Session Information
31 SES 09 B, Investigating Literacy Education in Europe: Multiple contexts, multiple methods
Paper Session
Contribution
This presentation plans to summarize the developments and findings of a research carried out during the 2017/2018 academic year in a public school in Nazaret, one of the most disadvantaged neighborhoods in the city of Valencia (Spain). The aim of the research was to analyze and assess the potential of materiality to radically transform the way English was taught and learnt in this urban school. The research was inspired by two frameworks of theoretical and practical knowledge: the philosophical school known as 'new materialisms' (Barad, 2007; Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012) and 'New literacy studies' (Pahl & Rowsell, 2012; Street, 2012; Thiel, 2015). the team focused on the different ways in which matter impacted literacy and English language education in the aforementioned disadvantaged primary school. This required understanding matter in three different, albeit interrelated, ways: socio-economically, socio-culturally, and technologically. From a socio-economic perspective, matter was understood as the range of material resources unfairly distributed in a neoliberal society (Harvey, 2005). From a socio-cultural perspective, matter had to do with the material and artifactual nature of the homes and communities in which the students’ cultural and linguistic capitals and diverse literacy practices originated and were shaped and enacted (Pahl & Rowsell, 2010). Finally, from a technological perspective, matter referred to the material support (printed, digital, etc.) that language requires so as to acquire a written form (Luke, 1994/2018).
At the time of this investigation, Nazaret remained the most impoverished neighborhood in the city of Valencia. It bore witness to how intense socio-economic stratification deriving from neoliberal policies can end up making the lives of more and more people develop at the margins of, or remain completely external to, many of the advances taking place in the spheres of cultural, scientific, and economic production—and hence also external to the English language through which these advances are mostly conveyed. In order to explore how a pedagogically-informed consideration of matter could transform the teaching and learning of English in this specific research context, the team designed the Words Matter/Palabras reales project. It involved three multimodal, artifactual projects that widened the quantity and quality of matter active in the English classroom, specifically in order to build a material continuum between English as a subject and the students’ homes and communities. The research team expected that this material continuum would help compensate for the linguistic, cultural—even existential—break that existed between the two worlds.
In terms of pedagogy, the project adopted culturally-responsive orientations to literacy pedagogy (Hall, 2008). It accordingly became multicultural, multiliterate, multimodal, artifactual, and also multilingual. This meant that, for the project to be multicultural it had to welcome first the multiple literacies through which the learners’ cultures were originally built and conveyed; this, in turn, demanded that the project be multimodal and artifactual (since home and community literacies clearly support themselves on multiple modalities and artifacts), which, likewise, required that the familial languages through which each of these literacies were originally built be accepted in the English classroom at different phases of the project. This entire framework was put into practice through the creation of a multimodal exhibition, which was the one purposeful act that brought together and reassembled the diverse interests of the students and the research team.
Method
The research was conducted by a university lecturer and researcher, three “EFL primary education” graduates, and four current "EFL primary education" student-teachers. The research team organized itself through a Collaborative Action Research (CAR) methodology (Burns, 2005) that gave all the members the chance to become teachers-as-researchers (Stenhouse, 1975/1981). The Words Matter/Palabras reales project extended itself through three cycles of inquiry: one for each workshop. The team drew on individual and group interviews with all students, sound recordings from key school sessions, analyses of the students’ multimodal work, weekly CAR meetings, end-of-cycle assessment sessions, and the CAR members’ research journals, which the team kept systematically. Also, photographs were taken at significant moments during the project to record not only the gradual outcomes of the project but also key, ongoing experiences. At the outset of the project, the team requested special permission from each of the families to reproduce this evidence, which was granted in all cases. Framed within qualitative research, the deductive analysis at the end of each cycle focused on whether our pedagogical design of the material dimension of literacy (its multimodal and artifactual qualities) had helped establish a link between the Words Matter/Palabras reales project and the students’ home and community literacies. If so, had this connection allowed the students to actualize these literacies in the English classroom and produce work that, despite utilizing English, was inherently valuable for them and their communities? In order to give an answer to this research question, the university teacher, as the most experienced researcher, first examined the diverse data the team had collected to filter out the information that was not related in any way to the research question and which would therefore not enter the transcription process which he also undertook. Then, during the next phase of analysis, the team members shared all the transcripts, photographs, and student work, and individually conducted an initial coding. Quotes from the transcripts were then organized thematically using a Microsoft Excel table which was collectively revised and filled in. The CAR team gradually extended the coding process through collective assessment sessions in which they shared, contrasted, and triangulated their own categorizations, traced interrelationships between the categories, and tried to bring the analysis to a higher level of abstraction.
Expected Outcomes
New materialisms and New literacy studies proved to be rich and constant sources of pedagogical guidance and inspiration during the Words Matter/Palabras Reales project. The main pedagogical affordance the project found on matter was the possibility of bridging and synthesizing the cultures, literacies, and skills of the school and out-of-school contexts through multimodal and artifactual pedagogies that decidedly acted upon the material dimensions of the literacy process. By drawing on a diversity of artefacts and materials, the research team succeeded in mobilizing the learners' cultural capitals, identities, and multimodal literacies in the EFL classroom. For instance, by including a wide a range of material resources, and by offering the students an equally wide range of multimodal forms of expression to channel their voice—drawing, cutting, pasting—the project activated literacy practices they had often developed at home. Yet, as opposed to the economic restrictions affecting their homes, interviews revealed that the wealth of material resources the students found in our English workshop enabled them to do more complex and sophisticated work, and also motivated them to put more effort into it. The multimodal and bilingual nature of the workshops enabled the students to replicate home literacy practices and transform them into academic and artistic work that included the English language. Through the final exhibition, the children had the chance to showcase their artifacts in ways that would be praised not only for their strict educational or linguistic value—i.e., how much English they had used, and how correctly—but, rather, for being an appreciated contribution to Nazaret’s social life and the communities that lived there.
References
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham and London, UK: Duke University Press. Burns, A. (2005). Action research: an evolving paradigm? Language Teaching, 38, 57-74. doi:10.1017/S0261444805002661 Dolphijn, R., & van der Tuin, I. (2012). New materialism: Interviews & cartographies. Ann Arbor, MI.: Open Humanities/Publishing. Hall, J. (2008). Language education and culture. In S. May, & N. Hornberger (eds.), Encyclopedia of language and education, 2nd edition, Volume 1: Language policy and political issues in education (pp. 45-55). New York: Springer. Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Luke, A. (1994/2018). The social construction of literacy in the primary school. In A. Luke, Critical literacy, schooling, and social justice. The selected works of Allan Luke (pp. 28-74). Nueva York: Routledge. Pahl, K., & Rowsell, J. (2010). Artifactual literacies. Every object tells a story. New York: Teachers College Press. Pahl, K., & Rowsell, J. (2011). Artifactual critical literacy: a new perspective for literacy education. Berklee Review of Education, 2, 129-152. Street, B. (2012). New Literacy Studies. In M. Grenfell, D. Bloome, C. Hardy, K. Pahl, J. Rowsell, & B. Street, Language, Ethnography, and Education. Bridging New Literacy Studies and Bourdieu (pp. 27-49). New York: Routledge. Stenhouse, L. (1975/1981). An introduction to curriculum research and development. London: Heinemann. Thiel, J. (2015). Vibrant matter: the intra-active role of objects in the construction of young children literacies. Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice, 112-131. doi:10.1177/2381336915617618
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