Quantitative Literacy to New Quantitative Literacies

See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319160466 Quantitative Literacy to New Quantitative Literacies Chapter · May 2017 CITATIONS READS 0 39 3 authors, including: Rohit Mehta James P. Howard California State University, Fresno Johns Hopkins University 32 PUBLICATIONS 42 CITATIONS 13 PUBLICATIONS 0 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects: MSU-Wipro STEM & Leadership View project I Wonder: Research To Practice View project All content following this page was uploaded by Rohit Mehta on 18 October 2017. The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. 5 Quantitative Literacy to New Quantitative Literacies Jeffrey Craig, Rohit Mehta; James P. Howard II Michigan State University; University of Maryland University College 5.1 Introduction Steen and colleagues [42] made their Case for Quantitative Literacy based on the premise that the 21st-century, pri- marily due to technology changes, is a significantly more quantitative environment than any previous time in history. The design team who wrote the case made rhetorical observations about the increasing prevalence of numbers in society in the United States; phrases like [a] world awash in numbers [42] precede nearly every piece of literature regarding quantitative literacy (or numeracy). The authors used this rhetoric to position people relative to the demands of social systems in the world. Specifically, numeracy has emerged as a partner to literacy because the social world is being integrated with numbers due to recent technological advances. Steen argued that as the printing press gave the power of letters to the masses, so the computer gives the power of number to ordinary citizens [40, p. xv]. Ac- cordingly, ordinary citizens should be empowered to use and understand numbers in meaningful and liberating ways. With comparisons to power and literacy, as when Steen claimed an innumerate citizen is as vulnerable as the illiterate peasant of Gutenbergs time [40, p. xv], it becomes important to consider the ways literacy research has interrogated illiteracy. An important development in literacy scholarship is the emergence of social theories of literacy [2, 15] as counterparts to the psychological theories. As the discursive move to tie numeracy to literacy echoes throughout the scholarship, an ongoing, concerted effort to learn directly and productively from this longstanding field should continue. It is to that effort that we are trying to contribute this chapter, where we are beginning with a media literacy framework that offers four dimensions for thinking about the transformations of literacy. We use that framework to think about quantitative literacy in a similar way. In part, these efforts are challenged due to the rapidity of quantitative changes to our societies when, as [1, p. 15] forecasted twenty years ago, today we are drowning in data, and there is unimaginably more on the way. Happily, literacies scholarship has worked through the same technological and sociocultural shifts that scholars argue created the vacuum for quantitative literacy. For example, research on multiliteracies (e.g., [8]) and on new literacies (e.g., [27]) investigates the impacts of new social practices and new technologies on literacy, teasing apart modes of representation that make social spaces to understand literacies in those spaces. We draw parallels with this research in multiliteracies and new literacies and use its adaptability with emerging technologies as a framework to better understand quantitative literacies in the new media age--which began when the screen challenged what it means to read and write in ways that are not predominantly alphabet-centric [25]. 33 34 Chapter 5 Quantitative Literacy to New Quantitative Literacies Specifically, the main purpose of this chapter is to reconceptualize quantitative literacy as a social practice (also see Chapter 1 by Fisher in this volume). At times this involves thinking about how the skills of quantitative literacy [42] are changing, and what might be added to their list. More centrally, however, we want to move to thinking about quantitative literacy practices that are social and goal-driven and not reducible to skills, instead being dynamic cultural interactions. In our exploration, we adapt an existing framework used to analyze media literacy (e.g., [30]) to provide a structured approach to quantitatively literate in the new media age [25]. This framework analyzes the effects of multimodal media on quantitative literacies by considering four interrelated aspects of media: access, analysis, evaluation, and content creation. In embracing the media literacy framework, first, we explore the potential of taking a sociocultural approach to literacies, wherein practices are considered as culturally and contextually embedded. Second, we tackle the quantitative literacy as a skill perspective, because it focuses on what people have or should do rather than what they do--a more sociocultural approach. It calls for a more descriptive and less judgmental approach. Therefore, we argue for a perspective that emerges from transformations of mathematical and statistical skills enabled by technological changes, but fundamentally created by technology users. This perspective evolves into the practices engaged by people interact- ing with quantitative information in new and sociocultural ways. We call this perspective, new quantitative literacies. One benefit of this approach is that it poses a direct challenge to quantitative literacy discourse as it is constituted normatively; instead, it suggests clearer educational and social science research and attention to what students (and people generally) can do, attempting to mitigate the common deficit perspective taken toward quantitative literacies. 5.2 Literacies as social practices [15] argued that the changing literacy practices emerge from new social practices, including those evolved upon advent of new technologies. He found that many scholars from different fields had begun to focus on literacy practices as something people do in the world, rather than solely in their heads. Hence, whereas traditional psychology saw readers and writers as engaged in mental processes...NLS [New Literacy Studies] saw readers and writers engaged in social or cultural practices [15, emphasis in the original ]. As social and cultural practices, literacies are not static; [28] argued that literacy is deictic, or constantly changing. Its dynamic nature derives from conceptualizing literacy as more than the ability to read and write, where it is always literacy for something - for professional competence in a technological world, for civic responsibility and the preservation of heritage, for personal growth and self-fulfilment, for social and political change [?, p. 76]. Literacy is not a fixed entity because what, how, where, and why people read and write changes through time and context. For example, the emergence of social media (e.g., Twitter) and use of smartphones has changed the activities of reading and writing, where use of multimodal texts, such as GIFs, memes, emojis, has become a common practice. That is, technology, especially digital technologies powered by internet, provide ever- changing contexts and multimodal spaces for reading and writing, which makes defining literacy somewhat irrelevant, but rather shifts focus to understanding its plurality. [28] identified several central principles of literacies which hinge on the transformative power that technology generally, and the internet specifically, have had on literacy. The authors claimed that internet drives the emergence of new social practices of literacy by creating new literacies, systematically transforming existing literacy practices and supporting people engaging in new social practices of literacy. To understand digital literacies on the internet goes beyond finding the new places that the same literacy practices exist. New social practices include text messaging, email, and viral information sharing, and transformed existing social practices include reading the newspaper [36], reading comprehension [29], and academic scholarship [18], among others. The multimodality of literacy also decentralizes language from literacy because to be literate involves not only words, but also images, speech, sounds, gestures, and other modes expression and representation [21]. Textbooks, for instance, have embraced the internet as e-books and can be organized interactively around images and hypertexts [25, 26]. A similar multimodality is involved in quantitative literacy, where the integration of quantities not only within contexts, but also with words, images, and videos. [42] pointed to technological changes as the fundamental driver for calls for quantitative literacy, just as [22] argued for re-conceptualized media literacy because the twenty-first century is a media saturated, technologically dependent, and globally connected world. They organize their theorization of critical media literacy around the concept of public pedagogy; that is, the idea that media constitutes another source of public education that intersects with but is distinct from public schooling. The great challenge of media literacy 5.3. New quantitative literacies 35 in this age, they argue, is that it is insufficient to teach students only to read and write with letters and numbers [22], because the multimodal format of media involves the interaction

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