Rethinking Rural Literacies: Transnational Perspectives (2014)

Rural Literacies: Transnational PerspectivesCitation: White, S. (2014). Book review Rethinking literacies: Transnational perspectives. Journal of Research in Rural Education, 29(4), 1-2.Rethinking Rural Literacies: Transnational Perspectives co-edited by Bill Green and Michael Corbett, brings together international scholars from two distinctive fields-rural and literacy studies-to provide scholarly insights into the role and significance of literacy practice and in and for development. Collectively the chapters seek to and contribute to a deeper understanding of how such notions literacies, education, social justice, and place- consciousness together might better serve our world. What emerges from the chapters in this book is that is indeed no essential (p. 8) and yet across and between the chapters a greater sense of rurality is intimately evoked.The book deliberately returns to, and builds from, the term first coined by Donehower, Hogg and Schnell (2007) in the book of the same name. In the original text the term is defined literate skills needed to achieve the goals of sustaining life in areas (p. 4). In this new book the term is redefined within the broader transnational perspectives such mobility, globalisation and place and space. Authors from multiple international perspectives including Australia, Canada, the United States and Finland all come together to examine and explore the intersection of contemporary research in literacy/literacies from the perspective of rurality that globalisation opens (p. 2). In so doing the book seeks to renew and extend a socio-critical interest in the understanding of the term from a wider global perspective. As such, the book explores multiple, mutable and mobile and ever relational, they inevitably float in a global sea (p. 12).The book's overall theoretical orientation draws upon three strands of thinking; the idea of place-conscious it applies to literacy education; the view of literacy a practice, and; the notion of justice (Gruenewald, 2003). The significant contributions of this book include the ways it examines these three inter- related strands, how it encourages the reader to rethink the relations between the non-human and human world, and particularly the way it extends the notion of eco-social justice. Rautio and Lanas (Chapter 11) do this particularly well. While caveats and caution are attached to the shared definition of rurality, as the eco-social world beyond the Metropolis (p. 2), it is a definition that many of the authors take up and explore. As Kerkham and Comber (p. 197) in their chapter highlight there is now wider recognition that 'social justice' may need rethinking to foreground the nonhuman world and the relation between people and politics of places, people and environments in terms of eco- justice.The text is organized thematically into four sections: Conceptualizing Rural Literacies; Literacy/Pedagogies; Place and Sustainability, and; Mobilities and Futures. Depending on ones' own research or scholarly interests the reader may choose to connect with an idea, author, focus, place or methodological stance. All chapters consider the three theoretical orientations. In the first section, the authors here open the literacies and rural education discourse(s) and examine and foreground for other chapters the different but complimentary ways in which these two scholarships dialogue together. Howley's chapter brings mathematical into the conversation, further expanding the notion of rural literacies. …