Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book begins with a Foreword by Shirley Brice Heath and her reflections on Brian’s impact on the field of literacy studies. It offers a historical framing of literacy as social practices. The book looks at ways of socializing through language, images, and more modular texts and the implications of these relational forms of social practice for literacy studies. It describes the language and cultural diversity of people’s lives undermining a conception of social context as homogeneous. The book examines how young children author stories across contexts invoking the concept of language as a social practice to explain their authoring process. It focuses on heteroglossia in and across diverse educational social contexts. The book discusses academic literacies as a way for individuals to embrace heteroglossia with the resultant lamination of assemblages into their compositions.