Literacy Education and Chronic Illness: Building Educational Opportunities From Adolescents’ Embodied Literacy Experiences While Hospitalized

• In Event: Embodied Literacies Across Contexts

Abstract

Literacy researchers have become increasingly interested in literacy practices as emergent phenomena of embodied and emplaced activity. Similarly, this session presents results from an action research, ethnographically grounded study of how adolescents engage in affect through everyday literacies while hospitalized. In embodied and geographic transition, adolescents used their literacies to engage in affect by writing to experience movement, impart enlivened senses of self, communicate shifting identities stemming from their diagnosis, and to strengthen familial bonds. Findings informed a digital media and storytelling project, which drew on the genres, digital practices and affectivities in which adolescents engaged naturally. This study’s use of ethnographic findings to advance meaningful educational opportunities in context suggests needed attention to affect in educational research and practice.

Author

• Christian Ehret, Vanderbilt University