“That Sounds So Cooool”: Entanglements of Children, Digital Tools, and Literacy Practices

Abstract

Many observers have argued that minority language speakers often have difficulty with school‐based literacy and that the poorer school achievement of such learners occurs at least partly as a result of these difficulties. At the same time, many have argued for a recognition of the multiple literacies required for citizens in a 21st century world. In this study the researchers examined a specific case in which English language learners (ELLs) made short videos about sustainability and social justice, to determine the diverse literacy practices such activities entailed. The researchers found that children produced storyboards and scripts, and videos with titles, and engaged in several other literacy activities, discussing what “made sense” in sequencing in a documentary story, what sustainability and social justice meant, how to report on information they had gathered, and so on. They also examined how new materiality theories might assist us in analyzing how ELLs engage in digital literacy activities. These theories encourage us to think about how human beings interact with other kinds of materials to accomplish perhaps novel tasks. With respect to language learning, such a view might challenge our conceptions of language and literacy learning. For new materiality theorists, language and literacy cannot be an “out‐there” kind of “thing” that learners put “inside” themselves. Rather, languages and literacies and people and their activities and other materials accompany one another, and are entangled in sociomaterial assemblages that rub up against one another in complex and as yet unpredictable ways.

Multimodality in Education: Some Directions and Some Questions

“…As shown in Toohey et al. (, this issue), self‐directed “studio” learning can combine with instruction or advice from teachers or other adults, and will be valued by students, provided it is good advice, provided it helps them along in a task they wish to do well in. This requires a serious approach to what students produce.…”

A Short Story Approach to Analyzing Teacher (Imagined) Identities Over Time

“…In terms of content , attention is systematically paid in the analysis to three intersecting dimensions of narrative: who , or the characters in the story, their relationships and their positions vis‐à‐vis each other; where , or the places and sequences of places in which the story action takes place; and when , or the time in which the action unfolds, past, present, and future. It could be asked why what questions are also not asked in the analysis of content, especially considering recent turns to theories of the material, which incorporate nonhuman elements in descriptions and analyses of experience (Toohey et al., ). One reason is that when one starts asking further questions ( why , how ), the analysis becomes too unwieldy.…”

Emplaced Identities and the Material Classroom

“…Scholarship across disciplines has recently emphasized the importance of sensation, place, and material in the examination of culture (Pink, ; Racles, ). Research and theory have integrated social and political experience into sensory, material, and technological processes (Griswold et al., ; Pigg, ; Toohey et al., ). In a sense, the social subject becomes embedded by “meshworks of materials” (Toohey et al., , p. 465) that articulate a “receptivity from which organized cognition, and the sense of the self as subject emerges” (Colebrook, , p. 20).…”

“…Research and theory have integrated social and political experience into sensory, material, and technological processes (Griswold et al., ; Pigg, ; Toohey et al., ). In a sense, the social subject becomes embedded by “meshworks of materials” (Toohey et al., , p. 465) that articulate a “receptivity from which organized cognition, and the sense of the self as subject emerges” (Colebrook, , p. 20). This ontological move emphasizes a material ecology that denies a privileged status to humans and their semiotic resources (Micciche, ).…”

“…For our purposes, then, an emplaced identity refers to relations between material settings, objects, and spaces, with particular respect to the ways they contribute to experiences of the self. Classroom events can be conceived as a “meshing” (Toohey et al., , p. 465) of cultural and physical materials where topics, languages, ideas, memories, and knowledge are fully integrated into (but not reducible to) local environments. Practically speaking, this introduced some difficult but hopeful questions on which to further our pedagogy: How does this room become a class?…”