Book Review: Literacies that Move and Matter: Nexus Analysis for Contemporary Childhoods

Abstract

In the last few years, public discourse on literacy has been constricted as politicians, publishers, and popular media have been trumpeting a singular, seemingly surefire, yet misleading way to teach reading to all children. "Emphasize phonics!" they proclaim and back up this decree with plans that can easily be mandated, packaged, and sold to schools (Compton-Lilly et al., 2023). This simplified, single-factor, "science of reading" approach, however, relies on a very narrow body of research targeting the needs of a specific student population and ignores decades of educational and literacy research that have demonstrated that reading is anything but a simple process (Alverman et al., 2018;Pearson et al., 2023). Indeed, in Literacies that Move and Matter: Nexus Analysis for Contemporary Childhoods, Karen Wohlwend employs this rich corpus of research and theory-and grounds it with numerous examples, explanations, and guidelines for conducting our own inquiries-to prove that literacy engagements are thoroughly complex and multilayered.Literacies that Move and Matter provides a clear and comprehensive introduction to nexus analysis, a form of discourse analysis that takes a critical stance to spotlight the actions at the center of, surrounding, and emanating from sites of literacy engagements. In this stance, literacy is not one autonomous set of skills, but a convergence of expected and often unquestioned actions that encompass the literacy event. The central argument of the book, then, is that all action is mediated discourse; though it can be unaccompanied by language or traditional printed text, it nonetheless communicates volumes about what we assume, what we know, and what we hope for in social situations. Building upon her previous work on expanding what counts as literacy (e.g., Wohlwend, 2011), Wolhwend walks readers through the conceptual and theoretical landscape upon which nexus analysis draws, most