The Embodiment of Meaning-Making: Investigating Embodied Experiences of Online and Offline Texts

• In Event: (Im)materializing Literacy: Making Sense of New Contexts for Research

Abstract

Objectives

The final presentation examines our fourth proposition to our framework for (im)material literacy. This proposition draws attention to the significance of children’s subjective experience of contexts. I will present data from a longitudinal study in an urban high school to illustrate embodied understandings of material and immaterial spaces.

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical focus of this presentation is on how texts materialize the immaterial, bringing us to another (im)material relationship: the relationship between texts and subjective or felt experience. Such research directs our attention to the children’s subjective experience
and the way texts anchor emotions. In our fourth proposition, we therefore draw on Merleau-Ponty’s (1962) argument that we experience objects in place and perception has an active, subjective dimension.

This focus on embodied meaning-making illustrates how our lives are lived, as Pink (2009) says, in the new ‘coming to know’ of place, in what she terms ‘place-making’ and our sense of place is always lived, in the moment of encounter. Ingold (2007) discusses our ‘entanglements’ with objects, but also how we move through these object landscapes, the ‘lines’ we make, and the threads we follow and traces we leave of that activity. As we walk, we create invisible lines in the landscape that can, if trodden over and over, create a
trace of our movement over the earth (Ingold 2007). Pink has used the term ‘sensory ethnography’ to describe this phenomenological turn in social science, away from the linguistic ‘schema’ of multimodality, into a lens that is more ‘in place’ that involves ‘coming to know’ in perceptual terms (Pink 2009).

Methods

The presentation draws on an ethnographic study of high school students over a two-year study using a design-based approach to the teaching of English literature. Using observational, interview, and artifactual data, I examine students’ embodied understandings of online and offline texts. There is an action research dimension to the research because the English teacher and I teach lessons based on the principles of design.

Findings

The evidence includes video, audio tape, field notes, interviews with teenagers together with reflective discussions with participants. The focus of this presentation is on the way in which seeing literacy in this way illuminates it as material and immaterial and how integral it is to include an embodied view of (im)material literacy.

Scholarly Significance

It can be seen in relation to the uses of literacy in communities, drawing on Hoggart’s famous book of the same name (Hoggart 1957). By seeing writing as a form of inscription that is itself an artifactual practice, the nature of home literacies becomes situated and linked to
domains of practice in new ways.

References

Hoggart, C. (1957). The Uses of Literacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ingold, T. (2007) Lines: A Brief History. London: Routledge.
Merleau-Ponty, M. 1962. Phenomenology of perception: An introduction.
London: Routledge.
Pink, S. (2009). Doing Sensory Ethnography. London: Sage.

Author

• Jennifer Rowsell, Brock University