Almina, the Petsitter, and Social Commentary

• In Event: Millennium Hotel Roundtable Session 4
  In Roundtable Session: Possibilities and Limits of Posthumanist Inquiry for Reimagining Literacy Education as the Practice of Justice

Abstract

This paper draws on data from a five-month-long case study that brought into assemblage a classroom, children, teachers, a comedian, researchers, and the production of comedy for social commentary. One of the aims of the study was to examine how young students might use humor parody to engage with issues, topics, ideas and world views that they consider of social and cultural significance and urgency. The paper focuses primarily on one child, 11 year-old Almina, and several moments that took place across the study to argue for assemblage, not just as a means for conducting research but also as a pedagogical approach (Davies & Gannon, 2009).

Data sources include: video and audio recordings, photos, artefacts, interviews, observations, and fieldnotes. The data analysis takes an assemblage lens as articulated by Latour (2005), following his interpretation of the work of Deleuze and Guattari (2004). It involves approaching the people, texts, objects, events and practices associated in literate endeavors as a flattened hierarchy (Latour, 2005). That is, rather than privileging Almina’s human interactions and relegating the texts, etc. associated with her literate interactions to the category of contextual features, the analysis considers both the human and non-human as participants in the interaction. By focusing on the affect produced as these participants come into association in the assemblage, new understandings of Almina’s literacy development are enabled.

The paper traces Almina’s participation in a classroom collaborative storybuilding project with groupmates Imran, Sherry, and Jessie. The collaborative storying flowed from intra-action (Barad, 2007) with a professional comedian as the class participated in the kinds of techniques comedy writing teams employ. Together the four girls created a story of three pets who take revenge on their evil petsitter. As the girls worked on the development of the main character, Sarah the Nerd, and refined their story through rehearsal, they collectively interrogated Sarah’s motivations and concluded that her own dire circumstances prompted her actions. Almina went on, in her own individual writing, to further explore the question of social and financial inequity. In this paper, I will argue that the pedagogical approach, which employed an assemblage perspective and provided much room for embodied sensemaking (Aukerman, 2013; Enriquez, Johnson, Kontovourki, & Mallozi, 2016), allowed the four girls and Almina, in particular, to engage deeply with notions of social justice and social commentary.

Author

• Kimberly Lenters, University of Calgary