Space and Time: Critical Contexts for Educational Research in Schools and Communities

Author(s):

Catherine Compton-LillyJennifer RowsellKate PahlHelen Nixon Sue Mary Nichols

Conference:

ECER 2009

Network:

14. Communities, Families and Schooling in Educational Research

Format:

Symposium

Session Information

14 SES 09, Space and Time: Critical Contexts for Educational Research in Schools and Communities

Symposium

Time:

2009-09-30

10:30-12:00

Room:

JUR, HS 10

Chair:

Catherine Compton-Lilly

Contribution

This international symposium explores time and space as contextual factors that affect educators, students, and families. We offer three research projects that explicitly address time and/or space as significant contextual factors and explore methodological possibilities for exploring space and time. In particular, we examine the impact of literacy and schooling amid changing geographies, temporalities, architectures, educational timelines, physical spaces, and daily schedules. The research questions addressed by the three symposium papers examine the ways time and space operate in the lives of children and in families. The first paper examines spatial and temporal dimensions of information networks that are available to parents and related to children’s early learning and development. The second paper focuses on the funds of knowledge and cultural stories accessed by families and the relationships among cultural stories, artifacts, and timescales. The third paper challenges temporal constructs related to schooling and encourages educators to consider how temporal policies position students as successful or unsuccessful in school. Together, these three papers not only extend and develop existing theoretical frameworks, but also introduce novel methodological procedures designed to highlight the ways time and space operate in people’s lives Theories that address time and space are central to this paper. The authors of the first paper, extend recent “spatially sensitive” theory (Mannion et al 2007) and examine the mobilities that occur in both geographic and cyber spaces (Ailwood 2000). All three papers, the draw on Jay Lemke’s (2000) timescale model to explain how people operate at multiple timescales as they make sense of themselves, their actions, and their lives. These timescales extend from people’s knowledge of historical time through their imagined futures. In the second paper, the author focuses specifically on the role artefacts play in people’s lives as they travel across time and space. The third paper, also draws upon Bakhtin’s notion of chronotope to examine how official expectations related to time and space are played out, or not played out, as children move through school.

Method

Symposium contributors have crafted novel methodologies that allow them to explicitly attend to time and space. In the first paper, the authors have crafted a multi-layered methodology that includes an ecological survey of the affordances of neighborhoods relative to parent information sources. They have designed several spatially and temporally oriented approaches to analyze interview texts. This presentation highlights the use of a time-space grid to foreground these themes and the use of Googlemap to locate the places identified by participants. In the second project, a series of in-depth ethnographic interviews (Spradley 1979) were coded and clusters of themes were identified within the dataset that could be linked to the oft-told stories and artefacts. Themes included: gold, textiles, travel, changing identities and family values. The third study involved periodic restudy (Saldanã, 2003) of the same group of children and their parents at three and four year intervals over a ten-year period.

Expected Outcomes

In the first study, researchers demonstrate that the ways parents experience and interact within time and space are affected by parental habits, philosophies, subjectivities, and networks of information. They demonstrate how spaces that align with particular philosophies, values, and personal stories carry across longer timescales for children. The second study provided information about how relationships among timescales, artefacts and intergenerational stories operate as important sources of cultural knowledge for the production of family literacy and language. It was found that repeated stories were of high importance to the families (Hymes 1996) and that children’s literacies were shaped by these multilingual narratives (Gregory 2008). In addition, data from the second study was archived and subsequently used to create family learning materials and an educational resources website. The final paper challenges temporal constructs related to schooling and encourages educators to rethink temporal policies that define student success/failure within schools.

References

References Ailwood, J. (2000) Time, space and mobility in a globalizing world: What's in it for young children? Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 21(1) 105-111 Author (in press) Bakhtin, M.M. (1981). Forms of time and the chronotope in the novel. In M. Holquist (Ed.); C. Emerson & M. Holquist (Trans.) The Dialogic Imagination. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, pp. 84-258. Chawla, L. (Ed.). (2002). Growing up in an urbanising world. London: UNESCO and Earthscan. Christensen, P. & O’Brien, M. (Eds.) (2003). Children in the city: Home, neighbourhood and community. London & New York: Routledge Falmer. Comber, B. (2001). Critical literacies and local action: Teacher knowledge and a 'new' research agenda. In B. Comber, B. & A. Simpson (Eds.) Negotiating critical literacies in classrooms. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum. Comber, B. & Nixon, H. (2005). Children re-read and re-write their neighbourhoods: critical literacies and identity work. In J. Evans (Ed.) Literacy moves on: Using popular culture, new technologies and critical literacy in the primary classroom (pp. 127-148). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Comber, B. Nixon, H., Ashmore, L., Loo, S., & Cook, J. (2006). Urban renewal from the inside out: Spatial and critical literacies in a low socioeconomic school community. Mind, Culture and Activity, 13(3), pp. 228-246. Corsaro, W. (Ed.). (2005). The sociology of childhood (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. Derr, T. (2006). 'Sometimes birds sound like fish': Perspectives on children's place experiences. In C. Spencer & M. Blades (Eds.), Children and their environments: Learning, using and designing spaces (pp. 108-123). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Francis, M., & Lorenzo, R. (2006). Children and city design: proactive process and the 'renewal' of childhood. In C. Spencer & M. Blades (Eds.), Children and their environments: Learning, using and designing spaces (pp. 217-237). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gonzalez, N., Moll, L., & Amanti C. (2005) (eds) Funds of Knowledge: Theorizing Practices in Households, Communities and Classrooms. Rahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Ass. Gregory, E. (2008) Learning to Read in a New Language: Making Sense of Words and Worlds 2nd Edition London: Sage Publications Heath, S. (1982) Ways With Words Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heft, H., & Chawla, L. (2006). Children as agents in sustainable development: the ecology of competence. In C. Spencer & M. Blades (Eds.), Children and their environments: Learning, using and designing spaces (pp. 199-216). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Horelli, L. (2006). A learning-based network approach to urban planning with young people. In C. Spencer & M. Blades (Eds.), Children and their environments: Learning, using and designing spaces (pp. 238-255). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hymes, D. ed. (1996) Ethnography, Linguistics, Narrative Inequality: Towards an Understanding of Voice. London: Routledge. James, A., Jenks, C., & Prout, A. (1998). Theorizing childhood. New York: Teachers College Press. Jenks, C. (2005). Childhood (2nd ed.). Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge. Leander, K. & Sheehy, M. (2004). Spatializing literacy research. New York: Peter Lang. Lemke, J. (2000). Across scales of time: Artifacts, activities, and meanings in ecosocial systems. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 7(4), 273-290. Lemke, J. (2005). Place, pace, and meaning: Multimedia chronotopes. In R.H. Jones & S. Norris (Eds.) Discourse in action. London, Routledge, 111-122. Malone, K. (Ed.). (2007). Child space. New Delhi: Concept Publishing Company. Mannion, G., Ivanic, R. & the LfFE Research Group (2007) Mapping literacy practices: theory, methodology, methods. International Journal of Qualitative Research in Education 20(1) 15-30 McLaren, P. (1998). Revolutionary pedagogy in post-revolutionary times: Rethinking the political economy of critical education. Education Theory, 48(4), 431-462. McNaughton, S. (2001). Co-constructing Expertise: The development of parents’ and teachers’ ideas about literacy practices and the transition to school. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 1(1), pp. 40-58. Morgan, J. (2000). Critical pedagogy: The spaces that make a difference. Pedagogy, Culture and Society, 8(3), 273-289. Neuman, S. and Celano, D. (2001). Access to Print in Low-Income and Middle-Income Communities: an ecological survey study of four neighbourhoods. Reading Research Quarterly, 36(1), pp. 8-26. Prout, A. (2005). The future of childhood : towards the interdisciplinary study of children London & New York: RoutledgeFalmer. Reay, D. (2000). Children’s urban landscapes: configurations of class and place (pp.151-164). In S.R. Munt (Ed.) Cultural studies and the working class. London: Cassell. Ricoeur, P. (1980) On narrative. Critical Inquiry 7(1) 169-190. Ryan, M. (2007) Diagramming narrative. Semiotica 175(1-4) 11-40. Saldanã, Johnny (2003). 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Author Information

Catherine Compton-Lilly

University of Wisconsin Madison

Curriculum and Instruction

Madison

220

Jennifer Rowsell

Rutgers University

Learning and Teaching

Princeton

220

Kate Pahl

University of Sheffield

Educational Studies

Sheffield

Helen Nixon

University of South Australia, AustraliaRutgers University, USA

Sue Mary Nichols

University of South Australia, AustraliaRutgers University, USA

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