Literacy Learning as Cruelly Optimistic: Exploring "Otherwise Possibilities" Through Transmedial Storytelling

• In Event: Transmediation in Motion: New Directions for Theory and Inquiry on Multimodality in School Spaces

Abstract

In this paper, we “think with” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) affect theories (Blackman, 2019; Seigworth & Gregg, 2010) to explore the cruel optimism (Berlant, 2011) that reading pedagogies (e.g. read alouds, leveled readers) can produce for readers and teachers alike. We draw on particular moments in a first grade classroom (NYC) to argue that such pedagogies transmit “normalizing” affects that promise upward mobility, college and career readiness/success, classroom community, and happiness but instead produce literate identities, which cruelly reinforce the racialized, gendered, and classist myth of meritocracy (Jones & Vagle, 2013). According to Blackman (2019), science is a “storytelling machine” with the propensity to “sanitize, excise or even exorcise narratives, actors, agents and entities” (p. 41). This machine furthers a dominant narrative that not only decontextualizes time and space, but also affectively circulates to re/produce student bodies in myriad ways, for example, as “struggling,” “unsuccessful,” and even learning “disabled” (Author 6, 2018). As a larger destructive force, it has the potential to violently impact our capacity to read, write, respond, think, and imagine otherwise (Sharpe, 2016). Cruel optimism is harmful, then, because it normalizes particular fictions and fantasies that are presented as scientific truths without acknowledging that these dominant stories are but one narrative (Moss, 2015), thereby closing off other ways of knowing, being, and doing.

We draw on Blackman’s (2019) concept of transmedial storytelling (for transmediation see Rowsell et al., 2018; Author 2, 2006), as a distributive form of storytelling, to make visible those narratives that have been traditionally displaced within classroom spaces: after all, “[a story] does not exist in one place, is distributed across time and space and is enacted by multiple agents, actors, agencies, entities and objects” (p. 22). That is, we seek to unearth the dominant stories that are often held as truths so as to create different narratives, or otherwise possibilities (Crawley, 2020), that “enliven rather than report, to render rather than represent, to resonate rather than validate, to rupture and reimagine rather than to faithfully describe” (Vannini, 2015, p. 15). We think with data/theories (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) of affect as “scenes of entanglement” (Blackman, 2019, p. 23) so as to reimagine standardized understandings and taken for granted notions of what it means to be successfully literate. The data that we explore here—gathered through participant observations, fieldnotes, informal student and teacher interviews, and objects/texts related to literacy practices—derived from a larger 6-month post/qualitative study examining the affective encounters that impacted the making of first grade students as “un/successful” readers (see Author 6, 2015, 2018). This work offers pedagogical possibilities for bodies that are often read as unsuccessful (e.g. disengaged and struggling) and/or successful (e.g. happy and engaged) and explains how the guise of optimism can fail to acknowledge the larger social, political, and economic forces at play to shape the unfolding of academic realities that are simultaneously connected to the past, present, and future.

Authors

• Bessie Dernikos, Florida Atlantic University

• Jaye Johnson Thiel, University of Georgia - Athens