Abstract
This is a themed issue, a collection of four studies drawing on non-representational views of literacy theory, research, and practice. We begin with scenes from each study:
A group of middle school youth is entangled in a media-making project—one girl leans forward in a chair, flipping a copy of the book; a boy stands, waving a clipboard. Each is imagining a particular way to represent scenes of novel in film; frustrations are palpable.
Eleven-year-old Nigel is playing with an online game that allows him to create racing tracks through an urban scene for his scarved sled rider (the game character). Later, he talks about how he and his friends reinvent a similar scene as they skateboard down his multilevel parking garage, dodging cars.
A group of elementary students are immersed in a virtual world where their avatars happen upon boxes of poison. Together, they begin to search for clues to build, via a chat room, a narrative about what happened to an abandoned town.
A father is in prison where his son and he are participating in mural project. The son asks his father if he ever married his (the son’s) mother. Another child asks her father what happened to her mother.
These articles ask us to rethink many of the boundaries and dichotomies we create as we engage in our work with children, youth, and adults, in and beyond schools. Influenced by Deleuzian, new materialist, post-humanist and phenomenological perspectives, the authors guide us away from subject/object or discursive/material dualisms toward refocusing our scholarly and research lenses to focus on intra-actions, (im)materiality, affective intensities, and becoming. They ask us to give up our boundary-making and interpretive practices, including our representational discourses such as framing and knowing that assign agency only to humans, and often do not take account of how bodies, things and discourses are spatially and materially entangled.
These accounts—more suggestive of possible ways of seeing and experiencing the literacy lives of youth than providing conclusive findings—are taken up in this issue by researchers in England, Canada, and the United States who are researching literacy practices in and beyond elementary and middle school classroom settings, in homes, in virtual worlds, and in a prison.
Merchant and Burnett draw on a baroque method of stacking stories inspired by the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1987/2004) and Law and Mol (2002) to re-theorize their Barnsborough project (a 3D world that incorporates virtual play) in an elementary school setting. To make meaning—across on and offline spaces—data such as field notes, chat logs, reports, and a researcher-constructed comic are shared as points of departure rather than in search of some truth or a coherent story. By looking at the gaps and rhizomatic or various threads among the stories told by these data sources, Merchant and Burnett seek to provide a more “generous, ebullient and vivid [account] of literacy.”
In her critical case study of one young writer, Nigel, Lenters draws on a socio-material perspective (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987/2004; Latour, 2005) “to map the people, signs, practices, material objects, and places in the unfolding of Nigel’s passionate play with two symbolic figures,” the line rider and the stick man. Using a rhizoanalysis technique that explores the forming and re-forming of situations and motivations, she examines Nigel’s writing to illustrate how what we might otherwise consider “off task” (i.e., doodling) behavior in school settings can instead be understood as de/re-territorializing of his school writing assemblage, or social and material production, and as fertile ground of agency, creativity, and becoming.
Ehret, Hollet, and Jocius invoke a metaphor of meshwork (Ingold, 2013, 2015) of bodies, materials, and environments with co-constituted agency to conduct an analysis of middle school students’ engagement in media making to create book trailers based on the novel, Holes. Focusing on two students in their project, the authors traced backward from the product (the trailer) to discover the ongoing flow of privileging: how ideas, imaginings, and passions were moving toward product while simultaneously generating boundaries and exclusions. They argue for this move in literacy research and education that fully attends to “the emergent and entangled ‘we’ of experience, to the intensities [e.g., of justice-text-self-world] as an ethical imperative.”
And, finally, Muth’s article takes a phenomenological approach (Vagle, 2014) to a weeklong, family literacy mural project in which imprisoned fathers and their visiting children participate. However, Muth focuses not on the direct meanings that are immanent in the multimodal mural making, drawing, and writing, but instead, on the unwritten, unnamed scripts fighting for a too crowded space in the shadowy penumbra created by the literacy event itself that erupt without warning with the frankness only a child possesses. “Why did you kill Misha (her mother), she asks her father? And then, “Are you going to kill me?” Thus, Muth explores how fathers experience their own time in prison and their children’s presence at the same time—while participating in what seems to be a mundane literacy activity. By marshaling an array of phenomenological tools and concepts such as epoché, bridling and reduction to put brackets on his own interpretations of these experiences, Muth attempts to capture the fathers’ being-in-text and being-for their children despite the prison experience.
We may look closely at the concepts raised in these studies to see how many aspects are not entirely new; indeed, embodied, spatial, and non-representational ways of knowing have deep philosophical, intellectual, and cross-cultural roots in human thought and belief systems. However, taken together, these perspectives and accounts arguably constitute yet another turn in our field beyond the cognitive, sociocultural, and digital toward (im)material, immersive, affective, vernacular, intentional, embodied, and emergent accounts of literacy practices. Through their research, these authors ask us to imagine new, more generous ways of seeing, experiencing, and valuing inter-subjectivities, entanglements, and possibilities in our work. In short, they are asking how we might make different sorts of ethical commitments within our research and practice.