The (New) Literacy Studies: The evolving concept of literacy as social practice and its relevance for work with deaf students

Developed in the 1980s by social anthropologists, education researchers and psychologists, the field of research known as (New) Literacy Studies (NLS) has put forward a sociocultural understanding of literacy as practice. Although the NLS’ core assumption about literacy—that it is more than a set of cognitive abilities—is still as valid nowadays as it was then, new theoretical ideas have been added to their canon. These include multiliteracies, multimodality, real literacies, materiality and affect. With these notions, literacy researchers continue to challenge conventional discourses about literacy and their disregard for the range of literacy practices people engage in. In this paper, I introduce some of these new theoretical developments. I then discuss their conceptual relevance in the context of two action research projects with deaf children and youth in India, Uganda and Ghana. In these projects, my colleagues and I tried an approach to teaching English to deaf children and young adults that was specifically inspired by ideas from real literacies and multiliteracies. Our approach was shaped by the NLS’ commitment to social justice and its belief in literacy teaching having to build on students’ existing literacy practices. In the paper, I discuss some of the challenges we experienced when putting these ideas into practice and look at how the students engaged with them in light of their expectations and desires for learning.


Introduction
The best ways to teach reading and writing are an ongoing concern in research, policy and practice.Within research, the field of literacy studies, which cuts across disciplines such as education, social anthropology, linguistics and psychology, has done much to support ongoing national and international efforts to improve literacy teaching and learning and avoid narrow and elitist views on what it means to be literate.In this paper, I specifically discuss research that is informed by broad, culturally sensitive conceptions of literacy.Developed in the 1980s, what is known as (New) Literacy Studies 1 (NLS) offers a sociocultural understanding of literacy as practice.From the beginning, NLS researchers were keen to develop their perspective's implications for teaching reading and writing.One of the NLS' core aims has been to broaden conventional notions of literacy and to challenge dominant discourses of reading and writing that often disregard people's practices and result in (new and old) illiteracies.
Since Street (1984Street ( , 1993)), Heath (1983) and others founded the NLS, many new ideas have been added to its canon, among them multiliteracies, real literacies, multimodality, materiality and affect (see below).Many of these theoretical ideas were put forward by researchers located in the Global North and, when brought to field sites in the Global South, have encountered the realities and expectations that students bring to their learning.This can be a challenge.In this paper, I introduce some of these concepts and discuss them in light of work with deaf children and young adults 2 in India, Ghana and Uganda that I have been part of over the last 5 years.In two connected projects we have developed and tested a new approach to teaching English (literacy) to deaf children and young adults.Our work in these projects is shaped by our commitment to social justice, our belief in deaf communities' agency and capacity and our support for sign languages next to English literacy teaching.
I begin my paper with a short introduction to the field known as (New) Literacy Studies and some of the more recent ideas informing this no-longer-so-new field of research.This is by no means a comprehensive overview of recent developments in this field of study: I will highlight those new developments that were part of our scholarly horizon when setting up the Peer-to-Peer Deaf Multiliteracies project (P2P Project) and that therefore to some extent informed the approach we took.In the final section, I briefly describe our experiences with some of these concepts while carrying out the project.I will focus on how some of the ideas we brought to the project encountered the material and social realities of our students' and teachers' environments and how the students engaged with our ideas in light of their own expectations and desires.This is not a detailed discussion of the projects' findings, which can be found elsewhere (Papen and Tusting 2020;Papen and Zeshan 2021;Papen and Gillen 2022), but more an overview of our experiences implementing it.

The dominant discourse: literacy as skills
Literacy is generally assumed to be a set of generic cognitive skills.It is important to comment here briefly on the impact and power of this dominant discourse.The 'skills view' (Papen 2005), which Street (2003) called 'the autonomous model of literacy', is pervasive, shaping educational policy and public opinion, with the media 1 I refer to the (New) Literacy Studies with brackets around 'new' to signal that this field has been established some time ago and is, strictly speaking, no longer new.Some authors nowadays refer to it simply as Literacy Studies. 2 In this paper (as in other publications about the Peer-To-Peer Deaf Multiliteracies project) I use lowercase 'deaf' and not the deaf-Deaf distinction that has in the past been used by researchers.This is in line with a new convention in Deaf Studies that seeks to avoid static notions of deaf experience and identity (Kusters et al. 2017b).
frequently reporting on 'a lack of' standards of reading and writing among children and adults in countries across the world (see Hamilton 2012).This view turns literacy into a 'simplified construct' (Prinsloo and Krause 2019, p. 158) that serves as the basis for developing and implementing approaches to teaching and assessing literacy that can be scaled up, for example, across all the schools in a country.Another effect of the autonomous model is that it imposes 'Western conceptions of literacy on to other cultures' (Street 2003, p. 2).As literacy in this view is seen as a 'property' of the individual (Prinsloo and Krause 2019, p. 159), it becomes connected to personhood-to how one is seen and positioned by others (Power-Carter and Zakeri 2019)-and linked to class, race and ethnicity-related prejudices and negative stereotypes.

A different view: the no longer 'New' Literacy Studies
In the 1980s, a new orientation within research on literacy emerged.Called New Literacy Studies (NLS), it offered an alternative view of literacy that challenged the orthodox idea (then and now) of literacy as a set of generic cognitive abilities.Beginning with the works of Brian Street (1984Street ( , 1993)), Shirley Brice Heath (1983Heath ( , 2012) ) and others (e.g.Barton 2007), the NLS put forward an understanding of literacy as social and cultural practice: embedded in, shaped by and shaping values, beliefs and power relations.Since then, this idea of literacy as a socially situated practice has been further developed by scholars from a range of countries, examining the role of literacy in different communities and contexts.
(New) Literacy Studies researchers have and continue to challenge the autonomous model of literacy with in-depth investigations of literacy learning and literacy use in educational contexts and beyond.Instead, they offer a view of literacy that acknowledges and values different communities and their literacy practices.Literacy practices are understood here to mean shared cultural ways of using and valuing literacy in different contexts.Driving this view, which Street (2003) aptly termed an 'ideological model' of literacy, is a strong commitment to inclusion and social justice and to understanding what students bring to their learning regardless of their backgrounds.
This commitment, which dates to the early studies by Heath and Street, has continued to define (New) Literacy Studies.In tandem with it is an ongoing critique of literacy pedagogies that often privilege skills such as decoding or correct spelling (Pahl and Rowsell 2020).(New) Literacy researchers carefully examine the forms of literacy that govern teaching and learning in schools or other educational contexts.They investigate how these pedagogies lead to exclusion related to, for example, race and class, when only those practices that match mainstream views of literacy are valued and count under the existing regimes of assessment (Rowsell et al. 2019).Much work in the NLS is aimed at developing rich and meaningful literacy pedagogies that take account of what all children and young people already do with literacy and what dispositions, skills and interests they develop through these practices, an aim that was also foremost in our work with deaf children and young adults.Despite K their commitment to diversity, NLS researchers have not yet paid much attention to disability and to the situation of deaf learners (see Papen and Gillen 2022).
I now introduce some of the more recent developments in NLS and then illustrate how we drew on these in the P2P project.

Multiliteracies and multimodality
The term multiliteracies was introduced in the 1990s to capture the changing nature of reading and writing practices in contemporary societies as changing economic and political circumstances, migration and the spread of digital technologies require us to rethink the meaning of literacy.With the proliferation of digital communication tools, new forms of literacy have emerged that have the potential to be inclusive, to transcend the boundaries of standard spelling, and to allow for language mixing and creativity.However, there is also a risk of new illiteracies emerging as the perceived threshold of literacy continues to evolve.
Multiliteracies emerged in recognition of the wide range of semiotic modes that people use and that should be considered part of literacy and literacy teaching.From its beginning, multiliteracies were driven by the argument that education should promote the effective participation of all youth in "public, community and economic life" (New London Group 1996, p. 60).To achieve this, literacy pedagogy needs to go beyond established and narrow skills-based conceptions.
The 'multi' dimension of multiliteracies encompasses two elements: the use and recognition of multiple languages and socially and culturally appropriate forms of language (including non-standard, popular language varieties) and the central role of multiple modes (including visual and gestural) in communication and learning (Cope and Kalantzis 2009).Agency takes a central place in a multiliteracies perspective, with all meaning-making seen as dynamic and creative (Cope and Kalantzis 2009) and learners encouraged to take a critical view of knowledge claims.In multiliteracies, criticality also means taking account of "alternative starting points for learning" (Cope and Kalantzis 2009, p. 188) related to learners' subjectivities and individual backgrounds.

Real literacies and home-school literacy links
A concern for children's home literacy practices has been central to the NLS from its inception.Heath's (1983Heath's ( , 2012) ) work powerfully illustrates the differences between the uses and cultural values attached to literacy in different homes.Children from mainstream middle-class backgrounds tend to grow up surrounded by literacy practices such as bedtime stories that match some of the practices and expectations common in schools, giving them an advantage over children from other backgrounds.
Drawing on Heath' seminal work, in the past decades, researchers have studied children's home literacy practices and how these can be brought into schools.These studies (see, for example, Curry et al. 2016), have, however, often confirmed what Heath found: the home practices of families from non-mainstream backgrounds do not always match the practices valued in schools.Therefore, pedagogies are needed that allow children and young people to draw from their own literacy experiences in the context of school curricula and standards for literacy and language.A key driver behind that work is that failing to acknowledge the diversity of literacy practices children bring to school is not only alienating these children from school curricula and learning, setting them up for failure, but that insisting on the narrow canon of what counts as literacy ends up impoverishing these same literacy and language curricula (Burnett et al. 2020).
The real literacies approach (Street 2012;Street et al. 2006) was developed in the context of adult literacy teaching in the Global South.It shares much with the attempts to bring home literacy practices into children's literacy learning, but addresses adult learners.It works on the assumption that for literacy curricula to be meaningful they must be closely linked to the learners' own everyday uses of literacy.Literacy teaching should focus on 'real' or authentic texts from the learners' environment: for example, signboards, bureaucratic forms, religious texts and other documents.The real literacies approach was originally designed for teacher training to support adult literacy programmes.It was used in such training programmes in countries including India and Ethiopia.

New materialities and post-human approaches
Sociocultural accounts of literacy learning and use offer a counter-perspective to the skills view of literacy and complement cognitively oriented research.Although materials have always been seen as part of literacy practices, recently some researchers have suggested that we need to pay greater attention to materials and spaces to better understand how the social and the material interrelate (Burnett and Merchant 2020).
Drawing our attention to the role of materials and objects has been informed by developments in theoretical thinking associated with what is called New Materialism.Materials, in this perspective, are not seen as agentive as such; however, attention is given to the way they are 'in relation' (Burnett et al. 2020, p. 113) to other materials and people, discourses and practices.Lemieux and Rowsell (2020) talk about 'mutual relationships' between humans and objects, which they characterise as 'entangled relationality' in which agency is located not in a person or object but rather emerges from relations or interactions between people and objects: children working with an iPad, for example.In a recent study in Finland, Kumpulainen et al. (2022) used this perspective to better understand how children use augmented story crafting and storytelling about the natural world to develop empathy.
The turn to materials in NLS is related to the wider philosophical orientation known as posthumanism.Overlapping with materialist perspectives, posthumanism seeks to understand literacy teaching and learning from an angle that extends beyond cognitive and social-relational considerations to the way in which humans and nonhumans interact (see, for example, the papers in Hackett et al. 2020).
Although it is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss these new approaches in any detail, it is important to note that they are intended to continue the progressivecritical literacy agenda the NLS set in motion, challenging deficit views and the K emergence of new illiteracies that can result from narrow pedagogies and assessment regimes, but also acknowledging the challenges in achieving this (Burnett et al. 2020;Hackett et al. 2020).

Literacy and affect
Literacy researchers' interest in materiality has also been linked to considerations of embodiment and affect.Driving this thinking is the need to challenge purely rational and cognitive conceptions of literacy.Affect captures embodied reactions to literacy, such as an event or situation that involves a specific text, as well as social context and people, such as a literacy lesson (Jones 2016;Ehret et al. 2018).These embodied reactions to experiences with texts may, as Jones ( 2016) explains, include physiological responses.Affect, therefore, is understood as embodied reaction, different from named feelings (Ehret et al. 2018), but still part of emotion.Research into affect and literacy, according to Ehret and Leander (2019, p. 8) considers 'the energies and qualities of our engagements with texts' in relation to lived experiences, whether explicitly named or not.
Turning to affect has led literacy researchers to closely attend to the moments and situations when literacy learning is happening, focussing on processes rather than products (see Enriquez et al. 2016).This has involved a critique of the multiliteracies perspective, which according to Leander and Boldt (2013) has placed too much emphasis on products such as students' multimodal texts and not enough on what happens when children and young people make such texts or when they engage with texts.
Studies on affect and literacy (see the chapters in Leander and Ehret 2019) share a conscious move away from conceptualising affect and emotion as individualistic, and consider them in the context of social relations such as those between teachers and students.Thus, they connect understanding affect with the wider concern with considering reading and writing as social practices where social relations, institutional contexts and power shape how literacy is used and valued.

The Peer-to-Peer Deaf Multiliteracies project
Following a pilot project (2015)(2016), the Peer-to-Peer Deaf Multiliteracies (P2P) project (2017-2020) developed, implemented, and researched an approach to teaching English literacy to deaf children and young adults that specifically drew on real literacies, multiliteracies and multimodality.The P2P project (with its preceding pilot) is therefore best described as an action research project.Another core aim of the project in each of the three participating countries (Ghana, India and Uganda) was capacity-building for deaf communities.Deaf peer tutors and deaf research assistants initially received 3 months of training before carrying out two 6-to 8-month rounds of interventions with additional training in between.During each round, classes took place in a range of venues and were supported by our local project partners.The curricula for young adult classes were co-created based on real-life texts chosen by K the tutor or the students and included materials such as signboards, forms and websites.The approach for the children's classes was more directed by the tutors, who sought to create lessons that started from the children's environment and everyday culture.For both groups, we aimed to start from students' existing language and literacy practices and to value how they were already using English or encountering it in their lives.We wanted to focus on English literacy practices that would be useful to them outside their lessons.We assessed learning by testing students before and after the two intervention phases and collecting portfolios of their ongoing work.Throughout the project, we collected qualitative data in the form of monthly tutor reports, observation reports from research assistants, photographs and videos of classroom activities, lesson materials, and fieldnotes from our, the international co-researchers', class visits and many WhatsApp conversations with the tutors and research assistants.It is important to highlight that education for deaf people is severely limited in all three countries, with few schools specifically for the deaf.The sign language of the deaf community in each country is usually a child's first language and the main language of communication among both deaf children and adults.Whether and when a deaf child can acquire a sign language varies, though.Some children may not have been born deaf and may have learned a spoken language first.Others, born to hearing parents who are unlikely to be signers, may only gain access to a sign language if they can attend one of the few deaf schools (Akanglig-Pare et al. 2021).Sign languages are closely linked to deaf cultures, and there has been an important drive from within deaf communities to counter deficit views of sign languages among hearing populations and to develop deaf cultures to be accessible to more deaf people.However, sign languages are undervalued in the three countries we worked in, regardless of their legal status, and there are too few teachers proficient in them (Akanglig-Pare et al. 2021).Deaf people are stigmatised, and in our project we were eager to counter views of deafness as disability.English is a high-status language that is not only used in education, official contexts and the economy but also one that people aspire to learn and use widely in everyday contexts.In addition, it is a former colonial and a current world language (Gillen et al. 2020).These language constellations and ideologies are the context with which our project engaged.

Multiliteracies, multimodality, materiality and affect in the P2P project
The understanding of literacy as social and cultural practice oriented and informed our work in the P2P Deaf Multiliteracies Project.The NLS's pursuit of a non-deficit social justice approach to literacy teaching was particularly relevant to our project.
With deficit views about deafness, sign languages and deaf people's ability to learn widespread in all three of the countries we worked in, the NLS invited us to develop curricula that allowed for learners' existing skills and practices to be valued and brought into the lessons.We did this by using themes and materials close to the students' everyday lives that were often suggested by the students themselves (see Papen and Gillen 2022).Multiliteracies and multimodality were introduced during the training, and the tutors embraced them and made them the backbone of their lessons.Although they had not previously been familiar with these terms, the ideas behind them were not unknown to them.Multiliteracies, for example, were part of their own lives: in India, in particular, tutors and students were frequent users of smartphones and digital technologies.Multimodality was also not an alien idea for the tutors (see Nanking 2021).
The following examples from some of the lessons illustrate in more detail how the tutors and students engaged with these theoretical ideas and how that played out.

Real literacies, multiliteracies and multimodality: the adult classes
A series of lessons from one adult class in India, which was hosted by the Delhi Foundation for Deaf Women, illustrate the use of real and multiliteracies.These lessons took place during 1 week in December 2018 and included nine female students between the ages of 16 and 27.One student brought in an application form for a bank account (Fig. 1) that was entirely in English and contained a number of questions and tick boxes.
How the peer tutor and research assistant, Manavalamamuni, used this form exemplifies the kind of work based on a real-life text that we know has also happened in other lessons and other classes.Vocabulary relating to banking was a core part of the lesson as the students were unfamiliar with English words such as 'account', 'credit' and 'deposit' and uncertain about the concepts they represented.This part was guided by the tutor but followed by hands-on work by the students, who each completed their own copy of the form (Fig. 2).

K
A few weeks after the class worked on the bank form, Manavalamamuni taught a similar series of lessons.The topic had again been initiated by a student: she wanted to learn to use online shopping sites such as Amazon India.Here, the 'reallife' example consisted of the tutor demonstrating on his laptop each step in the process of buying a pen drive online.Then, the students, working in pairs in the Foundation's computer lab, practiced using Amazon India's website (Fig. 3) and made posters that showed the steps of making purchases online in detail (Fig. 4).
In these examples, we see how both real and multiliteracies were enacted in the lessons, with the two concepts overlapping and leading to student-driven learning activities that were closely aligned with the young women's everyday uses of English and what they were interested in learning about.Multimodality manifested not only in the active and valued use of Indian Sign Language (ISL) as the medium of communication through which the students and Manavalamamuni engaged in the lesson but also played a role in the production of the posters when the students presented them to each other, each pair standing at the front of the class and 'speaking' to their class with their poster.As in many of our classes, using ISL here ensured the students' full access to the lesson content, clarified the meaning of key terms for them and allowed them to actively participate in the lessons (Zeshan et al. 2023).

Multimodality, home to school literacy links and affect: the children's classes
In our children's classes, the choice of lesson topics was driven by our aim to offer literacy education that was closely related to the children's home environment and daily life.The resources included, first of all, the schools themselves.At the Happy Hands School for the Deaf in Odisha, a residential school for deaf children, the tutor, Pal, used the school building to illustrate lessons about electricity, with the sockets, cables and fans in the classrooms and play areas serving as examples, had the children make English labels with key terms and put them next to the object in question.He extended the lessons beyond their initial focus on literacy by teaching the children how to make their own handheld fans.Meanwhile, Nanking, a peer tutor in Uganda, specifically encouraged learning through a range of modes and materials in her lessons.These 'capitalised' on deaf learners' visual abilities (Kuntze et al. 2014, p. 218).A series of activities on houses, house building and construction materials illustrates this.Nanking first invited the children to draw a house, using their drawings to introduce key vocabulary and terms (see Fig. 5), and then asked them to build their own houses.In the absence of more sophisticated materials, Nanking (2021, p. 159) comments on having to limit this activity to either paper boxes or clay (an example of the latter is shown in Fig. 6).
Our teachers used picture books, when and where they were available.For example, Nanking supplemented her lessons with a picture book retelling the folktale of the three little pigs who build themselves houses (with varying degrees of success).Reading aloud in our deaf classes relied on our fully bilingual-bimodal classroom culture and could also be described as a form of "signing along with reading" (Kuntze et al. 2014).I witnessed this approach in a children's class at the Indore Bilingual Deaf Academy in Indore that I visited in September 2019.Vishwakarma, the tutor, used a picture book that I had brought.As only one copy was available, he created a slide show and displayed it, page by page, on a large screen at the front of the classroom.First, he told the story "visually" (so to speak) by signing in ISL while pointing to the English text.This was the same approach Nanking had used in Uganda.Then, Vishwakarma invited the children to comment on the pictures as he went through the book page by page again.In this way, he explicitly engaged them with the visual images in a way that was not dissimilar to how one would discuss a picture book with a group of hearing children, but which was even more relevant to the deaf children's understanding of the book and the story it contained.During this step, the tutor also returned to specific words and thus kept the focus on both images and written English.In the third part of that lesson, some of the girls came to the front and acted out the story in ISL.My third and final example, which also comes from the Happy Hands School in Odisha, again illustrates the use of role-play, multimodality and crafting.A series of lessons on animals and zoos was suggested by the children's reaction to seeing zoos illustrated in a picture book about animals.The tutor, Pal, had initially focussed on Fig. 7 The children making their own zoo teaching the signs for animals and their English names but realised that some of the longer English words were difficult for the children to remember.He also noticed that the idea of a zoo was unfamiliar and somewhat alien to the children.By crafting their own animal masks and cages together, the unknown practice of displaying animals for visitors to look at became alive and understandable.By role-playing the lives of animals in a zoo for another class at the school, the children practiced and at the same time shared with others their knowledge and new vocabulary (Figs. 7  and 8).

Discussion
The above examples illustrate how multiliteracies, real literacies, materiality and multimodality shaped our lessons and curricula.Multimodality, specifically, could be seen to be at the core of learning and teaching.As a kind of principle underpinning classroom activities, it materialised in the ways in which the tutors drew on and encouraged the children and young adults to use a range of modes, including their sign language, to engage with the lessons.For us, multimodality was closely linked Fig. 8 A child playing a peacock in a cage to accessibility and to ensuring that all students were able to actively take part in the lesson regardless of their prior language and education experiences (Zeshan et al. 2023).
Materiality mattered to our project in both its absence and its presence.In each of our project venues, the constellations of materials that were or were not available influenced the specific ways that multimodality and materiality became part of the students' learning.When designing our approach, we had been aware of the lack of suitable and accessible learning materials for deaf children and young adults in all three countries, one factor that influenced our choice of real literacies to support teaching (Papen and Gillen 2022).Referring specifically to India and Uganda, Manavalamamuni (2021) explains that very few teaching materials have been designed specifically for deaf children.In the adult classes, authentic texts such as the bank form could serve as learning materials, but the tutors for the children's classes often had to create materials together with their students.
Manavalamamuni (2021) highlights the children's enjoyment in creating materials, which involved moving around, crafting, and then using the materials to roleplay or for games (ibid., p. 48; see also Papen and Zeshan 2021).The "excitement" of making their own materials and then engaging with them is also commented upon in other tutors' reports.Here, the affective side of learning is coming to the fore (Ehret and Leander 2019) along with the relevance of the process of engaging in literacy practices beyond a focus on the products or outcomes of learning (Leander and Boldt 2013).Lemieux and Rowsell (2020, p. 150) also comment on how materials "spark" decisions and collaborations among children in a classroom, generate "wonderment" and in our case, perhaps, are simply a source of joy and playfulness.The multimodal ethos that was at the core of our project supported that joy.
As explained earlier, our approach was fully bilingual-bimodal: in each case we saw the sign languages not as a means of teaching English but as a learning goal in itself, leading to a form of additive bilingualism (Swanwick 2017) or duallanguage approach.The idea of a "semiotic repertoire" (Kusters et al. 2017a) expresses this precisely: in both adult and children's classes, the entire range of the students' communicative abilities was used and valued.To build on and develop the students' use of their full semiotic repertoire extends the original idea of multiliteracies while retaining the orientation towards social justice that Cope and Kalantzis emphasised-and which our project shared.
Making space for students to express themselves in whatever mode suits them-and valuing their sign language in particular-was part of the active, joyful and often highly animated classroom culture the tutors describe in their reports and that I myself witnessed when I visited both adults' and children's classes in Indore in 2019.In my classroom observations, these embodied and affective aspects were visible to me in students' animated gestures and faces while signing and how they often left their seats to go to the board or join a discussion on the other side of the room.In the young adult class, such discussions took place often and ranged from how a sentence in ISL should be translated into English to, in one case, a debate about environmental concerns relating to droughts and tree planting in India (Papen and Gillen 2022).K However, our project was not all plain sailing: the students did not fully embrace our approach.In the classes for young adults, the multiliteracies approach and its focus on experiencing real-life texts, which provoked the animated classroom discussions I witnessed, was challenged by students' frequent requests for explicit grammar lessons.In our training, we had introduced the tutors to what we called 'embedded grammar teaching', where grammatical features in authentic texts would become the subjects of short grammar lessons.In their reports, the tutors frequently commented on the students' requests for grammar instruction and their (the tutors') difficulties with teaching grammar based on the authentic texts (see also Nanking 2021).That grammar was a priority for the students required us to rethink our approach and to consider what may have been lacking in our original design.Teaching English grammar to deaf learners is known to be difficult because the structures of sign languages generally bear little resemblance to English grammatical patterns.Thus, since 2020 we have been developing game-based activities for teaching grammar to be used as part of a multiliteracies approach (Papen and Zeshan 2021).
We needed to make certain reorientations to the P2P project.Several students had dropped out of the adult class that I visited in Indore because they felt that there was too much discussion in ISL during the lessons and not enough grammar teaching.In Ghana, criticism of the approach was less overt, but when invited to contribute examples of everyday English literacy practices to the curriculum, students would include topics from their regular high school courses.In Ghana, our classes were offered at a deaf technical high school as a supplemental programme and most of our students were also attending the high school.In response to their requests, our lessons moved away from their planned focus on real-life texts and practices.In Indore, the tutor also responded to the students' demands and re-oriented his lessons to put more emphasis on grammar (without any connection to real-life texts).His students were also mostly still studying for their high school diplomas or else enrolled in one of the academy's college-level courses.
What might explain the students' reactions to our approach?We can see the students' agency here, as well as their desire for these supplemental English classes to address what they considered to be their most pressing educational needs.When designing the project, we (academics, mostly from the Global North) had highlighted a diverse literacy curriculum with a focus on students' ability to use English for a range of purposes and deliberately not privileged school curricula.But the students considered success in formal education to be paramount.It also seems that their assessment of their own abilities was more strongly grounded in a deficit view than we had anticipated.Accordingly, they feared that our experience-based approach would not offer enough direct teaching and that their benefit from the classes would not be sufficient to justify the time and effort they required.
Perhaps the prevalence of such deficit views about their own abilities should not have come as a surprise.The participants in focus groups that we conducted with deaf people in Ghana and Uganda as part of our pilot project stressed their limited abilities to use written English, and expressed concern about their literacy practices.These deficit views, Gillen et al. (2020) suggest, are likely to be based on deaf people's experiences with formal education and with school-based assessments that are designed for hearing students and in which deaf learners are set up to fail.
It is also reasonable to assume that the students were more familiar with teachercentred forms of teaching and a focus on explicit skills.Our approach is likely to have clashed with their experiences of and expectations for teaching.Our students brought 'their social and cultural worlds with them' (Power-Carter and Zakeri 2019, p. 224), including their educational experiences, and these oriented them towards the kind of curricula and lessons they were familiar with.This cultural world is also likely to have included their awareness of the power of degrees and certificates in contexts where deaf people face high levels of marginalisation and economic disadvantage and where formal education is seen as a gateway to employment, income and status.

Conclusions
Following a brief introduction to the field known as (New) Literacy Studies (NLS) and some of its recent developments, in this paper I have illustrated how the P2P Deaf Multiliteracies Project drew on and put into practice NLS-inspired ideas.The (young adult) students' reaction to the P2P project is of particular interest when looking at these ideas and the concept of literacy as social practice that underpins them.It highlights an issue that has been a source of debate and-to an extent-of criticism of the NLS since their beginning: does a focus on everyday literacy practices and the celebration of local and cultural diversity inadvertently romanticise the 'value' these practices have for their users?At stake here are what Luke (2004) calls the 'material consequences of literacy'-for example, the cultural capital gained from a degree and the potential to convert it into economic capital.With others (e.g.Brandt and Clinton 2002), he cautions that a focus on 'local' literacy practices, while valuable, should not lead researchers to ignore the importance of the wider structural and political contexts or economies of literacy, of which our students seemed highly aware.This is an ongoing issue for NLS and any culturally oriented view of literacy.
The project's findings have been discussed in detail in a number of publications, including two open-access books (Papen and Tusting 2020; Gillen and Papen 2021; Papen and Zeshan 2021; Papen and Gillen 2022; Webster and Zeshan 2021).

Fig. 3
Fig. 3 Two students working on Amazon India's website

Fig. 5
Fig. 5 Student explaining English words in Ugandan sign language