Reading, Literacy, and Education

In his article "Reading, Literacy, and Education" Mikko Lehtonen outlines a contextual approach to literacy. He asks how the changing relations of culture and economy, transformation of nation states and national cultures and changing notions concerning affect and cognition, transform notions of literacy and reading. Relying on the results of a recent Finnish research project on new reading communities and new ways of reading, Lehtonen highlights substantial continuities in the reading habits of the so called Google generation when compared to other generations of readers. Print media is not, however, connected self-evidently to cognitive reading among the said generation. Lehtonen concludes that the currently dominant ways of understanding reading are not necessarily the most useful when researchers aim at understanding the present ways of reading. Lehtonen calls for such research that would deepen the understanding of what media generations are, how the reading of printed texts happen in multimodal contexts, and what affordance various media forms, including print media, have for readers.