Sociomaterial assemblages,entanglements and text production: Mapping pedagogic practices using time-lapse photography

Abstract

This paper maps a teacher’s pedagogic practices when teaching young children to produce texts using digital technologies during a literacy lesson for 7–8 year-old children. Pedagogies are broadly understood as what the teacher does in a classroom to facilitate learning in a twenty-first century classroom. The paper argues that the very notion of pedagogy places the teacher at the centre of learning practices, more so than other aspects of teaching such as the curriculum and assessment, which are heavily regulated by policy. Underpinned by understandings of sociomaterial assemblages, incorporating the material and the spatial, data were collected using time-lapse photography, classroom observations and field notes including classroom floor plans. The findings of a frame-by-frame analysis of the time-lapse photographs are reported through the three interconnected concepts of pedagogy, space and materials. The paper concludes by suggesting that an understanding of the material and spatial entanglements in a classroom through a mapping of pedagogies augments current knowledge, enabling a fresh understanding of teaching literacy and how young children learn to write as twenty-first century learners as children enact their journey of becoming-writer.