Curriculum as a safe place: Parental perceptions of new literacies in a rural small town school

New literacies have challenged all players in the educational enterprise in many different ways. Youth are now engaged in literacies that extend well beyond the safe and respected traditional texts that their parents experienced in school. In this research we analyze parents' perceptions of the relative educational value of their children's different textual engagements both in and out of school. We find that parents employed a textual hierarchy of educational value with the traditional hard copy school textbook and literature at the top of the pyramid, and plastic virtual and visual texts at the bottom. These assessments are understood within a framework that employs the idea of safety to understand how parents navigate and negotiate the often risky literate engagements their children enjoy.