Actualizing the Virtual in Classroom Settings

• In Event: Portals to Understanding Learners’ Social Interactions Online

Abstract

The study of new, digital literacies has contributed to a growth of interest in fluidity, hybridity and the blurring of boundaries between contexts (Leander and McKim, 2003). This paper builds on this interest by exploring theoretical and methodological issues in literacy studies that emerge from our studies of how children and adults make meanings when virtual worlds are embedded in classroom contexts.

Drawing on the work of Law and Mol (2002), and Kwa’s exploration of “baroque complexity” (Kwa, 2002), this paper underlines the significance of recognising and interrogating multiplicity in examining interactions through and around texts. Our theoretical and methodological argument emerged from a multi-perspectival study of 10-11 year-old children’s meaning making around virtual worlds in classroom contexts. Field notes, video, and screen-capture were used to record children’s activities in-world and in the classroom and as a means of elaborating our own perspectives on the interactions and meanings that emerged. Our focus of analysis was not on single bounded literacy events but on ways that the inter-connecting mesh of emotions, materialities, activities and intentionalities inflected and interfered with one another as children and adults interacted with and around the virtual world.

In exploring this “inter-connecting mesh” we draw on notions of “assemblage” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) to present a series of “stacking stories” from different perspectives on what happened as children traversed virtual and physical sites. The juxtaposition of these stories enables us to explore the significance of multiplicity for students’ meaning making.

The students in our study moved seamlessly between the “real” and the “virtual” appearing to make meanings through inter-connecting pathways between the two, producing hybrid spaces that were constantly under construction. Incidents, individuals, and places were neither situated in single or plural worlds, but tangled up in both. Importantly then, the classroom and the virtual world are not parallel plural places inhabited by parallel plural identities. The idea of the fractal in which phenomena occupy more than one dimension but less than two has helped us conceptualize the complexity of what happens across on/offline sites. This has led us to draw on the idea of “baroque complexity” (Kwa, 2002), to suggest a nuanced interpretation of on/offline meaning-making that acknowledges fluidity and instability and also “a strong phenomenological realness” (Kwa, 2002:26).

This work makes a contribution to theorizing meaning making in virtual worlds, but also raises questions about how we theorize and research literacies more generally. It contributes to debates around how we conceptualize the situatedness of literacy by problematizing notions of context and location. It highlights how the qualities and boundaries of encounters with texts may change from moment to moment and differ for individuals or groups. It argues for a view of literacies and for methodologies that acknowledge this complexity.

These issues, we suggest, are particularly important at a time when diverse and multiple literacies collide with educational policies that reduce literacies to “the basics” in ways that oversimplify children’s engagement with texts and sideline the inherent complexity of meaning making across modes of representation.

Authors

• Cathy Burnett, Sheffield Hallam University

• Guy Merchant, Sheffield Hallam University