Material and Social Dimensions of Text Production: Collaboration Between iPads, Texts, and Young Literacy Learners

• In Event: 43.053 - Materiality Meets Multimodality: The Forgotten Role of Material Objects in Digital Literacies

Abstract

Objectives
This paper draws on understandings of literacy as a material and social practice, considering the implications for classroom pedagogies when learning to produce texts is digital and collaborative.

Theoretical Framework
From a sociomaterial frame we understand literacy to incorporate material, spatial, social, human and textual dimensions. Learning to produce texts always occurs through intra action between people, the non-human and the material, along with the spaces in which these entanglements occur. Foregrounding the materiality of learning to write and produce texts, moves beyond the idea of children using tools and technologies as they learn in classrooms. Instead children are understood to be among the materials (Sorensen, 2009). Of course children use the technologies and resources, but at the same time these materials act on the children and their choices, and as such influence the educational practice that is enabled. By de-centering the human dimension in this way, we are able to understand learning to produce texts to be social and material.

Methods and Data Sources
The data analysed was collected as part of a larger study on learning to write and produce texts in the early years of school. In this instance a teacher and researcher worked together to design and implement a design-based experiment to consider the what, how, who and when of learning to produce texts collaboratively and digitally. Here we are particularly interested to the materiality of text production practices as children in year 2 work in pairs with an iPad to produce digital texts.
Data was collected using time-lapse photography, classroom observations, and the digital products produced within the lesson. The time-lapse photography enables a frame-by-frame analysis of the literacy learning events and allows us to think-with space, time, materials (Kuby, Rucker & Kirkhofer, 2015) and to consider the bodily movements of collaborative practice between children as text producers and the materials and spaces that they find themselves among.

Results
The results demonstrate the collaborative, material and spatial dimensions of learning to produce texts. The children are seen to produce text collaboratively. The paired writing, with a shared iPad, gives rise to a symbiotic writing relationship. The pairs operate in unison, and are with the technological device. Their attention is focused on the screen and the iPad moves. Different children take the lead as text producers, other children’s bodies lean in to offer advice and suggestions. At times children are distracted from the writing and look away, but almost immediately, they refocus onto the screen, without any external encouragement. The technological device draws the children into writing. The digital tool becomes their unitary focal point – a point of collaborative text production.

Significance
The study provides insights on learning to communicate with digital technologies in early years classrooms. The findings push us to consider learning literacy as much more than learning basic skills, and provides a means to come to terms with the material nature of learning literacy in classrooms where digital and print texts are brought together, and where producing texts is a collaborative practice.

Authors

• Aspa Baroutsis, Griffith University

• Annette Woods, Queensland University of Technology