Agent E, Mr. Happy, and Me: Using Abduction to Author(ize) Adolescents' Stories and Selves

• In Event: The Continuing and Renewed Urgency of Critical Digital Literacies: Ethical and Political Considerations on Research and Practice

Abstract

Objectives
In this presentation, two researchers of adolescents’ transliterate practices highlight the emergent, constructed nature of our own interpretive meaning-making in online classrooms. We foreground positionality and imagination in making decisions about representing youths’ storied identities.
Theoretical Perspectives
A transliteracies lens (Stornaiuolo, Smith, & Phillips, 2017) emphasizes literacy as contextual, political, and dynamic, calling attention to the mobilities and immobilities that support and constrain literacy development. The “trans-” prefix indicates how enactments of literacy take place across modes, contexts, and time (de los Ríos & Portillo, 2021; Stornaiuolo et al., 2017), and resist dichotomous framings of literacy that contrast print-based literacy with digital, oral, and visual literacy (Authors 6 & 5, 2021).
Our inquiry is interlaced with poststructural feminism’s challenge to “undo some of the damage left in the wake of binary thinking” (Ellsworth, 2005, p. 3). To that end, we apply an abductive approach (Timmermans & Tavory, 2012) that fosters exploration in literacy research (Harste, 2014), calls attention to the partial view of the researcher, and aligns with a transliteracies focus on emergence.

Methods/Data Sources
Presenter 1 spent six months as a participant observer in two 9th grade Zoom classrooms during COVID-19 shutdowns. From the dataset (fieldnotes, recordings, artifacts, and interviews), Presenter 1 used an abductive approach to construct the cases of two focal participants (Mr. Happy and Agent E) that will be presented, as well as a secondary analysis of what the students were trying to say about themselves through their pseudonyms. Presenter 2, who joined the project following data collection, will provide an additional, retroactive analysis represented through comics.
Each level of analysis will address the questions: ‘Who are these students? (According to whom?) What stories are being told about them -- their relationships and interactions -- in each analysis? How, why, and to whom are the stories told?’ Our aim is to avoid exploitative representations by turning the “othering gaze on ourselves and resist[ing] the historical tendency to situate ourselves at the center” (Ellsworth, 2005, p. 9).
Findings
By layering perspectives, we comment on the situated, idiosyncratic, and power-laden nature of data construction and interpretation. We use transliteracies as a framework for understanding and complicating concepts as far-ranging as classroom identities (the contextuality and mediation of studiousness and clowning), cultural affiliation (fluid raciolinguistic identifications), engagement in a Zoom classroom (and what constitutes staying ‘on task’), and the various mediated ways of reading, writing, and communicating in a virtual school space.
Significance
This presentation raises ethical questions and speaks to the conundrum of how researchers reconcile the divergent ways adolescents and adults tell their stories. How can researchers claim to represent human experience without eliding the partial and imaginative work of interpretation? How do we draw attention to partiality when writing in academic genres that fetishize truth? How might other genres and mediums be differently suited for representing multiple or fractured perspectives? How do we ensure that students are more present in our research, even if it drastically complicates the notion of a singular veracious representation of (trans)literate events and practices?

Authors

• Sarah Rapp, University of California - Santa Cruz

• David Eric Low, California State University - Fresno