Literacy and Education tells the story of how literacy--starting in the early 1980s--came to be seen not as a mental phenomenon, but as a social and cultural one. In this accessible introductory volume, acclaimed scholar James Paul Gee shows readers how literacy "left the mind and wandered out into the world." He traces the ways a sociocultural view of literacy melded with a social view of the mind and speaks to learning in and out of school in new and powerful ways. Gee concludes by showing how the very idea of "literacy" has broadened into new literacies with words, signs, and deeds in contexts enhanced, augmented, and transformed by new technologies.