ABSTRACT
Deborah Hicks’ evocative depiction of the literacy worlds of two White, working-class children, their communities, and the implications of both for the future of other workingclass children serves as an apt segue for a chapter on what multimodality and New Literacy Studies contribute to literacy education. Multimodal and ethnographic perspectives, together and separately, capture a liminal space between home and school and between beloved, familiar objects and pedagogic ones informing and making more explicit the discontinuities across domains of practice that can cause diffi culties for students such as Jake. Jake’s capacity to write about NASCAR miniatures alongside using a basal reader captures so well the subtle ways in which school literacy becomes relevant to learners like Jake in a detailed, situated, material way. Looking as much at the materiality of Jake’s car and what value it has for the learner as we do at a set of practices used to incorporate the car into a writing activity gives a clear picture of a literacy learning moment and what it can tell us about a learner.
