Leveraging Syncretic Literacies to Understand Student Sense-Making in Computing-Integrated Language Arts (Poster 3)

• In Event: Computational Thinking in Humanities

Abstract

Objectives and Significance
There are many efforts to integrate computing into K-12 language arts (Jacobs et al., 2021; Guzdial, 2022). The field must come to understand how pedagogies position practices from both disciplines relative to each other and to students’ cultural practices (New London Group, 1996; Kafai & Proctor, 2021). This study interprets curricular designs and interactions documented in computing-integrated bi/multilingual sixth grade language arts classrooms involved in a research practice partnership (RPP). Rather than look for evidence of student achievement of fixed language arts and computing standards, authors leveraged the theory of syncretic literacies (Gutiérrez, 2014; Radke et al., 2022) to understand students’ sense-making across and beyond domains and to highlight the new literacies that can emerge from integrated practice. Ultimately, this analysis promotes dismantling boundaries between everyday and disciplinary practice which can marginalize non-dominant learners.

Background and Theoretical Framework
As educators integrate practices typically associated with language arts and computing, new literacies that are more than the sum of their parts emerge, such as digital humanities (e.g. Lynch, 2021), creative computing (Brennan et al., 2014), and critical computing (Ko et al., 2020). Practices from language arts are positioned differently vis a vis computing: some frame CT as literacy, support literacy through CT, or CT through literacy (Jacob & Warschauer, 2018).
Less work explores how students’ cultural practices -- especially those marginalized in schooling -- get positioned relative to disciplines in these pedagogies. Conceiving the object of learning as syncretic literacies can support such exploration. These connect and reorganize practices associated with disciplines and students’ everyday lives “so as to engender new forms of knowledge and expertise” (Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016, p. 572). Syncretic literacies flatten traditional hierarchies between those practices in ways that grapple with the tensions between them (Gutiérrez, 2014). Recent work in syncretic computational literacies (Radke et al., 2020) explores the overlap of computing, disciplinary and students’ communities.

Data and Methods
This poster shares an analysis of transcripts of classroom moments documented in NYC-based bilingual computing-integrated language arts classrooms where bi/multilingual middle schoolers engaged in digital storytelling with the Scratch environment. Activities were co-designed to elicit syncretic literacies. Following Radke et al., (2022), syncretic literacies also helped us attend to how students leveraged resources associated with home, other out-of-school communities, computing, and language arts in sense-making. We employed techniques from design narratives (Hoadley, 2002) to infer the pedagogical decisions that may have supported syncretic literacies.

Results
Students drew on code, multimodal, embodied and multilingual linguistic resources, knowledge of gaming, sports, Spanish-language media, and everyday family practices in the kitchen during integrated language arts and computing activities. Their explorations re-shaped expectations for language arts by transforming what counted as text, literacy, analysis, “writing” and “reading”, and expanded the typical objects of CS practice beyond programming languages and computational thinking. Teachers promoted syncretic literacies by welcoming students to have conversations about, with, and through code in culturally relevant contexts, and by welcoming students to translanguage -- use their full language repertoires to learn and communicate (García & Li Wei, 2014).

Authors

• Sara Vogel, City University of New York
  Presenting Author

• Christopher Hoadley, University at Buffalo - SUNY
  Presenting Author

• Sarah C. Radke, Concord Consortium
  Non-Presenting Author

• Laura Ascenzi-Moreno, Brooklyn College - CUNY
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jasmine Y. Ma, New York University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Wendy Barrales, Graduate Center - CUNY
  Non-Presenting Author

• Lauren Vogelstein, New York University
  Non-Presenting Author