Investigating the Commensurability of Practice Across Social Spaces: Adolescents' Writing Events as Sites of Engagement

• In Event: Emerging Methods for Studying Adolescent Writing Across Spaces and Over Time

Abstract

In this paper, I demonstrate the use of nexus analysis (Author, 2015; Scollon, 2001; Scollon & Scollon, 2004) to investigate the relationship among brought along and brought about social and literacy practices (Koole, 2003) within adolescents’ writing events. The purpose in doing so is two fold. On one hand, this type of investigation helps reveal how adolescents bring to bear social and literacy practices that may or may not be commensurate with the ones sanctioned in particular writing events. Understanding this commensurability has the potential to reveal how and why adolescents take up some practices and reject other practices. On the other hand, this investigation reveals the extent to which enacted practices are dispersed across social spaces and/or integrative to specific literacy events (Schatzki, 1996).

This investigation is grounded in a social practice view of literacy, which can be understood on three different scales (Baynham & Prinsloo, 2009). On the macro scale, practices are considered on an ideological level as an abstraction and are shared among a large number of people (e.g., Althusser, 1994; Bourdieu, 1977; 1991). On the micro scale, practices are aggregates of observable, mediated actions over time (Scollon, 2001). In between these two, the New Literacy Studies conceptualizes practice on a meso scale as both observable within literacy events (Heath, 1983) and as an abstraction on an ideological level (Street, 1984). Therefore, when considering the relationship among practices—as oppositional, assimilative, adaptive, etc. (Bloome, et. al, 2005)—understanding the scale(s) of commensurability can help researchers investigate how and why people take actions and events unfold in the ways they do.

This paper presents selected literacy events from a larger study of adolescents engaged in collaborative writing within an elective English class. I draw on mediated discourse analysis at the micro level (Norris & Jones, 2005; Scollon, 2001) and nexus analysis at the macro level (Scollon & Scollon, 2004) to investigate how and why the adolescents’ collaborative writing with the selected events unfolded in the ways it did and what the significance of those events is for their literacy practices within and beyond the elective English course.

The findings suggest that though the adolescents worked together as an identifiable group, the relationship among the practices they brought to bear and the ones brought about through online and in-person social interactions forms a complex nexus of practice that cannot simply be described as a community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991). In fact, the incommensurability of their literacy practices shaped the collaborative writing as much as the ones that were commensurate, including practices that are not typically associated with collaborative writing (e.g., play fighting, joke telling, hyper correcting). The significance of this investigation is a refinement of how we conceptualize practice in literacy studies research. This approach can also be used to investigate the relationship among practices without an a priori rationalization of the meaning and purpose of those practices (Leander & Boldt, 2012).

Author

• Ryan M. Rish, University at Buffalo - SUNY