The present investigation constitutes an ethnographic study of students' enactment of a new media literacies (NML) project at an urban high school in a large city in Brazil. The study adopted a sociocultural perspective of literacies and it furthers understanding of how students enacted and made sense of NML within the context of the school in which they were situated. The findings indicate that students faced difficulties using and making sense of NML when these practices were conducted at the school computer lab. Students struggled to write on the computer and to use web tools, even when teachers interfered to support them. Students did not demonstrate communicative competence in the computer lab. The lack of students' action around writing in the lab contrasted with their abilities to write in the local cyber café and in the classroom. At the local cyber café students felt more comfortable to "mess it up" and they used a few digital technologies, particularly to exchange messages with others (Orkut, which is a version of MySpace.com; instant messaging; and email).

These uses fulfilled an actual need of students to transmit information and it allowed them to participate and to gain membership in certain peer groups. Students writing in the cyber café subverted the grammar and the syntactical norms from school. Students had difficulties writing in the classroom. These difficulties seemed to be related to their perceptions of the school enduring lack of resources, and that they disregarded as not important for their future. Students' written pieces were short, unimaginative and impersonal. Yet, they were able to think about their writing in complex ways, demonstrating a sense of audience, content, and metacognition. Students wrote non-school related materials during school and these fulfilled many of their communicative needs (e.g., to exchange brief messages with friends, to express their feelings to a loved one). Students demonstrated communicative competence both in the cyber café and in the classroom. The difficulties faced by students in the computer lab stemmed from various factors, including their struggle to make sense of the NML within their perceptions of what school is about (their perceived and enforced need to be "serious" and to be "quiet"); their lack of "intention" to act in the computer lab; the problematic skills-based instruction conducted in the lab; and their lack of interest in the NML as it was enacted at school.

Study findings problematize notions that propose furthering students' communicative competence by introducing NML practices at school. While this may be true for some students in some contexts, this does not seem to hold for all students in all contexts. In the case of the students investigated in this study other literacy practices were important to them. While it seems appropriate to acknowledge students' "local" literacies, students still need to be supported in the transition to more socially validated literacy practices such as the NML. This seems to indicate the need to develop a hybrid culture of practices at school in which both students' "local" literacies and NML are negotiated and in which understanding and experience in context are mutually constitutive of learning.