The (Im)Materiality of Educational Space: Interactions between Material, Connected and Textual Dimensions of Networked Technology Use in Schools

Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education

Pahl

et al. 2012

Self Cite

105

116

This article deconstructs the online and offline experience to show its complexities and idiosyncratic nature. It proposes a theoretical framework designed to conceptualise aspects of meaningmaking across on-and offline contexts. In arguing for the '(im)materiality' of literacy, it makes four propositions which highlight the complex and diverse relationships between the immaterial and material associated with meaning-making. Complementing existing sociocultural perspectives on literacy, the article draws attention to the significance of relationships between space, mediation, materiality and embodiment to literacy practices. This in turn emphasises the importance of the subjective in understanding how different locations, experiences and so forth inflect literacy practice. The paper concludes by drawing on the Deleuzian concept of the 'baroque' to suggest that this focus on articulations between the material and immaterial helps us to see literacy as multiply and flexibly situated.

Section: Vignette: Street Viewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The (im)materiality of literacy: the significance of subjectivity to new literacies research

Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education

Pahl

et al. 2012

Self Cite

105

116

“…A sociomaterial perspective on intensification, for example, might foreground how an ambient lighting effect or musical score plays into and out from what else is going on, threading its way into the ongoing liveliness of event and helping to propel forward certain ways of doing or being. Or when considering use of networked technologies to connect participants, it might prompt a focus on how the screens that mediate such connections physically position readers, or on the kinds of physical and/or face to face interactions that over-layer on-screen engagements (Burnett 2011). When inviting participants to make the world, it might foreground material understandings, experiences and resonances that inflect what they do.…”

Section: Broader Applications and Future Directionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conceptualising digital technology integration in participatory theatre from a sociomaterialist perspective: ways forward for research

Research Papers in Education

Parry

et al. 2018

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Existing research on the use of technology in participatory theatre in education has paid little attention to the moment-to-moment unfolding that characterises the liveliness at the heart of such practice. In this conceptual article, we show how a sociomaterialist perspective can illuminate the contingent co-emergence of people, things and technologies that produces this liveliness of events. Perspectives drawn from actor-network theory are used to illuminate one example of the integration of technology in participatory theatre in an educational context. The concepts of mutability, disruption, maintenance, potentialities and multiplicities are developed as an explanatory framework for future research and practice in these and similar forms of educational activity.

“…Our previous work on literacy and technology in classroom contexts has explored relationships between the online and the offline, and the porosity of these in the lived experience of pupils and teachers (Burnett, , ; Burnett, Merchant, Pahl & Rowsell, forthcoming; Merchant, , , ). This has led us to question the relevance of the binary distinctions that recur and proliferate in the literature – those that assume boundaries between online and offline, digital and print and so on – but it also provokes us to question how we see literacies more generally.…”

Section: New Literacies and New Ways Of Thinking About Literaciesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Points of view: reconceptualising literacies through an exploration of adult and child interactions in a virtual world

Journal Research in Reading

2013

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This article explores theoretical and methodological issues in literacy studies emerging from an investigation of how children and adults make meanings when virtual worlds are embedded in classroom contexts. Drawing on the work of Law and Mol and Kwa's exploration of ‘baroque complexity’, it highlights the importance of recognising and interrogating multiplicity in examining interactions through and around texts. The implications of this, we suggest, go beyond research into literacies in digital environments to raise questions about how we theorise and research literacies more generally. In particular, this leads us to re‐examine the use of the literacy event as a unit of analysis. We argue that these issues are particularly important at a time when diverse and multiple literacies collide with educational policies that reduce literacies to ‘the basics’ and to simple models that prescribe what is learned.