Textually-Mediated Teaching, Learning and Lives
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Textually-mediated Teaching, Learning and Lives
The Literacies for Learning in Further Education Research Team Presenters: Greg Mannion and June Smith, University of Stirling Zoe Fowler and Roz Ivanič, Literacy Research Centre, Lancaster University
Paper presented at the 6th Annual Conference of the Teaching and Learning Research Programme, Warwick, 28-30 November 2005
ABSTRACT
The Literacies for Learning in Further Education project is funded to explore the everyday literacy practices of students and those required of them in their studies of specific curriculum areas. Our aim is to examine those everyday literacy practices from home, work, community, and leisure which might be drawn upon to more effectively enable students to achieve their study goals. In Phase 2 of the project, we have been researching 2 units in 11 curriculum areas in four further education colleges, two in England and two in Scotland. This has entailed collecting data on writing and reading in the teaching and assessment of certain subjects and similarly exploring the literacy practices both within and outside the college of a sample of students on each of those units. For both further education staff and students participating in the project, an immediate key outcome has been the recognition of the nature and extent of the textual mediation of their practices in teaching, learning and their lives more generally.
We will draw on the New Literacy Studies view of literacy as a social practice to examine the dynamics of the literacy practices which people bring with them to FE. We will illustrate what forms this textual mediation takes in the different domains of students’ lives, and some of the ways in which everyday literacy practices currently act as a resource for learning. We will also account for how students may resist such usage on the basis that formal course-based learning is not their primary interest. In the process, we will point to the ways in which teaching and learning can be understood through the lens of textual mediation. We will focus discussion on how literacy practices in students’ everyday lives may be respected and harnessed to enhance learning.
KEYWORDS Texts, Textual mediation, Literacy practices, Further Education Contextualisation, Writing, Reading, Assessment, Transfer, Informal,
1 1. Introduction
‘I just can’t believe how much they do at home. Before becoming involved in this project, I thought most of them (students) maybe skimmed through a magazine occasionally or texted their friends, but no more than that’. (Martin, a practitioner researcher on the LfLFE project) Martin, and his fellow practitioner researchers within the ‘Literacies for Learning in Further Education’ (LfLFE) project , have all remarked on this finding. Their surprise about the breadth and depth of students’ home-based literacy practices is one that many teachers in Further Education (FE) would recognise and perhaps even share. FE students, particularly those under 19, are regularly portrayed as a media generation who have no interest in literacy practices beyond playing computer games (Luttrell and Parker 2001). Furthermore those practices which they are thought to be involved in are often devalued (Gee 2003). Yet the data collected by the researchers as part of the ‘Literacies for Learning in Further Education’ (LfLFE) project have shown that, in the main, students engage in rich and varied literacy practices outwith their formal educational institutions, but these are largely not drawn upon by their experiences within their courses. Most of the FE students involved in our research are young people and we are finding, in common with other research, that there are areas of life where these young people are enthusiastic, articulate, passionate, focussed, and quick learners, notably around new technologies, around music and other creative arts and around leisure and communicating with friends. We are interested in how these enthusiasms and ways of learning can be harnessed within college settings and how the links between everyday literacies and literacies for learning can be strengthened.
In order to do this we are undertaking an ethnographic study of students’ literacy practices in four Further Education colleges in the U.K, two in Scotland and two in England. The project is investigating the interaction between students’ vernacular literacy practices, and the literacy demands they face on 32 vocational and academic courses in eleven curriculum areas. The students range in age from 16 to 58. The aim of the research is to identify ways in which the students’ everyday literacy practices can be mobilised as resources to enhance their learning across the curriculum. The orienting theory for the research is a view of literacy as a social practice (Barton and Hamilton 1998, 2005; Barton, Hamilton and Ivanič eds, 2000), and as multimodal semiotic action (Cope and Kalantzis 2000, Kress and van Leeuwen 1996, 2001).
The research is being undertaken in partnership between university researchers and college- based researchers, using an ‘Exploratory Practice’ research methodology (Allwright 2001, Gieve and Miller (eds) 2006). This has involved first a ‘research for understanding’ phase, in which observation, collection of documents and a variety of types of interview (including
2 interviews stimulated by a ‘clockface’ activity, and photo-elicitation) were used to achieve an understanding of the nature of, and potential interface between, the students’ vernacular literacy practices and the literacy demands of the courses they are studying. This is now being followed by an ‘action research’ phase, in which understandings reached through collaborative interpretation of this data are being used to design curriculum developments and innovations. These are, in turn, being researched through observation and critical evaluation.
In this paper we focus on the distinctive feature of this research within the set of TLRP projects concerned with Further Education: the role of literacy as a mediating tool in learning and teaching. We address this in relation to the central focus of our own project: the interface between the literacy practices in which students engage in the rest of their lives and the literacy practices in which they need to engage in order to succeed on their courses. In the first section we use a simplified adaptation of Activity Theory as a heuristic to explain what we mean by texts mediating social action. We then give examples from research conducted during Phase Two of our project (college year 2004 – 2005): the first of the multiple sites and domains of one student’s textually mediated life, the second of a student who is now successfully mobilising his self-generated literacy practices as resources for learning on his course, and the third of a student for whom there is an unproductive boundary between his literacy practices within and outwith his college course. We end by outlining the pedagogic challenge to find ways of adapting the literacy practices on college courses so as better to recognise, respect and harness students’ existing literacy practices as resources to enhance their success.
2. Textually mediated lives, learning 1 and teaching
In this section we use the basic elements of Activity Theory to focus attention on the role of multimodal texts in activities (drawing on the account of AT by Russell, 2005). These texts are themselves part of what we find useful to call ‘literacy practices’ – culturally recognised, habitual ways of using written language in order to fulfil social purposes. We show how multimodal texts and their associated literacy practices mediate not all, but most social activities, particularly those which have learning as their explicit object. This leads us to treat the study of multimodal texts and literacy practices as a lens for understanding teaching and learning.
The word ‘doing’ in Figure 1 represents any social activity. The word ‘learning’ in smaller letters, nestling up, as it were, to ‘doing’, represents the strong version of a participation view of 1 We use the word ‘learning’ to refer to a process which leads to some sort of increase in knowledge or understanding, or a change in practice. We try to avoid using the word ‘learning’ to refer to the product, or outcome of the process, preferring to name specifically what has been ‘learnt’.
3 learning: that all doing in any domain of social life (that is, not just in an educational setting) is also to some extent also a learning process, albeit subconscious and unintentional learning. This ‘doing’ with its entailed ‘learning’ consists, according to AT, of the interrelated elements shown in black in Figure 1. Note that there is no division between ‘con’ and ‘text’ in this figure: Subjects, Objects, Mediating Means and the relationships among them constitute the doing/learning and are not separable from it. They are what is meant by ‘doing/learning’, rather than being the context for doing/learning. The ‘Subject(s)’ refer to all people involved, the ‘Object(s)’are both what is worked upon and the aim(s) of the activity, and the ‘Outcome(s)’ are what the activity produces, intentionally or unintentionally.
A crucial insight of Activity Theory is that any activity is ‘mediated’ by material and conceptual tools and artefacts including, particularly, language. It is here that the focus of the LfLFE project lies: on the multimodal semiotic artefacts involving written language which mediate the many activities in which FE students participate. Drawing on New Literacy Studies (Barton and Hamilton 1998, Barton, Hamilton and Ivanič (eds) 2000), we make the semiotic artefacts the starting-point of our research, but we do not only analyse their characteristics as texts and artefacts: we also pay particular attention to the aspects of the activity which involve the production, interpretation, sharing, circulation and distribution of such texts. These ‘literacy practices’ (which may themselves be ‘activities’, ‘actions’ or ‘operations’ in AT terminology) can be further analysed in terms of the people, purposes, processes, places, spaces, times, duration, manner, technologies, tools and resources associated with them. In the LfLFE project, then, we are interested not just in the actual texts we observe students reading and writing, but more particularly in the literacy practices of which texts are a key part. We are studying the texts within the context of the practices, and in turn we are studying the literacy practices in the context of the whole, socially purposeful activity which they mediate.
Mediating means doing learning
Subject(s) Object(s) Outcome(s)
Figure 1: Learning as a concomitant of doing in any social activity
The second crucial insight of Activity Theory, which links it up with other socio-cultural theories of action, cognition, literacy, and learning, is that every element in a social activity is socio-
4 culturally and historically situated, both in its specific realisation within an actual observable activity, and as a generic element of an ‘Activity System’. That is, the activity itself, the people who participate in it, the object of the activity and the mediating means all bring with them historical trajectories and cultural shapings. Firstly, the observable activity is linked to other concrete activities in a hierarchical and/or sequential relation, as one social purpose leads to, or entails others. The people involved, the ‘subjects’ of the activity, each come to it with a unique socio-culturally shaped personal history: places they have been, other activities in which they have participated or are simultaneously participating, and mediating means which they have experience of using. Each of the semiotic artefacts (which are the types of mediating tool in which we are interested) is likely to have some sort of actual provenance: a place it was made; people who have literally or metaphorically read it before, and a future trajectory on which it will be read, reused, plagiarised and reconfigured for new purposes as part of new activities. Recognising how people and things are networked together in this way across multiple activities in time and space brings the insights of Actor Network Theory (Bowker and Star 2000, Fox 2005, Star 1989, Star and Griesemer 1989) into coordination with those of AT. It makes it possible to theorise what is going on in a particular, observable activity without losing sight of the permeability of the boundaries of that activity. (For further discussion of this theoretical issue, see Fowler and Edwards 2005, Mannion and Miller 2005, Smith 2005.)
An observable activity is not only networked to other concrete, observable activities in a fluid, polycontextual way, but is socio-historically situated in a type-token relationship too. That is, each activity, and each of the elements within it, is a unique instantiation of culturally recognisable practices: an ‘Activity System’ in AT terms2. In this respect, activities are ‘contextualised’: not in the sense of being within a container, but insofar that they are played out in their broader socio-cultural, political and historical context. Each of the actions which constitutes the activity is a trace of culturally shaped and culturally recognisable practices which make a commonality between this particular event and others like it - others, at least, which share some of its characteristics. So, too, do the ‘subject positions’ within the activity have a socio-culturally shaped history: the ways in which participants in the activity are customarily expected to be and to act has evolved as the same activity has been re-enacted and reconfigured over time. Finally, the artefacts, including the multimodal texts which are used and produced in the conduct of the activity, draw upon genres and discourses which are continuously being reshaped over time by socio-political and cultural forces in the wider context, and being redeployed to serve different interests. In this way, the elements in Figure 1
2 In a more thorough treatment of Activity Theory, the culturally recognisable patterns, positions, practices, genres, discourses and expectations in an Activity System would be described as ‘Rules and Conventions’ in the extended AT triangle. For the purposes of this paper, however, we refer only to the basic AT elements, and present ‘rules and conventions’ as extensions into cultural-historical space of each of these elements.
5 can be looked at not only as unique characteristics of an observable activity, but also as the connection between one activity and the continuous evolution of social life. In the LfLFE project, therefore, we are interested not only in the actual texts and literacy practices we observe mediating students’ learning experiences and other aspects of their lives, but also in the more habitual literacy practices in these arenas of social life, of which the observed texts and practices are an instantiation.
To make a link between this theoretical framing and our specific examples, we next show some different ways in which lives, learning and teaching are textually mediated. We have selected four scenarios, all drawn from our current research, to represent variations on the relationships among literacy, learning and lives. In Figure 2, all the scenarios involve some sort of ‘doing’. However, they vary in the extent to which they involve social interaction, literacy, and informal or formal learning. Scenario 1, Washing down a wall for re-painting, is an example of an activity in which there is unlikely to be any communication, written or spoken, firstly because it is actually destroying an existing form of semiosis – the decoration of a room, and secondly because it is such a filthy activity that it is usually done by someone without company. Washing down a wall for repainting, then, is an activity using the mediating means of a selection of culturally specific tools, but not using semiotic resources. However, a decorator is unlikely to undertake this activity without a radio playing, so even in this most semiotically sparse of activities, the ‘Subject’ is likely to be networked into a different context through the mediating means of a form of communication technology involving the semiotic resources of sound and/or spoken language.
1. 2. 3. 4. SCENARIOS Washing Installing a Finding out/ A Vocational down a wall heating learning how Class: for repainting system to play a new Painting and computer game Decorating Communication; use of _ + + + semiotic resources Use of literacy _ + + + Subconscious learning + + + + ‘that’ and/or ‘how to’, Intentional learning ‘that’ _ _ + + and/or ‘how to’ Authorised by an _ _ _ + educational institution
Figure 2: Relationships between literacy practices and learning in everyday and pedagogic contexts
Scenario 2, Installing a heating system, is, superficially, similar in that it involves skilled technical work. However, in the instance that we observed the plumber talked about what he was doing to his customer, and installed the pipes and taps in a particular way so that they
6 would ‘show’ the customer how to turn water on and off. All this he could do without ‘literacy’, but it did not stop there. In addition, he read a detailed technical manual as well as a manufacturer’s brochure in order to inform the customer about the installed system, and he used the technical manual in order to complete a registration and warranty card. Installing a heating system is, then, not only an activity involving mediating means more broadly, but is also specifically a literacy practice.
In these first two scenarios, the only learning we have examined has been incidental, sub- conscious, unintentional learning – learning through participation, involving no instruction. Now we will consider situations in which learning is the Object of an activity (that is, its purpose, or aim), as represented in Figure 3. What distinguishes Figure 3 from Figure 1 is that learning is not only a by-product of participation in the activity, but is also (one of) the explicit object(s) of the activity – at least for some of the participants. We are finding, as we expected, that when learning is one of the Objects of an activity, it very often involves some form of semiotic mediation, (and this usually includes written texts as well as spoken and other forms of communication), whereas this is not a prerequisite of incidental, subconscious, unintentional learning-through-participation – as the ‘washing down a room for repainting’ example shows.
Mediating means doing learning
Subject(s) Object Outcome = learning and = increased knowledge, change in practice understanding and capability
Figure 3: Learning as the Object of a social activity
This is not confined to pedagogic settings. Our first example is of intentional learning in the context of a private leisure activity – one which doesn’t necessarily involve a teacher and is not located in a formal institutional context with all the trappings of enrolment in a course or attendance at a class. Scenario 3, Finding out/learning how to play a new computer game, is an example of an activity in which the explicit object of the activity is to learn something and it involves a variety of literacy practices, both on screen and on paper. There is no teacher present but a learner in this scenario may call upon the help of informal ‘teachers’, real and virtual (for details about the literacy practices involved in playing and learning to play computer games, see Gee 2003, 2005).
7 So far we have on purpose concentrated our attention on relationships among language, social activity and learning outside pedagogic contexts, to show that there is a lot of learning going on, implicit and explicit, in everyday contexts, and that most of it involves literacy. But we now turn our attention to a pedagogic setting designed with the facilitation of learning as its primary object. Scenario 4, A Vocational Class: Painting and Decorating, has all the same characteristics as Scenario 3: the use of a full range of semiotic resources, including the reading and writing of written texts, and both informal learning through participation and more planned, conscious, intentional learning. The difference is that, even though it is a practical subject which can to a large extent be learnt ‘on the job’, in this case the teaching and learning is taking place under the auspices of an educational institution: in this case, in a classroom in the Construction section of Preston College.
In the following sections we present three short case studies of people whose lives illustrate the types of interrelationship among doing, learning and literacy which we have spelt out here. All three cases draw attention to the range and variety of the multimodal texts and literacy practices which mediate lives, learning and/or teaching in these students’ lives. The first case study concentrates on the polycontextual diversity of one student’s life, the nature of the multimodal texts and literacy practices which mediate her activities, and her different positionings in relation to these practices. The second is a study of a student for whom the interface between literacy practices in his home life and those on his college course changed during the year as he participated in our research. The third case study paints a less rosy picture of a student for whom there is a dissonance between the literacy practices in which he engages of his own volition, and those demanded of him by his college course. In all three cases we show the extent and complexity of the reading and writing students do in their everyday lives, illustrating the observation made by Martin in our opening quotation.
3. The textual mediation of a complex life: The case of Eve, a student on a Childcare course
Eve is an eighteen year old young woman who gave birth to her son, Alex, two years ago while she was still at high school. She is the only student on this course who has the experience of being a mother. To get to her childcare classes in a morning requires Eve to make a complex journey. The points along her journey can be seen to represent some of the main contexts of her life. She gets up at her boyfriend Ben’s house where she and Alex live. The house is in Ben’s name but she has taken responsibility for paying some of the household bills. At several times in general conversations with the class, Eve drew attention to the fact that she lived with her boyfriend – she was the only student in the class who was co-habiting with a partner and
8 this was seen as a mark of maturity. When she is ready for college and Alex is ready for nursery, Ben drives them to Eve’s mother’s house in the neighbouring town. Until recently, Eve lived with her parents in this house. Her mother then drives Eve and Alex to the community nursery which she manages. Alex attends this nursery and Eve has elected to do her childcare placement there. We observed Eve working in the nursery, where she appeared confident and self-assured with her work colleagues and with the children. On college days, Eve says goodbye to her mum and Alex and then catches two buses to Preston College. Given the complexity of navigating these multiple contexts, one should not perhaps be too surprised that Eve sometimes struggles to arrive promptly at college for the 9.30am start to lessons.
Eve travels physically, by car, bus and foot, between these different contexts of her life. In interview it also became apparent that she associates largely different literacy practices with these different contexts. In her work placement in the nursery, she is participating in a textually dense environment, requiring a wide repertoire of literacy practices. These might include writing out daily and weekly activity charts, filling in children’s daily diaries, maintaining medical records, reading to children, producing nursery displays and communicating with parents. At home with her boyfriend, she deals with mail, keeping take-away menus and named letters, discarding junk mail. She has recently organised paying for the council tax (a literacy event which she reported as being straightforward and unproblematic: she rang up “and you get a form through and that’s it really”.) However, paperwork associated with Alex is still sent to her mother’s address and she finds this more problematic to deal with. For example, she knows where Alex’s ‘red book’ (child development record) is but has never read it. She mentioned two things about which she would refer to her mother for advice. First, she wants to change the Child Tax Benefit to her name but doesn’t feel confident doing this. Second, she isn’t sure what the Child Trust Fund is or what she needs to do about it. However, Eve doesn’t mention her mother when talking about learning to fill in the Council Tax form.
Just as the practices are differently situated in physical terms, so too is Eve differently situated within these literacy practices in terms of her confidence and identity. Her confidence seems to shift with different situations, suggesting that the context of these practices implicates her identity. She appears more confident and assertive when discussing the paperwork associated with her life with Ben than with Alex. Her identity shifts between the situations of being Ben’s partner, Alex’s mother, and her own mother’s daughter; between being an unqualified childcare worker in a community nursery to a childcare student on a college course. One would expect that as a Childcare student and with a mother running a nursery that Eve would feel most comfortable with the literacy practices associated with looking after her son. That confidence seems to be apparent in her work placement in the nursery and the associated literacy practices. This suggests that making links between the curriculum literacy practices and those
9 used elsewhere requires understanding not simply the identities of students, but their identifications i.e. what they view as important or productive for them. It is not simply a question of trying to relate the everyday to the curriculum, but making significant relations. It is clear that the binary of formal and everyday oversimplifies the situation when examining Eve’s literacies, given that she is engaging with a range of formal bureaucracies in relation to her home and her child which are, in many cases, more complex than the literacy demands of her course.
4. Consonance: An example of how one student’s existing literacy practices act as a resource for learning
The HN multi-media course is taught within the computing department. Students on the HN course attend college three days a week and are taught and assessed in discrete units by a team of people. The unit focussed on within the research project was ‘Introduction to the Internet’. As an added value to their course, the students are offered opportunities to undertake web-design projects or enter competitions. All three of the male project students have taken advantage of these opportunities. In their focus group, they all agreed they felt these experiences would help to further their employment opportunities. As there was no placement element on this course, this simulated work experience provided them with opportunities to put into practice the elements of the course in a ‘real’ environment. The commitment of three of the project students to the vocational area was also evident when they spent break and lunch times within the classrooms working on their class work, extra projects or personal projects.
Tom (37) is a mature student who had been an apprentice qualified turner for over twelve years. He had studied and passed the National Certificate (NC level SCQF 5) multi-media course the previous year. He was separated from his child’s mother and his daughter visits him one day every weekend. He passed his HNC and intends to go on to HND level in 2005-2006 and from there to a degree level course.
From the conversations with Tom, a story of himself emerged as someone who did not read or write. Prior to our first taped conversation he told me that his previous occupation had not required that he engage with literacy at all and at home he said: ‘I will maybe flick through the paper from time to time’. As an NC student the previous year, Tom had been apprehensive about having to write at all, but had been particularly concerned about essays. However, by the time of the debriefing focus group, in May 2005, he explicitly declared that he was no longer afraid of tackling writing tasks at college. He said: ‘if you had asked me to write a 500 word essay last year, I would have panicked. Now I can manage 1500 words no bother.’ He felt his awareness of his development was not due to the course, but to being involved in the
10 conversations within the LfLFE research project. This awareness included both the literacy practices required of him within his FE course and also his home-based vernacular literacy practices.
During both the clock and camera activities, Tom described spending much of his leisure time at home involved in literacy practices which were directly connected to learning in his chosen vocational area. These practices included reading textbooks and computer specialist magazines, downloading tutorials from specialist websites and joining multi-media forums where he could ask for advice and guidance on aspects of the software he was finding challenging. Prior to becoming involved in the LfLFE project, he would not have associated any of these activities as connected to literacy. During the course of the three conversations with Tom he talked about these activities changed. In the first one, the clock activity, he said he ‘played’ with his computer most evenings. He was motivated to play around with the computer to improve his chances of employment and because it was fun. He felt he could pass the assessments based on reading the handouts provided by the class tutor. At this stage he did not associate his home-based computing activities with literacy.
In preparation for the second conversation, Tom was asked to take a number of photographs of his home-based literacy practices. From this range he was then asked to select six pictures which represented the most significant literacy practices at home. Five of the six chosen by Tom were connected to the use of his personal computer. During our conversation of these pictures, he surprised himself by articulating how literacy rich the activities he engaged in were. Before participating in the project, he said he had never explicitly explained what he did with computing at home nor had he associated them with literacy.
In our discussions, he came to understand that his attitudes towards and his practices around reading had changed. Tom described how his reading (and learning) had changed over the course of his time at college. At the beginning of the NC course, to learn a new aspect of computing, he said that, after listening to the demonstration given by the class teacher to the entire group, he used the step by step guides (which he referred to as tutorials) supplied by the class teacher, reading each step, one at a time, and then carrying out the step before reading the next instruction. He felt the tutorials were more significant than other handouts. He explained: ‘the tutorials are sets of instructions which you need to follow carefully, word for word. The handouts have general background information. You can select which bits to read’.
However, half-way through his HNC year, Tom described a different process when he uses a tutorial at home. He quickly reads through the entire tutorial whether it is from a book, a magazine or a website to get a feel for the end product. Then with the tutorial to one side,
11 rather than at his side, he tries out the new feature of the software. He refers to the written text only if he needs some help. He feels that he now needs to visualise what the end product will be and the stages in-between are less important to him. He has the confidence and the experience to experiment and not rely on following step by step written instructions. Another difference is that he now feels he would consult text books to help his learning whereas prior to his HNC year he felt they made no sense to him. Prior to this year, Tony felt textbooks were for academic people and not for people like him. This was part of his story of being a non-reader. He gave an example of one of his classmates who he thinks of as academic because he has 4 A levels and had studied at university. His view of what constitutes an academic person restricted his views of what was an appropriate text for him to read.
After nearly two years of studying multi-media, the physical location of where these activities take place may be different, but for Tom the main features of a literacy practice remain the same: medium used, the text types, the purpose, values and expectations. He does not have significant borders to cross. We propose two reasons for this: firstly, he viewed learning within the classroom as a collaborative activity and secondly the use of ICT is central both to his leisure activities and to his course. Both students and the class teacher acknowledged that the teacher was not an expert in all aspects of computing. Although the teacher provided demonstrations of aspects of a computing package, it was recognised that the teacher could only provide a starting point from which the students had to move on. Tom said: ‘What I am learning here (at college), I am implementing at home. The teachers can only point you in a certain direction and you have to do the rest’. In the multi-media classroom, students learned from each other as well as from the teacher. They brought in to college tutorials they had found on the Internet; they shared magazines and textbooks and they told each other of new websites or forums they had found. The students were co-constructing their understanding.
However, sharing of materials is not an explicit part of the teacher’s pedagogical approach. He did not actively promote this sharing. In this classroom, it happened because one of the students had considerable computing experience and set up informal sharing sessions during class time, break times and at non-teaching times. During one of my observations, he was asked to desist from one of his sharing activities because it was an inappropriate time. He had completed the assessment he had been given but the others had not. This student was making the border crossing happen, rather than this being an explicit pedagogical goal. Additionally, prior to the data from the conversations, the teacher was not aware of the richness and variety of literacy practices the students were engaging with at home. He could not therefore tap into this rich vein to explicitly mobilise students’ existing practices.
12 When talking about learning theory on which video games are built, Gee (2003) argues that the games are constructed in ways that fit better with the modern high-tech world. Within this multi- modal world, Kress (2003) argues that it would be more appropriate to talk of writing as ‘design’, moving the discussion away from that of students acquiring skills and competencies to them constructing their literacies and learning. Kress (2003: 50) wrote: multi-modality and multi- modal design has therefore deep epistemological effects’. We would argue that the learning within this multi-media classroom is particularly well suited to learners’ expectations, experiences and home-based literacy practices, and that the written assessment demands have the potential to tap into these practices. For Tom, there is a two way process as the border between college and home is not strongly delineated. His passions within his leisure time were brought into the college and college practices became part of his passions at home.
5. Dissonance: An example of how students may resist engaging in the literacy practices of a course on the basis that formal course-based learning is not their primary interest
In this example there is a sense dissonance between the student's home-related literacy practices and the identifications being encouraged through the coursework: a dissonance which results in expressions of resistance.
Stephen is an Intermediate 1 catering student. Stephen’s Icon Map revealed the dominance of his own leisure and home-related literacy practices over formal course-related literacy practices. More important is the manner in which the home / leisure related literacy practices are valued above those related to college coursework particularly in his discussion of the map. He feels that many students his age share the same interests which he summarises as: “Having fun, playing games, texting, computers”.
Figure 5: Stephen’s Icon Map. Home: Surfing net for information / 'personal research'; downloading tunes; burning CDs; playing X Box; using website to 'share' tunes etc via
13 the ‘Kazaa’ website; reading fiction. College/Home Overlap: Using IT; reading newspaper; reading handouts; using mobile phone for texting.
Handouts aside, the literacy practices he deems important that are positioned in the home/college overlap are mostly not obviously related to the course he is on. They include mobile phone message texting, reading the newspaper and internet use. They appear to be located here because they can happen at home or college and/or because the college provides good internet access.
Stephen is an avid user of new and old technology of certain kinds. Many of the literacy practices he deems important relate to communication of various kinds: (a) MSN instant messenger; (b) Telephone texting; (c) ‘Peer-to-peer’ file sharing via a web-based service called Kazaa is a central activity for him. Here he can download audio/music, games, software and video files. Here he gets and shares ideas for how to ‘cheat’ on computer games. He also burns tunes onto CDs and onto his Xbox so he can play music while playing games.
Stephen reads The Sun newspaper and shares his thoughts about the news with others in college. Interestingly, he does not like TV. S: I don’t really like the TV eh, because most of it’s pish ken so I dinnae watch TV at all really
GM: And what’s better about the newspapers then for you?
S: I don’t know, you can do it whenever you want, the news is always on at a certain time an that eh, so you’ve got to be in for it and that eh? And then I mean you can watch BBC News 24 or that but that’s just a load of pish.
For leisure, he plays a lot of computer games. He also reads a lot of fiction, getting through about a book a week (David Gemmell, Catherine Cookson are examples of the authors he reads). He mostly borrows these books from his grandmother. Stephen’s almost apologetic or embarrassed when he notices that he reads more fiction than the interviewer: GM: You read a lot more fiction than I do by a long shot. S: Yo, that’s well bad. You’re making me feel like a geek now.
14 He sees handouts as a central way of keeping abreast of college work. He feels reading handouts at home when he can find time enables him to pass the course. Other coursework that interested him lately was about chocolate. It seems there were some web sites that were of use here.
He also engages in what he calls ‘personal research’ via internet searches on topics that interest him. He found out that cannabis burns at a higher temperature than cigarette tobacco so there is an increased risk of throat cancer.
He notes that communication might be improved on campus if there were a MSN-type system in place. He feels the current e-mail system is not instant enough and it is solely for use in the college. He notices how his file-sharing habits through Kazaa might be replicated in the manner in which recipes are made available. He suggests that there could be music playing while they work in the kitchens. While he finds essay writing very tedious, he would find it a lot easier to burn a CD with various sorts of multi-media for an assignment. When offered the choice of constructing a multi-media CD or writing an essay he replies: S: […] Write an essay or burn a CD? There you go [he gesticulates the sort of work he would do on the computer with a series of quick hand movements and then offers me his finished product in mime]: CD! Oh … but writing an essay!
Reviewing his map he comments: “young people are more interested in what they do at home than what they do at college eh, like it’s more important to them cos they really want to do it” whereas at college he feels students get involved in reading and writing because they “need to”.
When asked about his map, Stephen takes it for granted students are more likely to be interested in ‘home’-related literacy practices than purely college-based ones. He considers that college is likely to ‘overlap’ with home because students usually choose to do a course that interests them. Conversely, many of his home-based literacy practices do not connect with college activities at all and appear not to be valued by college. For Stephen, listening to music, playing computer games and doing ‘personal’ research on the internet are not placed in the college domain because they are “not important at college” [Stephen]. For Stephen, we notice the irregularity of affordances offered by college coursework for mobilizing the literacies he is more at home with. Reading and writing he feels more at home with is not valued at college though he maintains a handle on coursework by valuing reading handouts himself. The times when he feels coursework is of more relevance is when it involves topics of interest (how to make chocolate biscuits with cannabis ingredients) or is mediated in a manner he is familiar (he finds websites more accessible). The use of websites to find information for both personal
15 interest (soft drugs) and to research his portfolio topics (chocolate) for his course provides an example of how ICT on occasion acted as a boundary object across domains.
In general, however, this hospitality student experiences well-defined differences between the identification processes within his youth group and his identification as a student chef. There are few opportunities for some form of leakage between the different contextualization processes (being on the internet, being in college, being a video gamer, being in the college kitchens) and his learning in different contexts. For the moment, the literacy practices that are important to Stephen - texting, having fun, playing games and computers - are not generally being drawn upon in the catering course in any systematic way. Nor is the course providing him with many ways of utilizing his awareness with ICT. In terms of his literacy practices, we can say there is a lack of coherence across the home, college and work domains. College-based and home-related literacy practices seem to meet different needs rather than a common purpose. This lack of co-ordination or alignment indicates the absence of border literacy practices and of boundary objects. His expressions of resistance at the surface may be better understood as resulting from the relative boundedness of the course context and a lack of what we might call ‘border-work’, rather than from the student's 'problem'. In Activity Theory terms this is understood as a ‘contradiction’ between the types of text and associated literacy practices which act as mediating means in different activity systems.
6. Comparison across cases It would appear that Eve, Tom and Stephen are engaging in literacy practices that are locally relevant for them. These practices have emerged in their contexts to meet their own needs, where activities they are engaging in are textually mediated. In some cases these overlap with college demands and in some cases they don’t. The students themselves report how literacy practices are affected by processes of identification, contextualization and learning within and across domains. Boundary literacy practices (such as Tom’s and some of Eve’s) appear to infiltrate other literacy demands and college-based practices that are created as part of college learning: they are polycontextual across domains. For Tom, we could say, the literacy in some cases is enacted in a less bounded network of contextualization, identification and learning (though she clearly has issues with the utility of handouts). For Stephen, there is a sense of a stronger boundary between the contexts, identities and learning emerging in his private world and those emerging via college coursework. The bounded nature of his domains is noticeable because of the rarity of the opportunities for cross-fertilization or ‘leakage’. Across the data we are finding that college learning involves literacy practices that connect with or resonate with the students’ literacy practices in different ways in different subjects with different motivations and affordances and constraints.
16 7. The challenge for pedagogy In these three cases we have pointed to the ways in which students’ lives, teaching and learning, and the interface between them can be understood through the lens of research on literacy practices. We have shown how the diverse activities in students’ everyday lives are textually mediated, and given examples of the literacy practices in which they engage to conduct their lives in a variety of domains. We have given examples also of the texts and literacy practices which mediate teaching and learning on the courses they are on, some of which mesh well with their everyday practices, and some of which don’t.
As we have seen, students’ own literacy practices and those encouraged by lecturers can provide a means of coordination and alignment across multiple contexts and identifications. Bowker and Star (2000) note that the creation and management of boundary objects is important in developing and maintaining coherence across intersecting communities. For our projects’ purposes, we expect some degree of joint ownership of boundary literacy practices by students and teachers to be necessary, though the meanings they attach to these will be different. But boundary objects and their associated practices should be working arrangements that are not imposed on a group or appeal to outside standards. One of the problems this throws up is what sort of curriculum are we envisaging. One view is that for a curriculum to be relevant and engender the production of knowledge it is likely not to be easily pre-planned or be pre-determined. Because it relies on relevance for students, it needs the possibility of the emergence of a task around which students can gain commitment while still allow for the alignment of college with other contexts in their lives. Since the practice of teaching, learning and assessment in FE are often circumscribed by outside control mechanisms, this raises a concern.
The LfLFE project is entering a third phase where are looking to generate more effective boundary objects and practices for different students in different subject areas. As such, this analysis suggests we may be seeking to create locally relevant interfaces or boundary zones between contexts for students. As the project enters the next phase involving college-based researchers in changing practice, it is to this task we next turn our attention.
Note This article arises from work done within the Literacies for Learning in Further Education research project, funded by the ESRC’s Teaching and Learning Research Programme (grant number RES-139-25-0117). Our thanks to all the other members of the research team.
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