Literacy, Mobility, and Collaborative Writing on the 7 Train

• In Event: Making and Mobilizing Possibilities for Public Education: Four Studies of Literacy Learning Across Contexts

Abstract

Objectives: Drawing on a series of mobile observations and interviews conducted with recent immigrants on their daily subway commutes from Queens, NY to an international public high school in Manhattan, this presentation reveals how students use their smartphones and time in transit to complete most of their reading and writing for school, collaborate on school work across languages and modes, and maintain and expand transnational social networks. Reading students’ mobile literacies against the backdrop of pedagogies of containment (Giroux, 2010) that characterize their experiences in school, I investigate the effects of material and embodied mobilities on literacy practices and demonstrate how scales of education (Nespor, 2004) are constituted, in part, by traversals across the city and internet.

Theoretical framework: To frame this this work, I draw upon analytics and methods associated with a “new mobilities paradigm” (Sheller & Urry, 2006) emerging in the social sciences and humanities. Through this paradigm, I investigate relations among literacies and embodied and material practices of movement, digital and communicative mobilities, infrastructures and systems of governance that enable or disable movement, and representations, ideologies, and meanings attached to both movement and stillness (Sheller, 2014).

Methods: I employed a number of ethnographic and participatory methods to trace out these relations. In addition to conducting mobile observations and interviews (Elwood & Martin, 2000), my participants and I engage in time-space mapping (Ivanič et al., 2009) to track patterns of movement in classrooms and to chart daily travels to, from, and through schools. I also trace “literacy trajectories” (Leander & Rowe, 2006) to show how academic writing, text messaging, social networking, and game play interact to create meshworks of meaning-making extending across space-time.

Data Sources: These methods resulted in the collection of multiple data sources; including, computer and smartphone screen captures, video recordings of students’ literacy practices on move, interview transcripts, field notes, and literacy artifacts (e.g., transit schedules and maps, academic essays, text message conversations, social media posts, assignments, syllabi, etc.).

Results: Analysis of this data reveals how students’ (im)mobilities across cultural and linguistic borders, digital networks, cities, school buildings, and systems of education depend on translingual and transmodal literacies, just as the emergence and development of such literacies depend on intertwined spatial and temporal mobilities. Consequently, the research suggests that the metalinguistic skills students employ and develop through interactions on the subway and social media are, in many ways, more valuable than the standardized literate and linguistic competencies promoted by pedagogies of containment.

Scholarly Significance: Through an integration of literacy and mobility studies, this research offers literacy scholars and teachers ways to attend to pluralities of moving bodies, objects, ideas, and texts that make up and connect literacy practices and scenes across space-time. This attention is central to the project of “learning across contexts” in literacy education and paramount in the face of increasing movements of people around the world; accelerating circulations of capital and messages; and intensifying exertions of control over individual and collective mobilities imposed by neoliberal states and institutions, including K-16 education systems.

Author

• Brice Nordquist, Syracuse University