Disrupting Privilege: Exploring the Everyday Spaces Children Inhabit Through Talk and Text

• In Event: 41.082 - Meanings, Flows, and Relational Spaces: A Symposium in Honor of Steve Witte

Abstract

Objectives: Freire’s (1972a; 1972b) work shows how adult literacy learners learn to read both the word and the world critically and discover a sense of themselves as agents who can act to transform the social. This is also possible for young children. We argue for the importance of extending children’s critical imagination for engaging with texts. We view such an imagination has having emotional, intellectual, social and ethical dimensions that enable children to consider how texts construct versions of the world, which may or may not be socially just. Case studies of teachers who work consciously with everyday spaces children inhabit reveal how seeing space as a text enables a critical re-imagining of the world.

Perspectives and theoretical framework: Kress’ work (2010) extends the notion of ‘the word’ to include other modes for making meaning such as visual, audial, spatial, kinaesthetic, and performative modes. Recognising that texts are multimodal, we adopt a wide notion of text to include images, conversations, spaces, bodies, and a broad notion of reading and designing such texts. This paper draws on work in critical literacy, particularly the contention that language, other forms of semeiosis, and power are central to critical literacy work (Author, 2010), and the importance, of teachers disrupting the commonplace (Vasquez et al., 2013). In educational contexts space is often constructed as invisible and fixed. By making space visible, power is made visible (Foucault, 1977) and the possibilities for imagining the transformative possibilities of space emerge (Foucault, 2000).

Methods: We use data from two case studies of teachers teaching critical literacy lessons in privileged schools in South Africa. One teacher worked with children in kindergarten and the other with Grade 3s. They redesigned activities from Author et al (2014) to suit their children and contexts. They reflected on these lessons in writing and discussions, redesigned new activities and reflected on these.

Data sources: We draw on written and oral reflective texts from teachers as well as a range of multimodal texts children produced: lesson transcripts, photographs, texts children created (e.g. mobile maps, surveys, drawings) and artifacts they created.

Results: The data show the emergence of unconscious notions of privilege that teachers worked to disrupt in their lessons. The Kindergarten teacher focused on litter in the school space. Children researched habits around littering and access to dustbins which enabled an interrogation of the complexities of social practices and their agency. The Grade 3 class worked with a questionnaire and ‘mobile maps’ to explore movement through school spaces. Issues of access, power and punitive punishment arose from their spatial and temporal analyses.

Scientific or scholarly significance of the work: Understanding that space can be rendered visible through multimodal texts offers ways for redesign the everyday worlds children inhabit. This work makes a contribution to understanding how early years teachers develop children’s imagination for more equitable social relations and the agency needed to effect change.

Authors

• Kerryn Dixon, University of the Witwatersrand

• Hilary Janks, University of the Witwatersrand