the twenty-first century.” She
argues that “[t]hroughout time, we see the contrasts and contradictions between
studies documenting informal literacies taking place in homes and communities
which show a wealth of skills, knowledge and inventiveness in cities, and reports
relating to school literacy which laments poor performance of city children in
classroom tests.” And her conclusion is an apt way to end the volume: “Even the
most rural environment can often be connected via satellite or internet to a wealth of
literacies, both oral and written, in numerous languages. Nevertheless, cities still
remain a hub of literacy. Through facilitating face-to-face interaction for people of all
nations and backgrounds they will always provide a haven for the development of
new and dynamic literacies.”

London Brian V. Street

Acknowledgment

Thanks to the following for their key editorial support:

Consulting Editor: Nancy Hornberger
Editorial Assistant: Lincoln Dam

xxvii
Contents

Part I Literacies and Social Theory .......................... 1

New Literacies, New Times: Developments in Literacy Studies ...... 3

Brian V. Street

Critical Race Theory ....................................... 17

Arlette Ingram Willis

Literacy Myths . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Harvey J. Graff and John Duffy

Literacy and Internet Technologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43

Kevin Leander, Cassandra Scharber, and Cynthia Lewis

BICS and CALP: Empirical and Theoretical Status of the

Distinction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
Jim Cummins

Reading Attitudes, Interests, and Practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73

John Edwards

Gender and Literacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83

Gemma Moss

Critical-Literacy Education: “The Supremely Educational Event” ... 95

Peter Freebody

Critical Literacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109

Yvonne Foley

Language, Literacy, and Knowledge Production in Africa . . . . . . . . . . 121

Kwesi Kwaa Prah

Biliteracy and Globalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133

Viniti Vaish

xxix
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
the azure cupola of heaven, to attest by their living beauty, or their
ruined grandeur, the genius and liberality which gave them birth. To
the cultivation and patronage of such noble arts, the vanity, the
hopes, and the holiest affections of man stand irrevocably pledged;
and we should deplore any invention or discovery, or any tide in the
nation’s taste, which should paralyse the artist’s pencil, or break the
sculptor’s chisel, or divert into new channels the genius which wields
them. But instead of superseding the arts of design, photography will
but supply them with new materials,—with collections of costume,—
with studies of drapery and of forms, and with scenes in life, and
facts in nature, which, if they possess at all, they possess
imperfectly, and without which art must be stationary, if she does not
languish and decline.
Sentiments analogous to these have been more professionally
expressed by M. Delaroche, a distinguished French artist,—by Sir
Charles Eastlake, whose taste and knowledge of art is unrivalled,—
and by Mr. Ruskin, who has already given laws to art, and whose
genius is destined to elevate and to reform it. M. Delaroche
considers photography “as carrying to such perfection certain of the
essential principles of art, that they must become subjects of study
and observation, even to the most accomplished artist.”... “The finish
of inconceivable minuteness,” he says, “disturbs in no respect the
repose of the masses, nor impairs in any way the general effect....
The correctness of the lines, the precision of the forms in the designs
of M. Daguerre, are as perfect as it is possible they can be, and yet,
at the same time, we discover in them a broad and energetic
manner, and a whole equally rich in hue and in effect. The painter
will obtain by this process a quick method of making collections of
studies, which he could not otherwise procure without much time and
labour, and in a style very far inferior, whatever might be his talents
in other respects.” In the same spirit, Mr. Ruskin[58] considers “the
art of photography as enabling us to obtain as many memoranda of
the facts of nature as we need;” and long before Mr. Talbot taught us
to fix upon paper the pictures of the camera obscura, the Rev. John
Thomson, one of the most distinguished of our Scottish landscape
painters, studied, in one of these instruments, the forms and colours
of the scenes which he was to represent. Other artists, both in
portrait and in landscape, now avail themselves of photography, both
as an auxiliary and a guide in their profession; but there are certain
difficulties and imperfections in the art itself, and so many
precautions required in its right application, whether we use its
pictures single, as representations on a plane, or take them
binocularly, to be raised into relief by the stereoscope, that we must
draw from the principles of optics the only rules which can be of real
services to the arts of design.
In painting a landscape, a building, a figure, or a group of figures,
the object of the artist is to represent it on his canvas just as he sees
it, having previously selected the best point of view, and marked for
omission or improvement what is not beautiful, or what would
interfere with the effect of his picture as a work of high art. His first
step, therefore, is to fix upon the size of his canvas, or the distance
at which the picture is to be seen, which determines its size. His own
eye is a camera obscura, and the relation between the picture or
image on its retina is such, that if we could view it from the centre of
curvature of the retina, (the centre of visible direction,) a distance of
half an inch, it would have precisely the same apparent magnitude
as the object of which it is the image. Let us now suppose that the
artist wishes to avail himself of the picture in the camera obscura as
received either on paper or ground-glass, or of a photograph of the
scene he is to paint. He must make use of a camera whose focal
length is equal to the distance at which his picture is to be seen, and
when the picture thus taken is viewed at this distance (suppose two
feet) it will, as a whole, and in all its parts, have the same apparent
magnitude as the original object. This will be understood from Fig.
47, in which we may suppose h to be the lens of the camera, rb the
object, and hy′ the distance at which it is to be viewed. The size of
the picture taken with a lens at h, whose focal length is hy′, will be
b′r′, and an eye placed at h will see the picture b′r′ under an angle
b′hr′, equal to the angle rhb, under which the real object rb was
seen by the artist from h. In like manner, a larger picture, byr, taken
by a camera the focal distance of whose lens at h is hy, will be an
accurate representation of the object rb, when viewed from h, and of
the same apparent magnitude. If either of these pictures, b′r′ or br,
are viewed from greater or less distances than hy′, or hy, they will
not be correct representations of the object rb, either in apparent
magnitude or form. That they will be of a different apparent
magnitude, greater when viewed at less distances than hy′, hy, and
less when viewed at greater distances, is too obvious to require any
illustration. That they will differ in form, or in the relative apparent
size of their parts, has, so far as I know, not been conjectured. In
order to shew this, let us suppose a man six feet high to occupy the
foreground, and another of the same size to be placed in the middle
distance, the distance of the two from the artist being ten and twenty
feet. The apparent magnitudes of these two men on the photograph
will be as two to one; and if we look at it at any distance greater or
less than the focal length hy′ of the lens, the same proportion of two
to one will be preserved, whereas if we look at the original figures at
a greater or less distance from them than the place of the artist, the
ratio of their apparent magnitudes will be altered. If the artist, for
example, advances five feet, the nearest man will be five feet distant
and the other fifteen feet, so that their apparent magnitude will now
be as three to one.

Fig. 47.
 The same observations apply to a portrait of the human face. In
looking at a human profile let us suppose the breadth of the nose to
be one inch, that of the ear one inch, and that we view this profile at
the distance of three feet from the ear, which is two inches nearer
the observer than the nose. The apparent magnitude of the ear and
nose will be as thirty-eight to thirty-six inches, whereas if we view the
profile from the distance of one foot the ratio will be as fourteen to
twelve, that is, the ear will be increased in apparent size more than
the nose. Hence it follows that all pictures should be viewed under
the same angle of apparent magnitude under which they were seen
by the artist as taken photographically, for if we view them at a
greater or less angle than this we do not see the same picture as
when we looked at the original landscape or portrait, under the same
angle of apparent magnitude.
From the observations made in the preceding Chapter on
photographic and stereoscopic portraiture, the reader must have
already drawn the inference that the same landscape or building,
seen at different distances, varies essentially in its character,—
beauties disclosing themselves and defects disappearing as we
approach or recede from them. The picture in the camera, therefore,
as used by Mr. Thomson, or, what is still better, with the exception of
colour, the photograph obtained by the same instrument, will supply
the artist with all the general materials for his picture. The
photograph will differ considerably from any sketch which the artist
may have himself made, owing to certain optical illusions to which
his eye is subject. The hills and other vertical lines in the distance
will be lower in the photograph than in his sketch.[59] The vertical
lines of buildings will converge upwards in the photograph, as they
ought to do, in receding from the eye; and in the same picture there
will be a confusion, as we shall afterwards shew, in the delineation of
near and minute objects in the foreground, increasing with the size of
the lens which he has employed.
In his admirable chapter “On Finish,” Mr. Ruskin has established,
beyond a doubt, the most important principle in the art of painting.
“The finishing of nature,” he states, “consists not in the smoothing of
surface, but the filling of space, and the multiplication of life and
thought;” and hence he draws the conclusion, that “finishing means,
in art, simply telling more truth.” Titian, Tintoret, Bellini, and Veronese
have, as he has shewn, wrought upon this principle, delineating vein
by vein in the leaf of the vine, petal by petal in the borage-blossoms,
the very snail-shells on the ground, the stripe of black bark in the
birch-tree, and the clusters of the ivy-leaved toad-flax in the rents of
their walls; and we have seen that a modern artist, Delaroche,
considers a finish of inconceivable minuteness as neither disturbing
the repose of the masses, nor interfering with the general effect in a
picture.
The Pre-Raphaelites, therefore, may appeal to high authority for
the cardinal doctrine of their creed; and whatever be their errors in
judgment or in taste, they have inaugurated a revolution which will
release art from its fetters, and give it a freer and a nobler aim.
Nature is too grand in her minuteness, and too beautiful in her
humility, to be overlooked in the poetry of art. If her tenderest and
most delicate forms are worthy of admiration, she will demand from
the artist his highest powers of design. If the living organizations of
the teeming earth, upon which we hourly tread, are matchless in
structure, and fascinating in colour, the palette of the painter must
surrender to them its choicest tints. In the foreground of the highest
art, the snail-shell may inoffensively creep from beneath the withered
leaf or the living blade; the harebell and the violet may claim a place
in the sylvan dell; the moss may display its tiny frond, the gnarled
oak or the twisted pine may demand the recognition of the botanist,
while the castle wall rises in grandeur behind them, and the gigantic
cliffs or the lofty mountain range terminate the scene.
If these views are sound, the man of taste will no longer endure
slovenliness in art. He will demand truth as well as beauty in the
landscape; and that painter may change his profession who cannot
impress geology upon his rocks, and botany upon his plants and
trees, or who refuses to display, upon his summer or his autumn
tablet, the green crop as well as the growing and the gathered
harvest. Thus enlarged in its powers and elevated in its purposes,
the art of painting will be invested with a new character, demanding
from its votaries higher skill and more extended knowledge. In
former times, the minute and accurate delineation of nature was a
task almost impossible, requiring an amount of toil which could
hardly be repaid even when slightly performed; but science has now
furnished art with the most perfect means of arresting, in their most
delicate forms, every object, however minute, that can enter into the
composition of a picture. These means are the arts of photography
and stereoscopic re-combination, when rightly directed, and it is the
object of the present chapter to shew how the artist may best avail
himself of their valuable and indispensable aid.
Every country and district, and even different parts of the same
district, have a Flora and Geology peculiar to themselves; and the
artist who undertakes to represent its beauties owes to truth the
same obligations as the botanist who is to describe its plants, or the
mineralogist its rocks and stones. The critic could not, in former
times, expect more details from his unaided pencil than it has
generally furnished; but with the means now at his command, he
must collect, like the naturalist, all the materials for his subject. After
the camera has given him the great features of his landscape, he
must appeal to it for accurate delineations of its minuter parts,—the
trunks, and stems, and leafage of his trees—the dipping strata of its
sandstone beds—the contortions of its kneaded gneiss, or the ruder
features of its trap and its granite. For the most important of these
details he will find the camera, as at present constructed, of little
service. It is fitted only to copy surfaces; and therefore, when
directed to solid bodies, such as living beings, statues, &c., it gives
false and hideous representations of them, as I have shewn in a
preceding chapter. It is peculiarly defective when applied to parts of
bodies at different distances from it, and of a less diameter than the
lens. The photograph of a cube taken by a lens of a greater
diameter, will display five of its sides in a position, when its true
perspective representation is simply a single square of its surface.
When applied to trees, and shrubs, and flowers, its pictures are still
more unsatisfactory. Every stem and leaf smaller than the lens,
though absolutely opaque, is transparent, and leaves and stems
behind and beyond are seen like ghosts through the photographic
image.
 Fig. 48.
This will be understood from Fig. 48, in which ll is the lens of the
camera, ab the breadth of the trunk or stem of a tree less than ll in
width. Draw la, lb, touching ab in the points a, b, and crossing at c.
Objects behind ab, and placed within the angle acb, will not have
any images of them formed by the lens ll, because none of the rays
which proceed from them can fall upon the lens, but objects placed
within the angle ecf, however remote be their distance, will have
images of them formed by the lens. If d, for example, be a leaf or a
fruit, or a portion of a branch, the rays which it emits will fall upon the
portions lm, ln of the lens, determined by drawing dm, dn touching
ab, and an image of it will be formed in the centre of the
photographic image of ab, as if ab were transparent. This image will
be formed by all the portions of the surface of the lens on which the
shadow of ab, formed by rays emanating from d, would not fall. If the
object d is more remote, the shadow of ab will diminish in size, and
the image of the object will be formed by a greater portion of the
lens. If the sun were to be in the direction mn, his image would
appear in the centre of the trunk or stem, corresponding to ab, Fig.
49.

Fig. 49.
If the stem occupies any other position, ab, Fig. 48, in the
landscape, objects, such as d, within the angle ecf, will have images
of them formed within the corresponding portion of the trunk or stem.
Hence, if ab, Fig. 49, represents the shadow of the stem across the
lens ll, the image of any object, which if luminous would give this
shadow, will be formed within the photographic image of the stem,
and as every part of it may have branches, or leaves, or fruit behind
it, its photographs will be filled with their pictures, which will have the
same distinctness as other equidistant parts of the landscape.
These observations are applicable to the limbs and slender parts
of animate and inanimate figures, when they are of a less size than
the lens with which their photograph is taken. They will be
transparent to all objects behind them, and their true forms and
shades cannot be taken with the cameras now in use.[60]
 In order, therefore, to collect from nature the materials of his
profession, the artist must use a camera with a lens not much larger
than the pupil of his eye, and with such an instrument he will obtain
the most correct drawings of the trunks and stems of trees, of the
texture and markings of their bark, of the form of their leaves, and of
all those peculiarities of structure and of leafage by which alone the
trees of the forest can be distinguished. In like manner, he will obtain
the most correct representations of the rocks and precipices, and the
individual stones[61] which may enter into his picture,—of the plants
which spring from their crevices or grow at their base, and of those
flowers in their native grace and beauty, which hitherto he has either
drawn from recollection, or copied from the formal representations of
the botanist.
In addition to their correctness as true representations of natural
forms, photographs have a peculiar value, for which no labour or skill
on the part of the artist can compensate. In drawing the sketch of a
landscape, or delineating the trees, rocks, and foliage which are near
him, or the objects in the middle or remote distance, several hours
must be spent. During this period, the landscape and its individual
parts are undergoing no inconsiderable change. A breeze may
disturb the masses of his foliage, and bend his tree stems, and ruffle
his verdure, and throw new reflected lights upon the waving crops,
while every direct light is changing in intensity and direction during
the culmination or descent of the sun. What he has delineated in the
morning will hardly correspond with what he draws at noon, and the
distances which at one time are finely marked in aerial perspective,
will disappear, or even suffer inversion by variations in the intensity
and position of the haze. If cottages, or castles, or buildings of any
kind, enter into the picture, the shadows of their projections, and the
lights upon their walls and roofs will, in sunshine, undergo still
greater variations, and the artist will be perplexed with the
anachronisms and inconsistencies of his choicest materials. The
landscape thus composed in patches will, in its photograph, have a
very different aspect, as much in its forms as in its lights and
shadows. The truths of nature are fixed at one instant of time; the
self-delineated landscape is embalmed amid the co-existing events
of the physical and social world. If the sun shines, his rays throw
their gilding on the picture. If the rain-shower falls, the earth and the
trees glisten with its reflexions. If the wind blows, the partially
obliterated foliage will display the extent of its agitation. The objects
of still life, too, give reality and animation to the scene. The streets
display their stationary chariots, the esplanade its military array, and
the market-place its colloquial groups, while the fields are studded
with the forms and attitudes of animal life. The incidents of time and
the forms of space are thus simultaneously recorded, and every
picture from the sober palette of the sun becomes an authentic
chapter in the history of the world.[62]
But, however valuable photography has become to the artist,
science has recently given him another important auxiliary. In order
to make this available, he must employ a small pocket binocular
camera, to take double pictures to be united in the stereoscope. His
trees will thus exhibit the roundness of their trunks and stems, the
leaves and branches will place themselves at their proper distance,
and he will discover the reason of peculiar effects which in the plane
photograph he has been unable to understand. Seeing that his own
picture is to be upon a plane surface, I can hardly expect to convince
the artist that he will obtain more information by reproducing the
original in relief. It is a fact, however, beyond dispute, that effects are
produced by the stereoscopic union of two plane photographs which
are invisible in the single picture. These effects, which are chiefly
those of lustre and shade, are peculiarly remarkable in
Daguerreotype, and it is by no means easy to explain the cause. In a
Daguerreotype, for example, of two figures in black bronze, with a
high metallic lustre, it is impossible, by looking at the single picture,
to tell the material of which they are made; but the moment they are
united into stereoscopic relief their true character is instantly seen. In
a Daguerreotype of Alexander and Bucephalus, portions of the figure
seem as if shaded with China ink of a nearly uniform tint, but when
seen in relief the peculiar shade entirely disappears. The
stereoscopic combination of two surfaces of different intensities,
though of the same colour, produces effects which have not yet been
sufficiently studied. But, independently of these peculiarities, the
artist will certainly derive more aid from his landscape in relief, and
from the study of its individual parts, in their roundness and relative
distances, than when he examines them in their plane
representations. The shadows which the branches of leaves cast
upon the trunks and stems of his trees he will be able to trace to the
causes which produce them. Effects in outline, as well as in light and
shadow, which may perplex him, will find an explanation in the
relative distances and differences of apparent magnitude of
individual parts; and, after becoming familiar with his landscape in
relief, as it exists in Nature, he cannot fail to acquire new principles
and methods of manipulation. Nature flattened upon paper or metal,
and Nature round and plump, as if fresh from the chisel of the Divine
sculptor, must teach very different lessons to the aspiring artist.
The historical painter, or the more humble artist who delineates
the scenes of common or domestic life, will derive from the
photographic camera and the stereoscope advantages of equal
importance. The hero, the sage, and the martyr, drawn from living
originals, may be placed in the scenes where they suffered, or in the
localities which they hallowed. The lawgiver of Egypt, though he
exists only in the painter’s eye, may take his place beside the giant
flanks of Horeb or the awe-inspiring summit of Mount Sinai; and He
whom we may not name may challenge our love and admiration
amid the sun-painted scenes of his youth, of his miracles, and of his
humiliation. The fragments of ancient grandeur which time and war
have spared, the relics of bygone ages which have resisted the
destructive elements, will, as the materials of art, give reality and
truth to the pictorial history of times past, while the painter of modern
events can command the most accurate representations not only of
the costume, but of the very persons of the great men whose deeds
he is called upon to immortalize. The heroes of the Crimean war,
whether friends or foes, will be descried in the trenches in which they
fought, amid the ranks which they led to victory, or among the
wrecks of the fatal encounter in which they fell. The sun will thus
become the historiographer of the future, and in the fidelity of his
pencil and the accuracy of his chronicle, truth itself will be embalmed
and history cease to be fabulous.
 But even in the narrower, though not less hallowed sphere of
domestic life, where the magic names of kindred and home are
inscribed, the realities of stereoscopic photography will excite the
most thrilling interest. In the transition forms of his offspring, which
link infancy with manhood, the parent will recognise the progress of
his mortal career, and in the successive phases which mark the
sunset of life, the stripling in his turn will read the lesson that his
pilgrimage too has a term which must close. Nor are such
delineations interesting only as works of art, or as incentives to
virtue; they are instinct with associations vivid and endearing. The
picture is connected with its original by sensibilities peculiarly tender.
It was the very light which radiated from her brow,—the identical
gleam which lighted up her eye,—the hectic flush or the pallid hue
that hung upon her cheek, which pencilled the cherished image, and
fixed themselves for ever there.
 CHAPTER XI.
APPLICATION OF THE STEREOSCOPE TO
SCULPTURE,ARCHITECTURE, AND
ENGINEERING.

To the arts of sculpture and architecture, the processes of

binocular photography and stereoscopic combination are particularly
applicable. The landscape painter has every day within his reach
examples of the picturesque, the wild and the sublime in nature. In
the fields which surround him, in the river, or even in the “brook that
bubbles by,” on the shore, on the heath, or on the mountain side, he
has the choice of materials for every department of his art. The
sculptor has no such advantage. Swathed in impenetrable drapery
the human figure mocks his eager eye, and it is only by stolen
glances, or during angel visits, few and far between, that he can see
those divine forms which it is his business to portray. He must
therefore quit his home and seek for the models of ancient and
modern art. In the British Museum, in the Louvre, in the Vatican, and
in the repositories of art in Berlin, Munich, and other European cities,
he must spend months and years in the study of his profession. He
must copy, day after day, those master triumphs of genius which the
taste of ages has consecrated, and gather from their study the true
principles of his art. Transferred to his own studio, these copies will
be his instructor and his guide. They will exhibit to him forms more
than human, though human still, embodying all that is true and
beautiful in what might be man. The value of these copies, however,
depends on the skill and care with which they have been taken; but
no labour however great, and no power of drawing however
masterly, can give even an approximate idea either of the outline or
round of solid figures, whether single or in groups. Light and shade
can alone evolve those muscular prominences, or those soft and
sphere-like relievos which give such power and beauty to forms,
male and female; but how can an artist catch and fix those lights and
shades which give relief to the parts which they illuminate or
obscure? The light of the sun, even in a cloudless sky, is ever
varying in intensity, and the breadth and direction of the shadows
which he casts are varying from hour to hour. In a cloudy day, the
motion of the clouds, and the varying reflexions within his apartment,
subject the lights and shadows to constant change. The portions of
the drawing executed in the morning will not harmonize with what is
drawn at noon, or during the decline of day. We consider it,
therefore, impossible to execute a drawing of a statue, or of a group
of statues, from which the artist can have anything like an accurate
idea of the forms which compose them.
From all these difficulties the sculptor has been relieved by the
invention of the photographic process. He may thus take copies of
statues in a few minutes, and take them in all their aspects, and as
seen at various distances, and in this manner he will obtain drawings
with the shadows as they existed at a particular instant, so that the
lights and shades, upon every individual part of the statue, will be
correctly related to each other. But valuable as these drawings are,
compared with those executed by the pencil, their value becomes
tenfold greater when they are taken with the binocular camera, and
with small lenses, as already described. When combined in the
stereoscope, he may reproduce the statue in relief, in all its aspects,
and of different sizes, and derive from its study the same advantages
which the statue itself would have furnished. In one respect the
creations of the stereoscope surpass the original. While the artist is
surveying and drawing instruction from the marble prototype, its
lights and shadows, and consequently the delicate forms, convex
and concave, by which they are produced, are constantly changing,
whereas, in the stereoscopic statue, everything is fixed and
invariable.[63] In taking busts and statues from the living subject, the
sculptor will derive great advantage from the stereoscope. Double
pictures of the whole, or of any portion of the subject, may be taken
and raised into relief, and from such binocular pictures, executed on
one side of the globe, an artist, on the other side, may complete an
admirable statue. The dying and the dead may thus be modelled
without the rude contact of a mask, and those noble forms
perpetuated which affection or gratitude has endeared.
We must warn the sculptor, however, against the employment of
binocular pictures taken with large lenses. Not only will the individual
picture be deformed, but a double deformity will be induced by their
union; and whether he copies from a statue or from a living figure,
his work must be defective, even to an ordinary eye.
In architecture, and all those arts in which ornamental forms are
given to solid materials, the binocular camera and the stereoscope
will be found indispensable. The carvings of ancient, or mediæval, or
modern art may be copied and reproduced in relief, whatever be the
material from which they have been cut. The rich forms of Gothic
architecture, and the more classical productions of Greek and
Roman genius, will swell the artist’s portfolio, and possess all the
value of casts. With the aid of the Kaleidoscope the modern artist
may surpass all his predecessors. He may create an infinite variety
of those forms of symmetry which enter so largely into the decorative
arts; and if the individual forms, which constitute the symmetrical
picture, are themselves solid, the binocular-kaleidoscopic pictures,
taken photographically, will be raised into the original relief of their
component parts, or they may be represented directly to the eye in
relief, by semi-lenses placed at the ocular extremities of the
reflecting plates.[64] If the symmetrical forms are taken from lines in
the same plane, no relief will be obtained from the kaleidoscopic
pictures.
But it is not merely to the decorative parts of architecture that the
stereoscope is applicable. The noblest edifices, whether of a civil, a
religious, or a military character, which he could otherwise study only
as a traveller, and represent in hurried and imperfect sketches, will,
when taken binocularly, stand before him in their full relief and
grandeur, reflecting to his eye the very lights and shadows which at a
given hour the sun cast upon their walls.
In the erection of public buildings, hourly or daily photographs
have been taken of them, to shew to the absent superintendent the
progress of his work; but these pictures will be still more expressive
if binocular ones are combined in the stereoscope.
To the engineer and the mechanist, and the makers of
instruments of all kinds, the stereoscope will be of inestimable value.
The difficulty of representing machinery is so great that it is not easy
to understand its construction or its mode of operation from plans
and perspective views of it. The union of one or two binocular
pictures of it, when thrown into relief, will, in many cases, remove the
difficulty both of drawing and understanding it. Photographs of
machinery, however, consisting of a number of minute parts at
different distances from the eye, have, when taken by large lenses,
all the defects which we explained in reference to trees and their
branches and leaves. Supports and axles will be transparent, and
the teeth of the wheels, and the small and distant parts of the
mechanism, will be seen through all the nearer parts whose width is
less than the diameter of the lens.
In taking a binocular picture of a machine or instrument
consisting of various parts, that minute accuracy which is necessary
to give the true form and expression of the human face is not
required; but if it should happen that, in a correct binocular view of
the object, parts are concealed which it would be useful to see, we
must discover the binocular angle which will shew these parts in the
two pictures, or, generally speaking, which will give the best view of
the mechanism, and then adjust the lenses of the camera to give the
desired representations of it. These observations will be found useful
in obtaining stereoscopic views of the structures in carpentry and
ship-building.
 CHAPTER XII.
APPLICATION OF THE STEREOSCOPE
TO NATURAL HISTORY.

In treating of those objects of natural history which enter into the

composition of landscape scenery, such as trees, plants, and rocks,
we have pointed out the method of having them accurately drawn for
the stereoscope; but it is to the importance of stereoscopic
photography in natural history as a science that we propose to
devote the present Chapter.
When we reflect upon the vast number of species which have
been described by zoologists, the noble forms of animated nature,
whether wild or domesticated, and the valuable services which many
of them perform as the slaves of man, we can hardly attach too
much importance to the advantage of having them accurately
delineated and raised into stereoscopic relief. The animal painters of
the present day,—the Landseers, the Cowpers, and the Ansdells,
have brought this branch of their art to a high degree of perfection,
but the subjects of their pencil have been principally dogs, horses,
deer, and cattle, and a few other animals, with which they are well
acquainted, and specimens of which were within their reach. To give
accurate representations of giraffes, hyænas, and the rarer animals
which are found alive only in zoological gardens and travelling
caravans, is a more difficult task, and one which has been
necessarily intrusted to inferior hands. In this branch of his art the
photographer is perplexed with the difficulty of arresting his subject
in a position of repose and in the attitude which he requires. But this
difficulty will diminish as his materials become more sensitive to light;
and means may be found for fixing, without constraint, certain
animals in the desired position. We have seen the portrait of a dog
taken with such minute accuracy that the slightest trace of any
motion could not be perceived. Its master directed his attention to a
piece of bread, and he stood firmly waiting for his reward.
Considering truth as an essential element in all photographs, we are
unwilling to counsel the artist to have recourse to a large lens for the
purpose of accelerating his process by seizing his restless object in
a single instant of time; but what cannot be tolerated in the human
form may be permitted in animal portraiture as a necessary evil. The
divine lineaments and delicate forms which in man the intellect and
the affections conspire to mould, are concealed under the shaggy
drapery of the world of instinct; and even if they existed and were
perceived, could hardly be appreciated by those who have not
studied its manners and submitted to its laws. But even in the
present state of photography such a celerity of process has been
attained that a distinguished amateur in Edinburgh has constructed a
portable camera, which, by pulling a trigger, instantaneously records
upon its sensitive retina the surf which is hurrying to the shore, or the
stranger who is passing in the street. With such an instrument, in
such hands, the denizens of the jungle or of the plains may be taken
captive in their finest attitudes and in their most restless moods.
Photographs thus obtained will possess a value of no ordinary kind,
and when taken in the binocular camera and raised into relief by the
stereoscope, will be valuable auxiliaries to the naturalist, and even to
the painters and the poets whose works or whose lyrics may require
an introduction to the brutes that perish.
In representing with accuracy the osteology and integuments of
the zoological world—the framework which protects life, and to which
life gives activity and power, the aid of the stereoscope is
indispensable. The repose of death, and the sharp pencil which
resides in the small lens, will place before the student’s eye the
skeleton, clothed or unclothed, in accurate perspective and true
relief, while he contemplates with wonder, in their true apparent
magnitude, the gigantic Mastodon, the colossal Megatherion, and
the huge Dinornis, or examines the crushed remains of the
lengthened Saurian, or the hollow footsteps which ancient life has
impressed on the massive sandstone or the indurated clay.
In the other branches of natural history, ichthyology, ornithology,
conchology, &c., the stereoscope will be found equally useful. In
entomology, where insects are to be represented, the microscopic
binocular camera must be used; and in order to prevent the legs, the
antennæ, and other small parts of the object from being transparent,
and therefore spotted, with the images of objects or parts beyond
them, as explained in a preceding chapter, the smallest lenses
should be employed.
The roots and bulbs which are raised by the agriculturist and the
horticulturist, the turnip, the beet, the carrot, and the onion; and the
fruits raised in the orchard, on the wall, or in the hothouse, may be
exhibited in all their roundness and solidity in the stereoscope; and
as articles of commerce they might be purchased on the authority of
their pictures in relief. The microscopic stereoscope will, in like
manner, give accurate magnified representations in relief of grains
and seeds of all kinds, and by comparing these with the
representations of those of a standard form and quality, the
purchaser may be enabled to form a better idea of their excellence
than if he saw them with his own eyes, or had them in his own
hands.
 CHAPTER XIII.
APPLICATION OF THE STEREOSCOPE
TO EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES.

The observations contained in the preceding chapters prepare us

for appreciating the value of the stereoscope as an indispensable
auxiliary in elementary as well as in professional education. When
the scholar has learned to read, to write, and to count, he has
obtained only the tools of instruction. To acquire a general
knowledge of the works of God and of man—of things common and
uncommon—of the miracles of nature and of art, is the first step in
the education of the people. Without such knowledge, the humblest
of our race is unfit for any place in the social scale. He may have
learned to read his Bible, and he may have read it after he had
learned to read;—he may have committed to memory every
sentence in the Decalogue;—he may have packed into the
storehouse of his brain all the wisdom of Solomon, and all the divine
precepts of a greater than Solomon, while he is utterly ignorant of
everything above him, around him, and within him,—ignorant, too, of
the form, the magnitude, and the motions of his terrestrial home,—
ignorant of the gigantic structures which constitute the material
universe,—ignorant of the fabrics which industry prepares for his
use, and of the luxuries which commerce brings from the ends of the
earth and places at his door,—ignorant even of the wonderful
operations of that beneficent commissariat, which is every moment,
while he sleeps and dreams, elaborating the materials by which he is
fed and clothed.
Were we to say, though we do not say it, that in our own country
the teachers, so penuriously endowed by the State, are not much in
advance of their pupils, we should err only in stating what is not
universally true; and yet there are men of influence and character
insisting upon the imposition of sectarian tests, and thus barricading
our schools against the admission of the wisest and the fittest
masters! And while every civilized community in the world is eagerly
teaching their people, irrespective of religious creeds, the same
bigots, civil and ecclesiastical, in our own country, have combined to
resist the only system of education which can stem the tide of vice
and crime which is desolating the land.
Missionary labour and reformatory institutions, valuable as they
are, presuppose an educated community. To instruct and reform a
race that can neither read their Bible nor derive knowledge from
books, is a task beyond human achievement. The dearest interests
of society, therefore, call loudly for Secular Education,—the greatest
boon which philanthropy ever demanded from the State. The
minister who, in the face of sectarian factions, dares not identify
himself with a large legislative measure for the education of the
people, and resigns office when he fails to carry it, prefers power to
duty, and, if he ever possessed it, divests himself of the character of
a statesman and a patriot. He may be justified in punishing the law-
breaker who cannot read his statutes, but he is himself the breaker
of laws of a higher order, and sanctioned by a higher tribunal.
If the education of the people is to be attempted either by partial
or comprehensive legislation, the existing system is utterly inefficient.
The teacher, however wisely chosen and well qualified, has not at
his command the means of imparting knowledge. He may pour it in
by the ear, or extract it from the printed page, or exhibit it in
caricature in the miserable embellishments of the school-book, but
unless he teaches through the eye, the great instrument of
knowledge, by means of truthful pictures, or instruments, or models,
or by the direct exhibition of the products of nature and of art, which
can be submitted to the scrutiny of the senses, no satisfactory
instruction can be conveyed.[65] Every school, indeed, should have a
museum, however limited and humble. Even from within its narrow
sphere objects of natural history and antiquities might be collected,
and duplicates exchanged; and we are sure that many a chimney-
piece in the district would surrender a tithe of its curiosities for the
public use. Were the British Museum, and other overflowing
collections, to distribute among provincial museums the numerous
duplicates which they possess, they would gradually pass into the
schools, and before a quarter of a century elapsed, museums would
be found in every proper locality.
As we cannot indulge in the hope that any such boon will be
conferred on our educational institutions, it becomes an important
question how far it is possible to supply the defect by the means
within our reach. The photographic process may be advantageously
employed in producing accurate representations of those objects,
both of nature and of art, which it would be desirable to describe and
explain in the instruction of youth; but as experience has not yet
taught us that such pictures will be permanent, and capable of
resisting the action of time and the elements, it would be hazardous
to employ them in the illustration of popular works. It is fortunate,
however, that the new art of galvanography enables us, by a cheap
process, to give to photographs the permanence of engravings, and
to employ them in the illustration of educational works.[66]
But however much we may value such an auxiliary,
representations or drawings, on a plane, of solids or combinations of
solids at different distances from the eye, are in many cases
unintelligible even to persons well informed; so that, on this ground
alone, we cannot but appreciate the advantages to be derived from
binocular pictures and their stereoscopic relievo, not only in the
instruction of youth, but in the diffusion of knowledge among all
ranks of society.
One of the most palpable advantages to be derived from the
illustration of school-books by pictures in relief, is the communication
of correct knowledge of the various objects of natural history. If, as
we have already shewn, the naturalist derives important assistance
in his studies from correct representations of animated nature, how
much more valuable must they be to the scholar who never saw, and
may never see the objects themselves. In the department of zoology,
the picture might frequently be taken from the living animal, standing
before the camera in vigorous life and transcendent beauty; or when
this cannot be done, from the fine specimens of zoological forms
which adorn our metropolitan and provincial museums. The trees
and plants, too, of distant zones, whether naked in their osteology, or
luxurious in their foliage, would shew themselves in full relief;—the
banyan, clinging with its hundred roots to the ground,—the bread-
fruit tree, with its beneficent burden,—the cow tree, with its
wholesome beverage,—the caoutchouc tree, yielding its valuable
juice,—or the deadly upas, preparing its poison for the arrow of the
savage or the poniard of the assassin.
With no less interest will the schoolboy gaze on the forms of
insect life, which will almost flutter before him, and on the tenants of
the air and of the ocean, defective only in the colours which adorn
them. The structures of the inorganic world will equally command his
admiration. The minerals which have grown in the earth beneath his
feet, and the crystals which chemistry has conjured into being, will
display to him their geometric forms, infinite in variety, and
interesting from their rarity and value. Painted by the very light which
streamed from them, he will see, in their retiring and advancing
facets, the Kohinoor and other diamonds, and the huge rubies, and
sapphires, and emeralds, which have adorned the chaplet of beauty,
or sparkled in the diadem of kings. The gigantic productions of the
earth will appeal to him with equal power,—the colossal granites,
which have travelled in chariots of ice, and the rounded boulders,
which have been transported in torrents of mud; and while he
admires, in their strong relief, the precipices of ancient lava—the
Doric colonnades of basalt—the upheaved and contorted strata
beside them, and the undisturbed beds which no internal
convulsions have shaken, he will stand appalled before the fossil
giants of the primeval world that trod the earth during its preparation
for man, and have been embalmed in stone to instruct and to humble
him.
In acquiring a knowledge of physical geography, in which the
grander aspects of nature arrest our attention, their stereoscopic
representations will be particularly instructive. The mountain range,
whether abrupt in its elevation, or retiring from our view,—whether
scarred with peaks or undulating in outline,—the insulated mountain
tipped with snow or glowing with fire,—the volcano ejecting its
burning missiles,[67]—the iceberg fixed in the shore, or floating on
the deep,—the deafening cataract,—the glacier and its moraines,
sinking gently to the plains,—and even the colossal wave with its
foaming crest, will be portrayed in the binocular camera, and
exhibited in all the grandeur and life of nature.
The works of human hands,—the structures of civilisation, will
stand before the historian and the antiquary, as well as the student,
in their pristine solidity, or in their ruined grandeur,—the monuments
by which sovereigns and nations have sought to perpetuate their
names,—the gorgeous palaces of kings,—the garish temples of
superstition,—the humbler edifices of Christian faith,—the bastions
and strongholds of war, will display themselves in the stereoscope as
if the observer were placed at their base, and warmed by the very
sun which shone upon their walls.
Although few of our village youth may become sculptors, yet the
exhibition of ancient statues in their actual relief, and real apparent
magnitude, cannot fail to give them salutary instruction and rational
pleasure. To gaze upon the Apollo Belvidere,—the Venus de Medici,
—the Laocoon, and the other masterpieces of ancient art, standing
in the very halls which they now occupy; or to see the chef d’œuvres
of Canova, Thorvaldsen, and Chantrey, or the productions of living
artists in their own studio, with the sculptor himself standing by their
side, will excite an interest of no ordinary kind.
From the works of the architect, the engineer, and the mechanist,
as exhibited in full relief, the student, whether at our schools or
colleges, will derive the most valuable instruction. The gigantic
aqueducts of ancient and modern times,—the viaducts and bridges
which span our valleys and our rivers, and the machinery in our
arsenals, factories, and workshops, will be objects of deep interest to
the general as well as the professional inquirer.
There is yet another application of the stereoscope to educational
purposes, not less important than those which have been mentioned.
In the production of diagram representing instruments and
apparatus, which cannot be understood from drawings of them on a
plane, it will be of incalculable use to the teacher to have
stereoscopic pictures of them. In every branch of physical science,
diagrams of this kind are required. When they are intended to
represent apparatus and instruments, either for illustrating known
truths, or carrying on physical researches, binocular pictures can be
easily obtained; but when the diagrams have not been taken from
apparatus, but are merely combinations of lines, we can obtain
binocular photographs of them only from models constructed on
purpose. These models will give binocular representations in various
azimuths, so that the true position of planes at different inclinations,
and lines at various angles with each other, and at different
distances from the eye, will be readily apprehended. Astronomical
diagrams, in which orbits, &c., may be represented by wires, and
optical figures, in which the rays may be formed by threads or wires,
would be thus easily executed.
Among the binocular diagrams, consisting of white lines upon a
black ground, which have been executed in Paris, there is one
representing the apparatus in which a ray of light, polarized by
reflexion from a glass plate, passes through a crystallized film
perpendicular to the plane of the paper, and is subsequently
analysed by reflexion from another plate at right angle to the
following plate. This diagram, when placed in relief by the
stereoscope, gives as correct an idea of the process as the
apparatus itself.
As an auxiliary in the investigation of questions of difficulty and
importance, both in physics and metaphysics, the stereoscope is
peculiarly valuable. It enables us to place in its true light the
celebrated theory of vision on which Bishop Berkeley reared the
ideal philosophy, of which he was the founder, and it gives us
powerful aid in explaining many physical phenomena which have
long baffled the ingenuity of philosophers. It would be out of place to
give any account of these in a work like this, but there is one so
remarkable, and at the same time so instructive, as to merit special
notice. In order to exhibit, by means of three diagrams, a solid in
relief and hollow at the same time, which had not been previously
done, I executed three drawings of the frustum of a cone, resembling
those in Fig. 31, so that the left-hand one and the middle one gave
the hollow cone, while the middle one and the right-hand one gave
the raised cone. Having their summits truncated, as in the figure, the
cones exhibit, in the one case, a circle at the bottom of the hollow
cone, and in the other, a circle on the summit of the raised cone.
When these three diagrams[68] are placed in an open lenticular
stereoscope, or are united by the convergency of the optical axes, so
that we can not only see the hollow and the raised cones, but the flat
drawing on each side of them, we are enabled to give an ocular and
experimental proof of the cause of the large size of the horizontal
moon, of her small size when in the meridian or at a great altitude,
and of her intermediate apparent magnitude at intermediate
altitudes,—phenomena which had long perplexed astronomers, and
which Dr. Berkeley, rejecting previous and well-founded
explanations, ascribed to the different degrees of brightness of the
moon in these different positions.
As the circular summit of the raised cone appears to be nearest
the eye of the observer, the summit of the hollow cone farthest off,
and the similar central circle in the flat drawing on each side, at an
intermediate distance, the apparent distances from the eye of
different and equal circles will represent the apparent distance of the
moon in the zenith, or very high in the elliptical celestial vault,—the
same distance when she is in the horizon, and the same when at an
intermediate altitude. Being in reality of exactly the same size, and at
the same distance from the eye, these circular summits, or sections
of the cone, are precisely in the same circumstances as the moon in
the three positions already mentioned. If we now contemplate them
in the lenticular stereoscope, we shall see the circular summit of the
hollow cone the largest, like the horizontal moon, because it seems
to be at the greatest distance from the eye,—the circular summit of
the raised cone the smallest, because it appears at the least
distance, like the zenith or culminating moon,—and the circular
summits of the flat cones on each side, of an intermediate size, like
the moon at an intermediate altitude, because their distance from the
eye is intermediate. The same effect will be equally well seen by
placing three small wafers of the same size and colour on the square
summits of the drawings of the quadrangular pyramids, or more
simply, by observing the larger size of the square summit of the
hollow pyramid.
 This explanation of the cause of the increased size of the
horizontal moon is rigorously correct. If any person should suspect
that the circles which represent the moon are unequal in size, or are
at different distances from the eye, they have only to cut the diagram
into three parts, and make each drawing of the frustum of the cone
occupy a different place in the binocular slide, and they will obtain
the very same results. Hence we place beyond a doubt the
incorrectness of Dr. Berkeley’s theory of the size of the horizontal
moon,—a theory to which the stereoscope enables us to apply
another test, for if we make one or more of these circles less bright
than the rest, no change whatever will be produced in their apparent
magnitude.
 CHAPTER XIV.
APPLICATION OF THE STEREOSCOPE
TO PURPOSES OF AMUSEMENT.

Every experiment in science, and every instrument depending on

scientific principles, when employed for the purpose of amusement,
must necessarily be instructive. “Philosophy in sport” never fails to
become “Science in earnest.” The toy which amuses the child will
instruct the sage, and many an eminent discoverer and inventor can
trace the pursuits which immortalize them to some experiment or
instrument which amused them at school. The soap bubble, the kite,
the balloon, the water wheel, the sun-dial, the burning-glass, the
magnet, &c., have all been valuable incentives to the study of the
sciences.
In a list of about 150 binocular pictures issued by the London
Stereoscopic Company, under the title of “Miscellaneous Subjects of
the ‘Wilkie’ character,” there are many of an amusing kind, in which
scenes in common life are admirably represented. Following out the
same idea, the most interesting scenes in our best comedies and
tragedies might be represented with the same distinctness and relief
as if the actors were on the stage. Events and scenes in ancient and
modern history might be similarly exhibited, and in our day, binocular
pictures of trials, congresses, political, legislative, and religious
assemblies, in which the leading actors were represented, might be
provided for the stereoscope.
For the purpose of amusement, the photographer might carry us
even into the regions of the supernatural. His art, as I have
elsewhere shewn, enables him to give a spiritual appearance to one
or more of his figures, and to exhibit them as “thin air” amid the solid
realities of the stereoscopic picture. While a party is engaged with
their whist or their gossip, a female figure appears in the midst of
them with all the attributes of the supernatural. Her form is
transparent, every object or person beyond her being seen in
shadowy but distinct outline. She may occupy more than one place
in the scene, and different portions of the group might be made to
gaze upon one or other of the visions before them. In order to
produce such a scene, the parties which are to compose the group
must have their portraits nearly finished in the binocular camera, in
the attitude which they may be supposed to take, and with the
expression which they may be supposed to assume, if the vision
were real. When the party have nearly sat the proper length of time,
the female figure, suitably attired, walks quickly into the place
assigned her, and after standing a few seconds in the proper
attitude, retires quickly, or takes as quickly, a second or even a third
place in the picture if it is required, in each of which she remains a
few seconds, so that her picture in these different positions may be
taken with sufficient distinctness in the negative photograph. If this
operation has been well performed, all the objects immediately
behind the female figure, having been, previous to her introduction,
impressed upon the negative surface, will be seen through her, and
she will have the appearance of an aerial personage, unlike the
other figures in the picture. This experiment may be varied in many
ways. One body may be placed within another, a chicken, for
example, within an egg, and singular effects produced by combining
plane pictures with solid bodies in the arrangement of the persons
and things placed before the binocular camera. Any individual in a
group may appear more than once in the same picture, either in two
or more characters, and no difficulty will be experienced by the
ingenious photographer in giving to these double or triple portraits,
when it is required, the same appearance as that of the other parties
who have not changed their place. In groups of this kind curious
effects might be produced by placing a second binocular slide
between the principal slide and the eye, and giving it a motion within
the stereoscope. The figures upon it must be delineated
photographically upon a plate of glass, through which the figures on
the principal slide are seen, and the secondary slide must be so
close to the other that the figures on both may be distinctly visible, if
distinct vision is required for those which are to move.
 Another method of making solid figures transparent in a
photograph has been referred to in the preceding chapter, and may
be employed in producing amusing combinations. The transparency
is, in this case, produced by using a large lens, the margin of which
receives the rays which issue from bodies, or parts of bodies,
situated behind other bodies, or parts of bodies, whose images are
given in the photograph. The body thus rendered transparent must
be less in superficial extent than the lens, and the body seen through
it must be so far behind it that rays emanating from it would fall upon
some part of the lens, the luminosity of this body on the photograph
being proportional to the part of the surface of the lens upon which
the rays fall. This will be readily understood from Figs. 48 and 49,
and their description, and the ingenious photographer will have no
difficulty in producing very curious effects from this property of large
object-glasses.
One of the most interesting applications of the stereoscope is in
combining binocular pictures, constructed like the plane picture,
used in what has been called the cosmorama for exhibiting
dissolving views. These plane pictures are so constructed, that when
we view them by reflected light, as pictures are generally viewed, we
see a particular scene, such as the Chamber of Deputies in its
external aspect; but when we allow no light to fall upon it, but view it
by transmitted light, we see the interior of the building brilliantly
lighted up, and the deputies listening to the debate. In like manner,
the one picture may represent two armies in battle array, while the
other may represent them in action. A cathedral in all its architectural
beauty may be combined with the same building in the act of being
burned to the ground; or a winter scene covered with snow may be
conjoined with a landscape glowing with the warmth and verdure of
summer. In the cosmorama, the reflected light which falls upon the
front of the one picture is obtained by opening a lid similar to that of
the stereoscope, as shewn at cd, Fig. 14, while another lid opening
behind the picture stops any light which might pass through it, and
prevents the second picture from being seen. If, when the first
picture is visible, we gradually open the lid behind it, and close the lid
cd before it, it gradually disappears, or dissolves, and the second
picture gradually appears till the first vanishes and the second