Matter for All: Materialities of Progressive Literacy Curriculum Reform

• In Event: 61.066 - Multimodal Narratives of Literacies for Equity: Possibilities and Limits for Democratizing Evidence

Abstract

In literacy research, attention to materials and materiality has sought to expand notions of how literacies and curricula are produced in classroom settings (Pahl & Rowsell, 2010; Kuby & Rucker Gutshall, 2015; Thiel, 2015). “Matter matters” (Barad, 2003) as the posthumanist adage goes, but in this paper, I ask for whom materials matter, especially within school contexts where uneven distributions of resources, teachers, and students into highly segregated school systems in the United States are commonplace (Kucsera & Orfield, 2014). Furthermore, I seek ways that materially-focused literacy research can intersect with and leverage social justice oriented research in education.

The research from which this paper draws began as a nine-month study of one Kindergarten classroom, combining Actor Network Theory “sensibilities” (Fenwick & Edwards, 2010) with case study methods (Dyson & Genishi, 2005), to produce multimodal narratives that trace the materials mobilized in and through one classroom, and the literacy curriculum enacted as a result. These multimodal narratives, which juxtapose photographs, audio recordings, and official and historical school documents, expose wide reaching networks and mobilities of actors, both human and nonhuman, local and distant, that, too, are engaged in curriculum enactment alongside the teacher and students. I highlight specific moments where networks forged unique alliances beyond that of the school’s “official” reading curriculum, such as when a 14-foot tree salvaged from a trash pile on the sidewalk elicited a 2-month long class inquiry, while the mandated reading program sat in the closet still wrapped in plastic. In doing so, I consider what impacts the materiality of this classroom had on curriculum enactment, and what networks beyond the classroom controlled access to that curriculum.

The democratizing function of these multimodal networks lies in their inclusion of actors not always considered in curriculum enactment: trash collectors, local nonprofits, and potting soil to name a few. However, while I saw material network tracings as expanding inclusivity in my research, I also confronted how my own human biases and interests could produce inequities in the findings by centering the network around classroom materials and “cutting the network” (Fenwick & Edwards, 2010) in ways that ultimately marginalize other actors. By combining notions of materiality (Fenwick & Edwards, 2010) with “privileged literacies” (Hamilton, 2001) I then shifted the study to consider how larger networks, including student enrollment patterns, parent resource networks, and neighborhood gentrification, also influenced curriculum enactment by turning the public school’s “progressive curriculum” into a privileged commodity. This paper ends with a call to look out for (de)humanizing elements within materially-focused and multimodal research, reframing the “matter” in literacy research as a matter for all.

Author

• Daniel E. Ferguson, George Mason University