Literacy-as-event: accounting for relationality in literacy research

Abstract

Research in New Literacy Studies has demonstrated how literacy consists of multiple socially and culturally situated practices illuminated through a focus on literacy events. Recently, this sociocultural perspective has been complemented by relational thinking that views literacy as an ongoing reassembling of the human and more-than-human. This conceptual article proposes that, in exploring how relational thinking might be deployed in literacy research and practice, it is helpful to re-visit conceptualisations of literacy events. Specifically it proposes the notion of 'literacy-as-event' as a heuristic for thinking with the fluid and elusive nature of meaning-making, elaborating on three propositions: 1. event is generated as people and things come into relation; 2. what happens always exceeds what can be conceived and perceived; 3. implicit in the event are multiple potentialities. Approaching literacy research through engaging with literacy-as-event promotes an expansive, reflective, and imaginative engagement with literacy practices that aligns with relational thinking.

Answering the world: young children’s running and rolling as more-than-human multimodal meaning making

“…Whilst concurring with the emerging body of scholarship seeking to foreground the role of body, place, affect and atmosphere (Burnett & Merchant, 2018;Ehret, 2018;Thiel & Jones, 2017) over pre-design, intentionality and rationality within literacies, we argue this has major implications for how we might understand and recognize the multimodal meaning-making of young children. In particular, human design and intentionality as key features of children's multimodal meaning-making (Kress, 1997), need to be rethought if we acknowledge that modes of meaningmaking emerge as a result of the sound and movement practices through which human and nonhuman actants correspond (Ingold, 2013) with each other.…”

“…Thiel (2015) offers the notion of embodied literacies, in which children's story telling through their play and movement in place involves intense surges of emotion to which children's moving bodies respond. Burnett and Merchant (2018) have suggested rethinking literacy events with ipads in an early years classroom using the relational notion of event in order to consider the fluid and relational nature of literacy events and their multiple possibilities. This work extends notions of multimodal meaning-making in early childhood to emphasize the moment-by-moment unfolding nature of it (Kuby et al, 2015), which come about as a result of (human and nonhuman) bodies moving together (Hackett & Somerville, 2017).…”

On the relational autonomy of materials: entanglements in maker literacies research

“…Materials exist in the world whether or not they are found or used, and they demonstrate their autonomy in the planes of immanence (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980), between idea↔object, intentionality↔product and immaterial↔material. Those spectral materialities echo such literacies aspects as the mobile and the moving (Nordquist, 2017), the ephemeral and the relational (Burnett and Merchant, 2020), as well as the felt and the affective (Ehret, 2019).…”

“…With this article, we consider how the discussions, transcriptions, materials, researchers' interpretations, sounds and ephemeral moments were part of entanglements that are “a knot of forces and intensities that operate on a plane of immanence … .an enactment among researcher‐data‐participants‐theory‐analysis” (Mazzei, 2013, p. 736). It was not our goal to identify, or pinpoint, the effects or benefits of a literacy practice over another – simply, it was to see literacy events as relational and entangled in socio‐material assemblages (Burnett and Merchant, 2020), and we find examples from these research sites show the relational autonomy of materials. Posthumanism helped us see how materials mesh with humans in makerspace contexts.…”

Earning or Learning, or Not: Reconnecting Young Adults With Learning Through Multiliteracies Pedagogy

“…Leander and Boldt () described literacy activity as not primarily about generating signs of meanings as end points, but rather as “generating intensity and the excitement of emergence” (p. 26), where literacy is understood within material, embodied, relational, and semiotic assemblages (Burnett & Merchant, ; Leander & Boldt, ). The production of texts is not limited to the production of an artifact, but rather is “in the ongoing present, forming relations and connections across signs, objects, and bodies in often unexpected ways” (Leander & Boldt, , p. 22).…”