Expanding Normative School Genres: Latino Students as Semiotic Boundary Workers in Digital Space

• In Event: Latino/a Students Using New Digital Technologies to Develop Hybrid Literacies and Craft Agentive Selves

Abstract

The five-paragraph essay, used for standardized tests, is a normative pattern of production that occurs in English classrooms. Creating a profile page on a social network site is a normative practice that circulates in digital networked publics (Ito, 2008). Both are genres that encompass "semiotic ways of acting and interacting" (Fairclough, 2009, p. 164). I argue that a large part of appropriating new media in schools involves helping students and teachers recognize their expertise in genres that lie outside of accepted school learning as resources for literacy. Digital tools are addressed by this paper as affording the potential for students and teachers to innovate hybrid genres as spaces where youth can grapple with personally meaningful issues for a wide array of audiences. The research sought to support students in developing new literacies as creators of the format and content of their learning across multiple discursive domains.

Activity shared in this paper emerges from participatory ethnographic and interventionist research in the cultural historical tradition of expansive learning (Engestrom, 1987) combined with funds of knowledge research (González et al., 2005). Within the study genres are conceptualized as embodying and indexing particular social practices and discourses (Blommaert, 2009; Fairclough, 1995), and as activity systems that can be reworked by reconfiguring elements of activity across constituent networks. Lotman's (2005) emphasis on the border of semiotic space works to spatially orient students' agency in translating between the genres of different discourses and spaces.

The social and spatial learning trajectories of eight students are shared over time as they mobilize their literacies and identities to create hybrid genres with digital media. The youth identify as Mexican and Mexican-American and attended a writing course in an urban, US - Mexico borderlands region high school. In analyzing activity, I take a discourse-historical approach (Reisigl & Wodak, 2009) to explore "how discourses, genres and texts change in relation to sociopolitical change (p. 90)". Reconfiguring relationships between youth, digital and academic practices and modalities characterizes such change in this context. A combination of interview transcripts, videos and field notes of classroom interaction, students' multimodal products and online participation from across the entire intervention, spanning over one year, were examined. I analyzed processes of recontextualization (Reisigl & Wodak, 2009) and connected this to expansive practice and new literacies learning by coding for elements of new discourses and subject positions taken up by students through mobilizing interests, practices, narratives, and textual and multimodal elements into new spaces and genres.

Through reconfiguring the "tyranny of the five-paragraph" essay, students were supported in performing as semiotic boundary workers. They recontextualized image, text and concepts from their multiple subject positions across school, personal and popular media spaces to create hybrid genres that expanded literacy practices in multiple domains. Too often digital tools are appropriated without attention to the social practices that shape their affordances. This paper helps educators envision the possibilities for digitally mediated semiosis to hybridize youth and school practices through engaging genres as sites of expansion.

Author

• Lisa Hope Schwartz, University of Colorado, Boulder