Literacy as a Framework for Computing Education
Jennifer Higgs, Sepehr Vakil, Charles Logan · 2025
This chapter takes up the question of how we understand “literacies” in relation to platform technologies—and specifically, the benefits or drawbacks of extending the term to include competencies related to platformization. Merging insights from sociocultural literacy studies and computer science education research on “computational literacies,” we argue that there are both institutional and pragmatic challenges for literacy researchers to consider in choosing the terminology they use. Institutionally, while the interest of STEM fields in adopting the language of “literacy” may appear to lend prestige to literacy research (and researchers), it also risks reproducing “Great Divide” narratives that the field of sociocultural literacy studies has long critiqued. This relates to the pragmatic challenge that, in allowing the term “literacies” to be stretched too broadly, it may lose its capacity to explain those aspects of platforms and platformizations that are more closely associated with reading, writing, and textual practice. While there are no definitive lines to be drawn for when and how the term “literacies” ought to be used, the chapter offers questions and considerations to aid researchers and teachers in making their own determinations.