AERA Tuesday: From "Situating" to "Spatialing" Literacy Practice: Studies of Spatial, Critical, and Digital Literacies Across Contexts

SIG-Writing and Literacies. Scheduled Time: Tue, Apr 12 - 10:35am - 12:05pm Building/Room:
Le Centre Sheraton Montreal / Salon A

Official Abstract: As research in the New Literacy Studies
expands and builds upon a base informed by critical discourse analysis (Fairclough,
1995; Gee, 1990) and critical literacy (Comber & Simpson, 2002; Luke, 2000;
Shor & Pari, 1999), problems of analyzing literacy practice as local and
global (or "glocal," (Kraidy, 1999)) emerge. How might we interpret
textual-social practices such as web surfing "radically cross genre boundaries" (Lemke,
2001)? How might we account for the material objects in literacy events that "frame" interactions
that have traveled from other places (Brandt & Clinton, 2002; Latour, 1996)?
How do we interpret and account for the ubiquity of particular social literacy
practices, especially those of schooling (Street & Street, 1991)? What
is the relationship between language, literacy, and power as students, teachers,
and researchers cross sociocultural-historical boundaries (Rogoff, 2003)? These
theoretical and methodological problems may be attributed to the accelerated
flow of media, texts, commodities, power and bodies in contemporary global
culture (Appadurai, 1996; Castells, 1996; deCerteau, 1984) or to current limits
in theorizing literacy (Brandt & Clinton, 2002). This session brings together
research from the United States, Australia, and South Africa to address: 1)
key problems of theory in disrupting the "in school/out of school divide" (Hull & Schultz,
2002; Larson, in press; Leander, 2003); 2) key problems of pedagogy, or developing
new school-selected practices that neither reify nor pedagogize student-selected
practices across social space; 3) key problems of supporting children in building
meaningful curriculum for social change, and; 4) key problems of identity and
location.

"Games Go Abroad" by Hilary Janks

• 4 children designed book on games representing sense of place and games they
  play.


• games enabled students to engage in hybrid language and literacy practice.


• games lend themselves to multimodal representation.


• mother is old fashioned; children are modern and fearless (mostly)


• Tsotsi Kwela Kwela (8x8 grid, dance game)


• students as knowledge-maker, producing own content

My thoughts: This was a pretty cool presentation, content-wise,
showing multimodal representations (children's drawings, photographs, video,
song, text) of games and play to show how a sense of place (home vs. danger-woods,
etc) can be a vehicle for language and literacy learning. It's tough to put
them all together in a seamless presentation, but this was pretty good.

"Urban Renewal From the Inside Out: Spatial and Critical Literacies
in a Low Socio-Economic School Community" by Barbara M. Comber, Helen
P. Nixon, Marg Wells, Ruth Trimboli (U of South Australia)

• New London Group: 2001: 19


• what happens with children as their landscapes get destroyed/rebuilt?


• allow children to redesign their own space


• children learn spatial vocabularies (language of space)


• 80 architect students assist the students


• learning to express opinions


• "belonging space"


• of course they want a stream in front of their school


• children stake out the design on the school grounds


• community is invited


• children take architect design and "improve" on it with CAD program.


• Bodily movelment, Linguistic vocabularies, design, etc.


• How is design critical literacy?

My thoughts:  very cool look at getting children involved
in designing their own spaces (or the spaces that they occupy) -- the results
are not in yet, but it looks like the kids got really into it, and felt a lot
of ownership. Giving people a sense of ownership of their space is a key factor
of motivation -- and learning, and this did that.

Learning Spaces Travel: Stepping In Between the In/Out of School Binary by
*Joanne C. Larson, Lynn Gatto (Kentucky?)

• video conferences in schools


• "data corpus" (very fancy term)


• Goffman's (1974) concept of frame


• Conversational Analysis (yechh!)


• spatialized contexts were confusing. Pronouns served as indexical shifters.


• objects of instruction (IRE) vs. subjects of authentic learning (dialogic
  conversation)


• paper at rochester.edu/ (Larson's page)

My thoughts: Not really my bag of tea, although there's definitely
some interesting stuff here.

"Home/Schooling, Everywhere: Digital Literacies and Practices
of Space-Time" by
Kevin M. Leander

• Mia's weblog: written while in class, 2 years 4 months, 347 entries, 806
  comments, 1051 eprops,


• Mia uses Word dictionary for definitions


• [CRAP MSWord crashed! -- lost lots of notes here!]


• Let me try to reconstruct from memory a flavor of what got lost in the
  Word crash.(Curses Microsoft!!). Mia nad Richa both were in a "laptop
  school" (laptops provided to students. Mia was really into technology,
  she'd blog, IM, email, etc. for answers, look to her peers for learning,
  and didn't really separate Home stuff from School stuff. Richa also used
  technology a lot, but kept a clear border between home use and school use
  -- even to the extent of switching computers to do "recreational computing" --
  there's so much more that I can't reconstruct... this is why I take notes...

My thoughts: This was really the most interesting of the
presentations in this session (for me). the idea of distributive learning,
and learning with peers -- for example in Mia's using IM to ask questions of
her peers and cutting and pasting those answers for her notes. This strikes
me as *really  important* and I don't think Kevin looked into it. Is it
cheating? What learning is taking place for others and for Mia) in asking questions
of peers, and creating answers for peers over IM and email, etc.? This is what
the literacy folks are pointing at when they say: "Hey lookie here!"

"Hybridity, Globalization and Literacy Education in the Context of NYC’s
Chinatown" by James J. Albright, Kiran D. Purohit, Christopher Walsh

• look at literacy practices: notes, journals, literacy logs, student and
  teacher analysis.


• 4 myths: poverty= poor literacy skills; success in reading/writing connected
  with specific parenting skills;


• Diaspora (ang 2001)"transnational, spatially and temporally sprawling
  sociocultural formations[s] of people..."


• "culture neighborhoods"


• Chinatown not as community, but as a collection of buildings


• notion of outside/other;; home identity seen as resource, storehouse --
  not something dynamic


• online space (games etc.) were an identity that all engaged in, felt comfortable
  with.


• web design: if others get HTML skills, her skills in it will become worthless.
  Need to stay ahead of the curve.


• kids say game/anime are less literacy than HTML b/c they won't make money.


• gamers couldn't make the connection between school capital and gaming capital,
  but HTML kids could.


• moving away from "neighborhood" as  "community"

My thoughts: There's a lot again here, in the collision of
computer technology with tradition. For example, the idea of community and
home is changing -- When I got to Montreal, I felt like I was in a foreign
country until I was able to get online, to my "home space" -- the
collection of sites that I go to, my email, my blog, etc. Familiar territory
for me is not always Geographical. Another point of interest is the school
capital vs. gaming capital. What will get you ahead in the gaming (or online,
to use a broader space) community vs. what is valued in traditional society
(education/"schooling" = money).

Brian V. Street, brian.street@kcl.ac.uk,
King's College-London, Discussant

• half a dozen books on new literacies


• start with 2004 publications; throw out the older stuff.


• how do we engage with these new theories


• how do we


• linking our understanding of print literacies to multimodal literacies


• multiple literacies


• 5 headings




• literacy


• time space thingness


• relations


• power




• Palpatory Literacy (literacy=skill)


• digital literacies, spatial literacies, multimodal literacies, visual literacies


• mode, medium, register, discourse, domain


• be wary when using multimodality, of slipping back into a singular mode,
  also when using term "Affordance"


• Wednesday evening Street presents


• cultural, but embedded in power relations


• Deb Grant: literacies of the local -- what are the limits of local?


• LaSalle and Parr Understanding Literacies in the classroom (Clinton
  cited)


• Bahktin's "chronotope"


• wherever the resources come from and whatever their meanings, they come
  imbued with histories, but we redesign them.


• redeisgn is going on in all these places


• social relations


• The Literacy of Snake Oil


• textbooks offer simple reduction of knowledge to easy bounded, marketable
  objects. these sorts of literacies do not.


• Jim Gee vs. Catherine Snow tiff
  in RP Report, on evidence-based research (find this!)

- Joanne C. Larson, joanne.larson@rochester.edu,
University of Rochester, Chair