In amongst the glitter and the squashed blueberries: crafting a collaborative lens for children’s literacy pedagogy in a community setting

Abstract

In this article, we bring together relational arts practice (Kester, 2004) with collaborative ethnography (Campbell and Lassiter, 2015) in order to propose art not as a way of teaching children literacy, but as a lens to enable researchers and practitioners to view children's literacies differently. Both relational arts practice and collaborative ethnography decentre researcher/artist expertise, providing an understanding that "knowing" is embodied, material and tacit (Ingold, 2013). This has led us to extend understandings of multimodal literacy to stress the embodied and situated nature of meaning making, viewed through a collaborative lens (Hackett, 2014a;Heydon and Rowsell, 2015;Kuby et al, 2015;Pahl and Pool, 2011). We illustrate this approach to researching literacy pedagogy by offering a series of "little" (Olsson, 2013) moments of place/body memory (Somerville, 2013), which emerged from our collaborative dialogic research at a series of den building events for families and their young children. Within our study, an arts practice lens offered a more situated, and entwined way of working that led to joint and blurred outcomes in relation to literacy pedagogy.

Drumming in excess and chaos: Music, literacy and sustainability in early years learning

“…It recognizes that literacy incorporates a multiplicity of expressions, outputs and modes of communication, including the written and the verbal, the creative and the artistic. This is developed further by Hackett et al. (2017) who propose that multimodal literacy and its associated processes of meaning-making are ‘embodied and situated’ (59) and they draw on Somerville’s (2013) concept of place-learning and the role of place in literacy learning (Somerville, 2015).…”

Collaborative filmmaking and affective traces of belonging

“…We concur with calls to pay attention to the material conditions of mediamaking with youth while resisting the inclination to be prescriptive about which tools are necessary to produce which types of effects. And as expanded below, materiality—or the presence of the material world as both site and catalyst for response (Hackett, Pahl, & Pool, )—is evident in the expression of memories that are shared by the alumni we interviewed.…”

Metaphors we experiment with in multimodal ethnography

“…Multimodal ethnography, and the analysis of multimedia data artefacts, made an appearance as a named research practice in the social sciences in the mid-2000s with a publication by Dicks, Soyinka, and Coffey (2006), 'Multimodal ethnography'. Possibly on account of the article's subject matter (children's experiences of a science exhibition) children, young people and education are focal topics in research carried out since this publication that describes itself as 'multimodal ethnography' (Clark, 2011;Dicks, 2013aDicks, , 2013bDomingo, 2014;Falchi, Axelrod, & Genishi, 2014;Flewitt, 2011;Gallagher, Wessels, & Ntelioglou, 2013;Hackett, Pahl, & Pool, 2017;Hudley & Dicks, 2011;Pah, 2009). Multimodal ethnographic practices also emerge in research on space and identity as well as the overlap between the two (Bartos, 2013;Darbyshire, MacDougall, & Schiler, 2005).…”