ABSTRACT
Prior to writing this chapter, I explored digital literacies as a set of New Literacies practices for so-called “at-risk” adolescents. (O’Brien, 1998, 2003; O’Brien, Springs, & Stith, 2001). The work focused on how those practices expand our conceptions of literate competence while helping the students, many of whom have been disengaged from school for years, redefine their own competence. In this chapter, I extend this work by looking more closely at how current conceptualizations of literacy practices involved in using and creating digital media change adolescents’ perceptions of their own literate competence by using examples from two projects.
