Literacies for Learning in Further Education: promoting inclusive learning across boundaries through students’ literacy practices.
Greg Mannion
Kate Miller
Institute of Education, University of Stirling, Scotland in association with the LfLFE Team
Paper presented at the European Conference on Educational Research, University College Dublin, 7-10 September 2005
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Introduction
The Literacies for Learning in Further Education (hereafter, LfLFE) research project has been funded for three years from January 2004 as part of the United Kingdom’s Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP), administered by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). The project involves collaboration between two universities and four further education colleges in England and Scotland and has. been funded for three years from January 2004 as part of the United Kingdom’s Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP). A key aim of the TLRP is to improve the outcomes – however specified – for learners in teaching and learning contexts. The LfLFE project involves collaboration between two universities – University of Stirling and Lancaster University - and four further education colleges in Scotland and England – Anniesland College in Glasgow, Lancaster and Morecambe College, Perth College and Preston College. The project is in three Phases. Phase 1 was an Induction period, also allowed us to explore the literacy practices required by students in becoming a student in further education. Phase 2, ended in July 2005, examined in detail the literacy practices of students in eleven curriculum areas across the domains of college, work, home and community. The final phase of the project will involve developing and evaluating pedagogic interventions based upon our initial data collection and analysis. The premise for the project is that the literacy demands and practices of F.E. colleges are not always fashioned around the resources people bring to student life. This paper reports on a methodology, some data analysis and a theoretical position that together support a permeable and relational view of literacy practices and their associated domains. The data suggests that many students experience literacy in a polycontextual way and that it is possible to recognize the role of literacy as a set of boundary practices. The paper suggests it is a central pedagogical challenge to create opportunities for new boundary objects and boundary literacy practices to emerge in the interface between home, work and college contexts if learning is to be rendered more inclusive.
Theoretical Framing: Literacy Practices in Context
New Literacy Studies (NLS) provides the main theoretical home for this work providing a social view of literacy. What is ‘new’ in New Literacy Studies (NLS) after Street (1984) is a shift in perspective and the development of new concepts particularly the related ideas of literacy events- events that involve reading and writing - and literacy practices which seeks to understand literacy events in their social context. Recent work on literacy (Barton & Hamilton 1998, Barton, et al. 2000) focuses on literacy as situated in particular social ‘domains’ (such as home, school or workplace) which are structured, patterned contexts within which literacy is used and learned (Barton & Hamilton, 2000). Students may join various ‘discourse communities’ in these domains or be excluded from them. Seeing literacy as socially situated in domains foregrounds how literacies can change over time, be valued differently in different contexts and may be associated with new technologies in informal as well as formal settings. In a given domain, practices give rise to distinctive literacies and associated discourse communities. There is a danger here that because a domain supposedly provides a boundary, learning in one domain (say the home) is potentially separated from that which goes on in classrooms and colleges. This view fuels the idea that educational institutions value and somehow ‘deliver’ decontextualised and generalised knowledge. However, as Barton and Hamilton (1998) assert, domains are not permanently bounded and non-permeable. There can be overlaps between them. There is the potential for practices to be exported between domains and for domains to infiltrate each other. For us, a domain is not seen as a sort of container within which literacy practices takes place. Following activity theory’s insight that systems realize and reproduce themselves by generating actions and operations (Engestrom et al., 1995), we offer a similarly dynamic view of literacy domain focusing on the manner in which they co-evolve with and through the generation of practices. Practices are not just embedded in contexts. Rather, contexts are produced through practices which themselves emerge over time (Chaiklin and Lave, 1996). In terms of reading and writing, literacy practices are both dependent upon and productive of domains (Leander 2002).
In this paper we privilege the literacy practices that occur between domains. As we will show, these in-between contexts are common in students’ accounts of their literacy practices. To theorise the ways reading and writing gets deployed across domains, we draw on Van Oers’ (1998) term, recontextualisation to explain how people carry out known activities in new contexts or develop new patterns of activity to solve problems in new contexts.
The NLS view of literacy is further expanded by treating literacy as a multimodal form of communication (Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996) where many modes (speech, writing, reading, gesture, and even taste and so on) may come together in any communication activity. Kress and van Leeuwen (2001) unify the socially situated, embodied and interested use of semiotic resources under the umbrella term 'communicative practice'. For Kress, learning is about inner sign making and the shaping of the subjectivity of the signmaker while outward sign making can create new forms of syntax or text which can recursively impact on one's subjectivity. Here learners are always reinterpreting texts anew; learning is more akin to design work. Kress’ view informs our view of learning and further challenges the notion of context as container for action. DeCorte (1999) reminds us that earlier versions of the situated cognition perspective asserted that knowledge and skills cannot transfer across contexts because they are so strongly embedded in and tied to the context in which they are acquired. But a view is emerging that is more sensitive to multiple contexts in learning (Tuomi-Grohn and Engestrom, 2003). This view, argues for the use of the term ‘generality’ of knowing (Greeno, 1997) or polycontextual knowing across the different activities that learners participate in. Following Kress, literacy practices are not just socially ‘located’ but are directly engaged in the design of social contexts (Leander, 2002).
The link between learning and context, explored above, omits any discussion of identity formation processes. Hall (1996) offers a polycontextual theory of identification as the continual process of transformation that is not unified but fragmented and distributed across contexts, intersecting practices and discourses Because we continually identify across contexts in any one moment, recontextualization is seen as the process of participating in any number of contexts while concurrently changing that context through making sense of it out of experience of other situations, past and present.
For us ion LfLFE, because students are always on a journey of participation and identity formation across more than one context, learning is always polycontextual to some degree. Within this relational socio-cultural view, learning is taken to be evidenced by participation in a new activity in response to constraints and affordances of the new situation with a mobilization of resources drawn from the contexts of experience in other situations. This view of learning takes for granted a transformation or a recontextualisation of an earlier or parallel situation and the interaction of the learner in the new context. The research focus on literacy practices is best understood as a lens for understanding the relationships among the related processes of learning, recontextualisation and identification (Figure 1, below):
Figure 1: Literacy practices mediating learning, identification and contextualization.
In Figure 1, the representation of literacy practices in the centre of the diagram is intended to stand for the way in which literacy practices are implicated in the co-emergence of learning, identification and context. The central perspective on literacy here is that our contexts are mediated through our practices (tools): we learn, live and become through the reading and writing of texts of various kinds - everything from diaries, timetables, and the web to phone text messages. This is a freeze-frame representation of processes that are complex and dynamic, in order to make them amenable to understanding and investigation.[1] This two-dimensional image does not capture the ways in which diverse identities, contexts and learning relate to each other across as well as within domains. We continue to address the challenge of constructing diagrams that adequately represent our ideas here. Russell (2005: 8), drawing on Engestrom’s idea of expansive learning (1997), sets out the challenge of theorizing the multiple contexts that can be in play when a person is learning:
But to theorize expansion through different contexts, one must theorize the relations of all these elements in multiple activity systems, what Engestrom et al. call polycontextuality, the "third stage" of activity theory (Engestrom, Engestrom & Kärkkäinen, 1997). Participants within one activity system, one context, come from various contexts, and will enter various contexts. To understand the various ways participants interpret and use the tools, object, motive, rules/norms, etc. of an activity system, it is often necessary to analyze the relations among various contexts.
Here the notion of a boundary object is useful to help us spot how learning gets enacted in a relational and polycontextual manner. The notion of boundary objects was developed in actor-network theory (ANT) (Star, 1989), but has also been taken up by Wenger (1998) in his conceptualisation of communities of practice. In ANT, ‘like the blackboard, a boundary object “sits in the middle” of a group of actors with divergent viewpoints’ (Star, 1989: 46). Boundary objects are unique because they may play different roles in different domains or contexts. They are always embodied in a specific artefact (physical or conceptual) that is recognizable by members of more than one domain. By implication, boundary objects are themselves dynamic because the same artefact can have more than one meaning for an individual who inhabits more than one domain. Boundary objects act as translation devices affording communication between domains but also function as resources for boundary practices (Gal et al, 2005). For our purposes, we explore how some literacy practices may be acting as boundary practices occurring in the interfaces of literacy domains wherein identification, recontextualisation and learning is negotiated.
For Wenger (1998: 107) boundary objects work at the edges of communities of practice mediating their external relationships; ‘they enable co-ordination, but they can do so without actually creating a bridge between the perspectives and the meanings of various communities’. To date, a form of expansive learning resulting from border crossing between contexts has been seen as higher order form of expansive learning (Engestrom, 1995), though there is a sense that it is becoming the norm for those who inhabit multiple activity systems. Yet, a more relational view of place and space suggests that students at any level may ordinarily interact across multiple activity systems associated with college, home and work, leisure and other spaces. This suggests that boundary objects and their associated practices are not happening at the margins of communities of practice but are ubiquitous. The degree to which learning for regular students in formal educational settings is commonly polycontextual is not well understood. What if all learning, contextualization and identification involve degrees of expansion across and between contexts? This project sought to add to this picture by encouraging students to consider via the lens of literacy to what extent and in what ways their learning, identification and contextualization processes appeared polycontextual to them.
Methodology
The methodology informing this project is broadly -ethnographic, hermeneutic and reflexive. We are trying to obtain ‘thick description’ from the inside rather than merely act as observers from the outside. For this reason, a participatory approach imbued the methods and design though not all are ‘members’ of the research team in the same way and there is a continuum between those who are more like ‘respondents’ and those who are more like ‘researchers’. Here our aim is to support participants in becoming ethnographers of their own experience. The project is hermeneutic insofar as we recognise the recursive role of interpretation in the understanding of social practices, that is, the ways in which understanding is mobilised through the interrelationships between persons and artifacts and that these understandings help to shape future practices.
This has resulted in a mixed method approach to the project as a whole. In phase 2 one method of a number devised to capture data on student’s sense of their own literacy practices was the ‘Icon Mapping Exercise’. The rationale here is to explore students’ own understanding of the inter-related process of learning, recontextualization and identification. The method described was devised so that it allowed respondents to explore how these processes relate through the lens of literacy. In the first phase of this activity, students were reminded that they have already done work on noticing and exploring the literacy practices in their lives through other methods. Next, a range of ‘icons’ were presented to students that could be interpreted differently by each respondent to signify or function as a label for the sorts of literacy practices and events they had now become sensitised to as project respondents. Some examples of the full set of 40 icons are provided below. These were generated after piloting the activity and devising icons that represented the sorts of activities we knew were of some relevance from phase 1.
The icons represented a semiotic landscape which can refer to texts, literacy events or literacy practices in their lives. Working with these semiotic resources, students are invited to design a new text that in some way represents the inter-related process of learning, identification and contextualization. The method also took cognizance of the idea that students work in a multi-modal manner and can be viewed as ‘designers’ (Kress, 2001) of the maps they produce as signs through the research process. Individually, they were invited to pick a range of icons (maximum of 10) that reminded them of the sorts of reading and writing that they engaged in their daily lives inclusive of those encountered