Relocating the Development of Literate Persons and Practices: Tracing the Historical Trajectories of an Engineer-in-the-Making

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

Abstract

Objectives: Studies of writing and learning have tended to locate literate development comfortably within the presumed temporal, spatial, and generic boundaries of a particular social world, and thus have tended to view literate development as the product of people’s increasingly deeper, fuller history with that particular community’s texts and textual activities. By design, such studies, and the accounts of literate development they generate, tend to construe writers’ practices and identities as fixed in the given setting and to take a mono-modal approach that backgrounds or ignores other semiotic resources. Although such studies have provided detailed analyses of how situated activity within a particular setting informs the growth of people’s literate practices and identities, they have tended to obscure the lengthier histories that people and practices trace across the expansive and ever-expanding textual landscapes they inhabit. This study explores the longer, blurrier histories that inform the ongoing production of people’s literate development across multiple times, places, and representational media.

Theoretical Framework: Informed by sociohistoric perspectives and methodological approaches that situate the development of practice and identity in lengthy histories of re-use across heterogeneous times, places, and representational media (Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998; Hutchins, 1995; Prior, 1998; Prior & Shipka, 2003; Scollon, 2001a, 2001b, 2008; Prior & Hengst, 2010; Wertsch, 1991, 1998), this study examines the development of one undergraduate engineering major’s ability to act with tables and other inscriptions in ways valued by engineers.

Methods: The study adopts a longitudinal quantitative approach to examine the research participant’s textual practices and process for multiple literate engagements, including undergraduate engineering classes and high school coursework, but also a wealth of her everyday textual activities including scheduling daily activities, solving puzzles, writing fan novels, and playing video games.

Data sources include transcripts of audio- and video-taped interviews conducted over a span of three years, notes from ethnographic observations, and collected multimodal texts and artifacts that reach back to the participant’s early childhood.

Results: The analysis of the data illuminates the extensive history of acting with tables and other inscriptions for multiple activities that inform the participant’s use of tables in her engineering coursework. The analysis also makes visible the crucial role that the participant’s re-use of tables and other inscriptions across textual activities plays in her ongoing development as an engineer-in-the-making.

Scholarly Significance: Ultimately, the analysis argues for increased theoretical and methodological attention to the ways people’s participation with seemingly discrete, autonomous discursive engagements shape the pace and path of their historical becoming across the assumed boundaries of everyday, academic, and disciplinary worlds. It also argues for theoretical and methodological approaches that more fully address the role that histories of re-use and semiotic remediation across engagements play in the ongoing production of literate practices and identities. Pedagogically, the analysis argues strongly for instructional approaches that position learners not as people taking up already-made identities and practices and inhabiting already-made settings, but rather as persons continually making and re-making themselves, their practices, and their social worlds.

Author

• Kevin Roozen, University of Central Florida