ch6 Multiplicities in Motion A Turn to T

ch6: Multiplicities in Motion: A Turn to Transliteracies

Anna Smith, Amy Stornaiuolo & Nathan C Phillips (2017)

QUOTATIONS

Despite concerted efforts to integrate new technologies into classrooms, educators, researchers, and policymakers alike have acknowledged both a widening gulf between traditional schooling practices and young people’s digitally connected lives (Jenkins, Ito, & boyd, 2016), as well as growing inequities in learning opportunities for youth with more limited access to digital technologies (Gomez, Barron, & Pinkard, 2014).

As we expand pedagogically from multi- to trans-, we see 3 dimensions converging: 1) a focus on the mobilities of people and their literacies; 2) an openness to emergent aspects of meaning making; and 3) a critical eye on networks and connections that support some learners and disenfranchise others.

While multiliteracies scholarship highlighted multiplicity as a key premise for understanding contemporary literacy practices, transliteracies scholarship expands that focus to foreground issues of mobility.

– Designing for emergence: How do we design instruction in ways that allow for meaning to shift, transform, and travel over time and space in relation to differentially available resources? How are ideas and emotions resonating both within and across groups and networks? – Practicing relational reflexivity: How do people take each other into consideration and signal their understandings to one another? How can we take account of power differentials and multiple histories in explicit and critically attuned ways? – Surfacing critical lenses: How are people and things positioned in relationship? What are the consequences of those configurations when viewed at larger time or scales of context? How are in-school and out-of-school resources differently accessible, distributed, and taken up in use?

FOLLOW UP Definitely frame chapter 4 in terms of transliteracies; as mobility across figured and embodied worlds.

RESPONSIVE WRITING

This chapter looks at Unfold Studio as a response to Smith, Stornaiuolo, & Phillips’s (2017) argument that it is insufficient for teachers to “recognize and respond to” youth literacy practices, but that they “must also support young people in developing a critical perspective on the ways those multiple people, media, and objects connect, relate, and intersect while on the move.” (CITE). I propose Unfold Studio as an example of a pedagogy of transliteracies.

I agree that transliteracies is a good way of grounding literacy pedagogy; it moves the focus from tracing the ramifications of ideas through texts and cultural discourses into dialogic action: how we might reconfigure those meanings. This fits in well with my broader conception of critical action within Holland, et al’s framework of figured worlds.

Smith, Stornaiuolo, & Phillips (2017) describe “surfacing critical lenses” as an important pedagogical move. I see this particularly in relation to computational infrastructure. There is so much that students are already familiar with, and know how to use in particular contexts, which could be re-deployed as critical lenses. One example from Unfold Studio is bringing material aspects of online discourse into the writing classroom. Bakhtin talks all the time about how making a genre dialogic frees it up to critique and laughter. Online media are sinister in this respect… [Pull in my writing on this from elsewhere.].