Session Information
31 SES 14 A, Innovative Methodological Approaches to Investigate Literacies and Languages Learning in Education
Symposium
Contribution
This paper builds on a body of research seeking to find innovative approaches that can inform sociomaterial understandings of literacy. The video tour approach, where teachers were placed in control of the images captured, and asked to provide verbal annotation of different, spaces around their classrooms, provides insights into decisions made, perspectives taken, and assumptions held about young children, learning to write and literacy pedagogy in ways that may not be uncovered in more traditional approaches to data collection. We focus on decisions teachers make when organizing classrooms to investigate how they use space to guide children’s interactions with each other and with the classroom space. The classroom is understood as an example of a “material culture” through which a range of assemblages (Fenwick, 2014) become apparent in the types of experiences it comprises, resources it offers and the physical spaces themselves. This view acknowledges the interrelationships between time, scale, space, resources, people and interactions and offers a “method by which to recognize and trace the multifarious struggles, negotiations and accommodations whose effects constitute the things in education” (Fenwick & Landri, 2012, p. 2). Video tours are one way of examining how teachers understand classroom spaces and select resources to facilitate the teaching of writing. The tour is a linear walk-through of a location. Teachers were asked to use the video function on an iPad to record their classrooms, as they moved from one point to another, identifying and annotating key aspects of the classroom for teaching writing. The result is a corpus of video recordings that provide insight into teachers’ assumptions and decisions about the organization of spaces, the inclusion of resources and intended interactions. The video data were analyzed using a descriptive content analysis based on coding categories informed by the theoretical framework. We present trends across the data corpus and a micro-analysis of one video tour. We examine the theories, policies and practices deployed by this teacher in visualising and materializing the spaces for writing. In so doing various kinds of child writers are also simultaneously constituted.
References
Fenwick, T. (2014). Sociomateriality in medical practice and learning: Attuning to what matters. Medical Education, 48(1), 44-52. Fenwick, T., & Landri, P. (2012). Materialities, textures and pedagogies: Socio-material assemblages in education. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 20 (1), 1-7.
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