The Potential Momentum of Small Moments: Reflecting and Composing in and Across Online and Face-to-Face Spaces

• In Event: Roundtable Session 15
  In Roundtable Session: Writing and Literacies SIG Roundtable 9. Developing Literacy Practices and Habits of Reflection: Media, Materials, and Meaning-Making

Abstract

Seeking to explore how court-involved youth communicate and document their experiences in and across online and face-to-face spaces through the engagement of multimodal composing practices, this presentation offers a case study of one participant’s experiences. Walter was chosen as the focal participant of this case study because of his multiple years of involvement with the ATDP, as well as his multiple roles as a both a workshop participant and a research project intern. Like other youth, Walter was living through experiences of successes and failures, love and hurt, pride and shame, and both hope and uncertainty for his future. In this presentation, I focus on small moments that occurred with Walter, across workshops and internship days, in which Walter and I engaging together in the work of reflecting, composing, and working to fuse loyalty to the known with openness to the new (Hansen, 2011).

To highlight the lingering potential of small moments, I work to document shifts that could be seen within the boundedness of this case study. In discussing moments of reflecting together on Walter’s writing, I document a shift in the ways in which Walter discussed his writing— ultimately taking-up the invitation to use writing as tool to make himself known and know himself differently. Likewise, in focusing on small moments of multimodal composing on our public blog, I document Walter’s intention to create his own blog space as a way of being known and to showcase his knowledge of the world. Contexts that are rich with multiple modalities provide adolescents with the opportunities to develop and express their identities across the production of multiple kinds of texts that represent a variety of stories and use a range of modalities (Hull & Nelson, 2005).

In focusing on these small moments of reflecting and composing in and across online and face-to-face spaces, I strive to accurately portrayed Walter as a young man eagerly and actively engaged in the transformative (never complete) process of developing literacy practices and habits of reflection. Walter enthusiastically embraced the tasks of critiquing, investigating, discovering, and responding purposefully. Working to pay attention to smaller moments in educational spaces, I believe, can shift educational conversations from a focus of test scores and final products, to a conversation about the value in the processes that build towards these goals. In the examples of small moments offered in this case study, the processes of reflecting, revising, discussing, and engaging together in this work, were, themselves, worthy and meaningful endeavors and not merely the means to measurable ends. Thus, findings from this case study advocate for a greater attention to the potential momentum of small moments. Particularly for work with court-involved youth that can feel fragment at times— because of our current juvenile justice system which continues to disrupt, remove, and place extra burdens on court-involved youth and their families— the attention to small moments and the consideration of the potential lingering effects of those small moments becomes important.

Author

• Kristine Rodriguez Kerr, Columbia University, School of Professional Studies