Practicing or Preaching? Teacher Educators and Student Teachers Appropriating New Literacies

This chapter examines the implementation of a new 12-hour course on ‘New Literacies’ during the final year of a Bachelor of Education in English language education in Hong Kong. Specifically, it examines the authors’ attempts to create a community of practice around New Literacies teaching and learning. As part of this endeavour, the authors sought to embody – and to encourage their student teachers to appropriate as part of their evolving teaching selves – the ‘insider mindset’ (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006) of new literacies practices, as the authors planned and implemented the course. They hoped that experientially connecting theory and practice of New Literacies would provide affordances for teacher educators, and for student teachers, to capitalise on the powerful potential of digital technologies in order to rethink how curriculum might be implemented in ways that are more multimodal, participative, and collaborative. As the authors discuss below, their attempt encountered unanticipated challenges, reflecting the power of existing institutional structures and unarticulated assumptions. The final part of the chapter examines lessons from the authors experience that may have resonance in other contexts and explores how they might approach the challenges they encountered differently in the future.