Session Information
31 SES 06 C, Inclusion Through Literacy: From the community to the screen
Paper Session
Contribution
The New Literacy Studies (NLS) describe literacy as a situated practice (Barton & Hamilton, 1998), both socially and culturally. This concept implies that literacy practices have a purpose, and that they are connected to the spaces in which they originate. Literacy practices are also multimodal, since they involve a huge and increasing variety of modes. Multimodality is therefore a motor of meaning-making in literacy practices (Kress, 2010).
However, the notion of literacy has been reconceptualised in recent years (Burnett, 2015; Gillen & Barton, 2010). Although NLS consider literacy as a situated practice, the raise of globalisation and the use of technological devices have modified the concept of situation and space. Virtual and fluid spaces have found a prime position in literacy studies, covering a place set between the local and the global, and led to a concept of conformed space as social interaction (Massey, 2005). As stated by Burnett (2014), classroom spaces are hybrid and fluid. The increasing presence and diversity of technology involved in literacy practices has also led to a posthumanist approach (Gillen & Kucirkova, 2018; Kuby & Rowsell, 2017) suitable to understand the way young people interact with digital literacies (Escott & Pahl, 2017).
In our research, we take up the concept of (im)materiality, described as a binary relation between the material (artefacts, texts, screens) and the immaterial. In this relation, on-line and off-line literacy practices find new meanings (Burnett, 2015; Burnett, Merchant, Pahl, & Rowsell, 2014; Leander & McKim, 2003). (Im)materiality does not deny previous perspectives on literacy, such as situatedness of practices, but adds a notion of multiplicity (Burnett, 2015). Within this framework, (im)materiality may be approached in four different ways:
-The spatialisation of literacy
-The mediation of reality in screen-based texts
-The materialisation of literacies in things
-The embodiment of meaning-making (Burnett, Merchant, Pahl, & Rowsell, 2014).
This paper aims to describe and analyse the literacy practices of four 6-years-old children within four spaces: school, home, neighbourhood and community. The four children belong to low-income families and live in one of the most depressed and dangerous urban areas in Spain. Hence, their daily contact with life is mediated by technological devices such as smartphones and tablets, and (im)materiality becomes a key concept in order to understand their literacy practices. Besides, the poor literacy events to which they are exposed in their daily life at home reaffirm the gap between their home and school literacy practices, in which digital modes are rarely used (Gillen & Kucirkova, 2018).
Research questions may be summarised as follows:
1. Which are the literacy practices of low-income children in different spaces?
2. What is the nature of children’s interaction with other members of their community?
3. How do children construct and negotiate the meanings of discourses in different spaces?
Method
The concept of (im)materiality involves a notion of multiplicity, thus embracing a multiple perspective approach, inclusive of every sort of contradiction and complexity (Burnett, 2015). The recent directions in NLS have pointed to ethnography as a method able to capture this multiplicity. Approaches to ethnography include sensory ethnography (Pink, 2009), cartographies (Masny & Cole, 2012) or collaborative ethnography (Campbell & Pahl, 2018), among others. In this research an ethnographic approach (Heath & Street, 2008) has been applied, and has enabled the research team to delve into the daily literacy practices of the sample from multiple angles (Dicks, Flewitt, Lancaster, & Pahl, 2011). Specifically, this research relies on the concepts of multimodality, classroom ethnography (described as the branch of ethnography focusing on what takes place in the classroom, lit by sociology [Bloome, 2012)]) and linguistic ethnography, which considers the social context explaining the linguistic choices assumed by individuals (Copland & Creese, 2015). Multimodality has been considered as intrinsic to ethnography, considering its aim to provide a complex panorama of life (Dicks, Flewitt, Lancaster, & Pahl, 2011). The idea of multimodality applied in this research focus on the “modes” incorporated into the children’s literacy practices –images, texts, sounds, graphs, etc.- and their meaning. The participants were four 6-years-old children, attending a school at a low-income neighbourhood in the south of Spain. The main data gathering techniques were observation, conversations and interviews, developed at the school during the classroom time, focused on the literacy practices developed by these children. Products and artefacts produced by children, or present in the classroom, were also taken into account as far as they were meaningful to the children. The main artefact in this research was a mapping created by the children, containing different aspects of their literacy practices. Using photos and drawings, children explained their practices in the school, their home, their neighbourhood and their community (Clark, 2011; Clark & Moss, 2011). The observation of their task, the analysis of the resultant product, and the conversation that accompanied its creation, constitute the main data source of the current research. Interviews and observation have been transcribed and analysed from a multimodal point of view. Artefacts have been approached from a semiotic perspective. The content analysis carried out by the research team has applied the concept of (im)materiality and its four propositions, as described above.
Expected Outcomes
Results show the different ways in which the four children approach their literacy practices. All of them have daily contact with digital devices, such as smartphones, tablets and videogames, and highly estimate the literacy practices in the school involving technology, such as touch screens. The children’s attitudes to literacy display the four dimensions of (im)materiality described by Burnett, Merchant, Pahl, & Rowsell (2014). Their appropriation of these dimensions depend on their daily contact with the devices, their interaction with older siblings and friends, but also on their literacy development. Although the generalisation of these attitudes exceeds the aims of the current research, three different profiles may be identified in these children. The first one is that of the children with a sparse relation with technology, whose concept of reality is not mediated by screens, and who have not embodied the immaterial. The second profile is that of children whose relation with reality is so strongly mediated by screens and the immaterial, that tend to give meaning only to immaterial aspects of their daily life, in their different domains. Finally, the third profile is that of children whose relation to (im)materiality is profoundly embodied, and tend to incorporate embodiment to their literacy practices in every sort of domains. Therefore, although all the participant children develop literacy practices mediated by technology, its meaning differs depending on the children. These differences rely on the practices carried out at home, and the values transferred in it. The different profiles described reflect their conflicts with the more local and material school domain, and the reading and writing tasks carried out in it. The basic implication for teaching of this research is the need of contrasting the (im)material nature of the literacy practices developed at home, with the material literacy tasks offered at schools.
References
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