Acknowledging and interrogating multiplicities: towards a generous approach in evaluations of early literacy innovation and intervention

At a time of increasing calls from policy-makers for the use of ‘hard evidence’ in driving decision-making at national and local level in educational contexts, this article contributes to debates about evidence-based practice in early literacy research. It proposes that a reliance on studies designed to generate ‘hard’ evidence limits understanding about innovations and interventions, arguing that such reliance is not just problematic because interventions and innovations are interpreted differently in diverse sites, or because programmes need to be locally relevant, but because they are constituted differently through different evaluation studies. The article draws on Law’s notion of ‘method assemblage’ to consider how different studies produce different assemblages that have implications for how innovations are conceived. These ideas are exemplified using studies scrutinised through a systematic literature review of one kind of literacy intervention, early years book-gifting, which aims to promote book-sharing in the home. The discussion focuses specifically on how books as mediating objects are instantiated in various ways through different studies, with different implications for how book-sharing, book-gifting and ultimately reading are understood. When considered together, these studies construct book-gifting in multiple ways, problematizing and complicating the causal relations assumed in methodologies driving for ‘hard’ evidence. Drawing on the book-gifting example, this article explores what might be gained by embracing ‘multiplicities,’ the multiple ways in which things - such as objects, activities, principles, and indeed literacy interventions - are constituted through method assemblage. It argues that literacy evaluations can best serve children and their families, and the organisations, agencies and groups working alongside them, by seeking fluid, open and ‘generous’ accounts of innovations and interventions. Such accounts, it is argued, are more likely to acknowledge the complex relationships and practices associated with early literacy and generate new understandings and productive possibilities for early literacy learning

Literacy-as-event: accounting for relationality in literacy research

Research in New Literacy Studies has demonstrated how literacy consists of multiple socially and culturally situated practices illuminated through a focus on literacy events. Recently, this sociocultural perspective has been complemented by relational thinking that views literacy as an ongoing reassembling of the human and more-than-human. This conceptual article proposes that, in exploring how relational thinking might be deployed in literacy research and practice, it is helpful to re-visit conceptualisations of literacy events. Specifically it proposes the notion of ‘literacy-as-event’ as a heuristic for thinking with the fluid and elusive nature of meaning-making, elaborating on three propositions: 1. event is generated as people and things come into relation; 2. what happens always exceeds what can be conceived and perceived; 3. implicit in the event are multiple potentialities. Approaching literacy research through engaging with literacy-as-event promotes an expansive, reflective, and imaginative engagement with literacy practices that aligns with relational thinking

Boxes of poison: baroque technique as antidote to simple views of literacy

Rich and complex meaning making experiences, such as those associated with virtual play, sit uneasily with the view of literacy reflected in and sustained by current systems of accountability in education. This article develops a baroque perspective as a way of destabilising the ‘regime of truth’ associated with simple models of literacy - models that have emerged through educational reform. Building on poststructural approaches, we suggest that a baroque sensibility can help assert the messiness of educational experience and the contingent nature of meaning making that lie at the heart of literacy and learning. We draw on 6 techniques of the baroque exemplifying their use in an original methodological approach that we call ‘stacking stories’. These stories offer different accounts of actions and interactions in and around a virtual world visited by 9 and 10 year-old children in a UK classroom. The stories, together with the gaps, contradictions, continuities and discontinuities between them, read together through a baroque lens, trouble the taken-for-granted. They evoke the affective intensities produced through interactions between body, text and place as they infuse each other in multiple acts of meaning making. This baroque approach disturbs ways in which meanings are represented in both research and practice adding to poststructural accounts that foreground multiplicity and complexity. We suggest that such an approach provokes generous, ebullient and vivid accounts of literacy that are elided by simple models of literacy

The challenge of 21st Century literacies

In the second edition of their influential book on ‘New Literacies’, Lankshear & Knobel (2006) argued that engagement with these practices was ‘largely confined to learners’ lives in spaces outside of schools’ (p.30). That was nearly ten years ago, and in some respects very little has changed. Of course, in many classrooms there’s a lot more technology than there was, provision of smartboards desktops, laptops and portable devices is better, and there is a greater variety of software and hardware on offer. But even when equipment is available, up-to-date and in good working order, problems of curriculum integration still arise. Despite all the rhetoric about the importance of ‘new’ or ‘digital’ literacies in education, recent curriculum reforms and their associated assessment regimes have tended to privilege traditional literacy skills and print text. Although some innovative teachers are able to incorporate 21st Century Literacies in their classroom practice (see digitalfutures.org for example), for others the challenge is greater, particularly when it is coupled with competing curriculum priorities or the extensive blocking of websites associated with certain approaches to Internet safety (Hope, 2013). An expansive view of new literacies in practice somehow seems hard to realize

Scoping the field of literacy research: how might a range of research be valuable to primary teachers?

Literacy research has an important role to play in helping to shape educational policy and practice. The field of literacy research however is difficult to navigate as literacy has been understood and researched in many different ways. It encompasses work from psychology, sociology, philosophy and neuroscience, literary theory, media and literacy studies, and methodologies include a range of qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods approaches. In mapping this complex field, I draw on a systematic ‘scoping survey’ of a sample of peerreviewed articles featuring literacy research relevant to literacy education for children aged 5-11. Studies were deemed relevant if they: addressed literacy pedagogies and interventions; and/or provided pertinent insights (e.g. into children’s experiences of literacy); and/or offered implications for the range and scope of literacy education. The results of this survey are important in two ways. Firstly they help to articulate the range of literacy research and the varied ways that such research might speak to literacy education. Secondly they challenge easy distinctions between paradigms in literacy research. Recognising this complexity and heterogeneity matters given the history of relationships between literacy policy and practice in countries such as England, where polarised debate has often erased the subtle differences of perspective and confluence of interest that this survey illuminates. Based on the results of this survey I argue that an inclusive approach to literacy research is needed in educational contexts. Otherwise alternative and/or complementary ways of supporting children’s literacy learning may be missed, as will important possibilities for literacy education and children’s current and future lives

Assembling literacies in virtual play

Virtual worlds provide opportunities for new kinds of interaction and new forms of play and learning, and they are rapidly becoming a common feature of the lives of many children and young people. This chapter explores the digital writing and textual activity that circulates around this virtual play and the issues that it raises for both researchers and educators. Drawing on work from a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives we look at the ways in which the virtual is embedded in everyday meaning making and indicate important new directions for future research. In doing this we trace some possible relationships between writing and virtual play and consider how to engage with notions of authorship, particularly given the fuzzy boundaries between human and non-human activity. We propose that encountering such activity with a mood of ‘enchantment’ (Bennett, 2001) enables researchers and practitioners to approach moments of writing as fluid human/non-human assemblings and in doing so more fully appreciate the complexity and potentiality of virtual play

Primary student-teachers' perceptions of the role of digital literacy in their lives

In considering the potential for new student-teachers to draw from personal experience to arrive at transformative uses of technology in classrooms, this study investigates the nature of student-teachers’ ‘digital insidership’. It explores seven primary studentteachers’ perceptions of the role of digital literacy in their lives both within and beyond primary classrooms. Adopting a methodology influenced by phenomenology, it draws primarily from interviews, exploring participants’ experience of digital texts as social practice whilst adopting a reflexive approach to interpretation. The study draws on Gee’s concepts of ‘Big D’ Discourses and ‘borderland discourses’ to focus on how student-teachers’ perceptions of their digital practices interacted with different identity positions as they moved between personal and professional discourses. Exploring the varied feelings and levels of empowerment associated with digital practices, the study argues that these student-teachers’ sense of their own digital insidership was uneven and highly contingent on context. It describes both the new kinds of possibilities associated with their digital practices and the tensions they experienced when entering environments patterned by unfamiliar discourses. Highlighting what is termed ‘borderland activity’, it explores how personal and professional practices merged or contrasted as student-teachers found different ways of crossing, avoiding or spanning the borderlands between discourses. In particular, student-teachers’ stories of the accommodation of technology-use within teaching identities suggested that, whilst they may see technology-use as an important part of enacting a teacher identity, opportunities for transformation were limited as technology seemed chiefly to be accommodated, albeit in different ways, within discourses of standardisation and teacher control. Whilst some student-teachers may therefore see new opportunities for using technologies in innovative ways, they may receive most affirmation when using them in ways that are aligned to existing discourses. The study concludes by suggesting a series of strategies through which policy makers, researchers and initial teacher educators may investigate further student-teachers’ experiences of digital practices and,through promoting critical reflection on the discourses which frame technology use,encourage student-teachers to engage with technology in innovative and possibly transformative ways

Conceptualising digital technology integration in participatory theatre from a sociomaterialist perspective: ways forward for research

Existing research on the use of technology in participatory theatre in education has paid little attention to the moment-to-moment unfolding that characterises the liveliness at the heart of such practice. In this conceptual article, we show how a sociomaterialist perspective can illuminate the contingent co-emergence of people, things and technologies that produces this liveliness of events. Perspectives drawn from actor-network theory are used to illuminate one example of the integration of technology in participatory theatre in an educational context. The concepts of mutability, disruption, maintenance, potentialities and multiplicities are developed as an explanatory framework for future research and practice in these and similar forms of educational activity. © 2018, © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group