Session Information
31 SES 14 A, Innovative Methodological Approaches to Investigate Literacies and Languages Learning in Education
Symposium
Contribution
This paper considers how children represent their experiences of producing text and meaning through mapping-and-talking about the places, spaces, and materials of text production. While mapping usually involves compressing and containing spaces (Compton-Lilly & Halverson, 2014), here, mapping is used as a tool for opening these, with children tracing and connecting their text production pathways and networks (Sefton-Green, 2017). Using a sociomaterial lens, the children’s talk and maps identify where, with what, and with whom children are learning to write across diverse contexts. Drawing on Appadurai’s (1996) notion of ‘flows’, we trace children’s text production landscapes by mapping the networks children develop when learning to produce texts. Such theorising enables us to transcend the imagined borders of ‘in-school’ and ‘out-of-school’ learning, instead identifying a ‘geography’ of produced texts and meaning. We combine these ideas with understandings of literacy that foreground sociomaterial ways of thinking and in this way consider the spatial geographies of being among materials, texts, and people as a young literacy learner. Collected as part of a larger study of learning to write in the early years of school, the research approach used for collecting data combines ideas taken from ‘body mapping’ (Gauntlett & Holzwarth, 2006) and ‘draw and talk’ (Coates & Coates, 2006) methods, generating a research tool that utilizes written and verbal expression. We have called this process ‘map-and-talk’. Young children in the first four years of schooling were asked to map spaces where they learnt to write and produce texts, talking with the researcher in collaborative dialogue, and representing their learning landscape as they drew. Their maps and talk provide insight into the everyday experiences of learning literacy in early years’ classrooms. Children’s maps and their dialogue, are analyzed drawing on Burnett’s (2011) three foci: 1) the processes that produce space and identities; 2) the types of spaces that are produced; and 3) the influences that shape the spaces (p. 223). This analysis identifies how, where, with what, and with whom children produce texts as literacy learners. The children’s maps show a network of intra-actions of learning spaces, places and materials, spanning: landscapes (home; school; parks; carpet areas), people (teachers; other children; family); and things (kitchen tables; desks; lounge chairs; pencil; paper; computers; and iPads). This paper builds on a body of knowledge that identifies theoretically informed and innovative research methods providing insights into sociomaterial understandings of literacy as a social and material practice.
References
Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization (Vol. 1). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Burnett, C. (2011) The (im)materiality of educational space: Interactions between material, connected and textual dimensions of networked technology use in schools. E–Learning and Digital Media, 8(3), 214-227. Coates, E., & Coates, A. (2006). Young children talking and drawing. International Journal of Early Years Education, 14(3), 221-241. Compton-Lilly, C., & Halverson, E. (Eds.). (2014). Time and space in literacy research. New York: Routledge. Gauntlett, D., & Holzwarth, P. (2006). Creative and visual methods for exploring identities. Visual Studies, 21(1), 82-91. Sefton-Green, J. (2017). Representing learning lives: What does it mean to map learning journeys? International Journal of Educational Research, 84(2017), 111-118.
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