Blogging “Two Days and a Night”: Digital Literacies in Contested Spaces

• In Event: Multivocal, Multilingual, Multimodal, and Multicultural Literacies in Contested Spaces

Abstract

Purpose
This presentation highlights how an African American mother and son engaged in a blog. Using literacy as social practices and multimodality, this research helps to examine the role of digital literacy practices in contested spaces. In particular,
1. How might educators and students apply reciprocal apprenticeship models when using digital tools in the classroom?;
2. In what ways can educators, students, and parents create affinity spaces in on- and offline spaces?; and
3. How might educators use digital literacy practices to encourage and foster agency for students?
This research revealed how blogging was used to create affinity spaces, encourage apprenticeship models, and shape agentic roles for online communication and a sense of community.

Perspectives
This work involved an understanding of literacies as social practices (NLS) and multimodality. New Literacy Studies (NLS) (Barton & Hamilton, 1998, 2000; New London Group, 1996; Street, 1995) offer a body of scholarship across a range of social, cultural, historical, and political situations, contexts, and practices. The NLS perspective suggests that literacy is more than simply reading and writing; literacy is a way of acting, knowing, valuing, believing, learning, and using multiple tools and technologies. Multimodality (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001) offers opportunities to explore how individuals communicate using a range of different modes (visual, gestural, linguistic, auditory, and spatial) to make and create meaning.

Data
Data sources included interviews, audio- and videotaped participant observations, digital walks, and digital photos. Data analysis involved using qualitative coding procedures informed by grounded theory (Strauss, 1987). Activity Theory was used to examine the structure of human activity in the home (Engeström, 1987; Vygotsky, 1978). Mediated discourse analysis was used to identify and interpret the families’ moment-to-moment discursive and multimodal practices (Norris & Jones, 2005; Scollon 2001a; 2001b). Multimodal discourse analysis was used to explore how the multimodality of mediated actions and modes outside of the spoken language carry meaning (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001).

Results
Themes such as agency, identity, and power through family relational practices emerged that address how the mother engaged in digital literacy practices as mediating tools to help her make sense of her life. This work demonstrated new ways in which digital literacies shaped and reshaped how the mother communicated, interacted and identified with her sons in the home. As a result, these findings create a springboard towards advancing the public good by acknowledging the dynamics of family structures in literacy research and in the home.

Author

• Tisha Lewis Ellison, Georgia State University