Temporalities and Pathways of Learning: A Transliteracies Perspective on Young Men's Writing Development

• In Event: Literacies in Circulation: Exploring a Transliteracies Framework for Understanding Diverse Learning Pathways

Abstract

This paper presents findings from an 18-month ethnographic study tracing the development of four young men's writing practices across multiple formal and informal learning contexts traversed in a large urban center. This paper focuses on the temporal practices engaged by these young men. Attending to their anachronistic and proleptic temporalities was critical to tracing how the young men's understandings of their writing practices shaped their developmental pathways.

A transliteracies framework informed the theoretical orientation toward phenomena taken up in this study. This stance was attentive to the socially and culturally lived emergence of complexly mobile experience (in this case writing, cf. Dobrin, 2012) across varied timescales (Lemke, 2000, 2003) and fluctuating nexuses of interactivity among persons, practices, and things (Dyson, 2007; Thrift & Dewsbury, 2000). For this paper, I applied this orientation toward the temporal “speeds and rhythms of everyday social practice” (Leander, Phillips & Headrick Taylor, 2010, p. 329), particularly at how “events widely separated in space and time re-enact” (Lemke, 2000, p. 274) across timescales in resonant chains of influence (Prior & Hengst, 2010).

Data sources included in-depth interviews with focal participants, peers, and adults, observational fieldnotes, and youth-produced compositions (embodied, in print, and digital). Two layers of interpretive analysis were employed to determine participants’ emerging writing practices, and to map the dynamics of change in those practices across scales of time and space (Rosenberg & Grafton, 2010; Saldaña, 2003, 2009). This involved a digital interactive timeline (Author and Colleagues, 2015), which afforded a way to visually collapse and expand timescales in responsive rounds of purposeful comparison (Miles & Huberman, 1994). During the analysis of the dynamics of change it became evident that writing practices were being reshaped in reference to temporally disparate yet instrumental past moments and possible futures.

The ways the young men experienced time as they anticipated futures and reminisced on old writing practices led to the finding that these two particular dynamics were, in fact, temporal practices used to foster writing development. The young men used reminiscence and anticipation routinely during their writing processes, in making decisions about their writing practices, and when describing their writing practices to me. The full paper details the developmental pathways of the four young men with illustrative examples of how these temporal practices punctuated their developmental pathways. These young men did not develop as writers at a measured pace of “improvement”; rather, they acted on perceptions of past moments, present interactions and future anticipated identities simultaneously, resulting in distally resonant and influential literacy practices and events across timescales (cf. Burgess & Ivanic, 2010).

This study provides a sample of what may come into view when looking across scales of emergent activity--both contextual and temporal--unmooring the typical fixed gaze of studies that recognize literacy as a social practice on the immediate details of socially situated events or practices. This paper supports a re-imagining of teleopathic developmental models, arguing for an understanding of development as an emergent, deictic phenomenon, rather than enacted in a comparative framework of predetermined markers of improvement at preset paces and timeframes.

Author

• Anna Smith, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign