Making Spaces for Literacy: A Nonlinear History of "Innovative" Arrangement

• In Event: Techné in the Making: Literacies, Technologies, and Wonder in Research and Practice

Abstract

Purpose

This paper examines configurations and uses of space in the literacy classrooms of The Innovation School, a non-selective, urban public high school organized around principles of making. Following Delagrange’s (2011) call to see aesthetic arrangement as a techné of discovery that “unfolds in time and space” (p. 58), the paper maps instructors’ iterative efforts to design literacy classrooms as learner-centered, inquiry-driven makerspaces (Sheridan et al., 2014), and explores the ways students inhabited, affirmed, and subverted these arrangements through use. It further works to contextualize these spatial practices within a larger discourse of “innovation” in US school reform – a discourse that has long viewed space as both a condition of wonder (see: postwar studies of design for “experiential learning;” Miles, 1964) and as a means of conditioning wonder (see: programs for cultivating interest in STEM careers through experiential school reform; Honey & Kanter, 2013). In doing so, the paper looks to untangle the ways competing demands of this discourse circulate in the lived dynamics of classroom praxis – not only in spaces conventionally coded as “innovative” (e.g. STEM workshops, FabLabs), but also in those concerned with the more prosaic work of literacy teaching and learning.


Research Context

The paper draws on literatures of Science and Technology Studies (e.g. Harding, 2008; Haraway, 1988) and New Literacy Studies (Gee, 1990; Street, 2003), complementary theoretical traditions that attend to the ways knowledge and practice – of techno-science and literacy, respectively – emerge from contingent socio-historical processes. Building on previous scholarship that brings these frames into conversation (e.g., Brandt & Clinton, 2002; Author 2, & Colleague, 2017), the larger study pairs historical analysis of archival and published primary sources related to postwar techno-science and “innovative” school design with ethnographic data, collected in humanities classrooms of the Innovation School over its first three years of operation. Data analyzed for this paper include: iterative, teacher-produced plans for literacy makerspaces; student-produced artifacts; student and teacher interviews; fieldnotes; photographs; and illustrative archival documents.


Findings and Significance

Findings from the study illuminate how layered (and, at times, contradictory) notions of literacy and “innovation” animated both teachers’ efforts to make spaces for discovery and students’ efforts to make meaning in (and of) those designed environments. The result was, in Delagrange’s (2011) parlance, a precarious negotiation of techné, as teachers’ technologies-of-arrangement and students’ technologies-of-inquiry were braided together in tenuous interplay. What surfaced was a form of “innovative” practice that was less a top-down imposition hewn from techno-scientific industry (e.g. integration of cutting-edge tools, techniques, or designs; or organization of curricula to serve “innovative” economic sectors) and more an emergent, socio-historical process – an “innovation-from-below.” The implications of such findings contribute to a growing body of research on making, literacy, and reform, not only by locating possibilities and frictions as informal making practices are grafted onto formal school structures, but also by situating these practices as part of larger discursive legacies – an approach that opens space for further inquiries into the social histories of “new literacies.”

Author

• T. Philip Nichols, Baylor University