ScribJab at School: Possibilities and Challenges

• In Event: Roundtable Session 57
  In Roundtable Session: Literacy in Transcultural and Cosmopolitan Times: A Call for Change

Abstract

Objectives: We present results of a research project in which students wrote, illustrated and narrated bilingual stories using their heritage (or other) languages, along with English and/or French, for publication on a web site and iPad app we created: ScribJab (www.scribjab.com). We examine how ScribJab both engaged language learners in enhanced literacy practices but also posed pedagogical challenges for teachers, and further argue that a materiality theoretical perspective illuminates new issues in literacy education.

Theoretical Perspective: In our observations of learners using digital tools, we have found ‘materiality theories’ (Barad, 2007) particularly useful in explaining how the contact between humans and non-humans shifts classroom environments and has an effect on learning. From this perspective, humans and non-humans are seen as entangled with one another, ‘intra-acting’, affecting one another and changing together. Accordingly, in schools, material human beings intra-act with material learning objects, discursive understandings, spaces, time and one another, and together are agentive. Characterized as a ‘relational ontology’, theorists see users and tools as mutually constituting each other (deFreitas & Sinclair, 2013).

Methods and data sources: Using ethnographic methods, we observed the use of ScribJab in two sites: an elementary Francophone and a secondary English as a second language classroom. Our data include video and audio recordings, field notes, photographs, interviews with students and teachers, and artifacts of writing prompts, drafts and final products. Audio and video data were transcribed and coded using StudioCode. During analysis, we focused on intra-action among students, teachers, iPads, computers, other applications and websites, including other things like space, sound, and so on.

Results: Examining how the user and the tool mutually constituted each other, we noted that intra-actions with ScribJab occasioned episodes of collaborative translanguaging (Garcia, 2009) practices among students and teachers. These practices violated the policy of students using only the target language in class and challenged assumptions about ‘speakers’ and ‘non-speakers’ of various languages. Student collaborations also posed challenges for teachers who did not know how to evaluate collaborative (or other-language) writing. This study shows how the introduction of a new tool in classrooms both opens possibilities for enhanced engagement in literacy, but also poses challenges to usual practices.

Implications: Research has shown that student students' educational achievements are enhanced, their self-esteem is strengthened and they have higher expectations when they maintain links with their family languages and communities. As well, multimodal tools present many learning opportunities for students. Such multilingual and multimodal approaches offer opportunities for reaching ethical educational goals in a globally connected world (cosmopolitanism). However, engaging in transcultural, multimodal and multilingual forms of communication in schools will require significant reform. Rather than trying to harmonize new technologies with established educational practices, schools might better consider how these changes can serve to reshape educational goals and practices.

Authors

• Kelleen Toohey, Simon Fraser University

• Diane H. Dagenais, Simon Fraser University