Practices, Resources, Ideologies: The Emic Construction of What Counts Here and Tracing What Makes It Possible

• In Event: Roundtable Session 21
  In Roundtable Session: Integrating Analyses of Interaction, Texts, Ideologies, and Embodied Ways of Knowing

Abstract

Purpose
This paper examines the literacy practices and surrounding ideologies framing two Secondary 3 (9th grade) English language arts cohorts’ participation in an 18-session digital storytelling workshop. Specifically, I examine these 39 students’ and their teacher’s classroom interactions, authored digital stories, and the ideological values attributed to those practices in order to highlight the multi-sited and scaled construction of “what counted” (Crawford, Castanheira, Dixon, & Green, 2001) in a novel attempt to broaden literacy instruction locally. In addition to a focus on literacy practices and material resources, I also consider the sociolinguistic resources (Blommaert, 2010, e.g., discourses, shared macro-social categories) that supported the ways students and teacher positioned themselves and others in light of authorship and moral narratives,

Theoretical Perspectives
I bring together interactional sociolinguistics (Gumperz, 1982; Schiffrin, 1995) and analysis of positioning of roles and identities (Author, 2009) to examine how prevailing language and educational ideologies shaped possibilities for authoring and identifying with texts. I also draw on Blommaert’s (2010) critique of views of language as spatially fixed or reified as entity in order to reconfigure some of the ways we approach multimodal authoring as an ideological project animated by language educational policies, curricula, and local social actors.

Methods
The 18-session curricular enactment I consider here was part of a three-year ethnographic, multi-sited research project in Singapore aimed at developing digital storytelling workshops for academically marginalized youth both in- and out-of-school. For this paper, I analyze students’ digital stories and the practices and resources they drew on from an ethnographic perspective (Green & Bloome, 1997). Particularly, I interpret: 1) students’ and teacher’s emic perspectives about “what counted” and the type of interactional and ideological space their participation created alongside, 2) the material and sociolinguistic resources they drew on, as evidenced in their authored stories, and 3) the ideological milieu that shaped and was shaped by interactions in this process. I therefore continue the methodological project of linking and problematizing micro- and macro-social educational processes (e.g., Heller, 2001; Irvine, 2001) by considering social interactions and the metaphorical space they create locally in light of what is seen as possible for these students and this particular educational context.

Data
Students’ digital stories and related artifacts, video-recorded interactional data (whole-class and two focal groups) from the 18 sessions, researcher field notes, and interviews with teacher and students.

Conclusions and Significance
Understanding the opportunities and constraints afforded by macro-social orders (e.g., nation state, educational and language policy) relies partially on appreciating how those are valued are reflected in emic perspectives on authoring and positioning self in that process (locally, institutionally, and according to macro-social categories). In this paper I examine classroom interactions, texts produced, and the ideological layering of messages about who and what counts therein to illuminate how local meaning is made and the broad possibilities acknowledged, reified, and sometimes pushed back upon in that process.
(474 words)

Author

• Kate T. Anderson, Arizona State University