Scaling as Literacy Activity: The Labor of Global Connectivity

• In Event: 31.090 - Productions of Time-Space in Literacy Studies: Scale, Movement, and Texts

Abstract

Objectives/Purpose: One of the central tasks of literacy educators now is to help young people learn to engage in dialogue with others in digital contexts, navigating the ideas, texts, and artifacts that circulate across national, cultural, and linguistic borders. While emerging technologies make global collaborations increasingly easier for teachers, the issue of global connectivity is not as simple as linking teachers, classrooms, or students with one another. We suggest that the complex relationships involved in such exchanges require literacy teachers and scholars to take into account both people’s local histories and cultures and the broader ideological systems in which they are rooted. This paper examines how a focus on scale draws attention to the ways teachers strategically negotiate these demands.

Theoretical Framework: Grounded in New Literacy Studies (Street, 2003), this study explores how people’s literacy practices are ideologically situated within specific contexts and hierarchies. Drawing on sociolinguistic research into the ways linguistic resources (e.g., language varieties, vocabulary, etc.) are distributed and ordered across space/time (e.g, Blommaert, 2007), we explore how scalar movement has the ability to disenfranchise people’s ideas and texts as different normative judgments are placed on texts and people as they move.

Methods/Data: This multi-sited ethnography (Marcus, 1995) traced how five teachers in
Norway, South Africa, India, and the U.S. (NY and CA) participated together in an educational social networking project. Data collection over two years included extensive interview, observational, artifactual, and informatic data.

Findings: Shifting away from deficit frameworks, we employ a resource-orientation that considers what resources participants had access to, their distribution, and their deployment in interaction over time and across spaces. This scalar analysis focuses on teachers’ construction and negotiation of multiple affiliations across various temporal, local, national, and global scales. Findings suggest that categories of space and time (e.g., what counted as local, national, or global) were produced through teachers’ routine literacy engagements and that these were intertwined with multiple and overlapping social relationships. We trace the ways hierarchies and power asymmetries became instantiated in the daily work/labor of producing texts/contexts and how teachers strategically negotiated these contexts as they became increasingly sensitive to the ways colleagues navigated competing demands and differentially accessible resources.

Significance: As scholars like Luke (2004) call for teachers who can “work, communicate, and exchange physically and virtually across national and regional boundaries” (p. 1438), we need conceptual tools that allow us to understand how the activities of teaching and textual production within globalized contexts are stratified. We suggest that the concept of scale helps shift focus to the labor of producing texts and contexts (Bourdieu, 1977) across various scalar levels. This focus emphasizes the active work required by teachers as they negotiate different scales of participation, especially across power asymmetries and unequally distributed resources. In an unequal global world, scaling turns us to notions of inequality in literacy practices and how inequalities are produced, reproduced, and challenged through ongoing work/activity.

Authors

• Amy Stornaiuolo, University of Pennsylvania

• Robert Jean LeBlanc, University of Pennsylvania