New Literacies and Adolescent Learners: An Interview With Julie Coiro

JC: I have always had a passion for understanding what makes people literate and productive as learners. I’m fascinated by the range of strategies that readers use to make sense of the world around them, and I tend to gravitate toward ways of supporting learning for information and knowledge application in new settings. As I watch people make the transition from learning with books to learning in digital spaces, I usually focus first on the cognitive and metacognitive processes that they use to navigate and negotiate these dynamic online contexts. My time with the New Literacies Research Team from 2001 to 2007 at the University of Connecticut clarified my thinking about the skills, strategies, dispositions, and practices that readers need to understand and use the information they encounter on the Internet. For instance, our team’s work in several schools enabled me to observe firsthand that while skilled readers use many of the same strategies across both online and off line reading tasks (e.g., activating prior knowledge, determining important ideas, monitoring understanding), they also employ additional reading strategies to make sense of online texts. Some of these additional, or new, reading strategies include generating digital queries, scrutinizing search engine results, and negotiating multiple representations of text. Online readers also spend much of their time monitoring their reading pathways to evaluate whether they are moving closer to or further away from relevant and reliable information that suits their reading purposes. More recently, I’ve become intrigued with how learners interact with each other around online texts in relation to these cognitive reading processes. By exploring the forms and functions of student interactions during online reading activities from a more social constructivist lens, I’ve discovered new ways of thinking about productive online reading and knowledge construction. It’s been interesting to watch how pairs of students scaffold and support each other’s thinking in online reading situations in ways that extend beyond what Research Connections