Shifting Frameworks: Affordances of Literacy-in-Action in Children's Critical Literacy

• In Event: 68.059 - Assembling the Assemblage in Literacy Studies

Abstract

Purpose:

Brandt and Clinton’s (2002) seminal work, Limits of the Local, challenged social practice literacy research to widen its anthropocentric gaze to consider the role of material objects in literate interactions. To facilitate this shift, they propose an alternative to the most commonly used unit of analysis in socio-cultural studies, the ‘literacy event’ (Heath), 1981). The purpose of this paper is to discuss the theoretical and methodological provenances and affordances of ‘literacy-in-action’ (Brandt & Clinton) for an analysis that considers the human and non-human in a flattened hierarchy and the theoretical roots I’ve found necessary to explore as I use this approach to assemblage theory in my work with elementary school children.


Theoretical Framing:

‘Literacy-in-action’, which asks ‘what are people doing with literacy?” and “what is literacy simultaneously doing with them?” is based on the work of Latour (e.g., 1991). Guided by the early philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (e.g., 1962) Latour’s understanding of social order was also informed by a pluralist ontology and maintains that living beings move through the world by producing assemblages (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987/2004). Methodologically, the examination of assemblages begins with mapping and in this mapping, people are significant participants; however, the assemblage will also include signs, material objects, events, practices and utterances. I have been able to operationalize literacy-in-action by using Latour’s (2005) framework for conducting a rhizo-analysis and adding clarity to it by considering the question, “What is produced when participants in an assemblage interact?” (e.g., Barad, 2007; Bennett, 2001; Deleuze & Guattari, 2004). This has enabled me to effectively consider the social and material, ontological and epistemological milieu of children’s literacies.


Data Sources

I draw upon data from a seven month-long case study that brought into assemblage a classroom, children, teachers, a comedian, researchers, and the production of comedy.


Findings:

In order to discuss the affordances of literacy-in-action, I focus on one child, Alina, and two moments in the classroom study. I contrast the type of analysis available through the literacy event (Heath, 1981), with that possible using literacy-in-action (Brandt & Clinton, 2002). The literacy event analysis first looks across the data set at instances of Alina’s use of texts, noting contextual factors that are part of that interaction and then provides a means for describing her literacy practices in relation to humour texts, some of which include the Pakistani cartoon, Burka Avenger (n.d.), and the web-based texts of self-described “nerdybaker” Rosanna Pansino (n.d.). However, an alternative analysis, which utilizes literacy-in-action, makes visible the way in which these texts become agentive participants in Alina’s literacy learning and subsequent productions, such as the production of a humorous skit addressing social inequity.


Significance:

Socio-material perspectives are increasingly being taken up in literacy research and many see the potential for this to change the way literacy is framed in education settings (e.g., Author, 2016; Kuby & Rucker, 2016; Thiel, 2015). However, the field now requires development of robust and theoretically informed methods of inquiry for this potential to be fully explored and understood

Author

• Kimberly Lenters, University of Calgary