Reading on the Other Side of Campus: Introducing the Entext in Career Technical Education
James R. King, Norman A. Stahl, Sonya L. Armstrong, James DyerObjective:
The purpose of this conceptual manuscript is to extend the results of a series of studies by examining an unexpected observation in our work in community college Career Technical Education (CTE) courses. We offer a multi-disciplinary theoretical critique that we believe has important implications for postsecondary literacy scholars as well as community college and CTE scholars.
Method:
From research literature, we deduced that in community college CTE, professional fields including criminal justice, automotive, nursing, and horticulture have historically been positioned as non-academic and diminutively characterized as “vocational.” In our recent observational, interview, and survey research, we identified a range of complex literacy practices, modalities, and text types within CTE areas.
Results:
More directly, we observed non-print artifacts being used in ways that were analogous to reading and comprehending traditionally more valued “academic” print texts. Our observations, offered here anecdotally, aim to introduce these types of artifacts, which we refer to as entexts, toward advancing scholarly re-conceptualization and revaluing of the literacy practices within CTE areas.
Conclusions:
The theoretical model shared in this manuscript demands additional research as our findings extend the parameters of the New Literacies to engage with a fuller understanding of multimodal literacy via entexting as found regularly on the