Literacy, Media, Technology: Past, Present and Future 9781474257992, 9781474258029, 9781474258005

Citation preview

Literacy, Media, Technology

Also available from Bloomsbury Communication, Language and Literacy, Nichola Callander and Lindy Nahmad-Williams Education and Technology, Neil Selwyn

Literacy, Media, Technology Past, Present and Future

Edited by Becky Parry, Cathy Burnett and Guy Merchant

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2017 Paperback edition first published 2018 Copyright © Becky Parry, Cathy Burnett, Guy Merchant and Contributors, 2017 Becky Parry, Cathy Burnett, Guy Merchant and Contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-5799-2 PB: 978-1-3500-7503-0 ePDF: 978-1-4742-5800-5 ePub: 978-1-4742-5801-2 A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printed and bound in Great Britain To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contetnts List of Figures List of Contributors Foreword Donna Alvermann Acknowledgements 1

Literacy, Media, Technology Guy Merchant, Cathy Burnett and Becky Parry

vii viii xiii xvi

1

Pause 2

The Picture Postcard at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century: Instagram, Snapchat or Selfies of an Earlier Age? Julia Gillen

11

3

Television as a New Medium Margaret Mackey

25

4

From the Wild Frontier of Davy Crockett to the Wintery Fjords of Frozen: Changes in Media Consumption, Play and Literacy from the 1950s to the 2010s Jackie Marsh

41

Record 5 6 7

Constricting or Constructing Everyday Lives? Literacies and Inequality Susan Jones

63

Family Stories, Texts and Meaning: A Study of Artifacts during a Digital Storytelling Workshop Tisha Lewis Ellison

79

Mapping Place, Affect and Futures in an Adolescent’s New Media Making: Schizoanalytic Cartographies Christian Ehret

93

Play 8 9

‘Finger Flowment’ and Moving Image Language: Learning Filmmaking with Tablet Devices John Potter and Theo Bryer

111

Digital Personal Stories: Bringing Together Generations and Enriching Communities Natalia Kucirkova

129

vi

Contetnts

Rewind 10 Time Travels in Literacy and Pedagogy: From Script to Screen Becky Parry, Lucy Taylor and Nadia Haerizadeh-Yazdi

147

11 Children’s Writing in the Twenty-First Century: Mastery, Crafting and Control Clare Dowdall

163

12 How Does Boy 17 Read a Game? Julian McDougall

183

Fast Forward 13 Postdigital Literacies: Materiality, Mobility and the Aesthetics of Recruitment Thomas Apperley, Darshana Jayemanne and Bjorn Nansen

203

14 Assembling Virtual Play in the Classroom Cathy Burnett and Guy Merchant

219

Standby 15 Past, Present, Future Cathy Burnett, Guy Merchant and Becky Parry

233

Index

244

List of Figures 2.1

Two postcards from the Edwardian Postcard Project.

13

11.1 Jenii’s profile page.

170

11.2 Lyrics from a song by the band Paramore.

171

11.3 Someone Special tribute.

171

11.4 About Me statement.

172

11.5 Chloe’s profile page with self-penned tributes, advice and jokes.

173

12.1 Just doing text.

194

List of Contributors Donna Alvermann is the University of Georgia (USA) Appointed Distinguished Research Professor of Language and Literacy Education, and studies young people’s digital literacies and uses of popular media. Her books include Adolescents and Literacies in a Digital World; Reconceptualizing the Literacies in Adolescents’ Lives (3rd ed.) and Adolescents’ Online Literacies: Connecting Classrooms, Digital Media, and Popular Culture (2nd ed.). Author of over 150 articles and chapters, she co-designed a website that collects data on how a community of researchers and researched objects disrupt boundaries imposed by social media. Join Donna and her colleagues at www.becoming3lectric.com, a Creative Commons website for blogging and remixing multimodally. Tom Apperley is an ethnographer who specializes in researching digital media technologies. His previous writing has covered broadband policy, digital games, digital literacies and pedagogies, mobile media and social inclusion. Tom is a Senior Lecturer at the University of New South Wales (Australia) and a Visiting Fellow at the Research Unit in Public Cultures, University of Melbourne. Tom’s recent work has appeared in the journals Digital Creativity, Games and Culture, and The Fibreculture Journal. He is a chief investigator on an Australian Research Council funded Discovery Project (DP) that examines the contemporary and historic significance of videogame avatars. Theo Bryer has been a lecturer at the University College London Institute of Education (UK) since 2003. She is currently the tutor for the English with Drama PGCE course. Her research interests lie in drama and media teaching and the ways in which they relate to learning across the curriculum and outside school. Cathy Burnett is Professor of Literacy and Education at the Sheffield Institute of Education, Sheffield Hallam University (UK), where she leads the Language and Literacy Education Research Group. She has published widely in the field of literacy and education, with a particular interest in how children and teachers work and play with, through and around digital media in educational settings. Her most recent book is New Literacies around the Globe (co-edited with Julia

List of Contributors

ix

Davies, Guy Merchant and Jennifer Rowsell for Routledge). She is Vice President of the United Kingdom Literacy Association. Clare Dowdall lectures in Language and Literacy Education at Plymouth University (UK), working with research students and students in Initial Teacher Education. She researches and writes in areas relating to children’s digital and school-based literacies, and has a particular interest in notions of text and how texts are produced by children, both in school and in other contexts. She is Associate Editor for the United Kingdom Literacy Association’s international journal Literacy, and has recently co-edited a special issue entitled ‘Popular Culture and Curriculum’. Christian Ehret is Assistant Professor in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University in Montréal (Canada). He investigates affective dimensions of adolescents’ literacies through ethnographic and participatory design research. His inquiries therefore aspire towards deep anthropological engagement in communities and use-inspired outcomes that have meaning within – and often also beyond – those communities. In expressing the affects of this research through writing, such as the chapter in this book, he is committed to developing social theory towards knowing experiences of literacy in social life as fully embodied and fully human. Julia Gillen is Director of the Lancaster Literacy Research Centre and Senior Lecturer in Digital Literacies in the Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University (UK). Her most recent book is Digital Literacies (Routledge, 2014) and she also co-edited Virtual Literacies: Interactive Spaces for Children and Young People (Routledge, 2013) with Guy Merchant, Jackie Marsh and Julia Davies. Julia Gillen directs the Edwardian Postcard Project (http:// www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/projects/EVIIpc/), to which she has recently added an interactive resource. You can explore thousands of the cards, their transcripts and related historical data. Nadia Haerizadeh-Yazdi graduated with a BA (Hons.) in Childhood Studies from the University of Leeds (UK). With the intention to further pursue her academic career and interest in research, Nadia remained at the university and completed an MA in Social Research Methods. She is currently undertaking a PhD at the University of Surrey, researching the experiences of childhood cancer in relation to a new type of radiation therapy.

x

List of Contributors

Darshana Jayemanne is a researcher at the University of Melbourne (Australia). His work has examined performance in video games, narrative form in navigable media and the contemporary ‘postdigital’ environment of distributed computing devices. His work has appeared in The Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, Fibreculture and The Refractory Journal. Susan Jones is Assistant Professor of English in Education at the School of Education, University of Nottingham (UK). Her research focuses on the ways in which language, literacies and the arts are used by individuals, families and communities as resources in the negotiation of social and cultural contexts. This work is based primarily in informal family- and community-based learning contexts and draws significantly on ethnographic approaches. Her recent projects include a British Academy–funded study of the everyday literacies of families living on a Midlands council estate. Natalia Kucirkova is a senior lecturer in Early Years and Childhood Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University (UK). Her research concerns innovative ways of supporting shared book reading, digital literacy and the role of personalization in early years. Natalia’s doctoral research inspired the development of the Our Story tablet/smartphone app. She is the founding convenor of the Children’s Digital Books and Literacy Apps Special Interest Group of the United Kingdom Literacy Association. Most recently, Natalia was involved in the production of the Massive Open Online Course ‘Childhood in the digital age’ by the Open University and FutureLearn and a national survey of parents’ perceptions of children’s media use at home with Booktrust. Her publications have appeared in First Language, Computers & Education, Communication Disorders Quarterly and Learning, Media & Technology. Tisha Lewis Ellison is Assistant Professor of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia (USA). Her research explores the intersections among family and adolescent literacy, digital literacies and multimodalities. She takes a critical perspective on how agency, identity and power among African American families and adolescents are constructed as they use digital tools to make sense of their lives. A three-time award-winning researcher, Tisha has published in journals such as Reading Research Quarterly, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, Journal of Education and Journal of Digital Learning in Teacher Education.

List of Contributors

xi

Julian McDougall is Professor of Media and Education and Head of the Centre for Excellence in Media Practice at Bournemouth University (UK). He is the editor of the Media Education Research Journal and the Journal of Media Practice and leads a special interest group in Media Literacies for the United Kingdom Literacy Association. He is the author/editor of a range of books, including After the Media: Culture and Identity in the 21st Century and Barthes’ Mythologies Today: Readings in Contemporary Culture and his forthcoming titles include Doing Text: Media after the Subject, Popular Culture and the Austerity Myth: Hard Times Today and Education, Culture and Digital Media: Theorising Third Space Literacies. Margaret Mackey is Professor Emerita at the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alberta (Canada). She is currently teaching halftime and researching the role of children’s familiar landscapes (both real-life and fictional) in developing literacy. Her latest book is One Child Reading: My Autobibliography (University of Alberta Press, 2016). She has published widely on the topics of print, media and digital literacies. Jackie Marsh is Professor of Education at the University of Sheffield (UK). She undertakes research on young children’s literacy practices in the digital age and has led and participated in research projects in this area funded by the AHRC, British Academy, ESRC and the EU Commission, along with projects funded by various charities and government bodies that have involved schools and children’s media industry partners. She is Chair of the COST Action IS1410, ‘The Digital Literacy and Multimodal Practices of Young Children’ (www. digilitey.eu). Her latest book, co-authored with Julia Bishop, is Changing Play: Play, Media and Commercial Culture from the 1950s to the Present Day (Oxford University Press). Guy Merchant is Professor of Literacy in Education in the Institute of Education at Sheffield Hallam University (UK). He specializes in research into digital literacy and the inter-relations between children and young people, and new technologies of communication. He is widely published in international journals and is a founding editor of the Journal of Early Childhood Literacy. His groundbreaking work Web 2.0 for Schools was co-authored with Julia Davies, and he has co-edited a number of collections, including Virtual Literacies (2013) and New Literacies across the Globe (2014). He is active in literacy education and professional work, including writing curriculum materials and professional publications.

xii

List of Contributors

Bjorn Nansen is a lecturer in Media and Communications at the University of Melbourne (Australia), and a member of the Microsoft Research Centre for Social Natural User Interfaces. He researches digital media and communications technologies, computer interaction and network culture in the contexts of household, family and everyday life. Utilizing a range of ethnographic, online and visual research methods, his interests include technology adoption and use/ non-use, home media environments, young children’s digital culture, mobile and tangible media and interface studies. He currently holds an Australian Research Council funded Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA), to study young children’s use of mobile and interactive media. Becky Parry is a research fellow at the University of Nottingham (UK), currently working on the Tracking Arts Learning and Engagement project. Becky’s own research focuses particularly on children’s film, film education and children’s film production. She is author of Children, Film and Literacy published by Palgrave Macmillan. Becky was formerly a secondary teacher and cinema educator and has worked on numerous creative production projects with children and young people. She has a strong interest in participatory and arts-based approaches to research. John Potter is Reader in Media in Education and Academic Head of Learning and Teaching in the Department of Culture, Communication and Media at the UCL Institute of Education (UK). His research and publications are in the fields of media education, new literacies, creative activity and learner agency; digital video production by young learners; the use of social software and online networks for publication and learning; and the changing nature of teaching and learning in response to the pervasive use in wider culture of media technologies in formal and informal settings. Lucy Taylor is a teaching fellow in primary English and ESRC-funded PhD student at the University of Leeds (UK). Her research interests include the relationships between children’s reading and their writing, creativity in children’s reading and writing and the impact of national testing on primary classroom practice in English. A former primary school teacher and Literacy Coordinator in the UK and Europe, she has taught on Children’s Literature courses at the Open University and the Primary PGCE at Leeds.

Foreword Every foreword I have written has a story behind it. This one is no exception. It started with a conversation about ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’ – words in the subtitle of the present volume, Literacy, Media, Technology. Unbeknownst to the person asking my help in revising a similar subtitle for a manuscript he had written – one that the reviewers and a journal editor found problematic – I had just completed a first draft of the foreword you see in front of you. Briefly, the editor wanted a snappy subtitle that steered clear of all allusions to the linear, the straightforward or predictable. Smiling to myself at the coincidental circumstances that had brought us together, I invited the person seeking my assistance to read this foreword. He did, and in the end, he negotiated successfully with the journal editor to keep the same three words in the exact order, but for different reasons. My reason for finding past, present and future both suitable and necessary in the subtitle of Literacy, Media, Technology has its source in Lillian Hellman’s introduction to Pentimento: A Book of Portraits published in 1973. To Hellman, the term pentimento captured the following conditions. Old paint on canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman’s dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento because the painter ‘repented’, changed his mind. Perhaps it would be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again (p. 3). It’s the seeing and then seeing again process in Hellman’s definition that spoke to me as I read the separate chapters in the current edited volume. For example, I saw in some chapters a definition of literacy that replaced an earlier one. But did it indeed? And if it did, what nuances were added, what were subtracted and with what effect? More to the point, why didn’t the absence or presence of socalled new definitions and new forms of literacy stop me cold, especially when they appeared side by side with citations to people’s work that I both knew and respected? These same questions could be applied to media and technology. On more than one occasion I realized I didn’t need concepts such as New Media or newer

xiv

Foreword

technologies of the twenty-first century spelled out or signalled in some other way. It was as if Hellman’s notion of pentimento was sufficient: I was recognizing the past, present – yes, even anticipating the future at times – based on some aspect of literacy (or media, or technology) that showed through a different context, made its way in a changing demographic swell or simply ended up somewhat haphazardly in a configuration that defied instant recognition. And I was comfortable with all these embodied perceptions, save one. For Hellman, pentimento depended on original lines. For instance, it was the original somewhat faded or morphed that shone through old paint on canvas. Not so for me, at least not as first-time reader of Literacy, Media, Technology: Past, Present and Future. Original implies a beginning – an ordering relative to some imagined middle or ending. In my view, there are only middles that connect to other middles, devoid of movement forwards and back – but not static, not by any means. Lest my personal reflections on Literacy, Media, Technology: Past, Present, and Future wax too poetic or philosophic or lead to entanglements (even messes) deemed unworthy of the impressive time, effort and scholarship that went into this volume, let me switch roles from reader to enactor, or doer. It’s the role change I tell learners in my online classes that can lead to action plans, to walking the walk, not simply talking the talk. One action plan I have in mind involves adopting this book as the primary text for use in a course I teach online, titled ‘Popular Culture in Literacy Classrooms K-12’. Until three years ago, the course was a face-to-face offering. That changed when I found myself directing learners to the Web more often than not to engage in synchronous and asynchronous small group discussions while they sat physically assembled in a room too small to talk face-to-face. Now, fully online with scheduled Google+ hangouts twice a semester, my pop culture class is in need of a text that can support both linear and nonlinear learners. Whether read in past-present-future order or dipped into at will, Literacy, Media, Technology embeds the concepts and topics that I value and would like my students exposed to. A second action plan consists of using the book to introduce incoming doctoral students to a range of theoretical frameworks for connecting practice and research. These frameworks, derived from the same literature that the students will encounter in their courses, while presenting at national and international conferences, or designing their dissertation proposals, provide editorial structure and organization to what otherwise might seem a mere collection of research studies. The chapter authors write with authoritative competence on issues that range from child–parent interactions aimed at

Foreword

xv

critically mediating the media, to identifying the limitations of technological determinism, to studying assemblages that include postdigital literacies and gaming interfaces. Most importantly, the editors have given careful attention to the importance of an internationally balanced and representative research base. What better way to acknowledge a future that readers can recognize and enactors can engage. Finally, Literacy, Media, Technology: Past, Present and Future feeds seamlessly into action plans that call for putting to rest the artificial differences in formal and informal learning. The editors and authors featured in this volume are known for not mincing words and certainly for not taking shortcuts or avoiding controversy. As a result, what they have assembled here will extend the shelf life of this volume. For where else will readers and enactors find a more supportive intellectual environment in which to ‘repent’ and change their minds, much as Lillian Hellman envisioned. Donna E. Alvermann The University of Georgia, USA

Reference Hellman, L. (1973). Pentimento: A book of portraits. Boston, MA: Little, Brown.

Acknowledgements Chapter 4 is reprinted by permission of the publisher (Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.tandfonline.com). It originally appeared as Marsh, J. (2014). From the wild frontier of Davy Crockett to the wintery fiords of Frozen: Changes in media consumption, play and literacy from the 1950s to the 2010s. International Journal of Play, 3, 267–279. DOI:10.1080/21594937.2014.975975 reprinted by permission of the publisher (Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.tandfonline.com). Chapter 5 is based on a previously published journal article: Jones, S. (2014). ‘How people read and write and they don’t even notice’: Everyday lives and literacies on a Midlands council estate. Literacy, 48(2), 59–65. Published by Wiley Blackwell © 2014 UKLA. Dictionary references to Pause, Record, Play, Rewind, Fast Forward, Standby section dividers: © 2015 Merriam-Webster.

1

Literacy, Media, Technology Guy Merchant, Cathy Burnett and Becky Parry

Introduction This book has its origins in a symposium for the United Kingdom Literacy Association's annual conference held at the University of Leicester in 2014. The symposium marked the association’s twenty-fifth year, and aimed to draw attention to the changing nature of literacy – changes that are often associated with the development of media and communications technology. Many of the contributors to this volume presented at that symposium, and although more have been added subsequently, in order to develop a richer and more diverse picture, the basic idea of both looking backwards and looking forwards, captured by the ‘Past, present, future’ title, remains the same, even if it has become more nuanced in the writing. Having said this, we are not concerned here with mapping recent changes or anticipating future trends in communication; rather, we will be largely focusing on identifying themes that cut across different attitudes to, and uses of, available technologies and considering how different conceptualizations of the relationship between past, present and future might be significant to the field. In compiling an edited volume there is, inevitably, a process of selection, and this collection foregrounds the particular strengths and expertise of our contributors. This allows us to traverse a broad territory represented through personal exchanges of postcards in the Edwardian era to young people’s identity work on social media, and from the early appearance of television in domestic contexts to current and emerging forms of digital play. Themes like this are combined with vivid accounts of how individuals and particular communities make sense of the present through the past, and how they make sense of the past in the present day through using those technologies that are available to them. In this way, literacy, media and technology are always situated in everyday lives, in the values, the projects, the memories and in the motivations and feelings of the people who use them.

2

Literacy, Media, Technology

Press play The overlapping of literacy, media and technology in education research appears as a relatively recent phenomenon, and drawing attention to their intersection still has a sense of novelty. Witnessing the development and uptake of digital tools, scholars from rather different intellectual traditions have found themselves talking about very similar things. Disciplines with different genealogies have begun to converge. Literacy studies, with its traditional emphasis on the social uses of written communication and print text, has expanded to take account of complex multimodal texts bringing theories of space and materiality to bear upon our understanding of online social networking, virtual play and other uses of digital technology. Media studies has diversified too, moving beyond its focus on television and film to encompass newer kinds of texts, newer channels of distribution and shifts in the relationship between producers and consumers. Much the same could be said for the study of technology which now acknowledges how the tools we use both shape and are shaped by the ways in which we use them, and that despite some excitement about the potential benefits and dangers of digital development, the history of human tool use is a long and complex one. From a contemporary vantage point, it is easy to think that literacy, media and technology have simply shifted closer together in recent years, but through this volume we suggest that in fact they have always existed in relation to one another. Here we use the composite term ‘literacy-media-technology’ in order to signal this. Identifying this relationship both in current developments in theory and research and in recent technological innovations may, perhaps, provoke us into seeing the past more clearly, accounting for present trends more accurately and predicting the future of communication with more sensitivity.

Communicate The human appetite for communication lies at the heart of this book and is evident in the ways in which contributing authors, working from a variety of different perspectives and with a range of social, cultural and political investments, explore and celebrate how literacy-media-technology has been taken up at different times in order to establish and maintain connection, to entertain one another, to learn about the world and much else too. But while we can see some quite obvious changes over time, we are keen to avoid a simple

Literacy, Media, Technology

3

linear narrative, partly because this would result in an account that is altogether too smooth, too tidy to reflect everyday realities, and partly because it might erase some of the subtler refrains such as those associated with ownership and access, power and control, risk and regulation, interest and affect – and as a result some of the more irregular histories of communication. If ‘communication’ is a key theme, no better place to start. How could it be defined here? The most obvious place would be to begin with language and interaction – but then a common alternative use of the word refers to the connection of places rather than people. In this way we can speak about a communicating door or passage, and describe roads, railways and other transport networks as being part of a communication system. Of course this usage still involves people, but it is they themselves, or their goods, that move between locations rather than just their information or messages. This perhaps helps us to think about how communication – by whichever definition – always involves a kind of mobility, a movement across space and time. Indeed, it could be argued that one great leap of civilization was the development of technologies that enabled the separation of message from messenger. At this point in time, whenever it was, communication no longer depended upon co-presence. The medium conveyed the message, and staying ‘in touch’ could be achieved from a distance.

Keep in touch ‘In touch’ is itself an interesting expression, one which evokes both physical contact (connection) and affect. And touch itself plays such an important role in the intimacy of private correspondence, in handwritten messages, letters and postcards – but this continues through touch typing to the tap on a screen to ‘like’ a picture on Instagram or a post on Facebook. It reminds us all over again of the materiality of media – and the intensely personal nature of touch. Indeed, touchscreen interfaces appear at an interesting point in the development of technologies, shrinking the distance between us and what we read or watch. We slip a smartphone into our bag with the ease once used to carry a letter or a book; our hands cradle a portable device, stroking the screen, clasping the device as we might a book or a sheaf of papers, and we run our fingers over the lines that matter, or turn the page. With screens we are both closer and further away than we have ever been before. The large screens of the original picture palaces have over time

4

Literacy, Media, Technology

been refined to suit the needs of a new moviegoing population, enlarged for immersive cinematic experiences and resized to the dimensions of multiplex entertainment parks. Alongside this, the development of TV has domesticated the consumption of the moving image, first entering our homes as somewhat incongruous items of furniture before evolving into the wall-sized multichannel flat screens that dominate an increasing number of households. We are closer to our handheld devices –and they move with us, but the diversification of screen-based technologies allows for multiple possibilities offering close-ups at entertainment events, continuous information updates in public places and ongoing navigational views in private and public transport. Their sheer ubiquity confounds attempts to limit screen time. They have us surrounded – keeping us in touch with arrivals and departures, family and friends, Peppa Pig, the Dow Jones Index, colleagues and the next-generation gadgets (click to buy now). It is not as if small screens replace larger ones, that we’re constantly getting closer to them or that there’s a simple timeline that runs from page to screen. Most of us are in touch in multiple ways. Communication just gets more complex. We produce and consume across media, one-to-one, one-to-many, privately, publicly and in the spaces between. Information, communication and entertainment thread across these spaces as the word ‘transmedia’ (Kinder, 1993), which weaves through these chapters, suggests. Literacy, media and technology entwine and proliferate, blurring the boundaries that once allowed us to define them or separate them out. Take for example, Tangerine (Baker & Bergoch, 2015), the critically acclaimed movie filmed on an iPhone 5. Once it was hard to imagine a phone that wasn’t shackled to the wall, never mind something that you could use to make a movie, a video call, or send a piece of writing to someone on the other side of the globe. However, to think that this development signals a move in the direction of convergence is too simplistic. After all a phone call is still a phone call. And we can still send a postcard – not such a popular pursuit as it once was, but with a five-minute walk, you could probably buy one, if your stocks were low, and a stamp. And the rest isn’t history. Not yet. Contacting a friend in Lancaster involves pragmatic choices – choices between post, email, Twitter and Skype (see Gillen, 2014, p. 35, for example). In this complex array of literacy-media-technology, the choices we make or the choices we are able to make warrant continual investigation, whether those choices are about access, composition, hardware or software. But we cannot afford to leave the discussion to our own devices or reduce it to the devices we

Literacy, Media, Technology

5

own. In his critique of sociology, Bruno Latour problematized the tendency to separate people from the things they use, their material entanglements: No engineer ever distinguished the assembly of people and the assemblage of parts, so why explain things as if society and technology had to be kept separate? (Latour, 2005, p. 240)

Shifting our gaze to things, in the way that some technologists have done, misses the point too. A history of things in the past, present and future will always be incomplete unless we combine that history with the social actions and interactions that help to describe their contexts of use.

Message me In its recent guise as a transitive verb, ‘message’ has come to refer to a texting or email exchange. Messaging seems to capture the processual nature of ongoing communication, the continually emergent making of meaning that escapes our best attempts to define discrete events. Although one-to-one messaging can still be resolved to turns, new forms like synchronous chat and Twitter are multithreaded and cumulative. Observing this in the present may serve to illuminate things past. After all the ongoing exchange of wartime correspondence might as easily be thought of as a ‘traffic of texts’ (Kell, 2011) as is contemporary interaction. Phrases like a ‘dense web of communication’ or ‘a multilayered social network’ might be apt descriptions of the postal service in its heyday. And even now. Beneath the surface or at the edges of communication we are continuously and playfully working at the boundaries of possibility in the media we use. Any embellishment of meaning, creative flourish or new invention might be seized upon. From the SWALK of WW2 letter writers to the lols and emojis of the present day and from annotations on picture postcards to rapid image exchange through Snapchat, exploiting semiotic opportunities seems like an irrepressible urge. And even in difficult times, when messages come under constant surveillance, when they are banned, intercepted or censored, resistance through illicit channels or secret codes appears. It is hard to suppress the urge to message. But the flow of messages and their rhizomic spread through and across different media is not just restricted to one-to-one messaging. On the larger canvas of the global mediascape the production, consumption and circulation

6

Literacy, Media, Technology

of forms of one-to-many communication has become a defining feature of modernity (Appadurai, 1996). TV, film and radio have established distribution networks that print media often aspired to. The range and reach of these mass media are now such that the word global is, for once, no exaggeration. Although already a focus for innovation and creativity at the start of the last century, moving image formats continue to develop and proliferate: witness the evolution of the short-form on YouTube, the sophistication of CGI techniques and the wide distribution of 3D film. Add to this array the level of sophisticated imagerendering available to game designers, their incorporation into popular video games and the rapid emergence of this new narrative form and you begin to feel that contemporary life is indeed densely mediated.

Add to basket Ordering a new book has never been so easy. Enter the title into Amazon, click add to your basket and already (or so it seems) it is on its way, in the post or downloading to your Kindle. It feels immediate, on demand, so readily available. In fact, the sheer convenience of consumption often masks its underlying logic in our new media worlds. The internet, once conceived of as a sort of communal free-zone for communication, information exchange and playful interaction, is now as much a one-stop shop as a space for social networking. And although mass media tie-ins and marketing gambits are nothing new, Disney and their corporate competitors use this as a distribution network for new products – the movie, the game, the toy, the T-shirt. And all of this, of course, coexists with fan productions, re-mixes, parody videos and machinima, which also benefit from multiple opportunities for rapid widespread diffusion. In other words, the literacy–media–technology nexus is continually recycling and modifying the sociocultural conditions of its time, making certain subject positions available and others contested. Or to put it slightly differently, individual actions and interactions continue to produce and be produced by these subjectivities, working with and through the affordances of new and notso-new media. The dream of rapid connection, of internet everywhere, is a utopian trope in the cultural imaginary, evoking a seamless joining of people, places and products where everyone and everything is equal and equally available. While examples of creative and productive forms of collaboration and resistance proliferate, our celebration of such practices can smooth over conflict, inequity, scarce resources and ideological variance.

Literacy, Media, Technology

7

Check out Literacy, media and technology, seen as particular configurations of discursive, material and semiotic practices, flow in and out of the lives of individuals and communities temporarily meshing with the ideational and affective trajectories at play. The ways in which these assemble together give texture to specific instances of media engagement. They account for the singularity of the experience of watching time travellers on TV, composing a digital story of family memories or engaging in virtual play, as well as for the sheer diversity of experience that congregates around literacy-media-technology. This perspective gives the collection its unique signature, as our authors explore different instances of practice and as they think about how the past, present and future look from the standpoint of here and now.

References Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Baker, S. (Director/Producer) & Bergoch, C. (Director). Tangerine [Motion Picture]. United States: Magnolia Pictures. Gillen, J. (2014). Digital literacies. Abingdon: Routledge. Kell, C. (2011). ‘Inequalities and crossings: Literacies and the spaces-in-between.’ International Journal of Educational Development, 31(6), 606–613. Kinder, M. (1993). Playing with power in movies, television, and videogames: From Muppet babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Berkeley : University of California Press. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Interrupt action or speech briefly: she paused, at a loss for words Temporarily interrupt the operation of (a process or device): she had paused a tape on the VCR

2

The Picture Postcard at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century: Instagram, Snapchat or Selfies of an Earlier Age? Julia Gillen

Introduction In this chapter I discuss a technological innovation which was as popular in its own day as social media in our own: the picture postcard at the very beginning of the twentieth century. Contemporary evidence as to the extent of the postcard craze is awash with accounts such as the following, written in a 1900 travel article about visiting Swiss mountains: Recently I went up the Rigi with a large party. Directly we arrived at the summit, everybody made a rush for the hotel and fought for the postcards. Five minutes afterwards, everybody was writing for dear life. I believe that the entire party had come up, not for the sake of the experience or the scenery, but to write postcards and post them on the summit. (Sims, 1900 cited in Carline, 1971, p. 44)

The first decade of the twentieth century witnessed huge enthusiasm for ‘the cult of the picture postcard’ (Anon, 1904). At that time the enormous choice of pictures, and even the possibility to produce or customize one’s own, on a postcard, was a hugely popular innovation. A newly universally literate population grasped at the chance to send almost instantaneous short messages (Staff, 1979). Might ‘almost instantaneous’ be an exaggeration? Amazingly, that was what it felt like since postcards could pop into your letter box at virtually any time. The British Post Office was running several deliveries a day in many urban areas, and even across a considerable distance a postcard could take just a few hours to arrive. Postmen worked from six in the morning till ten at night, with just a few rests during the day (Clinton, 1984). People at work might send a card

12

Literacy, Media, Technology

to their home, which would arrive home before they did. It did feel subjectively as though postcards were virtually instantaneous (Milne, 2010). Considered more objectively, there was no comparably cheap, attractive written communications technology between the onset of the First World War and the digital revolution of the 1990s and onwards. In the meantime, before the advent of emails and SMS messages, the postcard occupied a far less important cultural position, relegated almost entirely to the status of slow, highly conventionalized one-way communications or souvenirs from holiday destinations or art galleries. There have been a few attempts to use postcards in relatively innovative ways, both physically and digitally (e.g. Laurier & Whyte, 2001), but these have not inserted themselves into the mainstream of popular culture. At the very beginning of the twentieth century, the postcard was the most popular social networking tool, sent and received whether one was at home, work, visiting another place or even perhaps on the move. People used them to convey all kinds of messages: to share plans, news, jokes, hopes, regrets and every other kind of interaction; sometimes the image was plainly the most important element of the message or even stood alone; sometimes the message appeared to be the most salient element and sometimes the two were inseparable. Nowadays, accustomed as we are to contemporary digital platforms, we know that occasionally the platform itself changes details of certain material characteristics: formats, templated features and so forth, and the postcard also went through such changes. With a parallel sensitivity I concentrate in this chapter on one particular format which was at its height in the first two years of the twentieth century. At that time the British Post Office insisted that the whole of one side of a card had to be used for the addressee’s name and address, plus the stamp and postmark. So the other side was restricted to a picture, plus a very little space that the postcard publishers tended to leave free so that a short message could be sent. There are obvious similarities with the format of Instagram and Snapchat in the present day, and indeed, at the time of writing, with Twitter, which has become much more image based than in its initial years (Gillen & Merchant, 2012). To illustrate the parallels and of course differences more clearly Figure 2.1 presents two cards of this format, that is, two front sides. Figure 2.1 presents two picture sides of the turn-of-the-century format of the early picture postcard. The top example includes an image of a castle, seemingly adapted from a monochrome photograph. It is captioned Caerlaverock Castle. This side of the card also contains a small publisher’s logo and the words ‘reliable

The Picture Postcard of the Twentieth Century

13

Figure 2.1 Two postcards from the Edwardian Postcard Project.

series’. Under the view is a pencilled message saying, ‘Hope to see you this evening, love Nessie.’ The other side (not visible here) contains some printed material: ‘POST CARD. The address to be written on this side’, plus a half-penny green stamp showing King Edward VII, and a postmark ‘Lockerbie B SP28 03’ which means it was posted on September 28th, 1903. Handwritten under and

14

Literacy, Media, Technology

to the left of these is the following: ‘Miss J Carmichael, c/o Mr Laidlaw Victoria Square Lockerbie’. Evidently the card was sent within Lockerbie and expected to arrive within hours of its despatch. In this chapter I introduce the practice of sending these cards at the beginning of the twentieth century, demonstrating why it was such an attractive communications technology and pastime for people. I briefly explain how I collected the sample of cards with which this chapter is concerned and outline my research methods. While primarily focusing on the cards themselves, my interest in literacy practices demands a situated understanding of people’s purposes and cultural understandings as they engaged in communications through the cards and so I am also motivated to broaden my contextual understandings. One way I do this is through drawing on media discourses about practices of postcard writing in the period. Another very useful method is investigating various kinds of historic records, as I will demonstrate through further examination of the cards illustrated in Figure 2.1.

The ‘turn of the century’ format picture postcard This format of the picture postcard was in its own time experienced as a revolutionary communications technology. Before the introduction of the postcard (initially without any image) in 1867, the overwhelmingly most common way of corresponding with someone was by letter. Letters were, understandably, a focus of education. People were taught at school about writing correctly, formatting letters and textual conventions. If they were insecure about their knowledge, there were plenty of etiquette manuals and advice in the media about how to do it properly. The postcard, in contrast, was the perfect carrier of a short message without the apparatus of associated formal, taught conventions. And, even better, with a picture postcard writers could make their communication more appealing. It had the feel of sending a gift, yet at less cost than the effortful letter. There was a tremendous choice of images available on postcards, not just scenes like local castles but photographs of actresses and other celebrities, jokey cards, cute cats and dogs, reproductions of high art or popular culture items – really almost any topic photographers and publishers could think of. Or you could commission or produce your own card. Sending postcards was economically important too. In 1898 Sir Charles Oppenheimer, the British consul general in Frankfurt, expressed pleasure that

The Picture Postcard of the Twentieth Century

15

British people appeared to be joining a German trend, the ‘fancy people have taken for sending post-cards with views as souvenirs’ (The Times, 12 July 1898, p. 4, Col. F.). He noted that ‘This new trade affects not only the Post Office, but also the paper industry and those concerned in illustrating, as well as various branches of the stationer’s trade.’ However he was extremely concerned that British manufacturers were being rather slow to adapt and that the British market might get saturated with German cards, to the detriment of the British economy. Contemporary media frequently reported on the new trend, and although hostility to postcards was given some voice, the overall tone was approbatory. In an extensive article in 1899 (November 1, p. 13, Col. C), The Times recalled the ‘ridicule and hostility’ with which the postcard had been met on its introduction. Concerns abated over the possibility for an increase in libellous communications, since postcards were held to be public communications unlike the private letter. Some deplored the threat to the art of letter writing or saw the use of a postcard as inconsiderate to the receiver: ‘Some people, too, urged that the use of a post-card was little short of an insult to the recipient, inasmuch as if the communication were not worth a penny it was not worth sending at all.’ Nevertheless overall the unnamed writer of the article opposed these views, arguing that in both commercial and personal spheres the postcard was enormously useful: ‘The post-card, with its entire freedom from all ceremony of formality, is such an obvious boon to thousands, if not millions, of correspondents in these days.’

Methods and aims The cards this chapter is concerned with come from the main collection of the Edwardian Postcard Project. This main collection consists of 3,000 cards written and posted during the period 1901 and 1910. They were collected by Nigel Hall and myself, over a period of many years. We acquired them by following collectors’ paths to postcard fairs and other sellers of ‘ephemera’. (Gillen and Hall, 2010a describe the circulation patterns of the cards in their own era and contemporary times in more detail.) We then transcribed the cards, following orthographic features faithfully. We categorized the cards according to a contextual and functional approach (Bazerman, 2004; Vásquez, 2015), through our inductively designed system, aiming at exploring the material choices made, the image topic and various other aspects of textual content and inferred function. For example, we assessed

16

Literacy, Media, Technology

how readable the cards were, according to handwriting standards of the time, and counted the number of words in the message. We categorized the writing implements and orientation of writing layout. Interested in how the cards fitted in the communications landscape of the time, we recorded mentions of other cards and letters. We recorded the sex of the writer and addressee when this was possible and whether any family relationships were made evident. Where possible we have extended our understanding of the cards through looking up the addressees in the censuses of 1901 and 1911. Within the collection of 3,000 cards, I then searched for all cards of the ‘turn of the century’ format; this produced fifty-six cards I analyse here. The questions I ask in this chapter are concerned with materiality, multimodality and a deeper understanding of people’s practices with the postcards, within the contexts of their everyday lives. First, what can be said about the materiality of card writing; that is, what did people write with, and how did people use the space and opportunities offered by this specific technology? When were the cards sent? What does this reveal about innovation, media regulation and people’s responses? These issues have regard to people’s responses to a particular multimodal technology and its affordances as perceived by them. Second, I examine a specific further aspect of multimodality: What connections do people make in their writings to the image and how do they do this? What can be inferred about their purposes and their literacy practices when using postcards? Finally, another way of locating the cards in their particular sociohistoric context is to move beyond readings of contemporary media discourse about postcards, through illustrating the possibilities to be gained through deepening understandings by investigating historical records. I will do this through returning to the cards featured in Figure 2.1.

Materiality, use of this postcard format and media regulation When examined in detail, how people use the cards can be seen to vary in many material aspects. Now we look at the writing implements first: forty-nine cards were written in ink, five in pencil and one was typed, which must have been a very fiddly exercise. Almost all the card writers avoided writing over the image, although this was a great challenge for one person who was left a margin around the picture of about a centimetre. Another writer whose message overlapped

The Picture Postcard of the Twentieth Century

17

with the picture was nonetheless careful to leave unspoilt the flowers that were the central visual topic. Orientation of writing varied considerably as people sometimes squeezed their messages into a very limited space. This connects with a very wide range of how many words they wrote: the least was 7; the most 146 and mean 38. Understandably as with any communications technology, most of the time its constraints and affordances, however consciously realized or not, remain unremarked as people pursue their main purpose. One writer in 1902 commented as he shifted orientation in the small margin around a monochrome image of a view in Killarney (this card was sent from one part of London to another). He squeezed in seventy-eight words, including: ‘These cards don’t give much room but still keep us in touch.’ Besides examining the use of space, it proved unexpectedly interesting to examine when they were sent. Before extracting this sample from the main collection, I expected all or most of the cards to have been sent in their heyday, that is 1901 and 1902, when this was the only format permissible. After this, the British Post Office permitted the ‘divided back’ design in 1902, which was the impetus for a huge surge in the popularity of postcard sending (Gillen & Hall, 2010b). This was because there was now more room for writing, since only half of the address side was required for the address, stamp and postmark. Cards became more attractive in that the whole of one side was devoted to an image, rather than competing with the message on a very restricted space. However, in actual fact the peak year of this data set is 1903, which accounts for half of the sample. So although the impact of the new ‘divided back’ format of 1902 had a huge impact and for the most part took over the market, this admittedly small sample demonstrates that there were still some of the older format sent in subsequent years. This may have been because people still possessed some and did not want to waste them; possibly they still chose to select this format from sellers who had the old stock on their hands. Perhaps the very constraint of the particularly small space was still appealing in itself to a few, rather as part of Twitter’s popularity has been the very constraint of its brevity (Gillen & Merchant, 2012). Perhaps people were sending the old format because it was one they had got accustomed to; in today’s era we do not all switch the moment that a new operating system comes in, for example, and may display some resistance to change. However, eventually supplies of an old format became scarce and particularly recognizably old fashioned; none in this data set were sent in 1907 or later. Many messages on cards referred to other methods of communication; almost a quarter specifically mentioned letters and others implied that the postcard is a short message sent either as an apology or a stopgap between letter

18

Literacy, Media, Technology

writing (see Gillen in press, for further discussion of the relationship between postcards and letters drawing on the wider collection). There were mentions of other media and technologies, demonstrating the Edwardians’ consciousness of living in what might, as in more recent times, be termed a ‘new communications landscape’ (Kress, 1998).

Multimodality: Relationship between text and image Many card messages pay specific attention to the quality of the card being sent as a gift. Perceived high quality seems to lie partly in the technical characteristics of colouration and artistry, and also in expanding or innovating within a specific genre. Miss Fay Vigdor received a postcard produced by a European manufacturer depicting a small child climbing into a bath. I do not know how the various effects, including subtle pink skin colouring and a metallic effect on the stove, were obtained; but the sender was plainly moved to draw attention to it, writing in the small message space under the image, ‘This is one of the latest I hope you will like it.’ ‘Cute children’ were a popular theme: this data set features five, three of which are humorous in style and all European produced. Although obviously this is too small a sample to draw any conclusions from, it would appear to fit with Oppenheimer’s concern, mentioned above, that British postcard manufacturers were being relatively slow to jump on new postcard trends. However, most of the cards were of scenes and most of those, although not all, were tied down topographically through the addition of a caption. Some featured notable buildings such as Edinburgh Castle or Buckingham Palace and bear out Oppenheimer’s comment on the popularity of sending views as souvenirs. Many writers were explicit about this: one card sent to Miss Oliver in Belfast featured Windsor Castle and the message: ‘Just driven over to see the Royal party set out for Ascot and after we view the castle.’ Yet there is ample evidence that in this era most postcards were not sent from holidays, to act as souvenirs. Many messages that refer explicitly to the picture side are for quite different purposes. David Evans, a student in Oxford, had sent several cards to his sister, Mary Evans, at home in Camberwell. He sent Oxford views sometimes with explicit attention as to differences between one image and another. On 1 October 1902 he had written ‘Above is the street I walk along daily’; another card referred explicitly to different card production technologies. On 27 September 1906 Mrs Florence Le Gros, who lived in Hounslow, received a postcard on which ‘Emma’ had squeezed 145 words around a monochrome

The Picture Postcard of the Twentieth Century

19

image of an interior of a Casino in Monte Carlo, perhaps chosen in honour of ‘Flo’s’ Channel Islands origins. (This postcard was produced in France.) Emma appears chiefly motivated to give advice on nutrition: ‘We were so pleased to hear that the baby is a little better hope he will continue to get better poor little Boy  …  I you I would not give him any more of that condensed milk father says that it is not good there is no nourishment in it.’ After commenting on an exchange of parcels and a recent good tea, Emma advises, ‘I forgot to tell you not to eat any of those Wall nuts as they are no good we had to throw ours away.’

Deepening contextual understandings The top card in Figure 2.1 is one of nineteen cards in our collection which were sent to Janet Stewart Carmichael, who was born in 1887 in Manchester. Since we buy from dealers who have typically stripped albums and then placed their contents in boxes, it is not unusual for us to find out after purchase that we have many cards from one album and so often to one specific person. Through finding this person at their home address in the time of the census of 1901 and/ or 1910, we can then often trace the family history of this person, and, where relatives are involved or named, elements of their biographies also. Janet Carmichael’s Scottish surgeon father died when she was only three. Her mother initially went to live with her grandmother but by the time of the 1901 census moved to Buxton. She told the census enumerator that she was ‘living on her own means’ but a commercial directory shows that she was letting out rooms. Janet’s collection of cards features a long-lasting friend from her Manchester days and a young woman from Bath who sometimes visited Buxton. References in other cards as well as this one provide evidence of her visits to Scotland, perhaps to connections of her father. This card records that Nessie was hoping to see Janet later that same day. Caerlaverock Castle is a tourist attraction about 17 miles from Lockerbie, so it might be that the two had been there together, that they had plans to go or simply that Nessie chose it as an attractive image that might interest her friend. Janet Carmichael died age 23; a local newspaper remembered her as a popular Sunday school teacher. This, as the other cards, tells us much about her activities and network of correspondents. The bottom card in Figure 2.1 is different in that it is impossible to find out anything about either the sender or the addressee. Nevertheless we can still make use of various kinds of clues to expand our understandings of the texts and practices around them. The sender has signed herself with an initial; the addressee would

20

Literacy, Media, Technology

have many clues from the card as to her or his identity and so, as with much social media today, it would be unnecessary to spell out one’s own name in addition to the message. The addressee cannot be found in the census since the card was sent to ‘Miss Cooke, c/o Mr E. Chambers, Martyr’s Fields, Canterbury’. This is one of many cards in the collection sent to a temporary address, demonstrating that Edwardian postcard users did not stop receiving and sending cards when they travelled around just as digital media users are no longer constrained by landlines and letter boxes. Other interesting information about postcard practices can be gleaned from the card. Its message is: ‘Dear L. Thanks for P.C. yesterday. It is grand here today, but was nasty the Bull was going all yesterday. Remember me to Ernest I will send him a card soon when I get a nice one love from ??’ This shows that L Cooke and the sender were enmeshed in a network of postcard sending. Both the reference to ‘a nice one’ and the image on this card convey the idea that sending a postcard showed that you were thinking of your correspondents through the act of communicating with them, but also that postcards could be valued as gifts through the attractiveness of the selected image. This reproduced photograph is captioned Connie Ediss. An excellently well-referenced article on Wikipedia contains links to a 1911 recording of her singing posted on YouTube, and considerable evidence as to her success as a popular musical comedy actress and comedienne. She performed in London, Broadway and as far away as Australia. She was particularly known for her persona as a sharp-witted Cockney. This is alluded to in this image in that with magnification I could establish that the book is ‘Tony Drum, a Cockney boy’ by Edwin Pugh, published in 1898. I did not expect to be able to unravel the reference to ‘the Bull’ but the card itself yielded an excellent clue. Postcards are stamped with postmarks by the British Post Office, the regulatory authority, which when legible give excellent information as to the date, time and location the card was sent from. Social media services often append such kinds of information to posts without the author manually writing these details. In this case, the card is stamped 7 pm, 6 April 1904 at Ilfracombe. The UK weather records for the month (Met Office, 1904) detail considerable stormy activity in the first week, caused by a ‘large number of Atlantic disturbances which skirted our western and northern coasts’. Ilfracombe is situated on the North Devon coast. Its lighthouse is called the Bull Point, and doubtless its foghorn was extremely active at this time. Presumably the writer could count on shared knowledge about ‘the Bull’ with her correspondent. So the card has many functions: to pass on some information about current personal activities, to share an interesting image of a popular celebrity and to consolidate personal relationships not just of the two directly concerned but also mentioning Ernest, in their shared network.

The Picture Postcard of the Twentieth Century

21

Conclusions The ordinary literacy practices of ordinary people have usually been overlooked in history, which focuses on the writings of elite persons (Gillen & Hall, 2010b; Lyons, 2013). The explosion of authoring multimodal texts that has come about with the contemporary digital revolution has led to a welcome recognition of complexity in everyday meaning-making practices involving writing. Analysing such digital discourses is most fruitfully entwined with a recognition of significance of the affordances of particular platforms, studied in fine detail. As Jones, Chik and Hafner (2015, pp. 10–11) discuss in relation to the classic definition by Gibson (e.g. 1986), this demands attention to the material features of the design of a technology, but just as much to how users choose to interact, according to the interplay of their own perceptions, intentions and consequent decisions. ‘It is this creative space between the designer and the user where the unexpected can happen which constitutes the affordances’ (Barton, 2015, p. 52). Close examination of how people utilize the affordances of a particular platform is as fruitful when studying literacy practices of historical technologies as it is of contemporary social media. The title of this chapter referred to some particularly popular social media practices at the time of writing: Instagram, Snapchat and selfies. Of course the picture postcard is different from any of these, but there are similarities and contrasts. Instagram can be used to send an image with a caption. The potential reach of an Instagram is far greater, and yet the possibility of playing with layout, handwriting and even font size is relatively limited. Snapchat might be used between two people or a group; it might be regarded as ephemeral or, perhaps, be preserved through a screenshot. Similarly the picture postcard has often been thought of as ephemeral, but the practice of putting some that the addressee particularly valued into an album led eventually to preservation of some over a hundred years, occasionally leading to digitization and a new online life (see e.g. this project’s website Gillen, 2015; also Ladd, 2015). Some postcard addresses, messages and mixtures of handwriting make it clear that the cards were not necessarily designed as dyadic communications but might be designed to be shared among family members. (Much later, David Evans’ presumably new wife added short messages onto his cards to Mary.) With the ubiquity of photographers in one’s locality, it was possible to commission a self-portrait; our main collection includes many such ‘selfies’. One such, sent as a Christmas card by a clergyman to his parishioners, is illustrated and discussed elsewhere (Gillen, 2013). It is sometimes claimed that we live now in a more ‘visual’ age (Kress, 2003); yet to the Edwardians it also appeared they were living in an age of unprecedented

22

Literacy, Media, Technology

access to colourful popular culture. Although full colour photography was not yet invented, they had many techniques for adding colour to cards, as well as appreciating the scope of monochrome and other visual, even tactile effects. Examining specific details of how people interact using a particular platform in an historical era can enrich our understandings of affordances of specific multimodal communications, challenging any assumption that it is only today’s digital technologies that display innovative and creative multimodal practices. It can also demonstrate the significant roles played by economic and cultural relationships, including across international boundaries, and that of authorities that in various ways regulate or influence spatial and temporal connections. History mandates focussing and refocusing the lenses of time, place, and alternative spaces. It probes and prompts us to comprehend what has been, what might have been, and what might be: choice, agency, and possibility, in their fullness and their limits. (Graff, 2013, p. 56)

Palczewski (2005) claims that the popularity of the postcard in the first decade of the twentieth century is comparable to that of the internet of the early twentyfirst century. In its own time, the ubiquity of the picture postcard in everyday social and cultural life was celebrated: ‘The picture postcard is triumphing all along the line. It dominates our domestic life; it pervades our business, and as a messenger of Art, Travel or Commerce, it wins a welcome wherever it goes’ (Anon, 1902). ‘Anon’ was not quite right in that absolute claim; contemporary media discourses displayed a range of concerns, even media panics over issues such as pornography, poor standards of literacy and also alleged declines in standards of politeness that are beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss. However, it is very clear that for Edwardian picture postcard users, this was an extremely exciting, highly multimodal technology, that served an enormous quantity of mostly informal communications, perceived as the epitome of their times.

References Anon. (1902). ‘To our readers.’ The Postcard Connoisseur, III(24), 83–83. Anon. (1904). ‘Some appreciations.’ The Picture Postcard and Collectors’ Chronicle, V(2), 29–29. Barton, D. (2015). ‘Tagging on Flickr as a social practice.’ In R. Jones, A. Chik & C. A. Hafner (Eds), Discourse and digital practices: Doing discourse analysis in the digital age (pp. 52–65). Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

The Picture Postcard of the Twentieth Century

23

Bazerman, C. (2004). ‘Intertextuality: How texts rely on other texts.’ In C. Bazerman & P. Prior (Eds), What writing does and how it does it (pp. 83–96). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Carline, R. (1971). Pictures in the post: The story of the picture postcard. London: Gordon Fraser. Clinton, A. (1984). Post office workers: A trade union and social history. London: George Allen & Unwin. Gibson, J. J. (1986). The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston, MA: Psychology Press. Gillen, J. (2013). ‘Writing Edwardian postcards. Journal of Sociolinguistics’, 17(4), 488–521. Gillen, J. (2015). Edwardian postcard project. Retrieved from http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/ fass/projects/EVIIpc. (Accessed 7 July 2016) Gillen, J. (in press) ‘ “I should have wrote a letter tonight:” a Literacy Studies perspective on the Edwardian postcard.’ In M.I. Matthews-Schlinzig & Caroline Socha (Eds), What is a letter? an interdisciplinary approach “Was ist ein Brief? — Eine interdisziplinäre Annäherung” Proceedings of the Symposium at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, July 2014. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Gillen, J., & Hall, N. (2010a). ‘Any mermaids? Tracing early postcard mobilities.’ In J. Urry, M. Büscher, & K. Witchger (Eds), Mobile methods (pp. 169–189). Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Gillen, J., & Hall, N. (2010b). ‘Edwardian postcards: Illuminating ordinary writing.’ In D. Barton & U. Papen (Eds), The anthropology of writing (pp. 169–189). London: Continuum. Gillen, J., & Merchant, G. (2012). ‘Contact calls: Twitter as a dialogic social and linguistic practice.’ Language Sciences, 35, 47–58. Graff, H. J. (2013). Literacy myths, legacies and lessons: New studies on literacy. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Jones, R., Chik, A., & Hafner, C. A. (2015). ‘Introduction: Discourse analysis and digital practices.’ In R. Jones, A. Chik, & C. A. Hafner (Eds), Discourse and digital practices: Doing discourse analysis in the digital age (pp. 1–17). Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Kress, G. (1998). ‘Visual and verbal modes of representation in electronically mediated communication: The potentials of new forms of texts.’ In I. Snyder (Ed), Page to screen: Taking literacy into the electronic era (pp. 53–79). London: Routledge. Kress, G. (2003). Literacy in the new media age. London: Routledge. Ladd, M. (2015). ‘Access and use in the digital age: A case study of a digital postcard collection.’ New Review of Academic Librarianship, 21(2), 225–231. Laurier, E., & Whyte, A. (2001). ‘ “I saw you”: Searching for lost love via practices of reading, writing and responding.’ Sociological Research Online, 6(1). Retrieved from http://www.socresonline.org.uk/6/1/laurier.html. (Accessed 7 July 2016). Lyons, M. (2013). The writing culture of ordinary people in Europe, c. 1860–1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

24

Literacy, Media, Technology

Met Office. (n.d.). Monthly Weather Report, April 1904. Retrieved from the Met Office website: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/learning/library/archive-hidden-treasures/ monthly-weather-report-1900s (Accessed 7 July 2016). Milne, E. (2010). Letters, postcards, email: Technologies of presence. New York: Routledge. Palczewski, C. (2005). ‘The male Madonna and the feminine Uncle Sam: Visual argument, icons, and ideographs in 1909 anti-woman suffrage postcards.’ Quarterly Journal of Speech, 91(4), 365–394. Staff, F. (1979). The picture postcard and its origins (2nd ed.). London: Lutterworth Press. Vásquez, C. (2015). ‘Intertextuality and interdiscursivity in online consumer reviews.’ In R. Jones, A. Chik, & C. A. Hafner (Eds), Discourse and digital practices: Doing discourse analysis in the digital age (pp. 66–80). London: Routledge.

3

Television as a New Medium Margaret Mackey

Introduction Television today is everywhere: in homes, in bars and restaurants, in doctors’ offices and airports and even on the planes themselves. The ubiquity of domestic television is an international phenomenon. A 2014 survey lists ninety countries that report household ownership of television sets at 85 per cent or above – and the survey compilers add, ‘Some countries report only the number of households with a colour television set, and therefore the true number may be higher than reported’ (NationMaster, 2014). In the developed West, ownership figures approach 100 per cent, with many households owning multiple sets. Many readers of this chapter will take these remarkable statistics completely for granted; television is so commonplace as to be nearly invisible. What we call ‘television’ today, however, only partially resembles the early incarnation of that medium. Today’s TV set serves as a medium for game playing. It houses personal video recorders that permit time-shifting and repeat viewing of programmes. It acts as a channel for video material fed into it by computer links and DVD players. And much more. The original television revolution created an enormous domestic impact, but the lifespan of what we might call ‘pure television’ – ephemeral, often live, beyond the control of the viewer whose only option for catching a programme was to show up on time – was surprisingly brief. Televisions began mass proliferation in the 1950s; by the 1980s, the phenomenon of video recording meant that a TV programme became something you could hold in your hands – another revolution whose consequences still reverberate. In this chapter I explore the early stages of that era of ephemeral television, through the lens of my own domestic experience with what to me was a new medium. In the terms used by Burnett and Merchant elsewhere in this book, I,

26

Literacy, Media, Technology

like many other Westerners in the 1950s, participated in a new (and temporary) assemblage that entailed ‘complexities of action and interaction between children, adults and machines, between ideas, discourses and imagination’ (Chapter 14, p. 219). This chapter explores some of those interactions around early television.

A domestic phenomenon Over the years, television has been perhaps the most domestically anchored medium. Until electricity entered the picture, gramophones were highly portable. Radio shifted some decades ago to the mobile world, establishing itself in cars and on transistors and then Walkmans. Movies, for a very long time, constitutively entailed leaving the house for the cinema. But television moved into the home and all its initial reception patterns were established domestically. It is therefore fitting that part of my account of television is told through the lens of my own family history. I have been watching television for some sixty years. This new technology disrupted my childhood around the time of my seventh birthday, and it arrived in my life after I had already learned to read. I had no history of moviegoing as a child, and I listened to the radio only to a limited extent. Effectively, television offered only the second form of fiction I had ever encountered, after print, and it provided my first experience of drama. The disruptive technology of my daughters’ childhood was video, followed by early computer games. For my grandchildren, the world of converging screens is all they have ever known. They actually watch very little live television; their screen lives are filtered through YouTube and Netflix; their parents’ tablets can link to the big screen on the wall or be held in a child’s hand. Mobility is certainly part of their schema of television. On the mobile screen, they can read, view, game and interact with remote family members. The distinctions that were so determinant for my brothers and me in the 1950s are far less significant to them. For me, television was ephemeral and impermanent. If you missed it, it was gone; though a show might be repeated some day, you could not count on its return. The capacity that my children acquired to replay their videos as often as they wanted, the facilities that permit my grandchildren to cruise the YouTube menus their parents have saved and to select old favourites for regular perusal – we may carelessly refer to the activity that ensues as ‘watching television’ but the experience is something very different from what I encountered.

Television as a New Medium

27

For us in the 1950s, there was a defining distinction between the utter fleetingness of the TV show that disappeared even as it played and the permanent, tangible world of the book that could be held in the hand, exchanged, revisited as often as desired. My grandchildren can hold a tablet in their hands, but, in that well-known paradox of the digital, its contents are, at one and the same time, only contingently present (each ‘screenful’ obliterates its predecessor) and yet infinitely recallable. In some ways, the change I experienced in the mid-1950s was the domestic revolution we call television. In other ways, what I experienced was the beginning of a short-lived broadcasting experiment, one that came to an end with the development of video recording in the 1970s and 1980s and was definitively put to rest by the invention of myriad mobile platforms in the twenty-first century. Television has been revolutionized, though our mental schema of ‘watching TV’ probably still entails a version of that 1950s experience.

Habitation and habituation Robert McDougall, exploring what brain research can tell us about reading a paper page and a screen page, discovered that participants’ prior experience affected what the EEGs recorded inside their brains. Those whose minds were accustomed to processing text on a screen produced different activity spikes on the graph from those without this experience. Such a variation establishes that a pure and absolute brain response to paper or pixels may simply not exist out of context (2015, pp. 100–101). Michael Grabowski, commenting on this work, observes: Thus, media habitation and habituation become central questions when examining the perception of media, leading to the conclusion that media themselves are not deterministic in their effects but, as extensions of human perception, integrate within an ecology of perception and cognition. (2015, p. xvii)

The ecological changes made by recorded and broadcast moving images have been memorably traced on a large scale over centuries of history by Raymond Williams. In the twentieth century, Williams argues, with the advent of cinema, radio and television: The audience for drama has gone through a qualitative change. I mean not only that Battleship Potemkin (Eisentein, 1925) and Stagecoach have been seen by

28

Literacy, Media, Technology hundreds of millions of people, in many places and over a continuing period, nor only that a play by Ibsen or O’Neill is now seen simultaneously by ten to twenty million people on television. This, though the figures are enormous, is still an understandable extension. It means that for the first time a majority of the population has regular and constant access to drama, beyond occasion or season. But what is really new – so new I think that is difficult to see its significance – is that it is not just a matter of audiences for particular plays. It is that drama, in quite new ways, is built into the rhythms of everyday life. … What we have now is drama as habitual experience: more in a week, in many cases, than most human beings would previously have seen in a lifetime. (1991, p. 12)

In the school year of 1955–1956, television certainly entered the rhythms of everyday life for my family. My parents initially refused to buy a TV set, but my brother suddenly disappeared from home life, glued to the screens in his friends’ houses for hours at a time. My mother and father decided they could regulate his viewing better at home, so they relented and a set appeared in our dining room. At first, our TV experience was subject to numerous rules: we could watch for a short spell after school, but in the evening we had to pick one half-hour show and could watch nothing else. Even if a sibling had picked a different programme, piggybacking was strictly prohibited. The initial plan was for no television at meals either, though I suspect that this decision was undercut the moment the TV set was put in its place on the dining room floor. Before long, we were watching the local news with our dinner. To the best of my recollection, the puritan edict about only one programme per evening per child did not survive the first year. These personal memories provide singular exemplification of a pattern that must have formed all around the television-viewing world in that era. Daily rhythms did not simply ‘change’; they were negotiated differentially in particular households. Most of the resistance my parents initially put up was swamped by the irresistible colonizing power and seduction of the TV screen. What the broadcasting system made possible was one factor; initially we had only one channel with limited hours. Family politics also played a role. Television rapidly became part of the parental armoury of child-management tactics. In our family, the battle was often conducted over bedtime. We lived in the easternmost city in North America, with consequences for our time zone. Newfoundland time runs ninety minutes ahead of Eastern Standard Time. The impact on any nationally scheduled programming was formidable. A hockey game, for example, that started in Montreal or Toronto at eight o’clock in the evening would not begin until 9.30 in Newfoundland.

Television as a New Medium

29

My parents negotiated a hard bargain with my brother, whose passion for hockey was intense: he had to go to bed early on Saturday night, without a fuss, and go straight to sleep; if he achieved these requirements, he would be woken up to watch the final period of the game being telecast on Hockey Night in Canada (CBC Television). But his side of the bargain was not yet complete; he was then obliged to be cheerful and well behaved all day Sunday, or the deal was off for the following Saturday. In such elaborate ways, television twined itself into our daily lives. Habitation and habituation followed. We got used to television, we ‘lived’ inside our television programmes for long stretches of play, we used television programmes as reference points for interpreting our own daily lives and vice versa. Our ‘ecology of perception and cognition’ (Grabowski, 2015, p. xvii) was irrevocably changed and we participated enthusiastically in its changing. The insertion of hours of daily drama into our mundane lives began to reshape how we responded to the quotidian nature of our surrounding world. Our television programmes had to teach us how to respond. Other children may have been regular cinema attenders by the age of seven or may have been habituated to radio drama. But there were enough utter novices like me that television programmes for children had to educate us in how to consume their offerings. The ephemeral quality of the television programme was generative. Viewers could return to the movie theatre as many times as they liked, but television was instantly gone. One thing we learned almost at once was that at the surface level of the individual programme, there was no such thing as a second chance: no pause, no rewind, no flicking back. That insight was soon followed by a second one: at the level of the series, there was plenty of repetition and redundancy. One programme was very much like another. We rapidly developed highly conventional schemas to help us process the fleeting stories. The potential to repeat makes many things possible and Steven Johnson has probably done as good a job as anyone in articulating the possibilities inherent in that option. ‘[T]he cognitive demands that televised narratives place on their viewers’, he declared in 2005, are ‘trending upward at a dramatic rate’ (p. 63). Television, Johnson says, is now beginning to match some of the cognitive complexity offered by reading. Recall the cognitive benefits conventionally ascribed to reading: attention, patience, retention, the parsing of narrative threads. Over the last half century of television’s dominance over mass culture, programming on TV has steadily increased the demands it places on precisely these mental faculties. The nature

30

Literacy, Media, Technology of the medium is such that television will never improve its viewers’ skills at translating letters into meaning, and it may not activate the imagination in the same way that a purely textual form does. But for all the other modes of mental exercise associated with reading, television is growing increasingly rigorous. And the pace is accelerating – thanks to changes in the economics of the television business, and to changes in the technology we rely on to watch. (2005, pp. 64–65)

Johnson says three elements contribute to this increase in complexity: ●

●

●

The first change is the proliferation of multiple threading of narratives. The second involves a reduction in what he calls ‘flashing arrows’ that direct viewer attention through ‘a kind of narrative signpost, planted conveniently to help the audience keep track of what’s going on’ (2005, p. 73). The third component is the development of social networks. My own experience corroborates Johnson on the importance of a new kind of social viewing. In 2002, I recorded a ‘live-action’ collective response to an editing error in the finale of the television series Felicity; viewers who were connecting online as the programme aired collaborated very actively to make sense of the ensuing discrepancies (Mackey, 2003).

To this list, I would add the impact of a shift in viewer control over the viewing experience, a phenomenon that Johnson mentions but does not highlight. Repeat viewing, especially on a DVD, YouTube or Netflix platform that permits pausing, rewinding and re-viewing, makes room for the social network to be activated both concurrently (as in my Felicity example) and at retrospective leisure. Alone or in concert with others, viewers can tease out the implications of the multiple threads of a story, just as they can with a novel, by flicking back and forth through the story and comparing notes with other readers. We had no such affordances at our disposal in the 1950s. We had to make sense on the fly or find out the next day from our own, very local collective on the playground what it was that we had missed. There were no second chances. But our programmes were designed for exactly that viewing scenario. Johnson is correct on an absolute scale when he suggests that programmes of yore ‘require less mental effort to make sense of what’s going on’ (2005, p. 83). For novice viewers at the time, however, the mental effort was significant. We had to learn how and why to process the images rolling before us. Even the rewards for paying attention were not instantly clear to us.

Television as a New Medium

31

‘Texts teach what readers learn’, said Margaret Meek, very influentially, in 1988. In this case, I am exploring what viewers learn, drawing on my own long-ago example to review what kind of learning was on offer to an utter newcomer to the world of moving images. I do not claim the kind of recall that would permit a detailed retro-analysis from memory. But another, smaller-scale, revolution has retrieved many of the shows I watched from the state of contingency in which I viewed them to the object-state of DVD-life. Not every programme from my childhood is retrievable, but many are now reincarnated, a season or two at a time, on DVDs and on Netflix; single programmes are often retrievable from YouTube. In some ways, the very fact that I can rewind at will renders their simplicities even more glaring, but these new forms of availability do provide a useful little test bed of texts that were definitively involved in teaching what at least one viewer learned. Looking at them today offers one kind of window into the world of early television. In this chapter, I will investigate the appeal and the affordances of four different forms of television programme: a simple children’s narrative (The Maggie Muggins Show, the one example where no recording is available); a children’s magazine programme (The Howdy Doody Show); an assortment of cowboy shows (including The Roy Rogers Show, The Annie Oakley Show and The Lone Ranger); and a situation comedy (Leave It to Beaver). Maggie Muggins was Canadian, but the others were all fixtures of American television of the 1950s and even before. Where I have been able to locate sample copies of my test set, I have selected the earliest programme available, with a view to maximizing the opportunity to explore what kind of teaching occurs.

A sample set Maggie Muggins For the most part, my retrievable examples are American. I did watch the Canadian programme Maggie Muggins, but I have not been able to locate any reproductions of the TV show, though I did locate a couple of associated story books (Grannan, 1947, 1958). The Howdy Doody Show came in both American and Canadian versions, but I am pretty sure that in Newfoundland, we watched the American incarnation; in any case, my DVD samples are American. Maggie Muggins and Howdy Doody both involved interactions between live actors and puppets, with highly repetitive scripts. My friend’s big sister used to call me Maggie Muggins as an acknowledgement of ‘Margaret’, and because,

32

Literacy, Media, Technology

like this television performer, I wore my hair in long braids. By the dissociated standards of how I could normally identify with the fictions in my life, these two links amounted to a binding connection, and I took on the inane antics of Maggie and her puppet animal friends with unusually personal commitment. The ‘flashing arrows’ that drew our attention to elements of the show were frequently reinforced by repetition. Maggie sang to herself every time as she visited her farmer friend, the only other human in this fictional world. To the best of my recollection, the opening words of the show were invariate: Tra la la la la la la lee Here comes Maggie Muggins, me, Tra la la la la la larrity, To say hello to Mr. McGarrity.

The signoff was equally ritualized but with some small changes in the wording to account for the activities of that particular day. Maggie would chant some version of the following (I made up this example): Tra la la la la la leadow Today we went to play in the meadow. I don’t know what will happen tomorrow!

I could still sing the opening and recite the closing (should anyone choose to request it!), but the details of the programmes in between are nowhere near so clear in my head. The books remind me that the animal chums include Fitzgerald Fieldmouse, Grandmother Frog and Reuben Rabbit, but my recollections are fuzzy and mostly involve Maggie talking brightly to Mr McGarrity, with her pigtails bobbing. The stories were simple and repetitive, and as much as anything what I gleaned from this programme was a greater understanding of the ritual pleasures of such repetition. For a very new viewer, even grasping some sense of the appeal of television was not neutral, nor could it be taken for granted at the point of television’s breakthrough into our daily lives. Maggie Muggins was not exciting or dramatic, but it did address new viewers like me with an invitation I could appreciate.

The Howdy Doody Show The Howdy Doody example differs insomuch as I can draw on data: a DVD set including forty complete episodes, assorted interviews, a timeline, a ‘memories book’ and the like.

Television as a New Medium

33

The blurb on the packaging of this DVD set says (in its American-centric way): The Howdy Doody Show was the first children’s network show to be broadcast: five days a week, the first network show of each day (preceded initially by the daily test pattern), the first television show to be broadcast in color, and the first show ever to air more than 1,000 continuous episodes. (Howdy Doody, 2008, n.p.)

It was produced by NBC, and I have no idea how many of these claims are true globally and how many hold true just in the United States. According to the assertion on the package, it first appeared in December 1947, when ‘only 20,000 American homes had televisions. With only six stations at this time, NBC owed much credit to The Howdy Doody Show for its growth and the network’s subsequent popularity’ (Howdy Doody, 2008, n.p.). My DVD set predates my own viewing experience, featuring full-length halfhour shows from 1949 to 1954. I would have seen my first specimen of Howdy Doody in 1955, and I certainly recognize many features. Freed from personal connection, I simply chose the earliest episode of the set in my possession (1 February 1949) in order to explore how it engaged with the project of teaching ‘how to watch’. The details were surprisingly intriguing for a show that can only be described as heavy-handed in its didacticism. Howdy Doody is a puppet, famous for his visible strings and low production values. Buffalo Bob Smith is the host of the programme, and Clarabell the Clown occupies a kind of halfway zone between human and created being. His clown makeup is all that makes his face recognizable; he does not speak but carries a horn that he honks to communicate. A group of live children constitute the Peanut Gallery. Initially a term used in vaudeville theatres, the Peanut Gallery incorporated the cheapest seats in the house (sometimes racially segregated) and acquired its name from two facts: peanuts were the cheapest treat to purchase in such theatres, and dissatisfied patrons of the Peanut Gallery would sometimes hurl their peanuts at the performers. ‘No comment from the Peanut Gallery’, was a standard saying across North America, one that was often heard in our house as our mother attempted to override the vociferous opinions of her pack of unruly children. In Howdy Doody time, the Peanut Gallery was composed entirely of children. I have discussed elsewhere (Mackey, 2016) that we novice viewers might make use of the presence of children on this bizarre show as a kind of check that television had some connections with our own world. Certainly the 1949

34

Literacy, Media, Technology

programme that I watched might benefit from some sort of voucher for its potential reality as so much of it would have been utterly alien to me. The opening sequence was standard: a cry from Buffalo Bob – ‘Say, kids, what time is it?’ and the response of the Peanut Gallery as the children burst into authentically out-of-tune song: It’s Howdy Doody time, It’s Howdy Doody time … It’s time to start the show, So kids, let’s go! (Howdy Doody, 1 February 1949)

This half-hour programme from 1949 contains at least three distinct lessons on watching. Six children from the Peanut Gallery are selected to follow instructions from Howdy Doody and draw a set of pictures. While they are working, Howdy and Clarabell show a ‘Howdy Doody Old Time Movie’. Initially the images run upside down, and the children have to tell Buffalo Bob to fix it. When that detail is sorted out, we are left with a very grainy silent movie to watch and Buffalo Bob provides a voiceover explanation of the images, using the Peanut Gallery as sounding board. In this film, little Bobbie causes mayhem throughout her family Christmas. After an assortment of slapstick antics, she pours some glue on the floor. Not only does she stick to the floor herself, she also causes rich Uncle Ben, a white-bearded oilman from Texas, to do the same. In the end, little Bobbie also sticks to the seat cushion, and when Uncle Ben picks her up for a hug, the cushion has to be pulled away, ripping her drawers away with it. Our final glimpse of this family is of Daddy hurriedly waving his hat to cover Bobbie’s bare little buttocks. ‘Isn’t that a cute movie?’ says Buffalo Bob to the Peanut Gallery. Buffalo Bob’s role as an interpreter of this old film can be compared very directly to the role of the person reading a story aloud to a child or group of children, as assessed by Marilyn Cochran-Smith (1984). She points out that the story-reader acts as a mediator, aligning the real child listeners with the implied reader created by the text. Buffalo Bob works in similar ways, helping the Peanut Gallery and the audience at home to align themselves with the implied viewer of an old film, some of the conventions of which will certainly seem odd or alienating to the children watching. One of Bob’s jobs in his running commentary is to highlight the flashing arrows that abound in this heavily signposted movie. Bob moves even more directly into the role of a mediator when the selected children produce the drawings they have created to Howdy Doody’s specification. Drawing a small girl, Michelle, to his lap, Bob produces the pictures and asks

Television as a New Medium

35

Michelle to suggest what is being portrayed in each. The idea is that six separate children can cooperate to create a story of Red Riding Hood; in the event, Bob has to do rather more mediating than he anticipated when Michelle gleefully identifies the final two pictures as the clown Clarabell, rather than as the wolf. Bob brings the Peanut Gallery round very smoothly to his own interpretation, and in this process, we see a clear instance of child viewers receiving training in how to look at a sequence of images. The final viewing lesson is rather more corporate in nature. Buffalo Bob has a board set up with pegs, and on these pegs he lays out an acrostic that, from the names of American cities, displays the label ‘NBC Television’. To me as a child viewer, this little segment would have been utterly opaque, if I had watched it in Newfoundland, and it is hard to believe it could have held much interest even for the audience members who actually lived in the cities that made it to the board. Nevertheless, the branding exercise conveyed the requisite information to an audience that might not have registered the significance of the NBC logo.

The cowboy shows Maggie Muggins and Howdy Doody were spectacularly simple in their framing, partly because they were aimed at very young children and partly because they were made on a tight budget. It seems a bit of a stretch to consider The Roy Rogers Show, The Annie Oakley Show, The Lone Ranger and others of that ilk as complex narrative, but to me, initially, that is exactly what they were. I have written in some detail elsewhere about Roy Rogers in particular (Mackey, 2014, 2016), and do not wish to reproduce my arguments at length. The lessons I learned from these highly conventional programmes were not trivial. For example, I learned to read juxtapositions as offering meaningful information about time and space (more about this understanding in the next section). I began to register the camera as a narrative organizer, attuning myself to elements of figure and ground, and the significance of the camera’s focal eye as one kind of flashing arrow. I established relatively quickly that I would need to remember those items that were deliberately brought to my attention because they were likely to reappear in meaningful contexts later on. I learned to carry information about the characters (shallow as it might seem today) from one show to the next. Roy Rogers offered highly stable characterization (flatter heroes and heroines would have been hard to find even then) and a very small repertoire of predictable responses to a crisis. The Lone Ranger inadvertently taught me about

36

Literacy, Media, Technology

continuity; the Lone Ranger was remarkable for his capacity to be plunged into a muddy puddle at one moment and to be restored to a pristine outfit in the very next shot with no other change of context. I clearly recall scornful playground conversations about the disrespect for viewers this casual approach implied, but I am fairly sure none of us understood the explanation for the problem we observed. I chiefly recall Annie Oakley as offering a reprieve from the suffocating patriarchy of just about every other programme I saw, but there is no doubt that the show provided lessons in watching as well. The cowboy shows (the three I have mentioned plus several others) functioned collectively as well as individually to provide a coherent fictional world (though ‘fictional’ is a very polite term for the white supremacist fantasies embodied in all these programmes). If you could follow one cowboy show, you were well equipped to make sense of another. George Burns and Gracie Allen parodied this predictability on the red-letter occasions when George broke the fourth wall to speak to the galloping cowboys and Indians on his television set, offering helpful guidance (‘They went thataway’) by pointing with his cigar. It did not take us long to become sophisticated enough viewers that we could appreciate this joke. Yet even as we laughed at Burns, we continued to follow the excitement of the cowboy shows with close involvement.

Leave It to Beaver My sample episode, ‘Beaver Gets “Spelled” ’, aired on 4 October 1957 (‘Beaver’). A pilot programme featuring different actors had preceded it, but this programme was the first in the regular series. Leave It to Beaver contains none of the overt instructional elements of The Howdy Doody Show. It was an early situation comedy, and it taught its viewing lessons tacitly. One substantial challenge for utter novices is learning to read cuts that permit the camera to move from one setting and time to another. Leave It to Beaver sometimes found ways to highlight its cuts with extra information. For example, in ‘Beaver Gets “Spelled” ’, there is a point where the school principal decides that a problem can be solved only by inviting Beaver’s mother to school, and says, ‘I’ll call her this evening.’ The screen fades to black, and it is very possible that a commercial break was inserted at this point. Be that as it may, the next image on the screen is June Cleaver holding the boys’ lunches as usual but dressed up in a good coat instead of sporting her normal apron. We know that time has passed because the ritual scene with the packed lunches marks the start of many days in the Cleaver household; we are also required to infer that

Television as a New Medium

37

the principal has made the phone call and the appointment has been set. Music helps us mark the time lapse; the score comes to a closure point as the screen blacks; a new tune starts with June appearing in her coat. The flashing-arrow role of a musical soundtrack was a convention I began to understand through watching this programme. Leave It to Beaver also features a laugh track, which acts as a supplementary ‘punctuation’ system to augment the information conveyed by the music. Jokes are emphasized, and the laugh track sometimes serves as segue to a new scene. The flashing arrow of the laugh track, in some ways, is the most overt instructional component in this programme and many others. It guides viewer attention, and for beginners, such guidance is helpful rather than irritating (hard as it is today to imagine the laugh track as scaffold). Leave It to Beaver is very slow by contemporary standards. Beaver and his older brother Wally discuss the terrible significance of the fact that he has been sent home with a note from his teacher to the background of a running gag that involves both boys making very elaborate efforts to fake having taken a bath. The scene runs from 5.11 to 8.24; the plot advances only minutely during this lengthy span, and the sight gag is clearly designed to serve as the main focus of viewer attention (reinforced by the laugh track). It is difficult to imagine a contemporary programme devoting well over 10 per cent of its screen time (the last scene of the episode concludes at 25.15 and the final credit rolls at 26.10) to a single joke, but Leave It to Beaver is decidedly leisurely. The ephemeral nature of television in the 1950s goes a long way to explaining the pace of the programme; redundancy must be built into every scene because there will be no opportunity to revisit a missed detail. The patriarchal and suburban ideology of this programme is legendary; to this day, all across North America, a reference to ‘June Cleaver’ invokes a certain kind of submissive housewife and full-time mother. I have written elsewhere (Mackey, 2016) about how the assorted American publications I encountered all reinforced a very strong image of the white picket fence, the Town Hall and the unforced patriotism that marked America to me. (Even that long list of American cities in The Howdy Doody Show would have fit readily into a pattern set by the squares on the Monopoly board named for urban US centres, and reinforced through a considerable percentage of the informational segments of my children’s magazine Jack and Jill.) In this chapter, however, I am less interested in the content of these programmes than in the viewing lessons they impart. Today’s children certainly learn these lessons at a younger age than seven or eight, but at some point they

38

Literacy, Media, Technology

need to take on board that, for example, one role of the soundtrack is to help direct visual attention, and that a cut, especially one marked by a fade to black, represents some shift in the frame of time and space. Television and film are not completely intuitive; they must teach what they need their viewers to learn just as books must do.

Playing it in The television we watched was extremely conventional and, in many cases, easy to adapt into our own play. Jackie Marsh’s work demonstrates that children still incorporate media content into their playground activities today (Marsh & Bishop, 2013), so it is not a practice uniquely rooted in the 1950s. Our cowboy shows were the most straightforward ones to import into our own environment – in part, no doubt, because of their plots that we perceived as heroic. Another ‘playable’ aspect of the cowboy shows was their outsized and simplistic gestures. We could gallop, we could shoot and we could have real or pretend fist-fights. We could swarm through the grass, and we could hide behind boulders. Our rocky landscape in Newfoundland was very far removed from the western scenery that featured in programme after programme, but it contained many of the requisite dramatic elements. Visual verisimilitude was not our priority – not least because the acquisition of real horses was beyond our capacity and even our wildest dreams. Cowboy shows, in short, could be played. Other programmes could be pretended, not quite the same exercise. Leave It to Beaver, with its predominantly male cast, left me unstirred – though I was very thoroughly a feminine little girl of the 1950s, even I could not work up any excitement about June Cleaver’s place in that world. But I imagined myself into other fictions, especially during my long walks to school. I overlaid imaginary landscape on the bedrock (literal and metaphorical) of my own surroundings. As I moved towards adolescence, I also began to imagine myself as the subject on the screen, surrounding myself with a panoply of imaginary cameras as well as a particular fictional universe. What I lacked in sophistication, I compensated for in fervour. I am not sure if all this pretending made me a better viewer or if it simply narrowed my focus so that I mostly watched with the intent of extracting subsequent play value – a highly selective perspective. Either way, my practices certainly invested an element of embodied attention into my viewing experiences.

Television as a New Medium

39

Conclusions Like any new medium, television did not simply ‘arrive’ in our lives in the 1950s. I have drawn on my own experience to the extent represented in this chapter in order to explore some of the ways in which television, rather, was ‘negotiated’ into our lives. Other ingredients in the ecology of our lives had to yield to make room for this new element. Our domestic negotiations over how to be a child in our particular family, our outdoor play, our indoor pretending and our interpretive skills all shifted with the onset of TV in our daily existence. All new media are negotiated in this way. It is very easy to attach a date to a new arrival and divide our awareness of its onset into a kind of ‘before and after’ assessment. But there is a ‘during’ to the appearance of any new media platform; its adoption into daily life is negotiated in many different ways, some arising from the nature of the new vehicle and some owing their complexity to the nexus of ordinary existence that is being disturbed. The content and presentation of the new platform also play a role, as does the relationship between the new arrival and the previously existing complex of old media. Adjustment and displacement take time and attention. We feel today as if these changes are happening at lightning speed, but even now they do not happen in a flash. My more singular example of the arrival of television into the lives of viewing novices provides a slow-motion version of a phenomenon with which we are all familiar, and which it is highly important for us to understand.

References Cochran-Smith, M. (1984). The making of a reader. Westport, CT: Praeger. Grabowski, M. (2015). ‘Introduction.’ In M. Grabowski (Ed.), Neuroscience and media: New understandings and representations (pp. xiii–xx). New York: Routledge. Grannon, M. (1947). Maggie Muggins stories: A recent selection of the famous Canadian radio stories. Illus. E. Schmidt. Philadelphia: John C. Winston. Grannon, M. (1958). Maggie Muggins: Tee-Vee tales. Illus. P. Patience. Toronto: Thomas Allen. Johnson, S. (2005). Everything bad is good for you: How today’s popular culture is actually making us smarter. New York: Riverhead Books. MacDougall, R. (2015). ‘Seeing in, and out, to the extended mind through an EEG analysis of page and screen reading.’ In M. Grabowski (Ed.), Neuroscience and media: New understandings and representations (pp. 89–107). New York: Routledge.

40

Literacy, Media, Technology

Mackey, M. (2003). ‘Did Elena die? Narrative practices of an online community of interpreters.’ Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 28(1), 52–62. Mackey, M. (2014). ‘Roy and the Wimp: The nature of an aesthetic of unfinish.’ In M. Reimer, N. Ali, D. England, & M.D. Unrau (Eds), Seriality and texts for young people: The compulsion to repeat (pp. 218–236). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mackey, M. (2016). One child reading: My auto-bibliography. Edmonton, AB: University of Alberta Press. Marsh, J., & Bishop, J. (2013). Changing play: Play, media and commercial culture from the 1950s to the present day. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Meek, M. (1988). How texts teach what readers learn. Stroud: Thimble Press. Muir, E. R. (Producer). (1947–1960). The Howdy Doody Show: 40 Episode Collection [DVD]. Universal City: NBC Universal, 2008. NationMaster. (2014). Households with television: Countries compared. Retrieved from the Nation Master website: http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Media/ Households-with-television (Accessed 7 July 2016). Neilson, J. (Director), Connelly, J., & Mosher, B. (Producers). (4 October 1957). ‘Beaver gets spelled.’ In Leave it to beaver: The complete first season. [DVD]. Universal City, CA: Universal Studios, 2005. Williams, R. (1991). Writing in society. London: Verso.

4

From the Wild Frontier of Davy Crockett to the Wintery Fjords of Frozen: Changes in Media Consumption, Play and Literacy from the 1950s to the 2010s Jackie Marsh

Introduction This chapter is concerned with how children respond to media texts and considers the nature of children as media consumers in the 1950s and the 2010s. There is little doubt that the extent and nature of children’s media consumption has changed over this time due to the growth of the media industry and its extension into new products through technological developments. In the 1950s, children’s exposure to non-print media was limited to television, film and radio. It is not possible to identify the hours of screen use by children in this period, although older people interviewed about their memories of media use in this time report that it was minimal, as they spent most of their leisure time playing outdoors (Marsh & Bishop, 2014). Fast forward to 2013, however, when the film Frozen was released, and the picture is very different. In the UK, Ofcom reported that children aged 5–15 watched on average 15.4 hours of television, used the internet for an average of 12 hours, played computer games for 8.7 hours and listened to radio for 6.8 hours over the period of one week. The figures for 3–4-year-olds are 15.5 hours for television, 6.5 hours for the internet, 5.5 hours gaming and 8.2 hours listening to the radio a week (Ofcom, 2013, p. 53). While the amount of time children engage with screens has increased, it is not the case with regard to cinema visits. The post-war years were a golden age for cinemas, but numbers dropped over time because of the increasing availability of television in homes from the early 1950s. It is not possible to identify figures that identify the child audience, but a Media Salles report (McCosker, n.d.)

42

Literacy, Media, Technology

indicates that there were over a billion (1,182,000,000) cinema admissions in the UK in 1955. In 2012, 172 million cinema tickets were sold in the UK (British Film Industry, 2013). The decrease in numbers does not necessarily relate to a decrease in interest in children’s films, however, as the figures relating to Disney’s profit from Frozen, detailed in a later section of this chapter, suggest. The chapter is predicated on the assumption that there is a significant relationship between play and literacy. Christie and Roskos (2009) suggest that the work of both Piaget (1962) and Vygotsky (1978) was helpful in illuminating this relationship: while a Piagetian approach focused on the interaction between individuals and the objects encountered in the environment, which includes tools for literacy in some play episodes, Vygotsky’s work identified the role of others in constructing understandings of literacy as a social practice. Vygotsky (1978) commented on the way in which symbolic play led to written language and, drawing on his work, Christie and Roskos (2009, p. 1) note that there are numerous aspects of behaviour that play and literacy share, including ‘pretend transformations, narrative thinking, meta-play talk and social interaction’. This relationship has been analysed further in the work of Wohlwend (2011), who argues that children play their way into becoming literate. Through play, children represent their understandings of the world around them symbolically, and their meaning-making leads to the production of multimodal, performative texts. Children frequently spontaneously embed the acts of reading, writing or multimodal authoring within play episodes and, as Medina and Wohlwend point out, these practices cannot be placed into a hierarchy that signals relative importance: Literacies often work together to open spaces for collaborative cultural production: that is, neither reading, writing, designing, nor playing is privileged over the other, but combine in assemblages of literacies in moment-to-moment interactions. (Medina & Wohlwend 2014, p. 114)

Thus, the relationship between play and literacy is well established and informs the analysis undertaken in this chapter. Children’s play and literacy practices are shaped by all aspects of their experience, including popular culture (Dyson, 2003; Marsh, 2013). Children’s popular culture practice is frequently embedded in global mediascapes (Appadurai, 1996). They engage with television, film and online sites and may own artifacts (including toys, books, comics/magazines, clothes and so on) that relate to their media interests. This ‘transmedia intertextuality’ (Kinder, 1993, p. 3) means that children engage with a particular narrative across a range of media. Carrington (2013) refers to these transmedia worlds as ‘new media

Changes in Media Consumption, Play and Literacy

43

assemblages’, which points to the way in which they are now dominated by ‘new’ media and digital literacy practices in a context which has changed rapidly since Kinder’s work on video games in the 1990s. Lévi-Strauss’s (1966) concept of bricolage characterizes a construction of knowledge in which the creator, the bricoleur, draws on whatever is to hand in order to create something new, and the bricolage does not have a central, privileged text. Children act as bricoleurs when they engage with new media assemblages, which are disparate in nature and not unified textually, and create texts and artifacts drawing on those assemblages which are themselves multilayered and complex. These hybrid texts and artifacts draw together children’s interests in popular culture but also may include snippets of talk overheard in shops, tales told to them by their families, something they have seen on television and so on (Pahl & Rowsell, 2013). This process was noted by the Opies in relation to children’s play episodes, which, they argue, turn out to be little more than reflections (often distorted reflections) of how they themselves live, and of how their mothers and fathers live, and of the books they read, and the TV programmes they watch. Whatever has latest caught their fancy is tested on their perpetual stage. (Opie & Opie, 1969, pp. 330–331)

Children’s textual poaching (Jenkins, 1992) and the continuous process of the appropriation, accommodation, assimilation and/or adaptation of new media assemblages is an established part of their everyday lives. Film is an important part of these practices. Parry (2013) demonstrates, in a study of young children’s engagement with film, that the medium is very important in children’s social and cultural lives. She found that the children she studied enjoyed playing with texts and artifacts related to film and that, in doing so, they were establishing their identities and signalling social affinities. In addition, Parry recognizes that Disney films were central to this process. Disney has been dominant in children’s popular cultural worlds since the early twentieth century, primarily through films but also through other media, such as games, toys and, recently, online virtual worlds. There has been extensive critique of the ‘Disnification’ (Giroux, 1995) or ‘Disneyization’ (Bryman, 2004) of society, terms which indicate the way in which Disney now permeates many aspects of the social, cultural and economic experiences of children and their parents. In addition, the portrayal of women, black and minority ethnic and working-class people in Disney films has been the subject of long-standing criticism, as have their commercialization practices (Wasko, 2001). Parry (2013), however, while recognizing these problematic aspects of Disney films

44

Literacy, Media, Technology

and commercial practices, also acknowledges the appeal of the films for many, and points out that young audiences are not bereft of critical powers and may engage in critique of these ideologies themselves. In addition, it is the case that Disney has persistently been able to capture the imagination of children, which is why its work features in this analysis. Their long-standing popularity offers the opportunity to undertake an analysis of this nature. The two films that form the focus for the analysis were chosen because they were the iconic children’s film of their respective eras, outperforming both other Disney films released around the periods in question and other children’s films. It therefore seems apposite to analyse the responses to these two films, given the similarities in the impact they had on audiences in the two periods in question. In addition, the choice of a film from the 1950s enables the analysis to draw on the work of the Opies, key commentators on children’s popular pursuits in the UK in this era. It is also the case that this decade was significant in terms of the impact that television had on the play and media lives of children and, therefore, it is an appropriate starting point for the analysis of changes in media use over time (Marsh & Bishop, 2014). The films are summarized briefly below. Davy Crockett: Indian Fighter, Davy Crockett Goes to Congress and Davy Crockett at the Alamo were released as a three-part television series broadcast in the United States in 1954–1955, the first television series of its kind. The series portrayed the life of Davy Crockett, a US frontier and congress person who, after leaving politics in 1835, fought in the Texas revolution and was killed at the Battle of the Alamo in 1836. Although Disney remained true to the historical facts, the public outcry was such that they had to shoot a new show, broadcast in 1955–1966, with a resurrected Davy Crockett (Allen, 1990). The first television series was edited into a feature-length film, Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier, released in 1955. Frozen is a three-dimensional, computer-animated, musical fantasy-comedy film released in 2013. The story was inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale The Snow Queen. It tells the story of Elsa, a princess who is estranged from her younger sister, Anna, because of Elsa’s fear of her own powers, which enable her to shoot snow and ice from her fingers and freeze all before her. Elsa flees into the mountains to ensure she does not cause harm to others, especially her sister, by inadvertently freezing them. The plot concerns the pursuit of Elsa by Anna and their eventual reunion, and is unusual in that there is no stock villain and the handsome prince, who initially appears as if he will help Anna to rescue Elsa, turns out to be a bad character. The historical and cultural analysis outlined in this chapter was undertaken by means of a review of several sources of information, adhering

Changes in Media Consumption, Play and Literacy

45

to principles that should underpin such analyses, such as a critical reading of both primary and secondary sources and a triangulation of selected evidence in relation to texts, their contexts and their audiences (Lehtonen, 2000). Details regarding the reception of Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier in the United States were gathered primarily through an analysis of texts detailing the history of the Davy Crockett phenomenon, identified through extensive searches of relevant databases (e.g. Web of Science; ERIC). With regard to the UK, I drew on the work of Opie and Opie (1959), identifying all that they had written in The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren about Davy Crockett. I also undertook a search of The Times and The Guardian/ Observer archives, examining all of the articles mentioning Davy Crockett and Frozen for relevant information. I analysed Disney’s website and Facebook pages relating to Frozen and undertook a YouTube/Vevo search using ‘Frozen’ as a search term. These websites were chosen because they are widely used in contemporary societies and thus an appropriate source to use in terms of illuminating some of the social and cultural practices undertaken by children today (Ito et al., 2009). The material gathered has enabled a number of points to be made about the continuities and discontinuities with regard to media consumption of play and literacy over time. Seven themes emerged from the analysis of the data: viral playgrounds, mediascapes, music, brandom, moral panics, parodic play, and play and literacy practices. These are discussed in the following section. The discussion in the remainder of this chapter addresses the question, ‘What are the continuities and changes in media consumption, literacy and play, identified through a comparison of child audience responses to a film launched in the 1950s and one launched in the 2010s?’ It is argued that this is an important question because of the constant cries that children’s play is disappearing in the new media age (for further reflection on this issue, see Burn & Richards, 2014; Marsh & Bishop, 2014; Willett, Richards, Marsh, Burn, & Bishop, 2013). Only historical reviews which consider play over time can address this issue and, even then, we should note that what can be presented is only a partial analysis bound by whatever sources are to hand at any given time.

Viral playgrounds One aspect of the Davy Crockett phenomenon that was noted frequently in commentaries on its popularity in the United States was the way it became

46

Literacy, Media, Technology

an overnight success. The film producer Steven Spielberg reported this in an interview he gave: Remember when Davy Crockett hit the theaters in 1955? I guess I was in third grade at the time. Suddenly the next day, everybody in my class but me was Davy Crockett. And because I didn’t have my coonskin cap and my powder horn, or Old Betsy, my rifle, and the chaps, I was deemed the Mexican leader, Santa Anna. And everybody came after me with the butt ends of their flintlock rifles. And they chased me home from school until I got my parents to buy me a coonskin cap. (Hodenfield, 2000, p. 77)

It may have been that the time was ripe for the release of a film of this nature. In a review of the social and cultural context that surrounded the Davy Crockett craze in the United States, Griffin (1999, pp. 107–108) notes that there was a growing concern for the safety of children in suburban landscapes, given increased traffic and the fear of drowning in pools in the middle-class gardens of California, in addition to anxiety about a perceived rise in juvenile delinquency, all of which persuaded parents to restrict the movements of their children. This in turn, Griffin argues, led children to be particularly attracted to the freedom seemingly enjoyed by Davy Crockett, who could move about at will. Whatever the reasons for its popularity, the film was an overnight success in both the United States and the UK. This can be characterized as an inevitable outcome of the ‘viral playground’. In using this term, I am not referring to any specific playground (e.g. school and adventure) but rather the sites of play in which children interact, such as an institutional space, street, park, bedroom and so on. In such spaces, rhymes, games, secrets and cultural knowledge are passed from child to child virally, being transformed, and the transmitted knowledge re-contextualized in the process. Even before the days of the internet, this transfer of knowledge occurred quickly, with the Opies (1959) reporting the swift passage of knowledge of games and rhymes across the country, and internationally, within weeks. The Opies suggested that this was an example of ‘transworld couriers’ employed by the ‘schoolchild underground’ (1959, p. 7). Despite its overnight appearance, both US (O’Boyle, 2013) and UK reports point to the short-lived nature of the Davy Crockett craze. As the Opies noted: At the end of the summer [of 1956], Crockett fever disappeared as suddenly as it arrived; only the Crockett songs continued, and still continue (1959) in full throat. (Opie & Opie, 1959, p. 122)

In comparing this spread of interest in a film-induced media craze from the 1950s with that of the 2010s, it is interesting to note that the rapid spread of

Changes in Media Consumption, Play and Literacy

47

knowledge through viral playgrounds is now much quicker due to the use of online social networking. Synchronous and asynchronous communication via Twitter, Facebook and so on enables games and rhymes to be passed on rapidly across large distances. Indeed, while it was the case that international transmission of childlore has always been present (the Opies noted, in The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959), similar Davy Crockett rhymes appearing in Wales and Australia within weeks of each other), there is now much more capacity for fast global exchange of cultural knowledge. In relation to Frozen, for example, children exchanged knowledge using YouTube comments and there were numerous blogs,1 fan fiction sites2 and wikis,3 which enabled fan-to-fan communication and the rapid spread of Frozen-related childlore.

Mediascapes While some might assume that mediascapes are a recent phenomenon in a new market economy, this is not the case. O’Boyle (2013, p. 90) suggested that Davy Crockett ‘was the first boomer fad, a seven month, $300-million buying spree’. There were over 3,000 separate merchandized products for the Davy Crockett film, with, as Telotte (2008) notes: not only the naturally linked products, such as buckskin jackets, moccasins, jeans, toy guns, action figures, and especially coonskin caps, but also items such as bathing suits, bedspreads, bicycles, guitars, lunch boxes, mugs, pajamas, pillows, purses, puzzles, soap, thermos bottles, underwear and wallets. (p. 103)

Inevitably, in 2013, the scope of the Frozen mediascape was much larger. In addition to these physical objects, it is now possible to play with virtual Frozen characters in computer games or blend online and offline play, as in the case of ‘Disney Infinity’, which involves the manipulation of physical dolls interacting with a game on screen. This is a key characteristic of contemporary play (Burke & Marsh, 2013; Marsh, 2014). Further, while the Davy Crockett craze did have international appeal, the Frozen mediascape was popular in over forty countries across all continents because of the globalized nature of media discourses (Appadurai, 1996). Indeed, such was the film’s success that it has been reported that in the second quarter of 2014, it had boosted Disney’s profits by 27 per cent and had accrued $770 million in global revenue (Kang, 2014). There is now greater intervention by global multinationals to sustain the initial interest in these mediascapes beyond the immediate period of passion.

48

Literacy, Media, Technology

Thus, while the Davy Crockett craze apparently lasted no more than a year in the 1950s, it is anticipated that the interest in Frozen will be extended, as it was for the previous popular Disney-animated film Tangled, released in 2010 but still popular in 2014. The intensity of the attraction for the films may dissipate somewhat for some over time, but the interest in the films for others may be sustained by repeated viewings on DVD players, which was not possible in the 1950s. Further, the media companies now adopt a number of peer-topeer strategies for communication in order to foster interest over time, such as the Disney Frozen Facebook page,4 discussed further below. In addition, the extension of the narrative into other media, a key aspect of mediascapes, means that there are now more opportunities to engage with the film in a variety of ways in contemporary societies, which can sustain interest for a longer period than was previously the case.

Music Music has always been an important part of children’s media consumption, and Disney has been continuously active in this area. Bill Haye’s 1955 recording of ‘The Ballad of Davy Crockett’, linked to the release of the film, was an astounding hit for that time. The song sold seven million copies in six months (Telotte, 2008, p. 103). The president of Disneyland/Vista Records reported that ‘sales of the three Davy Crockett story-telling records were in blockbuster figures never before enjoyed by any children’s records’ (Johnson, 1971), which encouraged the company to branch out into more general releases of popular music titles. After limited sales to the adult market, Disney realized that its primary market was children’s music and that has been their key focus since the 1960s (Johnson, 1971). Sixty years later, Frozen’s soundtrack was also popular, with the most popular song being ‘Let It Go!’, which charted in numerous countries across the globe. While the attraction of the signature tunes of films has changed little, however, the consumer practices in relation to the music of these two films have altered considerably over the past sixty years. In the 1950s and 1960s the music produced for children was not mainstream, and Disney failed to make any gains in the mainstream market (Johnson, 1971), which is not the case today. Bickford (2012), in an analysis of Disney’s engagement in the music industry, points to the way in which Disney has promoted a range of tween stars whose music is linked to other elements of the Disney portfolio, including television programmes and films. Disney singers such as Miley Cyrus

Changes in Media Consumption, Play and Literacy

49

and the Jonas Brothers have produced mainstream pop songs, albeit with desexualized lyrics. In this way, he suggests, Disney is bringing mainstream music to children, by coding it however trivially as childish. But it also does the opposite: taking music originally produced for children and expanding its reach to capture the mainstream. There is a backand-forth here, where children’s media colonises the mainstream just as much as the mainstream colonises children’s media. (Bickford, 2012, p. 426)

In addition, children are more actively involved in music production as well as consumption in contemporary societies, as identified by Bruns (2006), who introduced the term ‘produser’ to refer to this trend. Increasingly, young children’s musical practices involve music production and the sharing of these productions through social networking, with children aged 5–11 in a previous study of their use of virtual worlds reporting regular use of online music sites such as Limewire, in addition to using YouTube to access music videos (Marsh, 2014). Some children create music videos, including music machinima, which are films made in virtual worlds, and computer games using screen capture software. A popular form of machinima is ‘CMPV’ – films made in the Disney virtual world ‘Club Penguin’ (see Marsh, 2015, for further discussion of this phenomenon). These productions are an example of children and young people’s creative digital activities with music: they might make videos with soundtracks, upload films of themselves and/or peers singing and/or dancing (sometimes on karaoke machines or dance mats) or create and circulate ringtones made from favourite songs. Small (1998) uses the term ‘musicking’ to characterize people’s everyday engagement with music, and these social networking practices can be characterized as vernacular digital musicking in which, as Woodruff (2009, p. 26) suggests, there is a ‘false binary between “artist” and “listener” ’, as is the case with many of the musical practices of children. Thus, in relation to Frozen, there are many fan-produced videos posted to sites such as Vevo and YouTube, including a Club Penguin Music Video (CPMV) version of ‘Let It Go!’.5 These digital musicking practices of children have been utilized by global media companies for their own purposes, as discussed in the next section.

Brandom Given Disney’s commercial aims, it is, perhaps, unsurprising that they take an interest in fans and engage in activities which draw in those enthusiasts. In 1955,

50

Literacy, Media, Technology

the Davey Crockett craze was fuelled by Disney sending the star, Fess Parker, on visits to thirteen countries. His visit to the UK was eagerly received by young fans, with a media report of the time commenting that his appearance ‘was heralded by a good deal of anticipatory yells from the fur-hatted youngsters who eventually had to be restrained by policemen’ (The Manchester Guardian, 1956). In the twenty-first century, however, there are many more ways of reaching and engaging with fans, primarily through the use of the internet. Inevitably, this leads to the proliferation of online marketing activities, but of interest is the way in which this is sometimes approached in a bottom-up manner, through engaging with the practices of fans themselves. As Guschwan (2012, p. 20) notes, ‘social media has enabled fans/consumers to easily congregate online, but it has also created an opportunity for marketers to exploit the labor of these fans/ consumers and the communities that they have constructed’, a phenomenon also discussed by Van Dijck (2013, p. 18). Guschwan develops the notion of ‘brandom’, which references the activities of corporate institutions towards fans, such as the attempts by football clubs to utilize the passion of soccer fans towards their clubs for promotional purposes. I suggest that Disney utilizes the brandom strategy in a number of ways through its use of the social networking and digital musicking practices of Frozen fans. For example, the Disney Frozen Facebook page on 24 June 2014 posted a link to the film’s song In Summer, hosted on Vevo. The post alongside it noted, ‘It’s time to do whatever snow does in summer … make a music video of Olaf ’s favorite summer song, In Summer! Share yours using #FrozenInSummer.’6 Using two social networking forums, Facebook and Twitter, Disney promotes its single and also taps into the fandom practice of making music videos that pay homage to the original song, which fans then post online for others to share.

Moral panics Given the consistent moral panics concerning children and young people’s engagement with popular culture (Cohen, 2002), it can be of no surprise that this pattern can be seen in relation to both Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier and Frozen. The nature of the moral panic relating to each, however, was quite different. In relation to Davy Crockett, the key concern appeared to focus on the coonskin hat worn by the star of the show. Versions of the hats, as the Steven Spielberg interview suggested, were the ‘must have’ item for children of the day. A US commentator on the Davy Crockett craze in the United States, Margaret J.

Changes in Media Consumption, Play and Literacy

51

King (1985), reported that when supplies of live raccoons flagged, raccoon coats from the 1920s were cut up in order to create the sought-after hats. These were flammable and ‘became the subject of municipal safety bulletins, and all fire chiefs warned of their potential as fire hazards in a safety memo’ (King, 1985, p. 148). Further, Life magazine bemoaned the television series’ and films’ ‘sudden and shattering impact on the nation’s home life’ (Life, 1955), noting that children were even going to bed with their coonskin hats still on. In the UK, the hats also created great consternation, with some media reports suggesting that people were killing cats in order to make Davy Crockett hats from them, with one report titled, ‘Cats “killed for their skins”. Warning on “Davy Crockett” hats’ (The Times, 1956). Another report in The Manchester Guardian (1956) contained the headline, ‘Boys maimed and killed cats for Davy Crockett Hats’, and outlined a story in which three boys were caught torturing and killing cats. The story suggests that one of the boys apparently made the remark, ‘We will make Davy Crockett hats’, which the magistrate said ‘was the only possible explanation’ for this cruel act. In addition to the worry over the hats, Davy Crockett play with guns was a concern. Opie and Opie (1959) note that there was an increase in eye injuries, reported by the British Medical Journal, caused by children pointing toy rifles at each other. In 2013/2014, the moral panic that related to Frozen was quite different in nature and appeared to have less evidence to support the claims made. In the United States, there were widespread media reports of remarks by the pastor and host of a right-wing radio show, Kevin Swanson, that the film was ‘the work of the devil’ in that it was indoctrinating young girls to become lesbians, presumably because it focuses on the love between two girls (although they are sisters, which makes the claim even more inexplicable). Peterson (2014) suggests that ‘many equate the film’s most recognizable song, “Let It Go”, with the experience of coming out and accepting one’s sexual orientation’. However, the media reporting of this story was irreverent in tone, with little sense that the majority of the press (or the public) took this particular moral panic very seriously.

Parodic Play One function of play is to explore and respond to the social and cultural contexts that surround players. Through their games, rhymes and playground rituals, children examine cultural and social values and practices, seeking to reinforce normative discourses but also to question them. In their carnivalesque play (Bakhtin, 1984), culture becomes a subject of parody as well as a site for

52

Literacy, Media, Technology

imitation (Willett, 2013, pp. 159–160). Opie and Opie, in The lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959), report on the language play generated by Davy Crockett. From Wales, they note the following example of a parody, based on the words and tune of the Davy Crockett hit single: Born on a mountain top in Tennessee, Killed his Ma when he was only three, Killed his Pa when he was only four, And now he’s looking for his brother-in-law! Davy, Davy, Crockett King of the Wild Frontier. (Opie & Opie, 1959, p. 119)

In Glasgow, a parodic verse transformed David Crockett into ‘Davy Crewcut’, the leader of a Teddy Boy gang: Born in a tenement at Gorbals Cross Of all the Teddy boys he was the boss Got him a slasher [razor] five feet wide Chopped up his mother and dumped her in the Clyde Davy Crewcut, Davy Crewcut King of the Teddy Boy Gang. (Opie & Opie, 1959, p. 120)

Given that parodies have been a consistent part of childlore for centuries (Roud, 2010), it is of no surprise that Frozen parodies abound. However, what is of interest in parodic responses to Frozen is that adults also participate widely in the language play. So, for example, a US father penned a song that he uploaded on to YouTube7 in which he adapted the songs’ lyrics to complain about the effect of the song ‘Let It Go!’ on his family and himself. The original lyrics include the following verse: Let it go, let it go! Can’t hold it back any more. Let it go, let it go! Turn away and slam the door. I don’t care what they’re going to say. Let the storm rage on. The cold never bothered me anyway.

The father adapted these lyrics in his own song: Let it go, let it go! Can’t hear it one more time.

Changes in Media Consumption, Play and Literacy

53

Let it go, let it go! I think I’m gonna lose my mind. I don’t care what my kids will say. Let this song be gone. I just can’t take it another day.

The use of the internet to share and consume parodies in this way is a common practice in contemporary life, and the intergenerational nature of this play is of note. In the twenty-first century, there is widespread evidence of intergenerational play, propelled by the growing use of technologies, which contrasts to the reports of people growing up in the 1950s who, in general, comment on the separation of adult and child cultures (Marsh & Bishop, 2014).

Play and literacy The final theme to be discussed in this chapter is the nature of play and literacy in relation to Davy Crockett and Frozen. While both films prompted fantasy play, key differences between play then and now can be observed in the nature of the play texts developed. Marsh and Bishop (2014) suggest that contemporary play can be characterized by a process of intensified bricolage, which refers to the way in which some play texts, in some contexts, are now more laminated, that is multi-layered, due to the complexities of the textual landscapes of contemporary childhood. Localized practices are now conflated with the global in ways that were not possible in previous generations because of the way in which digital technologies accelerate and extend the ‘glocalization’ (Robertson, 1995) process. (Marsh & Bishop, 2014, p. 156)

In addition, the current relationship between online and offline play, seen in the example discussed previously of ‘Disney Infinity’, is leading to new kinds of play practices and online relationships between children (Burke & Marsh, 2013). Similarly, literacy practices in relation to each film have changed due to technological developments. Davy Crockett books and comics proliferated in the 1950s, while in the twenty-first century, children turn to a wider range of ‘textual toys’ (Dyson, 2003) in their meaning-making. In addition to the film and machinima creation, blogs, fan-fiction and wikis mentioned previously, there are also a variety of multimodal, digital texts that enable engagement with Frozen, such as story apps,8 singalong books with CD, karaoke DVDs and online games. Both play and literacy, and the relationship between them, are more complex in the transmedia landscapes of contemporary digital childhoods.

54

Literacy, Media, Technology

Conclusion This comparison of the continuities and changes in media consumption, play and literacy in the 1950s and the 2010s has raised a number of points that deserve further consideration. First, the way in which some of the fundamental responses to popular films are similar across this timescape is of interest, as it points to some of the enduring features of childhood, such as the importance of play, the impetus to be creative and innovative in relation to play and text production, and the significance of music for both affective and social purposes. Second, the continuities in relation to the responses at a macro-level to children’s interests and ‘crazes’ suggest that some adults tend to forget that they themselves once participated in such crazes as children and do not acknowledge the positive elements in addition to the challenges. Society will also construct particular conceptualizations of childhood, which are frequently more about the given values and morals of an era than anything to do with the lived experiences of children (Ariès, 1966). Finally, continuities in terms of the engagement with the mediascapes of a particular narrative demonstrate the way in which stories remain at the heart of our experience of daily life and define our relationship to each other and the world (Bruner, 1986). Notwithstanding the continuities, the analysis undertaken in this chapter has also identified significant differences in audience responses to the films, which relate largely to the way in which technology and commercial culture have impacted on children’s lives. These are not the only reasons for the differences, as there are numerous social and cultural changes that may frame the response of contemporary children to iconic films. For example, given the increasing restrictions in the twentyfirst century with regard to children’s independent movements away from the home (Gleave & Cole-Hamilton, 2012), it may be the case that a lack of opportunity to engage in role play of popular media characters in outdoor spaces explains some of the different responses to the two films. As discussed previously, however, cultural historians have suggested that the popularity of the Davy Crockett craze in the United States in the mid-1950s was due to the perceived greater restrictions on the physical freedoms of children at that time (Griffin, 1999) and so it is the case that each generation’s responses to cultural phenomenon need to be analysed in the light of the economic, social and political contexts at the time. Nevertheless, despite the complexities of drawing conclusions about the differences between specific eras, it is the case that technological changes have led to a paradigm shift in the communicative and cultural practices of everyday life in the twenty-first century (Kress, 2010). The differences between responses to the films in the two eras are related largely to the technological developments that

Changes in Media Consumption, Play and Literacy

55

have taken place during this period. This is a point also made in a study of changes in the ‘Tinkerbell’ narrative over the twentieth century (Myers, McKnight, & Krabbenhoft, 2014). In the participatory culture (Jenkins, Clinton, Purushotma, Robison, & Weigel, 2006) of contemporary societies, fan responses to film texts can create local, national and global links with other children as ‘produsers’ (Bruns, 2006) and not just consumers of media texts. Indeed, there is an increasing interest from children in the media creations of other children, as seen in the CPMV phenomena, for example (Marsh, 2015). Perhaps in the next iteration of a Disney-inspired craze, we will see even more evidence of this, with peer-to-peer multimodal, multimedia creations becoming a primary focus for play and literacy, and the films themselves playing a less central role in the mediascapes of the future.

Notes 1 For example, http://frozendailydose.tumblr.com, accessed December 17 2014. 2 For example, https://www.fanfiction.net/movie/Frozen/, accessed December 17 2014. 3 For example, http://frozen.wikia.com/wiki/The_Frozen_Wiki, accessed December 17 2014. 4 https://www.facebook.com/DisneyFrozen, accessed December 17 2014. 5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9GiRWK4-sI, accessed December 17 2014. 6 https://www.facebook.com/DisneyFrozen, accessed December 17 2014. 7 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ud6B_NXoNc, accessed December 17 2014. 8 http://disneystories.com/app/frozen-storybook-deluxe/, accessed December 17 2014.

References Allen, M. (1990). Western rivermen, 1763–1861: Ohio and Mississippi boatmen and the myth of the alligator horse. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ariès, P. (1966). Centuries of childhood. London: Pimlico (original work published as L’enfant et la vie familiale sous l’ancien régime 1960). Bakhtin, M. M. (1984). Rabelais and his world (H. Iswolsky, Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bickford, T. (2012). ‘The new “tween” music industry: The Disney Channel, Kidz Bop and an emerging childhood counterpublic.’ Popular Music, 31, 417–436. British Film Industry. (2013). Statistical yearbook 2013. Retrieved from http://www.bfi. org.uk/sites/bfi.org.uk/files/downloads/bfi-statistical-yearbook-2013.pdf (Accessed 17 December 2014).

56

Literacy, Media, Technology

Bruner, J. S. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bruns, A. (2006). ‘Towards produsage: Futures for user-led content production.’ In F. Sudweeks, H. Hrachovec, & C. Ess (Eds), Proceedings: Cultural attitudes towards communication and technology 2006 (pp. 275–284). Perth: Murdoch University. Retrieved from http://snurb.info/files/12132812018_towards_ produsage_0.pdf (Accessed 17 December 2014). Bryman, A. (2004). The Disneyization of society. London: Sage. Burke, A., & Marsh, J. (Eds). (2013). Children’s virtual play worlds: Culture, learning and participation. New York: Peter Lang. Burn, A., & Richards, C. (Eds). (2014). Children’s games in the new media age: Childlore, media and the playground. Farnham: Ashgate. Carrington, V. (2013). ‘An argument for assemblage theory: Integrated spaces, mobility and polycentricity.’ In A. Burke, & J. Marsh (Eds), Children’s virtual play worlds: Culture, learning and participation (pp. 200–216). New York: Peter Lang. ‘Cats “killed for their skins”. ’ (1956, May 9). The Times, p. 7. Retrieved from http://www. thetimes.co.uk/tto/archive/ (Accessed 23 December 2015). Christie, J. F., & Roskos, K. A. (2009). ‘Play’s potential in early literacy development.’ In R. E. Tremblay, M. Boivin, & R. De V. Peters (Eds), Encyclopedia on early childhood development (pp. 1–6). Montreal: Centre of Excellence for Early Childhood Development and Strategic Knowledge Cluster on Early Child Development. Retrieved from http://www.child-encyclopedia.com/documents/ChristieRoskosANGxp.pdf (Accessed 17 December 2014). Cohen, S. (2002). Folk devils and moral panics (3rd ed.). London: Routledge. Dyson, A. H. (2003). The brothers and sisters learn to write: Popular literacies in childhood and school cultures. New York: Teachers College Press. Foster, N. (Director), & Disney, W. (Producer). (1955). Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier [Motion Picture]. United States: Walt Disney Productions. Giroux, H. A. (1995). ‘Animating youth: The Disnification of children’s culture.’ Socialist Review, 24(3), 23–55. Gleave, J., & Cole-Hamilton, I. (2012). A world without play: A literature Review. Retrieved from http://www.playengland.org.uk/media/371031/a-world-withoutplayliteraturereview-2012.pdf (Accessed 17 December 2014). Griffin, S. (1999). ‘Kings of the wild backyard: Davy Crockett and children’s space.’ In M. Kinder (Ed.), Kids’ media culture (pp. 102–121). Durham: Duke University Press. Guschwan, M. (2012). ‘Fandom, brandom and the limits of participatory culture.’ Journal of Consumer Culture, 12, 19–40. Hodenfield, C. (2000). ‘1941: Bombs away!’ In L. D. Friedman, & B. Notbohm (Eds), Steven Spielberg: Interviews (pp. 70–83). Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Ito, M., Baumer, S., Bittanti, M., Boyd, D., Cody, R., Herr-Stephenson, B., & Tripp, L. (2009). Hanging out, messing around and geeking out: Kids living and learning with new media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Changes in Media Consumption, Play and Literacy

57

Jenkins, H. (1992). Textual poachers: Television fans and participatory culture. London: Routledge. Jenkins, H., Clinton, K., Purushotma, R., Robison, A., & Weigel, M. (2006). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century. An Occasional Paper on Digital Media and Learning. The John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation. Retrieved from www.macfound.org/media/article_pdfs/ JENKINS_WHITE_PAPER.PDF (Accessed 17 December 2014). Johnson, J. (27 March 1971). ‘The Disneyland records story.’ Billboard, D2 D15. Kang, C. (6 May 2014). ‘Walt Disney’s profit rises 27 percent on strength of “Frozen” movie franchise. ‘The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost. com (Accessed 17 December 2014). Kinder, M. (1993). Playing with power in movies, television, and videogames: From Muppet babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Berkeley : University of California Press. King, M. J. (1985). ‘The recycled hero: Walt Disney’s Davy Crockett.’ In M. Lofaro (Ed). Davy Crockett: The man, the legend, the legacy, 1786–1986 (pp. 137–158). Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Kress, G. (2010). Multimodality. London: Routledge. Lee, J. (Director), & Buck, P. (Producer). (2014). Frozen [Motion Picture]. United States: Walt Disney Pictures. Lehtonen, M. (2000). The cultural analysis of texts. London: Sage. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1966). The savage mind. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Marsh, J. (2013). ‘Early literacy and popular culture.’ In J. Larson and J. Marsh (Eds), Handbook of early childhood literacy (2nd ed., pp. 207–222). London: Sage. Marsh, J. (2014). ‘The relationship between online and offline play.’ In A. Burn, & C. Richards (Eds), Children’s games in the new media age: Childlore, media and the playground (pp. 109–131). London: Ashgate. Marsh, J. (2015). ‘The discourses of celebrity in the fanvid ecology of Club Penguin Machinima (CPMV).’ In R. H. Jones, A. Chik, & C. A. Hafner (Eds), Discourse and digital practices: Doing discourse analysis in the digital age (pp. 93–208). New York: Routledge. Marsh, J., & Bishop, J. C. (2014). Changing play: Play, media and commercial culture from The 1950s to the present day. Buckingham: Open University Press. McCosker, P. (n.d.). UK cinema – Twenty years after its arrival, how the Multiplex brought audiences back to the cinema. Retrieved from Media Salles website: http://www. mediasalles.it/cinemaresearch/Philip_McCosker.htm (Accessed 17 December 2014). Medina, C. L., & Wohlwend, K. (2014). Literacy, play and globalization: Converging imaginaries in children’s critical and cultural performances. New York: Routledge. Myers, E. M., McKnight, J. P., & Krabbenhoft, L. M. (2014). ‘Remediating Tinker Bell: Exploring childhood and commodification through a century-long transmedia narrative.’ Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, 6(1), 95–118.

58

Literacy, Media, Technology

O’Boyle, J. G. (2013). ‘ “Be sure you’re right, then go ahead”: The early Disney westerns.’ In G. R. Edgerton, & M. T. Marsden (Eds), Westerns: The essential ‘Journal of Popular Film and Television’ collection (pp. 83–103). New York: Routledge. Ofcom. (2013). ‘Children and parents: Media use and attitudes report.’ Retrieved from http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/research/media-literacy/october2013/ research07Oct2013.pdf (Accessed 17 December 2014). Opie, I., & Opie, P. (1959). The lore and language of schoolchildren. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Opie, I., & Opie, P. (1969). Children’s games in street and playground. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Pahl, K., & Rowsell, J. (2013). ‘Artifactual literacies.’ In J. Larson and J. Marsh (Eds), The Handbook of early childhood literacy (2nd ed., pp. 263–278). London: Sage. Parry, B. (2013). Children, film and literacy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Peterson, K. (27 March 2014). ‘Disney’s Frozen and the “gay agenda” .’ BBC News (Online), 013. Retrieved from BBC News website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogsechochambers-26759342 (Accessed 17 December 2014). Piaget, J. (1962). Play, dreams, and imitation in childhood (C. Gattegno, & F. N. Hodgson, Trans.) New York: Norton. Robertson, R. (1995). ‘Glocalization: Time-space and homogeneity heterogeneity.’ In M. Feathersone, S. Lash, & R. Robertson (Eds), Global modernities (pp. 25–44). London: Sage. Roud, S. (2010). The lore of the playground: One hundred years of children’s games, rhymes And traditions. London: Random House. Small, C. (1998). Musicking: The meanings of performing and listening. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Telotte, J. P. (2008). The mouse machine: Disney and technology. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. ‘U.S. again is subdued by Davy: Nation’s children (and stores) join Crockett frontier kingdom’ (25 April 1955). Life, 38(17), 27–33. Van Dijck, J. (2013). The culture of connectivity: A critical history of social media. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wasko, J. (2001). Understanding Disney: The manufacture of fantasy. Cambridge: Polity. ‘Where was the wild frontier? A Crockett Tamed.’ (11 April 1956). The Manchester Guardian. The Guardian and Observer digital archive. Retrieved from: http://pqasb. pqarchiver.com/guardian/advancedsearch.html (Accessed 4 July 2016). Willett, R. (2013). ‘Superheroes, naughty mums and witches: Pretend family play among 7- to 10-year-olds.’ In R. Willett, C. Richards, J. Marsh, A. Burn, & J. C. Bishop (Eds), Children, media and playground cultures: Ethnographic studies of school playtimes (pp. 145–169). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Changes in Media Consumption, Play and Literacy

59

Willett, R., Richards, C., Marsh, J., Burn, A., & Bishop, J. C. (2013). Children, media and playground cultures: Ethnographic studies of school playtimes. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wohlwend, K. E. (2011). Playing their way into literacies. New York: Teachers College Press. Woodruff, J. A. (2009). Learning to listen, learning to be: African-American girls and hipHop at a Durham, NC, boys and girls club (Unpublished PhD thesis). Durham, NC: Duke University.

A thing constituting a piece of evidence about the past, especially an account kept in writing or some other permanent form: identification was made through dental records a record of meter readings

A thin plastic disc carrying recorded sound in grooves on each surface, for reproduction by a record player: I’m listening to records in my room

5

Constricting or Constructing Everyday Lives? Literacies and Inequality Susan Jones

Introduction Literacy and inequality are commonly associated with each other in policy discourse. Both are regular sources of moral panic and both have formed the basis for successive governments to frame social policy. Both are used as measures of nations and as a basis for judging communities, families and individuals. A reductive model of literacy as an individual and quantifiable skill set is used as a marker of national success in the global marketplace. The interests of policy makers are also served by the reductive representations of what it means to live with a low income, which are a prominent feature of popular media. Much attention has been given in policy contexts to correlations between a deficit in a mandated version of literacy and reduced life chances. This has led to close government scrutiny of those involved in literacy education, with the professionals involved viewed as key actors both in the project of ‘social inclusion’ and as part of the global race to the top. Through a focus on everyday literacy practices in one community, this chapter will explore the connections between literacy and inequality in policy and practice by presenting two ways of viewing this relationship. First, it suggests that everyday literacy practices may be used as ways of understanding the impact of policy on everyday experiences. Examples are presented which show that, far from being the only solution, instrumental models of literacy, emerging from a human resource model of social inclusion, can actually serve to further exclude those already marginalized by social and economic challenge. Alongside this, the second focus of the chapter draws upon a sociocultural model of literacy to explore practices shaped not only by print but also by digital, multimodal and material practices. Such everyday literacy practices are presented as resources through which a wider

64

Literacy, Media, Technology

policy context is navigated. Exploring the role of literacy in both constricting and constructing the lived experience of individuals and their families, the chapter challenges dominant understandings of the relationship between literacy and inequality – not least, that ‘low literacy’ causes poverty, rather than the reverse. It argues that such understandings only serve to contribute further to the challenge faced by the most vulnerable in society by ignoring the wide range of creative and resourceful ways in which literacy is part of their everyday lives. The chapter draws on a small-scale ethnographic study of everyday literacy practices1 which focused on residents of a predominantly white working-class council housing estate on the edge of a city in the Midlands of England. The estate is one of many large areas of housing, also known as ‘social’ or ‘public’ housing, developed by local governments across the United Kingdom during the early to mid-twentieth century. The study explored, as one participant put it, ‘how people read and write and they don’t even notice’. This observation of the project’s themes captures how the participant felt that the literacies we were discussing were not part of dominant understandings of what it means to read and write. It is also suggestive of the ways in which social and literacy policy are connected in the everyday experiences of the families with whom I worked. Over the course of the study, I witnessed the impact on access to economic resources for these families when such policies, and the discourses which enable them, fail to ‘notice’ significant realities. Reductive models of literacy also fail to ‘notice’ its role as a cultural resource in negotiating lived experiences, and the creativity and resilience evident in everyday practices. The threat to social justice posed by this context is evident if we consider it within the framework offered by Fraser. As she points out, ‘economic disadvantage and cultural disrespect are currently entwined and support one another’ (Fraser, 1995, p. 69). For Fraser, social justice demands both redistribution and recognition. The injustices of unequal distribution of resources are prominent in a growing understanding of the impact of austerity politics on everyday lives. This chapter explores the importance of recognizing the impact of the entwining of literacy and social policy in dominant discourse on everyday lives and the potential for social justice offered by the recognition of a broader conception of literacy in everyday lives.

Understanding everyday lives through everyday literacies As Ball suggests, policy does not solely lead to quantitative or instrumental outcomes. Rather,

Literacies and Inequality

65

policies pose problems to their subjects, problems that must be solved in context. Solutions to the problems posed by policy texts will be localised and should be expected to display ad hocery and messiness. Responses indeed must be ‘creative’. (2006, p. 21)

Literacy is therefore an apt lens for the exploration of the complex impact of policy on everyday lives, especially when a broad view of literacy is emphasized, which accounts for such creativity. Literacy research based in schools which serve communities facing economic challenge (e.g. Comber, 2014) has demonstrated the importance of moving beyond a model of literacy which is limited to an officially mandated skill set, and a society which defines some of its members as deficient based on what are believed to be the skills required to adequately belong to it. Seminal ethnographic studies of literacy in one community (e.g. Barton & Hamilton, 1998; Heath, 1983; Purcell-Gates, 1995; Street, 1984) have presented literacy as plural, socially constructed and locally produced and as a valuable resource in the negotiation of everyday lives. The new digital and visual practices afforded by increasingly significant and accessible technologies are changing the way in which individuals, families and communities work together to share and make meaning from their experiences, and the recent influence of material anthropology on literacy research also invites us to reflect upon the ways in which we understand literacy as an individual and collaborative practice. The literacy practices explored in this chapter can be seen as local responses to wider contexts. Although the housing estate as a specific geographic location has multiple social and cultural connections within it, exploring everyday lives and literacies also reminds us that these connections reach beyond it (Massey, 2005). This suggests a view of literacy as not only reflective of immediate contexts but also as a site for the negotiation of the global, as is suggested by Brandt and Clinton (2002, p. 343): ‘Not only can one look to local contexts to understand local literacy, but one can also look to local literacy practices to understand key forces that organise local life.’ A brief outline of some of the ‘key forces’ in the lives of residents on the estate provides a context for the everyday literacy practices which are the focus of this chapter. While the examples given here are of specific policies and their impact, they are illustrative of the experience of many communities across neoliberal contexts worldwide. Residents have been recently affected by an austerity-driven social policy churn, first implemented by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government of the UK formed in 2010, and subsequently developed by the Conservative government elected in 2015. However, a tenacious discourse of the undeservedness of those in need of welfare support has long existed

66

Literacy, Media, Technology

within neoliberal politics (see, for example, Sennett, 2003; Taylor, 1996). Such a discourse forms part of what Taylor describes as the official text of poverty, which, she argues, critically affects the minds and imagination of the public (Taylor, 1996). One of the policies which quickly gained a great deal of attention upon its announcement and implementation in the UK was the under-occupation penalty: as of 1 April 2013, those deemed to be ‘under-occupying’ their social housing saw their housing benefit reduced by up to 25 per cent, despite a lack of smaller homes for them to move into. Dubbed in popular discourse as ‘the bedroom tax’, this is a policy that has had a significant impact on the life of Peggy, whose story is outlined later in the chapter. People across neoliberal regimes worldwide are facing the brunt of policy contexts justified by deficit discourse which suggests that they are not among the few ‘singled out for recognition’ (Sennett, 2003, p. 3). This lack of recognition is born of a lack of what Sennett describes as ‘respect’, where individuals are ‘not seen as a full human being whose presence matters’. Some of the practices outlined in this chapter illustrate how a dominant model of literacy is entwined within such a system, to the detriment of social justice. As Fraser notes (1995, p. 73): economic injustice and cultural injustice are usually interimbricated so as to reinforce one another dialectically. Cultural norms that are unfairly biased against some are institutionalised in the state and the economy; meanwhile, economic disadvantage impedes equal participation in the making of culture, in public spheres and in everyday life.

In addition to having an impact on access to economic resources, dominant models of literacy also prevent recognition. Such ‘nonrecognition’, for Fraser, includes ‘being rendered invisible via the authoritative representational, communicative, and interpretative practices of one’s culture’ (Fraser, 1995, p. 71). In relation to literacy, nonrecognition is institutionalized at all levels. A neoliberal discourse of marketization has dominated education policy in many countries in recent decades, and government monitoring of the teaching of literacy in schools and in adult education has meant that literacy is often characterized in these institutions by a narrowed, instrumental notion of its role and purpose (see, for example, Comber, 2012; Hamilton, 2012). Some of the adults who participated in this study retained from their school days such a view of what it means to read and write, including their own perceived deficit in relation to this, despite the breadth of ways in which they actively and creatively engaged with text on a daily basis. As well as having a direct impact on access

Literacies and Inequality

67

to resources, then, both cultural and economic, a narrow model of literacy also has an impact on individuals’ sense of the relevance and status of their everyday practice and, ultimately, their sense of agency and voice. An understanding of literacy as socially constructed means that researching everyday literacies requires a model which does not isolate practice from its wider context and acknowledges the place of such practice within what we understand as the ‘everyday’. The relationship between the everyday and dominant social structures has been explored in various ways. De Certeau (1984), to give a prominent example, sees the everyday as a site for resistant practice which often occurs through ‘the cracks’ in proprietary power. Bourdieu’s habitus (Bourdieu, 1977), another significant concept in the study of everyday life, refers to practice which is embedded in internalized established structures, and it has been seen as suggestive of normativity and submission. Pink (2012) argues, however, that to characterize everyday practice according to a binary of resistance or normativity is to limit our understanding of its complexity. Rather, the everyday should be seen as ‘where we make our worlds and where our worlds make us’ (p. 5). There are epistemological links between this view of the everyday and a notion of literacy as part of cultural system which can both constrict and construct lives. The way in which this view of literacy, including the various modes, media and technologies through which it is realized, can be seen in the lives of some of the residents on the estate is presented next.

Everyday lives and literacies on the estate The ethnographic research drawn upon here took place over eighteen months and involved interviews, participant observation in homes, at school and in community groups and, drawing on Pink (2007), the use of video to capture the (sometimes literally) shifting realities of everyday experience. The experience of two households is focused upon in this chapter and pseudonyms are given for all participants. The housing estate that is the focus of the research was built by local government, predominantly following the Second World War, to house residents bombed out of their inner-city homes and as part of what was known as the ‘slum clearance’. Alongside the older part of the estate, dating from the 1930s and built around crescents with amenities such as schools at their centre, are newer, prefabricated post-war houses originally intended as a short term measure; however, many residents, including one of the families with whom I worked, still reside in these steel-structured dwellings. Narratives of residents who have

68

Literacy, Media, Technology

lived on the estate since it was built nostalgically reflect a sense of collective endeavour and hope for the future (Jones, Hall, Thomson, Barrett, & Hanby, 2013). Describing a shift in discourse around social housing provision, Hanley (2012) outlines a sense in the early twentieth century of such provision being a ‘national asset’ (p. 46), providing working families with what they wanted at a time of potential political unrest. The decades following the Second World War saw Labour government housing policy influenced by a ‘preoccupation … with the health and dignity of the working man’ (p. 80). However, in more recent times, ‘estates have come to mean more as a cipher for a malingering society than as places where people actually live’ (p. 146). According to local authority data, and compared to the wider city, quantitative indicators suggest a higher than average number of residents on this particular estate claiming benefits; the number claiming disability living allowance is twice that of the city’s average. The estate has a higher than average population of elderly residents living alone and of young mothers. Despite a significant local authority welfare agenda and the strong presence of this on the estate, one of its residents described it to me as ‘the Forgotten Estate’, suggesting a disconnect between local government priorities and those of the people who live there. Literacy has a prominent place within local welfare provision, and is illustrative of the way in which, as Brandt (2001) notes, ‘access and reward’ for literacy are influenced by wider – and often shifting – ideological and economic forces. In a discussion with a local government worker during this study, the literacies of residents on the estate were described as ‘what they haven’t got’. The local authority have an action plan delivering ‘literacy awareness training’ for public workers such as health visitors, with documentation created to support them to ‘spot the signs of low level literacy’. ‘Early intervention’ schemes supported by the local authority include a local philanthropic initiative which funds engagement with an international book-gifting scheme aimed at children from birth to age five. This scheme operates through the local health service, thus firmly locating literacy within the health agenda (Hall & Jones, 2016). Social policy can be seen to have a role in shaping subjectivities ‘that fit in with the government’s idea of community as a site of empowerment’ (Wainwright & Marandet, 2013, p. 519) and the dominant models of literacy required to access services and resources on offer by the local authority is suggestive of what Wainwright and Marandet have termed ‘supportive power’. This includes help with ‘form filling’ from the local housing authority and an emphasis on the role of literacy at home in the form of reading stories and in supporting homework. In much of the provision for support with literacy, what Hamilton and Tett (2012, p. 45) describe as a

Literacies and Inequality

69

discourse of ‘human resource development’ dominates. An example of this is the computer classes compulsorily attended by benefit claimants, including some of the participants of this study, where the focus is on writing CVs and letters of application for jobs. As Taylor (1996) and Eubanks (2011) have noted in different contexts, models of literacy which fail to notice the realities of people’s daily engagement with text can lead to structures of support which may in fact compound the challenge for those in need of access to text-based resources. This is evident in what has happened at perhaps the most iconic site of literacy within the community: the local library. The community library on the estate is well used and is staffed by committed librarians who know their users well. Users have come to see the library as a vital resource, not only for the borrowing of books, but for access to computers, for advice and signposting, and as part of a weekly – and sometimes daily – routine where they come in to chat to the staff. Wider economic cuts have in many contexts been left to local professionals to implement (Hamilton & Tett, 2012). In this context, the library service city-wide has introduced a charge for the use of the computers, explained by the local library manager: ‘The first hour is free and it’s a pound an hour after that.’ For library users in this community, this means that On a Monday, all the terminals are full because that’s when you get your free hour and then it tends to tail off again until the end of the week when it picks up again as people realise that they need to do this or do that. Certainly things like benefit and welfare claims because they have to come back to check the reply. (Graham, local library manager)

Despite the emphasis in contemporary life across a range of global contexts on digital communication and the increased embedding within digital modes of the means to access economic resources, the policy decision enforced on this library fails to recognize its impact on the interimbrication of economic and cultural injustice. It provides a small, local example of the entwining of literacy within such injustice and how a lack of recognition of the role played by a wide range literacy practices in the realities of everyday lives can serve to compound the very challenges such policies claim to alleviate. There is an assumption within this policy that engaging with technology is somehow a luxury compared to accessing print-based materials and that those on low incomes who rely on the library’s digital technology can be selective in its use, both in terms of purpose and time, rather than be able to freely access digital resources as part of their everyday practices, not only to pursue the demands of a digital welfare system but for other

70

Literacy, Media, Technology

everyday needs such as keeping in touch with friends and family, for example, or being able to access a wider, and more affordable, range of goods and services online. As Eubanks (2011, p. 8) has argued, ‘the assumption of community deficit blinds many policymakers  …  to the real world of IT, to the true relationship between technology and poverty, and to the hope for high-tech equity’. This is one example of how the literacies engendered by government policy add to the constriction of everyday lives within the homes of families on the estate. However, multiple print-based, digital and material practices were also central to the shaping and the navigation of everyday life for these families. One such family is Katie’s.

Katie and Colin: ‘we sit and read together’ Katie is thirteen years old and lives with her dad, Colin. Since leaving compulsory schooling, her brother, James, attends a residential college for students with profound and multiple learning difficulties. Colin has raised his two children on his own since the sudden death of his wife nine years ago. His former passion for fishing was one of many things that had to change when he lost his wife and had to stop work because of his caring responsibilities. Colin describes himself as not reading anything apart from his newspaper, and attributes a lack of confidence with reading and writing to having ‘messed about too much’ at school. He is proud, however, that Katie is a prolific reader of print-based text. You want to see her little bookcase – it’s jammed. You go into her bedroom and constantly there will be a book on the bed and on the floor. She loves to read and I’m really pleased about that.

After losing his wife, Colin faced significant challenges given his son’s needs. He is honest about the way in which his daughter, who was four years old at the time, helped him to cope. I had to learn what James was saying because he doesn’t speak. … I’m sitting there thinking, ‘what the hell are you talking about?’ Because I didn’t have a clue. Katie would say ‘he wants a cup of tea’ and I’m going ‘why don’t he say that?’ She taught me a lot about how to look after him.

Bureaucratic literacies figure highly in day-to-day life because of the nature of the family’s circumstances. Colin: I don’t really [write] but when I do I get madam to check it for me. … Legal documents for [the kids]. When James comes home I have to write for his carer’s

Literacies and Inequality

71

allowance and I have to stipulate what he’s having and why and all this sort of thing. … I’ll say to Katie, ‘I’ll write this out but tell me if it’s ok’ and so I’ll write it on a jotter and she’ll go over it and change things like correct my spelling mistakes and put the punctuation in.

Father and daughter pool their skills for these and other everyday tasks. Katie: We help each other out like that … say I’m stuck on a maths problem he’ll help me out with that and then, in return, if he’s typing a letter or something I’ll help with his spelling and stuff.

Family is a central trope of neoliberal discourse, often used as a signifier of the perceived failings of those facing economic challenge. For this family, working together with the resources of language and literacy, through a variety of modes and technologies, is essential to their negotiation of everyday life. This includes negotiation of the appropriateness of language for different purposes and audiences, in some instances suggesting the intergenerational blurring of practices and their associations within dominant discourse. Colin: I used to ask Katie to text for me but now I do it myself. But she even puts speech marks and punctuation on the text! I said to her that’s going a bit overboard.

Father and daughter also regularly engage in discussions about fan fiction based on Katie’s favourite contemporary rock bands, which her father playfully compares to those of his own youth. The pair prioritize planning meals and cooking together, poring over magazines to select new recipes. Katie: We sit and read the magazines together to get recipes and stuff. We’ve got a recipe [for a visiting friend] ‘cos we were reading through the magazine together. It’s a sort of sticky ginger thing with chicken.

Digital and social media are central to how the family comes together, through video gaming and Skype, which is a vital resource for communicating with John and with extended family living at a distance. Katie’s social media presence is a source of fascination to her father and a means for him to share in her interests. Colin: If you want to know what she’s really like, check her Twitter account.

Colin’s observation of his daughter’s social media activity is partly motivated by a concern for her online safety. However, in following her activity, he not only learns from his daughter about the affordances of social media and how it works for her but also is able to observe her as she curates her online presence and shares with others, including her father, a version of herself and her developing interests.

72

Literacy, Media, Technology

The creativity and resourcefulness evidenced by Katie and her dad is often absent in dominant discourses of deficit, which ignore the ways literacy is utilized as a key resource in the material negotiation of everyday lives and how domestic activities which draw on a vast repertoire of modes, media and technologies, such as cooking and watching television, are important elements of this negotiation for a family playing, making and learning together. The story of Peggy, presented next, shows the profound impact of one particular social policy on her life and the role of a narrow model of literacy in compounding this challenge. It also illustrates how emerging paradigms within literacy research can reveal the place of literacy as a key part of Peggy’s response to that context.

Peggy: Writing home Peggy is sixty-two. At the start of the project, she had lived for thirty-three years in a rented social housing property in which she’d raised her three children. She has been a widow for nine years but many of her extended family live nearby, including ten grandchildren and two great-granddaughters, her siblings and her mother, whom she visits every week to share caring responsibilities. Peggy worked until recently at a local museum as a costumed interpreter and cleaner. Since being made redundant, Peggy found it difficult to return to work because of her health. The experience of school, where Peggy says ‘I had a bit of trouble reading and writing’, has affected her confidence ever since. I’m not very confident at writing. I can spell but I seem to get things wrong. My handwriting starts off really nice and neat and then it goes wrong.

However, a technicist, instrumental model does not seem to account for the range of ways in which Peggy uses writing in her daily life. Despite claiming that ‘I don’t do a lot of writing’, she lists a range of reasons for doing so: Writing is … for all sorts, isn’t it? Filling in forms, writing a shopping list, writing birthday cards, writing letters to your friends.

Peggy enjoys puzzles – ‘the easy ones’ – and the centrality of shared play is clear in the way in which Peggy makes use of the computer. She does not own a computer, but makes use of her sister’s and mother’s when she goes to visit them, often logging on to Facebook or playing online games. When I go to [my sister’s] I always ask if I can go on the computer and she says ‘it’s already on for you, waiting’. ‘Cos she knows. … Mum goes to bed early, so I

Literacies and Inequality

73

say I’ll just have half an hour on the computer then go to bed. I end up playing games. I like that bubbles one where you have to shoot them.

During the course of the research, our discussions of everyday reading and writing became focused on one significant event in Peggy’s life. In April, they’ll charge you for the two bedrooms that you’re not using – it’s called a ‘bedroom tax’ – and I said to [my daughter] ‘I can’t afford to live here.’

Peggy therefore started the process of finding somewhere new to live. This process exposed the physical, emotional and artifactual literacy work that is involved in creating a home. Peggy’s description of the process demonstrates the way in which a particular set of literacy practices, and assumptions around them, shape the experiences of those in most need of support. To move, I’d have to fill in a form for the council and then start bidding. Which would be a problem. You have to either look in the paper or you’d go on the computer but when you haven’t got a computer it’s a bit awkward. Usually on Monday they put what’s going in the paper and you have to bid and if someone has a higher bid than you, like if they have more need than you, then they get it. I’ve filled in the form … My daughter did it for me. I’ve sent it in – or I think I’ve sent it in anyway – and I’ve just got to wait for my bidding number and that hasn’t come yet.

Peggy is rendered passive by bureaucratic texts that control the application system, evoking the ‘toxic literacies’ of bureaucracy referred to by Taylor (1996). This is a particular issue for those who might find it challenging to access either paper-based forms or who do not have access to a computer. The timing of the process is out of the user’s control; hence, lives are framed by a weekly round of deadlines. The marketization of need means that there is a lack of certainty in any application, making waiting time a constant variable. ‘I’ve just got to wait’ suggests that this is a system where the person is secondary to the text. Over the next few months, Peggy described her feelings as she faced the move: I’m a bit unsure about moving because it’s the memories in the house … Me and [my husband] and the kids growing up and that. (July 2012) Leaving this; leaving [my husband]; leaving the memories in the house of bringing the kids up and moving from my friends. (January 2013)

An important theme in Peggy’s talk over these months was what she was going to do with her possessions as she prepared for the move into a smaller home, which turned out to be a one-bedroomed flat in a warden-assisted housing complex. As

74

Literacy, Media, Technology

the day drew nearer, we talked about the things she was giving away, and those she had chosen to keep. I’ve been very harsh with myself but there are some things I’ll never part with even though I ain’t got room to put them in.

Within the upheaval of the move, Peggy’s evaluation of her possessions demonstrated the way in which she was responding to the situation by using material objects as a way to construct her new home. Miller points out the ‘résumé effect’ of the home and that moving house allows for a kind of critical realignment of persons with their possessions. [It] allows people to reconstruct their personal biography as represented in memories of associated objects and thereby the sense the family has of itself … people have a chance to work on and repair the way they represent themselves and their own histories to themselves, and to the world, in accordance with how they now want to see themselves. (Miller, 2010, p. 97)

In her organization of her things, Peggy evokes Brandt and Clinton’s view of literacy as ‘an abstraction or redistribution of elements of the human lifeworld into the lives of things’ (Brandt & Clinton, 2002, p. 345). Observing Peggy over the process of her move led me to reflect on the ways in which, for her, everyday life was becoming literally defined by a sense of movement in response to wider contexts. Peggy agreed to film a video tour of her new home in order to present the ways in which she was undergoing the process of constructing it. Among the first things to be the focus of Peggy’s tour was a display cabinet, from which she took out a small teddy bear. This teddy bear here was the last thing my husband ever bought me. He died nine years ago. When I went to see him in hospital, he’d got this teddy bear sticking out his pocket and he says ‘I bought it especially for you’. So I keep that on show. (Peggy’s video tour of her new home)

The notion of ‘show’ is significant for Peggy as she negotiates her new role as a single occupant of this space. Material effects, imbued with personal symbolic meaning, are communicative resources creatively utilized to present a past and make sense of the present, which she does with a sense of audience. As such, Peggy is authoring herself into her new home. With her, she has brought objects which hold key memories, and which have been bought by others. She describes her collection of Cliff Richard memorabilia, which ‘no-one wanted out’ in her previous home. Now, they take pride of place demonstrating a key ‘ruling passion’ (Barton & Hamilton, 1998). Peggy’s fridge can be read as an example

Literacies and Inequality

75

of a text which signifies the way in which she has written herself into her new home. Among the array of fridge magnets are ones bought by friends and family from holiday, ones which are mementoes of day trips and events such as going with her sister to see Cliff Richard in concert. There is one which she found in a box during the move, a toy character which was cherished by her daughter some twenty or more years previously. The fridge, along with other objects such as a framed cross-stich made for Peggy by her daughter following the death of her father, illustrates the way in which ‘objects mediate our interactions with other places and other times’ (Brandt & Clinton, 2002, p. 345), supporting the negotiation of an acutely emotional process and reminding us that, far from being reducible to a narrow mandated framework, everyday literacies offer dynamic and agentive means of constructing lives.

Literacy in everyday life: Constricting or constructing? Decades of literacy research has shaped understanding of literacy as a multifaceted and socially located practice. The contexts for literacy practice, its forms and modalities, continue to develop and offer individuals, families and communities a wealth of resources for the negotiation, exploration and celebration of their everyday experiences. Local responses to wider social policy contexts often reflect far broader repertoires than are assumed within such policy. Within dominant discourse, as Taylor notes, too often ‘lives are reconstructed, fabricated to fit the dominant ideologies of society’ (1996, p. 242) and the subjectivities assumed when literacy is part of the enactment of social policy reflect a lack of recognition of the complex realities of everyday lives. In contrast to popular discourses of deficit, the shared practice of Katie and her dad demonstrates a family facing economic and social challenge working together to navigate their experiences, pooling resources and learning from each other. A bureaucratic process of official texts has significantly shaped Peggy’s experience in recent months. However, the artifactual assets of her everyday life have enabled Peggy to author herself into her new home. Recognizing the ways in which literacies, media and technology are utilized as resources in the complex negotiation of everyday life can help us to develop an understanding of the impact of social policy. Recognition of the role that literacy also has as ‘a resource for people acting back against the forces that limit their lives’ (Hamilton, Tett, & Crowther, 2012, p. 5) is also an essential part of understanding the role of literacy research and education in challenging inequality. This means acknowledging

76

Literacy, Media, Technology

how people read and write and how this affects their access to resources. It also means valuing the complex, creative and resourceful responses to wider contexts that exist beyond the deficit discourses that dominate understandings of inequality and what it means to be literate in the twenty-first century.

Note 1 New Literacies and Cross-generational Learning on a Midlands Council Estate, Small Research Grant number 113219.

References Ball, S. (2006). Education policy and social class. London: Routledge. Barton, D., & Hamilton, M. (1998). Local Literacies: Reading and writing in one community. London: Routledge. Bourdieu, H. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brandt, D. (2001). Literacy in American lives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brandt, D., & Clinton, K. (2002). ‘Limits of the local: Expanding perspectives on literacy as a social practice.’ Journal of Literacy Research, 34(3), 337–356. Comber, B. (2012). ‘Mandated literacy assessment and the reorganisation of teachers’ work: Federal policy, local effects.’ Critical Studies in Education, 53(2), 119–136. Comber, B. (2014). ‘Literacy, poverty and schooling: What matters in young people’s education?’ Literacy, 48(3), 115–123. De Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life. London: University of California Press. Eubanks, V. (2011). Digital dead end: Fighting for social justice in the information age. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Fraser, N. (1995). ‘From redistribution to recognition? Dilemmas of justice in a postsocialist age.’ New Left Review I/212, 68–93. Hall, C., & Jones, S. (2016). ‘Making sense in the city: Dolly Parton, early reading and educational policy making.’ Literacy, 50(1), 40–48. Hamilton, M. (2012). Literacy and the politics of representation. Oxon: Routledge. Hamilton, M., & Tett, L. (2012). ‘More powerful literacies: The policy context.’ In L. Tett, M. Hamilton, & J. Crowther (Eds), More powerful literacies (pp. 31–58). Leicester: NIACE. Hamilton, M., Tett, L., & Crowther, J. (2012). ‘More powerful literacies: An introduction.’ In L. Tett, M. Hamilton, & J. Crowther (Eds), More powerful literacies (pp. 1–12). Leicester: NIACE.

Literacies and Inequality

77

Hanley, L. (2012). Estates: An intimate history (new edition). London: Granta. Heath, S. B. (1983). Ways with words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jones, S., Hall, C., Thomson, P., Barrett, A., & Hanby, J. (2013). ‘Representing the “forgotten estate”: Participatory theatre, place and community identity.’ Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 34(1), 118–131. Massey, D. (2005). For space. London: Sage. Miller, D. (2010). Stuff. Cambridge: Polity Press. Pink, S. (2007). ‘Walking with video.’ Visual Studies, 22(3), 240–252. Pink, S. (2012). Situating everyday life. London: Sage. Purcell-Gates, V. (1995). Other people’s words: The cycle of low literacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sennett, R. (2003). Respect: The formation of character in an age of inequality. London: Allen Lane. Street, B. (1984). Literacy in theory and practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, D. (1996). Toxic literacies: Exposing the injustice of bureaucratic texts. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Wainwright, E., & Marandet, E. (2013). ‘Family learning and the socio-spatial practice of “supportive” power.’ British Journal of Sociology of Education, 34(4), 504–524.

6

Family Stories, Texts and Meaning: A Study of Artifacts during a Digital Storytelling Workshop Tisha Lewis Ellison

Artifacts never sit alone; they sit in spaces among other artifacts, people, and action. (Pahl & Rowsell, 2010, p. 38)

Introduction The artifacts we value tell stories about who we are; how we create meaning and give voice to our past, present and future selves. In this chapter, I discuss the relationships between stories, texts, artifacts and meaning created by three African American families during a digital storytelling workshop. Their stories – which include everything from the personification of a car, perspectives on autism and intergenerational family genealogies – not only capture the evocative stories told by a parent and child but illustrate how past family literacy traditions of storytelling travel between present and future realities of today’s familial spaces. In the Dig-A-Fam: Families’ Digital Storytelling Project,1 three African American mothers and their children sat next to each other at a university computer lab. Within this space, each family unit prepared to write about and discuss the process of creating a digital story together. During previous separate interviews, thirty-six-year-old Valentina and her son, twelve-year-old Chris; thirty-three-year-old Starlaa and her eight-year-old daughter, Star Doll; and thirty-six-year-old Chant and her nine-year-old son, Rem2 had shared their overall knowledge about using digital tools for work, school and leisure. Their experiences with such tools illustrate the current terrain of intergenerational

80

Literacy, Media, Technology

communicative and digital practices (Alvermann, Hinchman, Moore, Phelps, & Waff, 2006; Vasudevan, DeJaynes, & Schmier, 2010). Interestingly, these tools are also artifacts that mediate our everyday literacies. Artifacts are significant to this discussion because families interact with them through stories, places and spaces as a part of their history and, over time, artifacts traverse individual and relational borders, forging links between now and then. For instance, digital stories can include photos of family members or friends, or an heirloom that is passed down from one generation to the next. artifacts can also refer to space in a home, community or classroom, wherein individuals connect their identities with their existence (Barlett & Vasudevan, 2010). Digital tools and practices (such as digital storytelling via images, narration, stories or music) also convey meaning and transform practices in various settings. In this chapter, I focus on how artifacts become the topic of each family’s interactions that not only helped participants talk about personal, emotional and social issues in their digital stories but helped them make sense of artifacts and the meanings stories carry in shared spaces and practices. Within this rationale, the following question is raised: What is the nature of the artifacts these families use to tell their stories?

Artifactual literacies, texts and meaning making Considering families’ interactions with stories about artifacts, this work is centred on the framework of artifactual literacies, which focuses on the idea of an artifact and the story it tells (Pahl & Rowsell, 2010). According to Pahl & Rowsell (2010), an artifact is ‘a thing or object’. They argue that an artifact has the following qualities: (1) Has physical features that makes it distinct, such as colour or texture; (2) Is created, found, carried, put on display, hidden, evoked in language, or worn; (3) Embodies people, stories, thoughts, communities, identities, and experiences; (4) Is valued or made by a meaning maker in a particular context (p. 2). What makes artifacts relevant to this discussion is that they are part of the texture of everyday life, are material, have meaning and are woven into cultural histories. They travel between families, homes, schools and stories; are shaped by life experiences and the evocative nature of ‘objects that serve as markers of

Family Stories, Texts and Meaning

81

relationship and emotional connection’; and take on life roles that are multifocal and fluid (Turkle, 2007, p. 5). In Evocative Objects, Turkle (2007) discusses how objects call on our relationships to things and how we think and love the objects to which we are connected. The idea of artifactual literacies implies that everyone has a story to tell, that every object tells a story (Pahl & Rowsell, 2010). In this chapter, I draw on the work of three African American mothers’ and their children’s interactions with digital story topics as well as the artifacts that are connected to these individuals’ personal lives. I relate how family members made sense of their stories and the artifacts upon which they were based; I argue that examining the role of artifacts affords the opportunity to explore families’ evolving literacies and the ways in which meanings flow back and forth through time. In an effort to understand artifacts, it is important to recognize the role texts play in individuals’ everyday lives. Texts, of course, exist beyond printed books; they are representations of ideas, feelings and memories. They can take the form of digital photos, documents and multimodal ensembles that work together to create meaning (Kress, 1997; Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996; Pahl & Rowsell, 2010), appearing on social networking sites as well as in Prezis, PowerPoints and digital stories. Vygotsky (1978) asserts ‘cultural artifacts – whether physical or conceptual tools – are historically constructed’ (Lee & Smagorinsky, 2000, p. 5). As such, no text can make meaning on its own. Meaning making depends on what the individual brings to the text, what the reader takes from it and how he or she makes sense of it (Anstey & Bull, 2006). Scholars have focused on how meaning making in certain spaces has value. For instance, Pahl (2003) suggests that practices such as eating, watching television, sleeping, playing, telling stories and cooking create and co-create meaning over time. She argues that much of children’s textual meaning making is recognized as ephemeral. However, drawing on popular culture and other artifacts that populate children’s ‘figured worlds’ (Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998), Pahl (2003) illuminated how children’s use of texts in the home transformed meaning across modalities, and were ways of performing identity. Previous research has drawn attention to the power of digital storytelling. One such study centred on the ways in which eight first-grade African American digital storytellers understood texts and formulated storytelling compositions (Solomon, 2012). In her work, Vasudevan (2011) focused on the out-of-school storytelling and meaning making of lives, texts, bodies, spaces and practices embodied by youth. I examined how two African American females composed counter-selves

82

Literacy, Media, Technology

when using artifacts such as a computer motherboard and microphone as critical identity texts (Lewis Ellison & Kirkland, 2014); and based on a larger ethnographic case study of an African American mother and son, I explored how the two made meaning through digital storytelling that expanded from composing written texts to creating digital texts through multiple modes, including photos, music and spatial modalities within their situated contexts (Lewis Ellison & Wang, under review). In what follows, I examine how stories, experiences and objects are expressed in these families’ interactions during a digital storytelling workshop. By drawing on these interactions, I argue for the roles that digital tools and literacy practices, within family spaces, play to help families relate to and learn from one another and themselves through artifacts dear to them.

The Dig-A-Fam: Families’ digital storytelling project With funding from the National Council of Teachers of English Research Foundation grant, I created the Dig-A-Fam: Families’ Digital Storytelling Project in 2013. The goal was to offer five African American families (mothers along with their children) the opportunity to create a digital story from inception to completion using Microsoft Windows Movie Maker and/or iMovie. Each family would be responsible for learning how to create a digital story with the following activities: (a) watching and discussing examples of digital stories, (b) participating in digital storytelling workshops, (c) collaborating in family and group conversation circles, (d) script writing, (e) uploading photos, (f) creating texts and audio, and (g) showcasing their digital stories. In this chapter, data are explored through the connections of three families – Valentina and Chris, Starlaa and Star Doll, and Chant and Rem – during a one-day digital storytelling workshop in June 2014 (Lewis Ellison, 2016). The families met at a university computer lab for a ninety-minute digital storytelling workshop one Saturday morning. The workshop session was videorecorded, and its agenda, content and structure are described below: (1) (2) (3) (4)

Family introductions Introductions to the Dig-A-Fam: Families’ Digital Storytelling Project Viewing of two sample digital stories and Tisha’s digital story Family Conversation Circles: parent and child discuss their digital story topic(s) together (5) Group Conversation Circles: each family unit discusses their digital story topic(s) in a group setting

Family Stories, Texts and Meaning

83

Prior to the Dig-A-Fam project, I participated in an intense three-day digital storytelling workshop hosted by the Center of Digital Storytelling (CDS) in Washington, DC. CDS’s ‘Standard Workshop’ trained ten educators and laypeople to create digital stories. Activities included: creating storylines, script work and motion effects; conducting research; completing apprenticeship work; and learning multiple technological and media production skills for creating digital stories. The completion of this workshop helped me create a digital story of my own family titled Family’s Stories Carved on the Dining Room Table, which was used as an example for the families participating in this project. The CDS workshop activities were also replicated among the Dig-A-Fam participants.

Situating the context with families Families that I already knew from my church or workplace were invited to participate in the project. One family lived in a suburban community, and the two others hailed from urban communities, all in the Southern United States. Valentina, a thirty-six-year-old freelance marketing coordinator, is the single mother of Chris, who has autism. Starlaa, a thirty-three-year-old married graduate student, is the mother of eight-year-old Star Doll. Chant, a thirty-sixyear-old university professor, is a single mother of nine-year-old Rem. Each family member shared an interest in and knowledge of digital tools in their everyday lives, which was a major criterion for inclusion in the project. However, while all of the families were avid digital literacy users, some had not heard of digital stories, but were nevertheless interested in learning how to create them. As we worked and served in similar spaces at church and school, I had the opportunity to converse with the mothers on separate occasions about their digital literate lives and the practices in which they engaged on a daily basis in their personal, academic and vocational worlds, both as individuals and as mothers of digitally literate children. Each considered it normal to have high-speed internet service, laptops and iPads in their homes. They all used their smartphones for various purposes other than as communication devices (i.e. to conduct research, take pictures, record conversations and play games and music). Data collection involved three phases: the descriptive phase (questionnaires and interviews); the participatory phase (audio- and video-recorded digital storytelling workshops, structured and semi-structured interviews, participant observations, digital photos and photo elicitation interviews); and the

84

Literacy, Media, Technology

interpretative phase (data analysis, coding; structured and semi-structured interviews). All participated in one structured and semi-structured audiorecorded interview conducted in the spring of 2014, which lasted for sixty minutes for the parents and thirty minutes for the children. Data were analysed using coded interview transcriptions and videorecorded observations. Codes allowed me to identify and draw out themes and patterns from the data with each family while they engaged in and created their digital story. I member-checked these themes with the parents. Multimodal discourse and interaction analysis (Jones, 2012; Levine & Scollon, 2004; Norris, 2004; Scollon, 2001) were used to examine and chart the multimodality of mediated actions and interactions between the families. I analysed the families’ multimodal meaning making as they made sense of digital story-sharing/telling, and explored how the families’ practices influenced what they said and did both individually and collectively. I distributed via email and in person a fourteen-item questionnaire to the selected mothers, and they returned completed forms to me in the same manner. The questionnaire items focused on the family’s collective access to and proficiency with digital tools in their personal and business lives, as well as the type of broadband used in their homes. Items also inquired about their children’s educational attainment, grade level and whether they had participated in family projects together. The remainder of this chapter focuses on Chant’s, Valentina’s and Starlaa’s stories about their digital storytelling topics. The topics discussed at the workshop illustrate a distinct material connection (Kress, 1997) to artifacts and texts, and how these objects were woven into the meanings they carried.

(Re)storying family digital story topics On the first day of the workshop, I showed the families two examples of digital stories. The first one was created about a female’s family literacy practices in sports and education, whereas the second, Family’s Stories Carved on the Dining Room Table, was created about my family’s stories, practices and life celebrations, which were all situated at my parents’ dining room table. I highlighted the role that artifacts played in both digital stories, but spoke more directly about my own. I shared the memories (birthdays, family and business meetings and dinners) created with my family members on and at the antique wooden table as a way to illustrate how I created, conceptualized

Family Stories, Texts and Meaning

85

and constructed my personal digital story. Using prepared talking points, I conversed with each family member, and after each viewing, I asked the following questions: ‘What did you see while watching the digital stories?’ ‘What was the main idea of each story?’ ‘What did you see about the differences between each digital story?’ and ‘How did the stories shift your thinking considering your own digital stories?’ Valentina shared the following: ‘I saw the metaphors between both stories in how one highlights sports, trophies and family members engaging in them while the other centred around the dining room table as the focus of interactions.’ Starlaa stated, ‘I noticed that one video you narrated over music and the other one just had music and words.’ Chant pointed out, ‘In your digital story, you showed parts of your dining room table; the leg, the wood, how sturdy it was, and you talked about the table like it was a part of your family.’ This activity and their discussions helped me understand the families’ perspectives on the use of digital literacies, and their ways of thinking and being as individuals and co-creators of their own stories. I purposely chose these stories to highlight how everyday artifacts (photos, dining room tables, trophies and sports) became placeholders for the family unit – these objects held stories from the past, shared memories, built communities, revealed literacy practices, evoked identities through and across modalities, and worked individually and collectively to create meaning through storytelling.

Family conversation circles As they worked, at first, with paper and pen, family conversation circles were used to allow each family member to participate in a dyadic development of their digital story topics and themes so they could be discussed at a later time. During one conversation circle, Chant quietly asked her son Rem, ‘So what do you want to do our digital story on?’ During that time, Rem was out of town with his father, but Chant used Skype and eventually FaceTime to engage him in the creation of a digital story topic together. Valentina and Chris sat in the middle of the computer lab, talking briefly about suitable topics. Chris, who has autism, observed and communicated with his mother, occasionally touching the computer keyboard and writing down several topics. Sitting on the right side of the room, Starlaa and Star Doll worked together to discuss their digital story topic. Starlaa allowed Star Doll to take the lead in writing down the topics.

86

Literacy, Media, Technology

Group conversation circles Group conversation circles consisted of the families coming together as one group to share their topics, story ideas and questions. This segment allowed each family to be comfortable with one another and to elicit assistance from the group. Seated in a semi-circle, Chant, Valentina and Starlaa took the lead in sharing their digital story topics. Each story topic demonstrated how the material artifacts held meaning, helping to re-story past family events.

Chant and Rem: ‘The car is very important to us’ While other sections of the chapter focus on research outcome of orchestrating modalities that make up digital stories, this section looks at the process of choosing digital story topics from each family. I begin with an excerpt from Chant’s explanation of her story topic: Maybe you all can help me decide on a topic. We [Chant and Rem] do lots of things together, we do everything together. So the car is very important to us. I was thinking of the car and where we actually go and what we actually do. We’ve changed clothes in the car, we’ve driven to Virginia in the car, we’ve driven to St. Louis in the car. We talk in the car, we’ve cried in the car together. When we travel [out of town], Rem has different opinions and ideas on what he saw. He won’t sleep the whole time in the car, we actually have great conversations. We took pictures on our trip. We can both share our experiences and voices throughout. I got this car when I moved here so it’s monumental. It symbolizes a new beginning for us. We’ve created so many memories going to different places. So I’m thinking about what the car means to us and how it relates to us and our family.

In Chant’s quote, her car is described as a thing that serves many purposes for her and her son; it is both therapeutic and generative. Throughout Chant’s explanation, her car not only transformed the practice of transporting her from place to place but aided in her creation of identities (Gee, 1991) wherever she and Rem went, and allowed emotions and memories to be shared in this space. As Pahl & Rowsell (2010) observe, ‘Identities reside on a sea of stuff and of experiences’ (p. 8). Chant’s car is interesting here because it traverses time and space and carries particular resonances, links to key events (‘we’ve changed clothes in the car’), influenced their parent–child dyad (‘we’ve talked in the car’) and served as a space to express emotions (‘we’ve cried in the car together’).

Family Stories, Texts and Meaning

87

Chant and Rem’s practices remind us that families’ routine and literacy practices are often taken for granted until something or someone validates their existence (Leander & Boldt, 2013). As the only member of my family living in a different state, I shared my deepest emotions when I created my digital story, Family’s Stories, at the CDS workshop. The photos I collected from my childhood birthdays and those of my parents, brothers and nephews reminded me of our long history of closeknit family interactions. As I looked at my digital stories and photos from the past to present, it deeply affected me, especially since my father’s third cancer scare and the recent loss of my oldest brother, Jason, to colon cancer. Having to collect photos of Jason to compose his obituary programme was an honour, albeit a traumatic one. Indeed, these memories stay with me; they are ‘felt, heard, listened to, and looked at … recognizing embodied understandings as responses’ (Pahl & Rowsell, 2010, p. 10) and intimately connected with my own sense of self over time. Chant’s digital story topic also evoked responses from Valentina about the personification of Chant’s car: Valentina: Since your car is very vital to your lifestyle, do you have a name? Chant: No, we don’t call it anything. I just say, get in the— Valentina: Ok— Chant: —car. Valentina: Ok, ok. I’m just curious, like have you personified— Chant: We haven’t personified the car. We just say ‘the car’.

The focus soon extended to the names we chose to call our cars, but also to what we do in those spaces that allowed us to make meaning from those experiences: Tisha: I actually call mine Lou Lou. Chant: OH! Valentina: YEAH. I have a name for mine too. I just drove it from California. I completely understand your experiences with your vehicle. Tisha: I find this interesting, how you do everything in the car. I can relate to that as well. I have cried, scream[ed], as of last week— Chant: Right— Tisha: I’ve prayed. I have talked to myself in the car, just the thinking processes that happen. I have had SERIOUS conversations about my life in the car.

Chant, Valentina and I responded to our automobiles as artifacts and found commonalities that they offer as memories, experiences and safe spaces wherein

88

Literacy, Media, Technology

to share stories and personal experiences in a semi-public setting. These moments in time describe the importance of these stories as they are told, retold and shaped into narratives that make them less about a mere ‘story’ and more about how life is lived – in much the same way as timescales (Lemke, 2000) are described as part of human activity, identities and artifacts that move within and across time. As Lemke states: A process or an experience that takes minutes is very different from one that takes hours, or from one that takes weeks, or years, etc. This concept of relatively independent timescales in turn problematizes the ways in which humans do in fact integrate or cumulate meaning, experience, or identity across vastly different timescales. (2009, p. 143)

Valentina and Chris: ‘The most pervasive thing in our lives right now’ Objects and practices in which we have engaged over a period of time tend to have more resonance than texts that are confined to school settings. The next conversation circle came from Valentina, who suggested a topic for awareness by helping Chris share his perspective as a child living with autism: Valentina: This is my son Chris. He has autism. I would say that this is probably the most pervasive thing in our lives right now. It will be something I discuss but it [i.e. our digital story] will be from his perspective about how normal he can be but then at times, sometimes he’s NOT as normal. So I think I’ll balance that for now to just get me going. ‘Cause you know, no two children are alike with autism and so it will be from his perspective.’ Tisha: So is this perspective about awareness? Almost like a reality TV show? Valentina: It’ll kinda be like ‘Inside the life …’ ‘This boy’s life’. Like there are some things he’s very typical [about] and some things he’s not and to kinda show that contrast is like a conundrum. It’s like he has autism but he can read. He can do multiplication, but at the same time he has serious obstacles. I have to be honest and real with that and what’s that going to look like.

Valentina’s candid unheard stories of Chris’s autism were key. They create multiple descriptors for how he is perceived by both his disability and his experiences. Valentina also shared her struggles of being a single parent raising an autistic son: Of course there were hardships. Going to school, trying to raise a special needs child is a struggle. From trying to get adequate and specialized childcare and aftercare while I was in school at night was frustrating. I cried a lot to find childcare, sometimes on the day of my class at the eleventh hour.

Family Stories, Texts and Meaning

89

Valentina described her emotions and frustrations, which extend beyond her digital story topic, and demonstrate her everyday experiences of being a single parent seeking support and assistance for Chris – experiences that are often overlooked. Starlaa’s experiences were also similar.

Starlaa & Star Doll: ‘She wants to show…photography through four generations’ Starlaa: She [Star Doll] wants to tell her family tree histories. She wants to show how far she can go with her photography through four generations. Tisha: Excellent! That would be great. How will you start with the visuals? How will you go back to four generations? Starlaa: She wants to start with her and her mother showing pictures of her and them as a baby and through backward progression of who they are and the things that they have done. So it’s going to be like backward progression of them as pictures as older, teens, then a baby then her grandma and grandpa as middle-aged, teens, and babies. I really think we will enjoy this. It sounds fascinating. This [experience] will give us the chance to digitalize a lot of the pictures. Something I’ve always wanted to do. She’ll [Star Doll] have her legacy of her grandparents and great grandparents.

During private discussions in my office, Starlaa revealed that she suddenly lost her mother only five months earlier. With tears in her eyes, she described how her immediate family lives with four generations of women, and losing the matriarch of her family made it difficult to attend classes or concentrate. Thus, she and Star Doll chose to use their digital story to honour her mother’s memories and to highlight four generations of family members – an undoubtedly painful but astonishing tribute. Chant, Valentina and Starlaa’s stories were woven through and around artifacts that carried strong meanings for each of the families. They helped to connect past and present experiences, to reflect upon identities and to replay these significant and intimate narratives through digital media. Chant, Valentina and Starlaa’s descriptive stories demonstrated how these mothers and their children participated in a digital storytelling workshop. They described the multiple ways in which they related to the artifacts (from past and present stories) in ways that helped each other organize and explore the ways in which their digital story topics could come to life on the screen. One important component to each of these stories is the correlation between artifacts and affect. In most cases, affect is masked and checked at the doors of our lives, but here it resonates among the women and their connections to the

90

Literacy, Media, Technology

artifacts that are near and dear to them. Chant’s stories reveal how her car is a capsule for her and Rem’s multiple transformative practices. As a space where they laugh, cry and travel, Chant’s car helps them make sense of their lives. Such meaning making was even extended to Valentina and me, prompting us to share our discoveries with our own cars. During the composition of this chapter, Chant shared additional narratives of car travel with Rem to visit her mother, who was recently released from the hospital while battling colon cancer. Her car is used as a space to channel emotions she may have to suppress while visiting her mother in order to maintain positivity and hope. After the workshop ended, Starlaa mentioned how she is feeling better after the loss of her mother. As she states, ‘It sneaks up on you when you least expect it. It just sucka punches you [but] it doesn’t hurt as badly as it used to, not on a full-time basis.’ Because of this workshop, Starlaa’s stories and texts have become artifacts that help her to cope with her mother’s death just as Chant uses her car and Valentina her unique perception of autism to access stories and the sensory worlds wherein stories live.

Final thoughts The exploration of interactions in family and group conversation circles during a digital storytelling workshop has made the connection between artifacts, texts, meaning making and affective intensities visible. Teaching such artifactual literacies in today’s classrooms opens up possibilities for identifying how these embedded and embodied experiences and practices matter. Creating a social space where students bring overlooked artifacts, evocative objects and meaningful stories to classrooms also create opportunities for literacy learning through talk, images and writing. Lewis and Tierney (2011) focused on mobilizing emotion in an urban English classroom as a mediated action, exploring how students’ emotive interactions were mediated by talk, texts, and participation as components to broaden critical literacy. In addition, Dutro (2008), whose work featured realms of emotion and trauma she personally endured after the tragic death of her brother, examined how trauma as testimony became an artifact in how students responded to literature. I argue for the connection between varied home and school experiences and artifacts to leverage the kinds of stories and texts valued by students and adults. These stories can carry and connect students’ identities, and they can be transformed through the creative use of digital media.

Family Stories, Texts and Meaning

91

Notes 1 The Dig-A-Fam: Families’ Digital Storytelling Project was funded by the National Council of Teachers of English Research Foundation. 2 All persons’ names are pseudonyms.

References Alvermann, D. E., Hinchman, K. A., Moore, D. W., Phelps, S. F., & Waff, D. R. (Eds), (2006). Reconceptualizing the literacies in adolescents’ lives (2nd ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Anstey, M., & Bull, G. (2006). Teaching and learning multiliteracies: Changing times, changing literacies. Newark, DE: International Reading Association. Barlett, L., & Vasudevan, L. (2010). ‘Foreword.’ In K. Pahl & J. Rowsell (Eds), Artifactual literacies: Every object tells a story (pp. vii–viii). New York: Teachers College Press. Dutro, E. (2008). ‘ “That’s why I was crying on this book”: Trauma as testimony in children’s responses to literature.’ Changing English, 15, 423–434. Gee, J. P. (1991). ‘What is literacy?’ In C. Mitchell & K. Weiler (Eds), Rewriting literacy: Culture and the discourse of the other (pp. 3–11). Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey. Holland, D., Lachicotte, W., Skinner, D., & Cain, C. (1998). Identity and agency in cultural worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jones, R. H. (2012). Discourse analysis: A resource book for students. Milton Park, Abingdon: Routledge. Kress, G. (1997). Before writing: Rethinking the paths to literacy. London: Routledge. Kress, G., & Van Leeuwen, T. (1996). Reading images: The grammar of visual design. London: Routledge. Leander, K., & Boldt, G. (2013). ‘Rereading “a pedagogy of multiliteracies”: Bodies, texts and emergence.’ Journal of Literacy Research, 45(1), 22–46. Lee, C. D., & Smagorinsky, P. (Eds). (2000). Vygotskian perspectives on literacy research: Constructing meaning through collaborative inquiry. New York: Cambridge University Press. Lemke, J. L. (2000). ‘Across the scales of time: Artifacts, activities, and meanings in ecosocial systems.’ Mind, Culture, and Activity, 7(4), 273–290. Lemke, J. (2009). ‘Multimodality, identity and time.’ In C. Jewitt (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of multimodal analysis (pp. 140–150). Abingdon: Routledge. Levine, P., & Scollon, R. (Eds). (2004). Discourse and technology: Multimodal discourse analysis. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Lewis, C., & Tierney, J. D. (2011). ‘Mobilizing emotion in an urban English classroom.’ Changing English, 8(3), 319–329.

92

Literacy, Media, Technology

Lewis Ellison, T., & Kirkland, D. (2014). ‘Motherboards, mics, and metaphors: Reexamining new literacies and Black feminist thought through technologies of self.’ Journal of E-Learning and Digital Media, 11(4), 390–405. Lewis Ellison, T. (2016). ‘Artifacts as stories: Understanding families, digital literacies, and storied lives.’ Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 59(5), 511–513. Lewis Ellison, T. & Wang, H. (under review). ‘Competence, resistance, and voice: Digital story-sharing and agentive practices in an African American parent-child dyad.’ Norris, S. (2004). Analyzing multimodal interaction: A methodological framework. London: Routledge. Pahl, K. (2003). ‘Children’s text making at home: Transforming meaning across modes.’ In C. Jewitt & G. Kress (Eds), Multimodal literacy (pp. 139–154). New York: Peter Lang Publishers. Pahl, K., & Rowsell, J. (2010). Artifactual literacies: Every object tells a story. New York: Teachers College Press. Scollon, R. (2001). ‘Action and text: Towards an integrated understanding of the place of text in social (inter)action, mediated discourse analysis and the problem of social action.’ In R. Wodak & M. Meyer (Eds), Methods of critical discourse analysis (pp. 139–183). London, UK: Sage. Solomon, M. (2012). ‘ “Why can’t you just say, ‘It’s cute’?” The role of audience in first graders’ digital storytelling.’ Talking Points, 24(1), 14–22. Turkle, S. (2007). Evocative objects: Things we think with. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Vasudevan, L. (2011). ‘Re-imagining pedagogies for multimodal selves.’ Teachers College Record, 110(1), 88–108. Vasudevan, L., DeJaynes, T., & Schmier, S. (2010). ‘Multimodal pedagogies: Playing, teaching, and learning with adolescents’ digital literacies.’ In D. Alvermann (Ed.), Adolescents’ online literacies: Connecting classrooms, media, and paradigms (pp. 5–25). New York: Peter Lang. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

7

Mapping Place, Affect and Futures in an Adolescent’s New Media Making: Schizoanalytic Cartographies Christian Ehret

Introduction Not so long ago making digital media such as websites, videos and even images tended to be a relatively sedentary process. I remember a ‘digital imaging’ course I took at a major university in the United States around 2001. Students in the course were required to purchase a recent version of Adobe Photoshop, and throughout the semester we practised various techniques for ‘photoshopping’ images taken on one of a few digital cameras the professor made available for loan. Given the course’s focus on the Adobe software, the content of the images themselves was less important than the techniques we were able to display in manipulating them. Even so, the experience of sitting behind a boxy monitor and messing around with software such as Movie Maker, iMovie, GarageBand or Photoshop (what were apps?) was the norm for making digital media. Now rather than sitting behind screens, we most often move with them. We move our fingers across glossy glass, and we hold phones, tablets and watches up to the world, using them to view, share, ‘augment’ and visually manipulate the peopled places through which we move: unexpected scenes in metro stations, country fields blurring by the car window, QR codes aside museum installations, vibrant street art. Place affects our mobile digital media making more than software. Increasingly, and no matter the place, mobile devices are ubiquitous in developed societies (Pew Research Center, 2015) – and nearly so in developing nations (West & Ei, 2014) – especially among adolescents (Lenhart et al., 2015). In the United States, for example, 91 per cent of teens between the ages of thirteen and seventeen access the internet on a mobile device, such

94

Literacy, Media, Technology

as a tablet or smartphone, which have capabilities for capturing, sharing and manipulating new media on the move (Lenhart et al., 2015). Indeed, more than access content, these same teens produce digital media via texting; messaging apps such as WhatsApp or Kik; and the most popular social media apps among teens, Snapchat, YouTube, Instagram and Tumblr (Lenhart et al., 2015). What and how youth choose to communicate textually through these platforms are integral to the identities they are imagining, developing and practicing across the places through which they move everyday (Buckingham, 2008; Gardner & Davis, 2013). In this chapter I develop theories currently building across literacy studies that seek to understand relationships between place, identity and adolescents’ always moving digital literacies. Throughout the chapter I think alongside one seventeen-year-old’s experiences of making a digital video about homelessness in various locations throughout his community. I knew Nolan for over two years as his high school English teacher before I began following his video project about homelessness. Even as his English teacher I knew that he maintained a YouTube channel, both through his unsolicited and passionate requests for me to follow it and from the obvious fame it garnered him among his classmates. He uploaded a wide variety of videos to the channel that tended to index his passions for particular media and film genres: improvised and scripted comedy skits with friends, a short slasher film shot in his mom’s country cottage, and a puzzling high school noir à la Christopher Nolan or David Lynch. Although Nolan’s experiences making new media are singular, they are also indicative of the relationship between adolescents’ identities, digital production and, increasingly, place. In Nolan’s experiences, this relationship became yet more complicated as he moved with and filmed homeless men and women in his community. I therefore begin with a selective appraisal of theoretic perspectives apt for inquiry that continues to grow more complex, just as adolescents’ digital literacies grow evermore a part of both who they are becoming and how they communicate that becoming on the move. Next, I develop these perspectives through Guattari’s (2012) notion of schizoanalytic cartographies. Schizoanalysis was in part, for Guattari, a critique of traditional Freudian psychoanalysis that maps individual experience backward, using history and abstract social structures as a path towards understanding material futures. Guattari developed schizoanalysis as a collective and experimental method that focuses on how complex social activity, such as a group’s creative play and imaginings together, might generate potential for as yet unimagined futures. Schizoanalytic cartography is therefore

Mapping Place, Affect and Futures in New Media Making

95

a radical method of mapping immediate embodied, sensory and affective experience in order to imagine possibilities of safe movement into new places and ways of being (Walkerdine, 2013). His insistence on cartographic metaphor suggests Guattari’s refusal to separate singularities of experience from place, that is, his refusal to view human experience as somehow an interior ‘in hereness’ that makes sense of a material world ‘out there’. This attention to the relational becoming and malleability of self and place is particularly well suited for analysing connections between adolescents’ digital literacies, their becoming futures and their mobilities. I therefore conclude by illustrating the potential for analysing young people’s new media making as schizoanalytic cartographies, providing an analytic mapping of Nolan’s experiences making new media. Throughout the chapter I use the term ‘new media making’, rather than terms such as ‘digital production’ or ‘multimodal composition’ (see e.g. Jewitt, 2008), which are more common in literacy studies, in order to account for the always enmeshed relationship between making new media and embodied experience. Building on the wealth of work that has described youth engagement with digital production and filming within and beyond schools (e.g. Burn, 2007; Parry, 2013), I describe Nolan’s new media making as an emergent process of people, places and things affecting each other towards new movements, new ways of being and, particularly for Nolan, new ways of making. In short, making is never without the feeling of making – of moving hands and feet, of the air on streets or in bedrooms, of swiping, touching, clicking, of the senses of sound, of the warmth, chill, calmness and hues of colour. Making cannot be thought without the body, and the body cannot be thought without place. And all these movements are part of the selves we are producing. Moving forward, in this chapter and in literacy research, I argue that modes of mapping movement through places – understood as imaginative, relational performances and expressions of self and world – are essential for more fully embodied and human understandings of making new media with technologies whether they are named mobile or otherwise.

New movements of place, new media making and futures in literacy studies Historically, literacy researchers have understood place through insights from the New Literacy Studies, which described literacy as a social phenomenon unintelligible outside of the cultural context from which it is constructed (Gee,

96

Literacy, Media, Technology

2015). Place is therefore often synonymous with community, or ‘the place’ in which literacy is practised according to durable – if fungible – cultural norms (Barton & Hamilton, 1998). Building from perspectives on literacy as situated, researchers have developed theories of literacy and place alongside globalizing neoliberalism (e.g. Brandt & Clinton, 2002) and new technologies and digital media – such as tablets, smartphones and virtual worlds – that are complicating fixed notions of literacy in context, of literacy ‘in place’ (Leander, Phillips, & Taylor, 2010). For example, with the advent of new technologies and digital media that can connect culturally divergent social settings, researchers have conceived of digital literacies as ‘placed resources’ (Prinsloo, 2005) in order to account for how, in all forms of communication from print to multimodal, ‘form and function do not lock together unchangingly when texts and utterances travel and operate in diverging social spaces’ (Prinsloo & Rowsell, 2012, p. 273). Viewing digital literacies as placed resources has thereby opened critically oriented inquiry to how differences in the uses of new technologies across continents, for instance, are sometimes ‘simultaneously and systematically translated into inequalities between readers, writers and speakers’ (Prinsloo & Rowsell, 2012, p. 273). This critical perspective on constructions of literacy ‘deficits’ dovetails with other lines of inquiry that draw on the New Literacy Studies to describe relationships between literacy, technology and identity. These lines of inquiry have shown youths’ abilities to challenge, contradict and even explode cultural constructions of their being ‘in deficit’ with respect to literacy, for example, using technology to express themselves as artists where their geographic locations would stereotypically construct them as ‘less literate’ than the mainstream (e.g. Vasudevan, 2006). Ethnographies and case studies in this line of inquiry have opened profound imaginings of pedagogic possibilities that continue to proliferate in research on literacy, place and technologies (e.g. Comber, 2015; Wissman, Staples, Vasudevan, & Nichols, 2015). Indeed, this line of research continues to show that literacy, place and social futures are intertwined and mutually constitutive, and that how they are intertwined has implications for how adolescents’ literacy learning might be mentored across formal and informal settings. But because the postmodern impetus in this line of inquiry centres on critiquing discourses around – and cultural constructions of – youth futures, differences and deficits, embodied experience receives too little attention: the feeling of being in a place, the atmospheres generated in moving social relations, how adolescents make meaning through such feelings and such atmospheres and how these experiences infuse and affect expressions of self and world through digital media.

Mapping Place, Affect and Futures in New Media Making

97

Recognizing the need for more fully embodied understandings of youth’s experiences with digital media, literacy researchers are building social theory towards knowing relations of literacy, movement and making (e.g. Enriquez, Johnson, Kontovourki, & Mallozzi, 2015). With respect to digital literacies, these burgeoning theoretic perspectives dissolve binaries between, for example, physical and digital, on- and off-screen or material and immaterial. Literacy researchers are thereby developing perspectives such as (im)materiality (Burnett, 2015), real virtualities (Ehret & Hollett, 2014) and emplacement (Mills, Comber, & Kelly, 2013) in order to understand the always imbricated and reflexive experiences of bodies, place and digital media, even as those experiences enter into more expansive economic, political and cultural streams (Burnett, Merchant, Pahl, & Rowsell, 2014). On the scale of bodies in classrooms, real virtual perspectives have helped illuminate connections between motility – how, when and where people are able to move their bodies within specific, socially constructed spaces – and agency, for example, students’ agency while making digital media with mobile devices in school (Ehret & Hollett, 2013). With its dissolution of theoretical boundaries between body, environment and processes of making, this research conveys the necessity of developing theories of place in literacy studies to better understand its affective and material relations to human activity. For example, Pink (2011) theorized that if notions of place and embodiment are implicated with one of environment, then we need to understand places as composed of entanglements of all components of an environment. This includes geological forms, the weather, human socialities, material objects, buildings, animals and more. (p. 349)

Place, therefore, is an ongoing process that emerges at intersections of bodies, materials and environments, all moving, and all moving at different rates. Theorists of mobilities and place have described these emergent, moving intersections as ‘entanglements’ (Ingold, 2000) or a constant ‘throwtogetherness’ (Massey, 2005) from which lived experience and learning emerge. Place is therefore an always ongoing ‘event’, or a place-event (Fors, Bäckström, & Pink, 2013), that is an emergent becoming of human activity, material environments and even the technological nonhuman, such as smartphones, iPads and the wirelessly connected streams of bits and bytes that affect their operation. Place is an entanglement of all these elements – human bodies, environmental materialities, local and global discourses and more – constantly coming together and apart, constantly moving each other in place-events. From this perspective,

98

Literacy, Media, Technology

learning is more than situated and literacy is more than a placed resource. Learning and literacy are emplaced (Fors, Bäckström, & Pink, 2013); they are part of larger, ongoing place-events.

Schizoanalytic cartographies: Developing an analytic for imagining futures and new media making In the remainder of this chapter I explore how Nolan’s emplaced experiences of new media making inform his becoming future and how this becoming future emerges in place-events of making new media. I use the term ‘futures’ rather than ‘identity’, following post-structural critiques of how preformed, socially constructed identities are sometimes mapped onto imaginings of adolescents’ ‘available’ futures, thereby ironically limiting the possibilities of those imaginings (e.g. Leander & Boldt, 2013). Indeed, I follow Guatarri (2012) farther along the line of this critique, using his version of schizoanalysis to ‘minimize the use of notions like those of subjectivity, consciousness, significance … as transcendental entities that are impermeable to concrete situations’ (p. 23). In Guatarri’s analytic, nothing is known outside of what is immanent, and therefore ‘mapping’ the becoming of social futures requires a speculative analysis of relational configurations, which shift and change relative to particular assemblages. For example, imagine Nolan making digital videos about homelessness in his city, a rural college town in the American Southeast. Nolan goes to a very small Catholic high school where students are required to complete community service projects in order to graduate. He has said in research interviews that he started his digital video project because ‘lots of my friends are doing stuff like canned food drives at school … you know [student’s name who started canned food drive]? … and they all have their thing and all that. So you know I needed to do mine’. For Nolan, doing his thing meant starting a digital video project, and working with his friends to document the lives of men and women living without adequate shelter in his community. A self-described film buff, Nolan finds time to watch as many films as he can, and he especially admires the auteur directors David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino and Werner Herzog – although he idolizes Lynch most. Nolan has been making his YouTube videos, both alone and with friends, ever since he got his first digital video camera in middle school. He has shot videos using devices ranging from more sophisticated digital video cameras to his iPhone, iPad or even his friends’ mobile devices: whatever is on hand is most important, in Nolan’s view.

Mapping Place, Affect and Futures in New Media Making

99

I followed Nolan for well over a year as he shot video on mobile devices, and I moved with him across myriad filming locations. In just one day, for example, we followed a man, Jimmy, who had been homeless for over five years. We followed Jimmy from his campsite in a small wooded area behind a strip mall, to his friends’ apartment where they played music and I remained paranoically alert to a loose, pinkish-white boa constrictor; and then, we moved to a community shelter where he showed us the shower stalls and kitchen; and then, we moved to a camp stationed under a dilapidated train bridge, where about thirty men and women were living in tents. Taking just this day for analysis requires notions that exceed the theoretical reach of ‘situated’, ‘contextual’ or ‘translocal’ – notions common in contemporary literacy studies – if Nolan’s processes of new media making are to be understood as moving embodied experiences, experiences moving towards as yet unimagined embodied futures. To be sure, however, in each of these examples of filming locations, local discourses informed how Nolan perceived his production processes. Talking with me about what he had shot while we walked or drove to meet Jimmy at the next site, Nolan often expressed how he thought these portraits of everyday life might change people’s minds about who the homeless are, and hopefully inspire viewers to donate to the building of a new community shelter – Nolan’s stated goal for his videos. This persuasive purpose for his videos would help cultivate Nolan’s individual identity and sense of belonging within his small service-oriented school community. At the same time, more global discourses of adolescence, youth, and even Catholicism pervaded Nolan’s talk about his video project: I mean we have to do all that stuff [service projects] but nothing big really happens … there’s just a lot of people [teachers] wanting us to help others … but I do think that the videos will be more appealing because its not just some kid knocking on your door asking for donations you know?

Nolan’s reflexive addendums ‘but nothing really happens’ and ‘not just some kid knocking on your door’ evince effects of discourses that construct youth as a time of high expectations but ultimately low responsibilities. Lesko (2012) described this temporal dimension of how adolescence is culturally constructed through her notion of ‘panoptical time’. Panoptical time emphasizes artificial expectations for youth that place them ‘into a temporal narrative that demands a moratorium of responsibility yet expects them at the same time to act as if each moment of the present is consequential’ (p. 91). Infused with high expectations from his school and religion to do something that advances social justice before

100

Literacy, Media, Technology

the end of his senior year, Nolan relates what he perceives as the impotence of school community service projects in actually affecting social change. Nolan’s reflections on his processes of making digital videos evidence how the confluence of local and global discourses affects his experience and agency, and they inspire questions about whether, and how, his situated process of editing these videos may be similarly influenced. Further, how might his interest in becoming a filmmaker and his admiration of auteur directors manifest intertextually in this process? In short, how might the swirling discourses of youth, Catholicism, his school, filmmaking and auteurism, to take a few, affect Nolan’s agency as a maker of new media, and, indeed, as a maker of social change in his community? Each of these questions is deeply worthwhile in advancing postmodern, critical understandings of situated and digital literacies, but each of these questions also moves analysis away from Nolan’s emplaced experiences of making digital video – of moving with mobile devices – and how those emplaced experiences may steer Nolan towards as yet unimagined futures as a maker and doer. They move from the sensations of music and fearing boas to the abstractions of religion and auteurism. Proceeding with an emergence analysis, I do not wish to suggest a dichotomization of postmodern and emergence approaches to inquiry in literacy studies – for example, Lesko’s panoptical time has much to suggest about how adolescents experience and feel their lives in the present. Rather, I highlight (1) how most approaches to situatedness and context often bracket movement and emplaced experiences of making new media, and (2) I build from postmodern insights around the construction of youth identities to argue the potential of more speculative approaches to imagining youth futures. Such speculative analyses do require a shift in perspective, however. Moving forward from a postmodern critique of how the social is historically constructed and brought to bear on the present, emergence perspectives begin in the present and move forward, examining how the social is constantly brought into being through immanent, material relations. For Guatarri, this is the ‘existential territory’ of everyday life that cannot be captured in notions such as ‘discourses’, which are abstracted from always forward-moving embodied experiences. Walkerdine (2013) described Guatarri’s notion of existential territory in relation to place: if we understand the existential territory as the embodied affective place … in which a sense of existing is produced, we can see that Guattari retains some aspects of the idea of positions in discourse or in discursive practices but goes way beyond them by concentrating not on discourse but on the basic sensory experience of being located and of moving through the space and time of the locations. (p. 758)

Mapping Place, Affect and Futures in New Media Making

101

Existential territories are the mess of multisensory experience, of moving and feeling moved in everyday life, of static shock when swiping a smartphone, and ‘the rhythmic insistence of waking dreams’ (Walkerdine, 2013, p. 757). Although it is more expansive, Guatarri’s conceptualization of existential territories is in many ways akin to conceptions of place-events, especially in terms of affect. As in his work with Deleuze and in the work of contemporary Deleuzian scholars (e.g. Massumi, 2011), Guatarri conceives of affect as a prepersonal intensity that may register in embodied experience as feeling moved, for instance, ‘and manifesting itself by transfers that are as unlocalizable from the point of view of their origin as from that of their destination’ (p. 203). Asserting that it is ‘unlocalizable’, Guatarri suggests affect’s inextricable relation to a sense of being and moving through place, where affect ‘remains fuzzy, atmospheric, and yet is perfectly apprehendable’ (p. 203). As in Fors, Bäckström, and Pink’s (2013) conception of place-events, Guatarri conceives of existential territories as a relational experience of mind, body and environment that is not simply apprehended through the senses, but that is felt in the affective push-pull of experience, the movements and textures of social life, the feeling that our human bodies are somewhere. However, the complementary notion of ‘incorporeal universes’ goes quite further than place-events in developing an analytic for speculating social futures. Existential territories are never without ‘incorporeal universes’, composed of memories, the dreamed of futures of what could be, ritornelles – most often translated as rhythms and refrains. These ‘refrains’ are the affective basis of existence that thickens in existential territories and produce difference, change, becoming. To illustrate such difference-producing affective experience, Guattari often refers to Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time, with its ‘cortège of leitmotifs, of fecund moments, of refrains’ (p. 224), wherein a walk along uneven cobblestones and dipping a biscuit in tea conjure memories, feelings, refrains that affect present moments, thicken them, make them feel like something more than they are. But Proust’s characters are not trapped in a prison of returns, and neither are those in Guatarri’s analytic: ‘On the contrary, the process [of remembering] was ceaselessly exposed to the encounter of heterogeneous realities that could inflect it, make it fluctuate far from pre-existing equilibria, or even derail it’ (Guattari, 2012, p. 224). Their subjectivities, their futures, are not the cause but the ongoing effect of singular experiences. A schizoanalytic cartography maps these becoming subjectivities, analysing how incorporeal universes of refrains, dreams and appropriated discursivities

102

Literacy, Media, Technology

infuse and morph in embodied experiences of existential territories. Thus, a schizoanalytic cartography traces the movement of bodies, questioning and speculating the possibilities for becoming and difference without appeal to abstract or pre-existing authorities. This tracing of movement and change in the affective experiences of place, I argue, is especially apt for analysing relationships between place, new media making and embodied futures. As I have argued, adolescents make new media increasingly on the move, in places, indeed in emplaced experiences, that cannot be predicted ahead of their unfolding. If, in fact, emplaced experiences affect mobile, digital media making more than software, then how might schizoanalytic cartography aid in mapping new understandings of adolescents’ learning with digital, mobile devices? What new questions might such a mapping generate? In the following section, I provide brief schizoanalytic mappings of Nolan making digital videos about the homeless across two distinctly emplaced experiences. These brief mappings suggest the potential of this approach in offering an embodied and affective analytic relevant to adolescents’ mobile, new media making. However, Guatarri resisted generating a normalized schizoanalytic protocol. I therefore draw from the following themes that I have outlined in this chapter, using them to catalyse my speculative analysis: 1. 2. 3.

4.

Subjectivities are continuing effects of bodies moving through social life and not the cause. Affect, movement and change are primary to experience and therefore to becoming social futures. Affect, movement and change cannot be felt-thought outside of what is immanent, outside of place, bodies and sensory experiences. Importantly, what is immanent includes histories of place, bodies and sensory experiences that are always a part of becoming futures: the incorporeal universes of ritornelles, waking dreams (Walkerdine, 2013), appropriated discursivities. Imagination and speculation of what could be opens possibilities and potentials from experiences of the material present. Futures are not based on the ‘interpretation of fantasms [abstractions, constructions, etc.] and the displacement of affects but endeavours to render both operative, to score them with a new range (in the musical sense)’ (Guattari, 2012, p. 214). Learning to make is not a process of linear development towards a predicted and abstracted future, but of deepening, of ‘scoring a new range’, in material presents.

Mapping Place, Affect and Futures in New Media Making

103

Galvanized by these analytic themes, I offer the following mappings of Nolan’s new media-making experiences in and with place as, in part, a constant process of reimagining: (1) imagining his self as a maker in affective, socio-material relations, (2) my imagining of his making futures and (3) my speculation as to how those imagined making futures raise questions relevant to Nolan’s digital literacy learning in new spaces.

Mapping Nolan’s making futures: Character refrains From the perspective of developing his style as a filmmaker, Nolan felt that making digital videos about multiple homeless people would give him the opportunity to ‘create a different feeling for each person I introduce’, to ‘give them a character’. One winter morning, I went with Nolan to meet one such man, Clarence, whom Nolan had gotten to know over the course of many months. We met Clarence underneath the dilapidated, concrete overpass that he was using for shelter that week. It was early January, cold and damp. A bluegrey sky was overwhelmed by beige, oil-and-sun-soaked concrete. Clarence seemed nonplussed by our showing up to see him, and began pacing in circles as we approached. He asked Nolan, ‘What you filmin’ about today?’, and almost immediately thereafter he, as if accustomed to telling his stories to Nolan’s camera more than actually conversing or hanging out, told the air a story of how he had spent Christmas as he continued to circle on the concrete. Nolan shot Clarence from the side, focusing on his face and, then, slowing zooming into the tears sliding slowly from his eyes, while he told his story of huddling alone under the bridge to pass a rainy Christmas day. Later, while we watched the video in the cab of his pickup, Nolan would describe his experience of filming the shot. He was fascinated with how the video began to blur during the slow zoom to Clarence’s tears: Nolan: you could say it’s like the camera’s eye getting watery or something … I think it almost conveys more of his sadness like it flew into the camera and the camera tweeked a little bit … the camera freaks out with the blur shot and then immediately goes back … it’s a subtle little blur … It’s almost a special effects way have having the shot itself have the emotion that he himself is feeling right there.

For Nolan, the shot we viewed in the chilly truck was the emotion, the enunciation of a singularity we felt together while shooting Clarence, and that continued into the experience of sitting together, watching the video not 100 yards from

104

Literacy, Media, Technology

Clarence’s camp. I was struck by how Nolan curiously conflated the atmosphere of shooting under the bridge with an assumption about ‘the emotion that he [Clarence] himself is feeling right there’. In field notes, I would later puzzle over Nolan’s excitement with the image, and how Nolan only wanted to discuss the image of Clarence, and not the substance of Clarence’s vulnerable, rambling and singular story about spending Christmas alone under the bridge. It was as if the character Nolan wanted to depict, stylistically, was in the image’s affect, and that the affect of the existential territory we lived together in the shooting, talking and telling had evaporated. Over the next few days of following and filming other members of the homeless community, Nolan continued to talk not only about the trick of the camera and Clarence’s teary eyes but about all the hands and eyes he had filmed. He spoke about them as a sort of video synecdoche not only for their whole bodies but for their whole experiences of homelessness. For instance, after filming another man, who told us his story while sitting on a tree stump beside his pine needle sleeping mat in a suburban wood, Nolan talked again about eyes: Nolan: I feel like you really do feel the age and the hurt behind these guys eyes when I zoom in on them and I mean it really is the gateway to the soul just with those shots … but when I look at them I think to myself these just look like eyes that have seen a whole lot in their day, they’ve been through a lot, they look worn down.

Eyes, and often hands, were a refrain for Nolan, one emergent from his concrete experiences in existential territories of filming, but each pushing forward into the other, and into an emerging, identifiable style for his videos. Hands and eyes moved Nolan; he felt the stories he heard while filming through those hands, those eyes; and he worked to capture his immediate affective experience, which not only trained where his camera looked but where he wanted his audience to look. This was a refrain emanating not only from his own experiences of making videos with the homeless but also from viewing other documentaries about vulnerable populations. For example, Nolan often talked about how ‘weird this movie’ Titicut Follies was: Nolan: But I mean there were all these shots of eyes … like in the ward where they were all walking around and there wasn’t much talking  …  but lots of moving into their eyes … and it was while they were walking [close-ups on eyes] so it just felt weird.

Multiple times, Nolan associated his experiences filming the homelessness videos with this ‘weird’ feeling he had while watching Titicut Follies, a

Mapping Place, Affect and Futures in New Media Making

105

1960s documentary about patient-inmates of a hospital for the ‘criminally insane’. The association was not a reflection on telling stories about vulnerable human beings, however. The associations were in-the-momentof-filming comments, looking up from his camera to talk to me. They were part of an incorporeal universe full of affective experiences of hands, eyes, vulnerability, films, where, as with Proust’s character’s, Nolan was jolted by an unconscious recognition of his own becoming style as a maker of these videos, and perhaps, imaginings of his future making. These affective jolts of feeling moved were almost always emplaced feelings of ‘intimacy’ with homeless men and women: ‘I like the intimacy of shots where I get to zoom in on peoples’ hands and eyes.’ Indeed, Nolan spoke often of the ‘beauty’ in shots of the moving light on their ‘weathered hands by the fire’, and about the ways in which their eyes communicated their experiences differently from their words and narratives. Nolan’s talk about images of eyes tended to render people as images, as things, and yet there remains a sense of sensitivity and sympathy in Nolan’s feelings about their eyes – ‘eyes that have seen a whole lot in their day’; ‘they are just beautiful to me I guess’. Beauty is never an abstraction, unattached from existential territories: beauty is the thing felt beautiful. And, beauty affects beauty: there is nothing felt as beautiful that does affect an impulse towards begetting, that does not inspire duplication even where the duplicate may not bear a recognizable relation to the original experience of beauty (Scarry, 1999). Thus, an attribute of beauty is also its refrain: the impulse to bring it into being, to make it present, for example, the desire to capture an image of the sunset, in the moment, and share it on Instagram. For Nolan, feeling this impulse was not only part of his experience of making but also part of a becoming future as a maker, as a maker with this style. But Nolan’s aesthetic movements, in filming eyes and hands for instance, were never without ethical affects, which I felt in my experience as an ethnographer. I did not want to guide Nolan, but I often felt deeply pulled to insert myself and offer advice that I ultimately never did. I wondered: how could I mentor Nolan in continuing to deepen himself in a character that refrains from making vulnerable lives into flattened images, but that also generates stylistic refrains that are deeply felt evocations of character, of being in moments, in places, with people? How could I continue to stimulate this passion for finding and begetting beauty through making digital media, while at the same time complicating that passion with additional, critical impulses? How will Nolan’s becoming subjectivity as this filmmaker, with this sense of beauty, this aesthetic, contend

106

Literacy, Media, Technology

with the ethics of capturing the very vulnerable, the very human images he often finds beautiful? These questions bring me to a reflection on the mapping, the schizoanalytic cartography that generated them. Human experiences of becoming subjectivities shift and change relative to particular assemblages. Assemblages are the ‘bits’ of social life that become organized into notions and institutions at various scales like ‘family’, ‘community’, ‘nation’ (Leander & Rowe, 2006). Mapping Nolan’s becoming future as a new media maker requires attention to the shifting assemblages of Catholicism, youth culture, his school culture and his conceptions of homelessness, both local and global. Indeed, although it is outside the scope of this chapter, a developed schizoanalytic cartography would attend to how these assemblages shift in each existential territory of making. Still, I have mapped how Nolan’s becoming subjectivity emerged in emplaced experiences of existential territories. Across these experiences, I analysed how incorporeal universes of refrains infused his making, and morphed into textual expressions of concrete material worlds – his filming here and now with homeless men and women. Thus, I traced Nolan’s process across multiple sites of making, and I imagined his social future as a new media maker without appeal to abstract or pre-existing authorities. This imagining, however, has led me to the questions posed above, which I argue are paramount in developing new pathways for an always moving digital literacy education. In this chapter, I have worked to open inquiry around tensions currently arising from a shift of everyday digital practices: from the majority of digital life spent sitting before screens to the normalcy of moving with screens, holding them up to the world and rewriting that world through them. These are not questions abstracted from the statistics around mobile, digital devices in the lives of youth, statistics with which I began this chapter. They are deeply felt tensions emerging from my own experiences moving, mentoring and feeling with youth, like Nolan, who are making new media in sometimes emotionally laden places and social atmospheres. Affective intensities drove Nolan through his literacy experiences – the affect of textual production with people, places and things of ordinary, imperfect beauty that trained his camera and pervaded his talk about his process. Recent work has explicated relations between literacy futures and place, showing how ‘meaningmaking practices can be seen as glimpses of future spaces and belonging’ (Pahl, 2014, p. 24). Schizoanalytic cartography has the potential to develop as method for imagining future spaces of belonging, which for Nolan I imagine as making new media of aesthetic and social consequence. But these futures also require an

Mapping Place, Affect and Futures in New Media Making

107

affective mentoring, a way of being in time with youth that guides them to open and undetermined futures, which cannot be determined by appeals to abstract authorities or artificial notions of linear progress. Mentoring mobile new media makers requires intricate, delicate and deeply felt mappings of social futures I simply cannot predict.

References Barton, D., & Hamilton, M. (1998). Local literacies: Reading and writing in one Community. London: Routledge. Brandt, D., & Clinton, K. (2002). ‘Limits of the local: Expanding perspectives on literacy as a Social practice.’ Journal of Literacy Research, 34(3), 337–356. Buckingham, D. (2008). Youth, identity, and digital media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Burn, A. (2007). The place of digital video in the curriculum. In R. Andrews & C. Haythornthwaite (Eds), Sage handbook of E-learning research (pp. 504–523). London: Sage. Burnett, C. (2015). ‘(Im)materialising literacies.’ In K. Pahl & J. Rowsell (Eds), The Routledge handbook of literacy studies (pp. 520–531). London, UK: Routledge. Burnett, C., Merchant, G., Pahl, K., & Rowsell, J. (2014). ‘The (im)materiality of literacy: the significance of subjectivity to new literacies research.’ Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 35(1), 90–103. Comber, B. (2015). Literacy, place, and pedagogies of possibility. London: Routledge. Ehret, C., & Hollett, T. (2013). ‘(Re)placing school: Middle school students’ countermobilities while composing with iPods.’ Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 57(2), 110–119. Ehret, C., & Hollett, T. (2014). ‘Embodied composition in real virtualities: Adolescents’ literacy practices and felt experiences moving with digital, mobile devices in school.’ Research in the Teaching of English, 48(4), 428–452. Enriquez, G., Johnson, E., Kontovourki, S. & Mallozzi, C. A. (Eds) (2015). Literacies, learning, and the body: Putting theory and research into pedagogical practice. London: Routledge. Fors, V., Bäckström, Å., & Pink, S. (2013). ‘Multisensory emplaced learning: Resituating situated learning in a moving world.’ Mind, Culture, and Activity, 20(2), 170–183. Gardner, H., & Davis, K. (2013). The app generation: How today’s youth navigate identity, intimacy, and imagination in a digital world. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gee, J. (2015). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses. London: Routledge. Guattari, F. (2012). Schizoanalytic cartographies. London: Bloomsbury. Ingold, T. (2000). The perception of the environment. London: Routledge. Jewitt, C. (2008). ‘Multimodality and literacy in school classrooms.’ Review of Research in Education, 32(1), 241–267.

108

Literacy, Media, Technology

Leander, K. M., & Boldt, G. (2013). ‘Rereading “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies”: Bodies, texts, and emergence.’ Journal of Literacy Research, 45(1), 22–46. Leander, K. M., & Rowe, D. W. (2006). ‘Mapping literacy spaces in motion: A rhizomatic analysis of a classroom literacy performance.’ Reading Research Quarterly, 41(4), 428–460. Leander, K. M., Phillips, N. C., & Taylor, K. H. (2010). ‘The changing social spaces of learning: Mapping new mobilities.’ Review of Research in Education, 34(1), 329–394. Lenhart, A., Duggan, M., Perrin, A., Stepler, R., Rainie, H., & Parker, K. (2015). ‘Teens, social media & technology overview 2015.’ Lesko, N. (2012). Act your age! A cultural construction of adolescence. New York: Routledge. Massey, D. (2005). For space. London: Sage. Massumi, B. (2011). Semblance and event: Activist philosophy and the occurrent arts. Cambridge: MIT press. Mills, K., Comber, B., & Kelly, P. (2013). ‘Sensing place: Embodiment, sensoriality, kinesis, and children behind the camera.’ English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 12(2), 11–27. Pahl, K. (2014). Materializing literacies in communities: The uses of literacy revisited. London: Bloomsbury. Parry, B. (2013). Children, film and literacy. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Pew Research Center. (2015). Internet seen as positive influence on education but negative influence on morality in emerging and developing nations. Retrieved from http://www.pewglobal.org/files/2015/03/Pew-Research-Center-Technology-ReportFINAL-March-19-20151.pdf (Accessed 23 December 2015). Pink, S. (2011) ‘From embodiment to emplacement: Re-thinking competing bodies, senses and spatialities.’ Sport, Education and Society, 16(3), 343–355. Prinsloo, M. (2005). ‘The new literacies as placed resources.’ Perspectives in Education, 23(4), 87–98. Prinsloo, M., & Rowsell, J. (2012). ‘Digital literacies as placed resources in the globalised periphery.’ Language and Education, 26(4), 271–277. Scarry, E. (1999). On beauty and being just. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Vasudevan, L. (2006). ‘Making known differently: Engaging visual modalities as spaces to author new selves.’ E-Learning and Digital Media, 3(2), 207–216. Walkerdine, V. (2013). ‘Using the work of Felix Guattari to understand space, place, social justice, and education.’ Qualitative Inquiry, 19(10), 756–764. West, M., & Ei, C. H. (2014). Reading in the mobile era: A study of mobile reading in developing countries. Paris, FR: UNESCO. Wissman, K. K., Staples, J. M., Vasudevan, L., & Nichols, R. E. (2015). ‘Cultivating research pedagogies with adolescents: Created spaces, engaged participation, and embodied inquiry.’ Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 46(2), 186–197.

Engage in (a game or activity) for enjoyment: I want to play Snakes and Ladders Make (a music player, disc, radio, etc.) produce sounds: someone is playing a record – I can hear the drum

8

‘Finger Flowment’ and Moving Image Language: Learning Filmmaking with Tablet Devices John Potter and Theo Bryer

Introduction This chapter seeks to explore the making of moving image texts by children and young people using tablet devices. Ultimately, its focus is pedagogical. It is concerned with children, young people and those who work with them in education. For its theoretical perspective we draw on new literacies, locating lived experience at the centre of the discussion of humans using technology. In this way we put people and their practices at the heart of what we want to explore. Finally, we consider the features of tablet devices and ask questions about how sensitive pedagogy and good organization can shape their use. In this way we resist the arguments made by technological determinists that these devices in themselves confer agency and well-being on all who use them. These are devices with much promise for future uses of technology and media in schools, but there are many questions which could and should frame our approach to them. This chapter offers an account of a project with two groups of children and young people using tablet devices to create and edit short films. The pedagogical focus is on media production and, specifically, the teaching of the skills of moving image literacy which may or may not be supported by the haptic interfaces of tablets and smartphones. In the section below, we begin by outlining some of the background to the uses of tablet devices in school.

Some background: Tablets, media, children and literacy in years to come The tablet device, the smartphone and the touchscreen are all moving to the centre of what it means to be literate and productive in wider culture in this

112

Literacy, Media, Technology

century in both the developed and the developing world. Year on year their presence and ubiquity in our lives is increasing. Last year in the UK, the media and communications regulator reported that one in three children had personal access to a tablet device of one kind or another and that the proportion of five- to fifteen-year-olds using such devices regularly was twice the previous year (OFCOM, 2014). While such high levels of use are being reported in the home, there is significant parallel take-up in schools, with teachers, students and parents now engaging with a device which is in regular use in wider culture for entertainment, learning, writing, image production, social media interaction and more. The actual numbers in schools are much harder to quantify, at least in the UK, since such statistics on school information and communications technology (ICT) equipment are no longer collected centrally. It is possible, however, without too much of a caveat, to predict there will, in future, be ever higher levels of presence and permeability by tablet devices in all settings for learning, even if the actual uses of such devices vary widely and even if they are not completely unproblematic in everyday use. The drivers for this increased use and convergence between home and school around tablet devices are interrelated. On the one hand, there is a wellestablished industry selling apps to schools and homes with very low distribution costs via familiar platforms, often with the promise of raising standards (for a fuller discussion of which see Selwyn, 2013). On the other hand, there is the appeal to school managers and teachers of relatively low cost and familiarity; added to this are portability, shareability and the haptic quality of the device. We are not talking simply about an additional screen – this is a screen with which the user interacts as much through the medium of touch as audio-visually. For younger children, in particular, the way of being in the world and learning from it involves haptic experience across the range of toys, books, digital electronica and more. Furthermore, the haptic habit does not appear to lose appeal as we get older, with adults engaging increasingly through touch with screens, via tablets and smartphones year on year, and less time with computers, mice and keyboards (OFCOM, 2015). Indeed, one of the participants coined the phrase ‘Finger Flowment’ to describe this phenomenon. This seems to us to encapsulate neatly the key distinguishing affordance of the tablet device while simultaneously connecting to the concept of ‘flow’ and to agency and immersion in creative activity (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996). Given all of the above, if we take the view that cultural practices connect to literacy practices (Street 2003), and that meaning is contingent and context is all important, it could be expected that tablet devices and smartphones would

Learning Filmmaking with Tablet Devices

113

increasingly find a home in schools and after-school settings as artifacts for making and sharing texts of all kinds. In particular, tablet devices represent a form of technology which has the potential to cross the boundary between home and school, and one whose operation in the ‘third space’ between those places represents the possibility of a different engagement between curriculum knowledge and learner dispositions (McDougall & Potter, 2015). This potential is restricted and reduced where education systems narrow the definition of literacy within curriculum structures exclusively to print literacy. The moving image has become a dominant mode of communication, even as mastery of text and print literacy is still an absolutely essential skill. Regardless of local conditions and draconian levels of accountability which pertain in some education systems, the fact remains that wider culture and lived experience permeate schools in formal settings and in after-school clubs, in project work and in support for curriculum activity. In future, in a more imaginative education system with higher aspirations for its literacy programmes, working productively with both text and media might be part of an integrated approach. Tablet devices, then, offer the possibility of convergent uses of technology and media in future educational settings, formal and informal. It is important to note ‘possibility’, because the history of the deployment of technology in schools is not overburdened with proven positive benefits which are easy to decouple from other effects and initiatives (Buckingham, 2007; Cuban, 2001; Selwyn 2013). However, their position at the boundary between home and school combined with their usability and haptic qualities makes them of enormous interest to those researching learning, media and technology. We should certainly expect to see the bundled cameras and software on touchscreens used more for still and moving image production year on year across educational settings. The importance of building a body of research in years to come, which explores their use from a range of perspectives, is not to be overstated. So, in which pedagogical domains or theoretical frameworks would such research into tablet devices lie? First, it is important to establish a reason for using the devices. This was relatively straightforward in our case, dictated as much by the affordances, the potential for filmic action in the world, of a device which can be moved around with ease, operated by touch directly on screen, is easily shared and which appears to incorporate everything you need for making moving image texts. Second, in terms of theory, it is important to work with approaches which allow for an analysis of flow and agency in production, to see how the work is best mediated and by which kinds of groupings and activities. This has so far been investigated by early years educators and those with an

114

Literacy, Media, Technology

interest in multimodal analysis of meaning making (Crescenzi, Jewitt, & Price, 2014; Flewitt, Kucirkova, & Messer, 2014). There will also be things to say based on emergent forms of understanding of how such technologies work in quasiformal settings as both material artifacts and (im)material presence (Burnett & Merchant, 2014). Finally, as we have seen in other research on learner voice and technology (Selwyn, Potter, & Cranmer, 2010), there is a need to take account of the users themselves, their sometimes surprising analogies and words for their use of the devices and artifacts. In the sections which follow, we devote some time to setting the scene and to explaining the processes which we went through, beginning with the educational context for the project.

Out of the box: A project for Shoot Smart, funded by Into Film Into Film is a UK-based organization promoting and disseminating film education opportunities for children and young people aged between five and fifteen. It was formed out of the moving image education charities, Film Club and First Light, and its mission is as follows: to put film at the heart of children and young people’s learning and cultural experience. Working with the education sector and film industry it will deliver an ambitious and accessible ‘See, think, make. Imagine’ programme that seeks to make a step change in film learning for 5–19 year olds, encouraging and enabling watching, making and critical understanding on a scale never before seen in this country. (Into Film, 2015; emphasis added)

As researchers in new literacies and media education, we were very interested in working with an organization which sought to combine critical understanding and making with activities around moving image production. For us, this found resonance with the creative, critical and cultural model of moving image literacy (Bazalgette, 1989, 2000) and with those who have long argued that understanding moving image language is as much about making or ‘writing it’ as it is interpreting or ‘reading it’ (Buckingham, 2003; Burn & Durran, 2007; Burn, 2009). As media education researchers (Cannon, Bryer, & Lindsay, 2014; Potter, 2012), we were interested in working with Into Film on their ‘Shoot Smart’ programme, an initiative which aimed to partner researchers, teachers and filmmakers in a project which explored the use of tablet devices in filmmaking with children and young people.

Learning Filmmaking with Tablet Devices

115

The setting for the project was a quasi-formal one. It did not take place in school time. It was, however, located in a school classroom and infused with some of the formal arrangements and structures of schooling, with registration, grouping and the need to work within strict time constraints. This was useful for thinking about how it might work during a formal timetabled setting in school so that it could be fed back to provide models for teachers and learners in the future. For us, there was also enough of a ‘third space’ element about it, notschool and not-home, to think about the ways in which cultural experiences were being incorporated into the process of learning about filmmaking (Potter, 2011). It has been suggested elsewhere that opening the spaces, organization and communication in formal educational settings to wider culture can generate positive and inclusive outcomes for learners in a variety of curriculum areas (see Gutiérrez, 2008, on the sociocultural literacy of the ‘third space’). Moving image work was a natural fit for this kind of outcome because of its pervasiveness in wider cultural experience.

Research questions and theoretical positioning in the project It was intended that the filmmaking itself built on activities in a sequence of workshops which provided the pedagogical context for working with the tablet devices, connecting the learning about film to learning about filmmaking. In this way the children and young people were working with both the reading and the ‘writing’ of moving image texts. From our point of view as new literacy researchers we were keen to see how tablet devices, as culturally familiar objects, could be used to negotiate the learning within filmmaking and how they lent themselves to the particular constraints of an educational context. We wanted to learn more about how they could facilitate creative moving image production within the particular context of learning about film more widely. This meshed with our concern for thinking about models for moving literacy activities into an engagement with the many contemporary modes of meaning making in, for example, the widely shared short film form. At the same time the workshops could be quite specific about the craft skills and group roles they were learning which are inherent in film production. Our research design was guided by the intention to explore the following: 1.

The ways in which the affordances of tablet devices enhance practical filmmaking;

116

2.

3. 4.

5.

Literacy, Media, Technology

The potential barriers, including technical issues, to such uses which are inherent in educational settings and in the devices and associated software themselves; The children and young people’s views of the tablet device as an enabler (or not) of their creative production and vision; The advice which children and young people would pass on to their peers, their teachers and others in order to be successful in future filmmaking with tablet devices; The successful elements of the pedagogy employed throughout the project, including viewing other films, planning, storyboarding, scripting, shooting, editing and exhibiting.

These areas of enquiry were informed by recent key thinking about media education which foregrounds concepts such as iteration, feedback, convergence and exhibition (Burn, 2009; Reid et al., 2002). We wanted to explore meaning making with moving image texts and its relationship to both culture and pedagogy in ways which aligned with both semiotic analysis and cultural studies approaches, agreeing with Burn (2009) that one need not be privileged over another, but that both views are interdependent. Of further interest was the way in which the physical space of the groupings and organization of the participants worked with the virtual organization of the screen, its software and inherent promise of ease-of-use and ‘makeability’ (Fursteneau & Mackenzie, 2009). With this in mind we embarked on a series of visits to workshops with each age group and documented each stage of the process. We collected image, video and audio data with the children and young people and engaged them in discussion which was non-intrusive and guided by their motivations and interests week by week. We also wanted to hear about their pedagogical choices and issues from the professional filmmakers involved, including their views about working with a device which conflated the traditional roles in film-production into one artefact. The project took place in an inner-city, all-through institution (combining a primary and secondary school) with twenty children and young people in each of the after-school groups, namely: Year 5 (around ten years old) and Year 8 (around thirteen years old). The school had a significantly economically deprived and diverse intake. The workshop sessions took place on the primary site. For the Year 8 group, scenes were filmed around the secondary school site and in the immediate and familiar locale (including a nearby open space and a fried chicken shop). For the younger children in Year 5, filming was on the premises in the classrooms and in the immediate environs of the school playground.

Learning Filmmaking with Tablet Devices

117

A significant goal of the project was to develop students’ film language and understanding through collective viewing of short films and relevant excerpts of longer films which complemented and informed the practical work. The filmmakers provided a series of short example sequences which illustrated specific aspects of moving image language. They then set up short activities which moved straight into shooting and editing, taking these steps in a more rapid and iterative way in order to exploit the potential of the tablet devices. In the section which follows we discuss some of the ways in which learning about these issues was enhanced more directly by the possibilities inherent in the tablet devices.

Iteration, feedback, convergence and exhibition First, our overall evaluation suggested that tablet devices facilitated a kind of heightened experience which distinguished it from the pre-digital. This was not unproblematic and it depended frequently on sensitive interventions and adjustments made by the adults to their pedagogical strategies in the setting. Taken together, these factors ensured that the locus of agency in the project was with the human actors and that the learning was centred on filmmaking, both of which were supported by, and not led by, the tablet technology. Pedagogically, the filmmakers/facilitators followed a well-trodden path in starting with discursive film appreciation and following it with the deconstruction of a finished product. In this case they invited students to remake a short sequence from E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (Spielberg, 1982) on the tablet devices by sequencing stills of individual shots (see Burn & Durran, 2007). In the process they exploited the affordances of the editing app which employed an album and timeline as onscreen metaphor for selecting and ordering for editing, using the ‘finger flowment’ referred to earlier. Thumbnails were dragged by finger movement across the screen from the album to the place on the timeline and re-ordered as necessary. Through this activity the children were encouraged to recognize and explore the construction of a dramatic sequence (E.T.’s first appearance in this case) and to consider the narrative significance of different choices, based on familiar visual codes and conventions. Our observations suggest that the use of tablets quickly facilitated this iterative process, ‘the ability to endlessly revise’ (Burn, 2009, p. 17), because the students were able to engage with the processes of selection and shaping material so immediately. The facilitators’ approach assumed and

118

Literacy, Media, Technology

exploited familiarity with the use of touchscreens on the tablets. They spent five minutes discussing the impact of different shots and of camera angle, movement, point of view and light; half a minute explaining how to use the software; and the remaining time clarifying their expectations of the outcome of the editing activity, as students’ fingers were on the tablets. In the following brief transcript from dialogue that one of the researchers had with a small group of Year 8 students, the decision-making around editing emerges as more compelling than any issues around the technical operations of the device or the editing app. Amy questions and works out an important feature of the editing interface, reflecting the ‘mutability’ (Manovich, 2001, p. 133) and provisionality of the software – that the original videos (what Kayleigh calls the videos that ‘they’re based on’) do not disappear from the album once they are moved to the timeline: Amy – I think it will be a dark one. Kayleigh – We’ve already got that one. Amy – So why’s it still there? [She gestures at it, in the editing bin.] Kayleigh – Cos it’s, they’re based on it, they’re just there. Theo – They stay in there um. Kayleigh – That one … [her finger hovers over an image.] Theo – They stay in that and then you’re putting them down on the timeline so … Amy – Yeah [Kayleigh’s finger highlights the image so that it appears in the viewing window as Theo speaks]. Theo – you’re learning how to edit [Kayleigh’s finger points at an image]. Kayleigh – Don’t you think it’s that one cos then he’ll be looking around, this one [pointing at an image] looks like he was just in a rush cos that’s why it’s in a corner. Amy – Yeah that will be the one where he drops it [pointing at an image and then moving it to the timeline].

The facilitator who was leading the session then suggested that they ‘play around’ with the length of the media on the storyboard timeline. It took him a minute to explain how to do this by moving ‘the orange handles’. Within two minutes the pair were not only discussing whether the edits came too slowly but also changing the length of time that the images lasted in the sequence. Kayleigh’s comment ‘Wait let’s try it out this way’ exemplifies their willingness to experiment in response to the provisionality of the software. They became more reflective about six minutes into the editing activity: Kayleigh – I think these ones need to be like quick flashes … because (they’re) like scared of each other.

Learning Filmmaking with Tablet Devices

119

Almost at the same time as she made the suggestion, she was able to act on it and the pair reviewed the results, with a view to seeing whether the quick cuts communicated the characters’ fear. The Year 5 children made similar speedy progress in the initial hands-on activities, and one of the facilitators was surprised that he was not called on much more frequently for assistance with editing. In editing the final film the Year 8 facilitator noted that it took him two or three minutes to explain the processes to Grace, and yet soon afterwards she was talking about how precise she had to be in capturing the moment when the students were in the air jumping as she trimmed a ‘locked-off ’ shot. Her description of it being ‘like a blink, kind of  …  like when you blink and you think that you’ve missed something out’ suggests that she was beginning to get a sense of how editing involves what she called a ‘trick’ in the manipulation of time and space (recalling Murch, 2001). In terms of immediate feedback, the tablet’s cultural status as a device that is primarily for viewing means that its offer of instant review is an irresistible facility, enabling users to see their material appearing as a finished product, in full screen, on the go. Some students explained that this helped ‘generate ideas’, facilitating collaborative decision-making, since the tablet screen is large enough for several people to watch at once. Burn cites the ambiguity of the computer screen ‘as both a surface of working production and a surface of display’ (2009, p. 76) as a significant aspect in the dissemination of ideas between groups of children editing in close confines – a finding that is replicated and enhanced in the work we observed with the tablet devices. The more immediate feedback provided during the process of filming disrupted the traditional process of filming and editing in sequence. This echoed findings in a previous project which indicated that tablets supported an improvisational approach (Cannon, Bryer, & Lindsay, 2014) – a different workflow by comparison with traditional filmmaking, since ‘takes’ can be filmed, viewed and discarded in the moment. In this case filming ‘in’ the editing software further conflated the tasks because of the offer of a review and prompt to save or discard after each shot was taken. The key factor here is the short distance between action and review. Learning to tell a story through shooting and editing and instantly reviewing decisions that are made allows for a fast iterative path to learning about moving image grammar. This was one of the most successful elements that was exploited particularly during the early stages of the project, representing a heightened experience of the editing interface or ‘multimodal mixing desk’ (Burn & Parker, 2003; Sefton-Green, 2005) and bringing awareness of how the final product might look to the actual moments of filming.

120

Literacy, Media, Technology

Problematizing pedagogy There were two filmmaker/facilitators, both former teachers, and different pedagogical impulses at play in this project. Doecke underlines ‘the teacher’s role in facilitating the meaning-making practices that occur’ in the ‘culturallyspecific site’ of the classroom (2015, p. 149). Teachers’ values and creative aspirations clearly shape their interventions in projects that involve whole class or group outcomes like this. Like any collaborative process, the final filmmaking involved subtle negotiations between the facilitators and the Year 5 and 8 students – engagements to which the former brought their identities as ex-teachers, as workers in a creative industry and as expert filmmakers and enthusiasts. Of course, the students brought their own cultural affiliations, interests and expectations too, as well as their experience of using touchscreens. The context of an after-school club provided a ‘third space’ for sharing and negotiating all of this as they embarked on an ambitious creative endeavour together (Gutiérrez, 2008). The filmmaker working with Year 5 students was interested in the possibilities of the narrative suggested by the stimulus of a magical box. He explained that ‘the box was a device to allow the kids to be able to speculate and think about what was inside it or what would happen if you went inside it – so it had endless possibilities for stories’. He presented this to the students in a very immediate way by assuming a role in the film as a kind of ‘demon head-master’ (Cross, 1982) demonstrating the power of the box through his own reactions and framing the real class in role as his fictional class, subject to his magical powers. This involved a playful signalling and positioning of the children as actors in the drama. The spontaneous results were then edited into a compelling film narrative. The filmmaker working with Year 8 students underlined that ‘for us it was imperative that we showed them … examples of well-made films … for us to be able to show them how much more complex it is and how excited we were about it’. Because of this conviction, although he recognized that the tablets lent themselves to working quickly in an improvisational way, he was not necessarily interested in developing a practice that would accommodate this beyond the initial exploratory stages. The parameters of the project brief, the tight timetable and, ironically, the ease of use of the technology at the students’ disposal did not provide much scope for instruction about the complexities of filmmaking, yet for him this remained a pedagogical priority. A moment in the film made with the Year 8 group reflects his interest in introducing some regard for the practices of a master filmmaker to the process. He ‘blocked’ or choreographed the student

Learning Filmmaking with Tablet Devices

121

actors in lines at significant points in the narrative and directed them to react to events such as the appearance of a large box, in an ordered sequence. One of the students filmed the responses of the actors one by one, as they stood in a line. At the end of the project the filmmaker showed the Year 8 group the end of the crop duster scene from North by Northwest (Hitchcock, 1959) acknowledging the influence of Hitchcock’s visualization and direction of this climactic moment on his own conception of the drama they had created (particularly the choreography of the onlookers as the plane burns).1 This approach had a significant impact on the students’ involvement, on the texture of their acting and on the narrative structure of the final film. In terms of the students’ experience and their learning about the processes of filmmaking, it was as significant as the affordances and limitations of the particular camera and editing equipment that they were using. There was no time for the Year 8 group to reflect on the relationship between actor, director, camera operator and editor implied by this particular approach to filmmaking nor much discussion about whether the technology they used suited this particular approach (as opposed to a ‘shaky-cam’ or Dogme-style approach, for example). However, one student commented insightfully that the ‘iPad may take a wide shot but it doesn’t take the shot that they really need’. The filmmaker himself was frustrated by the tablet’s limited depth of field, complaining that they couldn’t get the variety of shot types ‘that you would get in every single film’. Classrooms are complex places – whether formally or informally organized as after-school spaces – and working in creative ways always involves subtle negotiations of interests, tastes and values in the process of what Franks terms ‘the act of selection, shaping, framing and re-representation that are surely the key features of art making’ (2000, p. 67). In the 1970s, Raymond Williams asserted that it is not the invention of technology that is significant but the ways that it is deployed in the cultural sphere (Williams, 1974). This case study documents a familiar shifting pattern of workflow and accommodation with new technology that is as common to the classroom as it is to the film studio and editing suite. Tablets and touchscreen technology certainly offer the kinds of ‘new expressive possibilities’ for creative work that Buckingham, Grahame and Sefton-Green documented in reflecting on practical media work in the classroom two decades ago (1995, p. 72). But it is worth acknowledging that new ways of working inevitably ‘interact with existing cultural forms and patterns of social use’ (1995, p. 72) and that teachers’ and students’ pedagogical and expressive purposes may not necessarily coincide with the potential or possibilities that new technologies seem to offer. One reflection of the filmmakers’ respect for their craft was their search for peripheral technology to enhance the tablet’s potential so that the students

122

Literacy, Media, Technology

might experience something closer to traditional filmmaking practices. One of the filmmakers reflected on the tripod mounts as ‘the real breakthrough … as they allowed the students to have the experience of stabilizing the iPads and decide if they wanted to pan, tilt and execute shots’. The mount was integral to the success of the ‘locked-off ’ shot in the Year 8 film because the camera needed to be kept in exactly the same position between shots for it to be effective (so that the students appeared to be falling from the sky in the final edit). When shooting the final films both tripods and mounts became the domain of one student director. There was notably less gathering around the screen or passing the iPad around to review shots as in the earlier, more experimental sessions. Stabilizing the camera like this signalled more clear-cut distinctions between the roles of camera operator/director and actors that were closer to industry rather than collaborative, classroom practices. On the question of sound, the generally poor quality of recording straight into the tablet was an issue that could not be so easily remedied and several students felt the lack of microphones was an issue. However, the facilitators did not regard this limitation as a barrier to the creation of engaging filmic narratives. They showed both groups short films or excerpts from longer films, which relied on a dramatic use of sound and music rather than dialogue, as stimulus material. This included The Red Balloon (Lamorisse, 1956), Fence (Murdoch, 2005), Room 8 (Griffiths, 2013) and Milk Run (Soskin, 2013). Through the process the student actors clearly recognized that an expressive or heightened form of acting was being required of them to communicate the story. In this way the quality of sound recorded on set became less of an issue, prompting more attention to the ways in which human actors and moving image language work to create meaning.

Convergence and multifunctionality Even allowing for the troubles with sound, the students were vocal in their praise for the benefits of working with a multifunctional device, one which combined all of the previously separate functions in traditional filmmaking and enabled ‘finger flowment’. The tablet device acted as storyboard, camera, editing and screening device. There were no trailing cables and hold-ups as new devices were connected and material uploaded. As a result, particularly in the early stages of the project, we were struck by the ease with which relatively large groups were able to engage with different aspects of moving image making in flexible ways in small spaces and with limited time, editing quickly as they leaned against

Learning Filmmaking with Tablet Devices

123

the wall in a corridor, for example. In the first session a small group of Year 8 students asked how to ‘pause the film and start it again’ in constructing a short sequence. Once prompted to take more than one shot, they found they could immediately review the shots in sequence, so that they could see the effect of a mix of close-ups on the hands and face. In this instance there appeared to be a tangible gain enabled by the technology in the increased visibility of the filmmaking process. The convergence of functionality in the relatively large screen designed for viewing as well as making proved to be a further asset for the novice filmmakers. Grace reported feeling confident about issuing instructions in the role of director/camera operator on location because she was able to review and ‘to see where they (the actors) need to be’ on the relatively big screen. Arguably this ease of use is a case of the creativity of digital culture residing, as Sefton-Green puts it, not ‘so much in its media – that is, its capacity to support forms of visual, audio or even text production – but in its subject positions: how it situates young people in relationship to meaning or forms of engagement’ (2011, p. 250). The degree of control conferred on the social actor in the setting was what enhanced the process for her.

Theorizing ‘finger flowment’: Haptic influences on the making of meaning A body of research literature is emerging around the nature of touch as mode for meaning making, with specific reference to the use of tablet devices (see, for example, articles in Walsh & Simpson, 2014). This work recognizes that touchscreens on tablet devices have enhanced affordances beyond portability and visibility, with touch now being recognized as a key operant in the making of meaning, a new mode to add to the ways in which digital technology is in the world. The participants in this project, older than those usually focused on in studies of touchscreen devices, looked on this enhanced level of interaction as, simply, ‘normal’, suggesting a level of integration of touch as controller. One student commented ‘it’s just a click, it’s just a tap of the screen and it’s there’ and another suggested that engaging with ‘finger movement’ on the screen as the principal means of interaction and control meant ‘it flows easy’, referring to this enabling aspect of the tablet touchscreen as ‘finger flowment’. As we have noted in earlier sections, this brings together the notion of flow and fashioning, a condition of making in which the focus on the task is absolute and the agency

124

Literacy, Media, Technology

of the maker is promoted (Cannon 2011; Csikszentmihalyi, 1996). In the suggestion of a fluency in the work pattern there are analogies with the process of writing to express ideas, using tools that, because of their immediacy and familiarity, effortlessly serve the producer’s purposes. There are further analogies with crafting as design, in which work is shaped iteratively over time. The tablet devices did lend themselves to this honing and crafting approach even though they had some drawbacks in other respects related to file management. At the user level, in the central activity, they acted as enablers of filmmaking and of new literacy production.

Concluding thoughts Burnett and Merchant (2014) consider that their work in literacy and technology in educational settings ‘has led us to question the relevance of the binary distinctions that recur and proliferate in the literature – those that assume boundaries between online and offline, digital and print and so on – but it also provokes us to question how we see literacies more generally’ (2014, p. 37). We have seen in this project how the tablet device itself has contributed to this blurring within the context of learning moving image production. This happened in four important ways: 1. 2.

3.

4.

The culturally familiar artefact represented an opportunity for boundary crossing between formal and informal settings of education. The previously separate craft skills of filmmaking, from planning to scripting, shooting to editing and exhibition, were all conflated into one screen space. As a consequence of the above, the distance between experimentation and review in making moving image language was closed to the point of hardly being there at all, forging rapid connections between the skills of ‘reading’ and ‘writing’ moving images. The activity was mediated through touch, the ‘finger flowment’ concept, an area which needs further investigation as the nature of human interaction with technology begins to bring about change in all spheres of social action, including both formal and informal settings for education.

We identified a key factor in the success of this project as a willingness on the part of the filmmaker/facilitators to employ a flexible pedagogy which negotiated the demands of learning the craft skills and grammar of the moving

Learning Filmmaking with Tablet Devices

125

image alongside the exploration of tablet devices. When they employed more traditional approaches to shooting material, the particular affordances that we have identified played a less significant part in the filmmaking processes. Teaching and teachers should not be written out of the picture as we imagine future educational activity around new literacies. Facilitative roles may shift and change over time, but these tablet devices are co-present with human actors in wider culture and require sensitive pedagogical intervention which is cognisant of their potential for all learners to engage productively with new and wider definitions of what it means to be literate. This intervention must recognize human agency itself as a determinant of success, above and beyond what may be claimed for the devices themselves.

Note 1 Showing the students images of the mosaics of stills from Hitchcock’s films from the nearby tube station was a nice conclusion to the project. Hitchcock was born close to the school and his association with the local area was a source of interest to many of the students.

References Bazalgette, C. (Ed.) (1989). Primary media education: A curriculum statement. London: British Film Institute. Bazalgette, C. (2000). ‘A stitch in time: Skills for the new literacy.’ English in Education 34(1), 42–49. Buckingham, D. (2003). Media education: Literacy, learning and contemporary culture. Cambridge: Polity. Buckingham, D. (2007). Beyond technology: Children’s learning in the age of digital culture. London: Routledge. Buckingham, D., Grahame, J., & Sefton-Green, J., (1995). Making media: Practical production in media education. London: English and Media Centre. Burn, A. (2009). Making new media: Creative production and digital literacies (New literacies and digital epistemologies). New York: Peter Lang. Burn, A., & Durran, J. (2007). Media literacy in schools. London: Paul Chapman Burn, A., & Parker, D. (2003). Analysing media texts. London: Continuum. Burnett, C., & Merchant, G. (2014). ‘Points of view: Reconceptualising literacies through an exploration of adult and child interactions in a virtual world.’ Journal of Research in Reading, 37(1): 36–50.

126

Literacy, Media, Technology

Cannon, M. (2011). Fashioning and flow. [Web log] Retrieved from https:// fashioningandflow.wordpress.com/ (Accessed 23 December 2015). Cannon, M., Bryer, T., & Lindsay, M. (2014). ‘Media production and disruptive innovation: Exploring the interrelations between children, tablets, teachers and texts in subject English settings.’ Media Education Research Journal, 5(1), 16–31. Crescenzi, L., Jewitt, C., & Price, S. (2014). ‘The role of touch in preschool children’s learning using iPad versus paper interaction.’ Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 37(2), 86–95. Cross, G. (1982). The demon headmaster. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996). Creativity: Flow and the psychology and discovery of invention. New York, Harper Collins. Cuban, L. (2001). Oversold and underused – Computers in the classroom. Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press. Doecke, B. (2015). ‘Storytelling and professional learning.’ Changing English, 22(2), 142–156. Flewitt, R., Kucirkova, N., & Messer, D. (2014). ‘Touching the virtual, touching the real: iPads and enabling literacy for students experiencing disability.’ Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 37(2), 107–117. Franks, A. (2000). ‘On a broader stage: Towards the aims of drama education.’ Caribbean Journal of Education, 20(2), 179–196. Fursteneau, M., & Mackenzie, A. (2009). ‘The promise of “makeability” – digital editing software and the structuring of everyday cinematic life.’ Visual communication 8(1), 5–22. Griffiths, J. W., (Director), & Venner, S., (Producer). (2013). Room 8 [Motion Picture]. UK: Independent Films. Gutiérrez, K. (2008). ‘Developing a sociocultural literacy in the third space.’ Reading Research Quarterly, 43(2), 148–164. Hitchcock, A. (Director/Producer). (1959). North by Northwest [Motion Picture]. United States: MGM. Into Film. (2015). Into film: FAQs. Retrieved from http://www.intofilm.org/faqs. (Accessed 23 December 2015) Lamorisse, A. (Director/Producer) (1956). The red balloon [Motion Picture]. France: Montsouris. Manovich, L. (2001). The language of new media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. McDougall, J., & Potter, P. (2015). ‘Curating media learning: Towards a porous expertise.’ E-Learning and Digital Media, 12(2), 199–211. Murch, W. (2001). In the blink of an eye: second edition. Los Angeles, CA: Silman-James Press. Murdoch, M. (Director/Producer). (2005). Fence [Motion Picture]. Royal College of Art and Angry Bear Productions. OFCOM (2014). Children and parents: Media use and attitudes report 2014. London: OFCOM.

Learning Filmmaking with Tablet Devices

127

OFCOM (2015). Adults’ media use and attitudes report 2015. London: OFCOM. Potter, J. (2011). ‘New literacies, new practices and learner research: Across the semipermeable membrane between home and school.’ Lifelong Learning in Europe, XVI(3), 22–35. Potter, J. (2012). Digital media and learner identity: The new curatorship. New York, Palgrave MacMillan. Reid, M., Burn, A., & Parker, D. (2002). Evaluation report of the Becta Digital Video Pilot Project. London: BECTA/BFI. Sefton-Green, J. (2005). ‘Timelines, timeframes and special effects: Soft and creative media production.’ Education, Communication and Information, 5(1), 99–110. Sefton-Green, J. (2011). ‘Creative digital cultures: Informal learning beyond the school.’ In J. Sefton-Green, P. Thomson, K. Jones, & L. Bresler (Eds), The international handbook of creative learning (pp. 244–252). London: Routledge. Selwyn, N. (2013). Distrusting educational technology: Critical questions for changing times. London: Routledge. Selwyn, N., Potter, J., & Cranmer, S. (2010). Primary ICT: Learning from learner perspectives. London: Continuum. Soskin, J. (Director), & Jackson, G. (Producer). (2013). Milk run [Motion Picture]. Houseblend Media. Spielberg, S. (Director/Producer). (1982). E.T.: The extra-terrestrial [Motion Picture] United States: Universal Pictures. Street, B. (2003). ‘What’s “new’’ in new literacy studies? Critical approaches to literacy in theory and practice.’ Current Issues in Comparative Education, 5(2), 77–91. Walsh, M., & Simpson, A. (2014). ‘Editorial for special issue on touchscreens.’ Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 37(2), 75–76. Williams, R. (1974). Television: Technology and cultural form. London: Fontana.

9

Digital Personal Stories: Bringing Together Generations and Enriching Communities Natalia Kucirkova

Introduction This chapter draws on a community project ‘Remember’ which explored the potential of digital personal stories to support cross-setting and intergenerational dialogue. Over six months, children in two Year 4 (eight- to nine-year-olds) classrooms interviewed local people about their WWII experiences and documented these in writing, pictures and audio, using an iPad app called Our Story and additional web-based resources from a local archive. Story sharing and collection of personal digital materials were facilitated by AirWatch software which enabled safe story sharing across formal and informal learning contexts. Digital personalized stories were later shared at a local event and online with the wider community. This chapter considers how intergenerational collaborative community projects might enrich children’s engagements with the past, and how new technologies can mediate the sharing of authentic community narratives and facilitate meaningful intergenerational and cross-setting interactions.

Rationale for the project Practices and research efforts to promote use of digital technologies in the school context have historically focused on educational benefits for children (see Roschelle, Pea, Hoadley, Gordin, & Means, 2000) or on the pedagogical practices for teachers (e.g. Mishra & Koehler, 2006). This project highlights the need for developing research concerned with wider community issues and that which bridges the learning processes and interests of various stakeholders, including children and their parents, teachers, elderly community members, as well as the technological partners providing, designing or facilitating the use of technology in schools, homes and the community.

130

Literacy, Media, Technology

It is beyond the scope of this chapter to provide a systematic description of the complex processes at play in a rich community project and to tackle the complex theoretical as well as philosophical debates in relation to technology and communities. Instead, I spotlight the role of authentic community narratives and technological innovation for story sharing. Specific attention is paid to the value of new technologies in bridging intergenerational differences in technology use and fostering digital storytelling skills. The chapter begins with an overview of some key studies in this area and the main theoretical and practical challenges addressed in the project, including a theoretical framework for intergenerational digital literacy, the value of community narratives and local stories in the age of the internet and the use of technologies to enable intergenerational dialogue and community engagement. I then describe the iPads and Our Story app used to collect and share stories in the project – and their particular affordances in relation to the project objectives. The remainder of the chapter captures the essence of the process of children’s collection and editing of stories, and focuses on the intergenerational learning happening in the community. The discussion centres on the blurrings between past/present and personal/community which were evident in the data.

Intergenerational digital literacy This chapter works from the assumption that literacy development relates not just to individual internal processes but that wider environments mediate our understanding of literacy, communication and meaning-making. In doing so, it focuses particularly on the role of adults (including elderly members of the community) as co-learners. Emphasis is laid on authorship, creation and sharing of knowledge, with technology largely facilitating the process of expertise development. This perspective on knowledge construction highlights the importance of cultivating learning environments which support collective, shared and dynamic learning communities rather than autonomous problem solvers. Learning is viewed as a process of creating transformational and evolving thoughts, and successful learning environments are contemplated at collective and organizational levels (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 2005).

Community narratives Community narratives are narratives which define a certain group, or community, of people, and they ‘serve as the context for personal stories’ (Nettles, 2005, p. 21).

Digital Personal Stories

131

The value of, and need for, these stories has been reported in various strands of literature. Community narratives are often reconstructed from local stories shared orally or stored visually in a local archive (such as a local museum) or in private family collections. Understanding how authentic community narratives are developed, captured and propagated is a key methodological challenge. Thus far, researchers have explored community narratives through various qualitative approaches, with the focus often being placed on underrepresented or minority groups. There has been an interest in exploring community narratives that already exist, finding new ways of sharing them or working with communities to generate new ones. For example, Humphreys (2000) used ethnographic approaches to study the personal and community narratives of members of Alcoholics Anonymous, while Renando (in preparation) explored positive lived experiences of Christians in the West using an innovative arts-based digital approach to narrative creation. Other projects have focused on the patterns of narratives in families and intergenerational connections, particularly in multicultural communities. Campano (2007), for example, sought to understand the narratives of immigrant students in North America in order to support students to make connections between these and their schooled experience. There are also studies which examine effective ways for connecting families to harness their cultural and linguistic resources within existing social systems (e.g. Genishi & Dyson, 2009). These projects share a commitment to fostering intergenerational dialogue and engaging young children in learning from elders and vice versa.

The value of intergenerational learning Several innovative projects have used technology to foster intergenerational dialogue. In exploring the value of intergenerational learning, Gregory describes the ways in which young children develop important literacy practices through intergenerational interactions (e.g. Gregory, 1996; Gregory, Long, & Volk, 2004). Drawing on her extensive study of the Bangladeshi community in London, Gregory (1996) describes how young children’s learning from their peers, siblings and grandparents contributed to the children’s bilingual learning, their construction of identity and communication skills. Heydon has explored how such interactions can be fostered and enriched using visual texts (Heydon, 2005, 2007). Recently, McKee and Heydon (2015) explored the use of technologies in an Intergenerational Digital Literacies Project, in which technologies (iPads) acted as a vehicle to expand the literacy and identity options for children and elders. Drawing

132

Literacy, Media, Technology

on multimodal literacy theory (Kress, 2007) and a conceptualization of literacy as a social practice (Vygotsky, 1987), the researchers studied how a combination and variety of modes and media, including visual and digital media, can engage partners in sharing songs and narratives. McKee and Heydon (2015) note in their research findings that during an intergenerational session involving a child and an elder participant, ‘the use of the iPad allowed children and elders to collaborate as equal partners within the meaning-making process’ (p. 236). Our project aimed to build on this intergenerational work by foregrounding the technological possibilities of iPads in supporting the development and sharing of narratives as embedded in the practices of the elderly, children, teachers and other community members.

Tablets enabling intergenerational dialogue and community engagement In schools, the use of new technologies has often been studied for its potential to nurture individual skills, such as children’s computational thinking (see Grover & Pea, 2013), digital literacy (e.g. Ba, Tally, & Tsikalas, 2002) or print-related literacies (e.g. Tüzün, Yılmaz-Soylu, Karakuş, İnal, & Kızılkaya, 2009). Tablets and computers are, in these scenarios, used primarily in dyadic or individual contexts. While such opportunities play an important role in the learning trajectory of individual learners, it is also important to recognize the social role technology can play in learning and its potential to foster dialogue and sharing of narratives in the community. Notably, the ways in which technologies can connect communities and enrich intergenerational relationships present an exciting new line of research. In our project, we focused on using iPads. iPads are flexible, portable and multifeatured devices that offer the possibility to run a number of apps. Over the last five years, iPads have gained great popularity as a tool for education as well as entertainment at home and in school. iPads fuse several technologies into one device, including a digital camera, keyboard for typing and audio-recorder. As such, they have the potential to engage children multimodally (i.e. via touch, vision and sounds) and sequentially (i.e. with gradually increasing levels of difficulty). These characteristics of iPads exemplify the potential of technologies to foster not a single literacy but multiple literacies (Jewitt, 2008). Emerging research shows that children can ‘play their way into literacies’ with popular media (Wohlwend, 2012) and that iPads in particular can foster the development of literacy skills (Falloon, 2013) and provide meaningful literacy

Digital Personal Stories

133

experiences for pre-school children and children with emerging language (Kucirkova, Messer, Sheehy, & Panadero, 2014) or limited language (Flewitt, Kucirkova, & Messer, 2014). Clearly, different apps will support children’s learning to a different extent (see Marsh et al., 2015).

The Our Story app This study utilized an app called Our Story we have been developing since 2011. Our Story (http://www.open.ac.uk/creet/main/projects/our-story) builds on the theory of personalization (Oulasvirta & Blom, 2008) and research concerned with effective shared book reading (Whitehurst et al., 1994). Over the past five years, the app has been used in various contexts to support children’s reading engagement at home (Kucirkova, Messer, Sheehy, & Flewitt, 2013) and classroom dialogue (Kucirkova, Messer, Sheehy, & Panadero, 2014). We have used a participatory research methodology through which participating schools have been pivotal for the design testing and iterative development of the app. Our Story has two main modes of engagement: the ‘Create’ and the ‘Use’ mode. In the Create mode, users can add their own pictures (either downloaded on the device or taken with the iPad embedded camera), sounds and texts. There is also a gallery of pictures where users can upload their own photographs from the camera roll or download pictures from the internet. There is a filmstrip at the bottom of the screen which can be used to arrange pictures in a sequential order to create a multimodal book. The Our Story ‘books’ are not traditional or electronic books, diaries or photo albums. Rather, they could be perceived as a blend of old and new affordances for capturing past and present experiences and authentic story-making practices. Users can easily add, edit or remove text and pictures during the actual activity of story sharing. The iPad camera and audio-recorder make the visual and audio material immediately accessible and amendable in the moment of sharing, which may have consequences for the there-and-then as well as anticipated future interactions. For instance, a played sound of the narrator’s voice recorded in the past can be replayed in the present and extended by including a comment by the child, or it can be deleted and left blank to be completed in the future. Alternatively, a pre-recorded spoken sound can be changed to a song or a soundtrack of the user’s choice, as the user can access his or her favourite tune impromptu, using the online access option inbuilt in the iPad. Similarly, a picture in the story can be changed to a different picture, taken and inserted almost instantaneously in the moment of story reading, using an in-built camera or any web-based picture depository.

134

Literacy, Media, Technology

The same responsiveness applies to the written text accompanying each story: with keyboards instantly accessible through the app, making both the reading and writing experience responsive to the ‘in the moment’ story sharing. A story created (written and narrated) at an earlier time can therefore be altered at the moment of sharing – and this transformation can occur in three different modalities (written, audio and visual). In Use mode, Our Story users can share their story using a variety of options. They can share the story by reading it in on the iPad (the finished story is presented page by page with the sound being played automatically) or they can share their stories remotely. For the latter, users can choose from the options of emailing the finished story to their friends or families or sharing it as a printed version. A particular advantage of using Our Story in intergenerational and community projects is its potential to support authentic community narratives. Although technologies can facilitate recording of community narratives, it remains a practical challenge for researchers to capture them in a way that would preserve their authentic character. There is a danger that community engagement and its portrayal become tokenistic and overlook the authentic nature of intergenerational dialogue. ‘Authenticity’ is a much used term, with many meanings. In our project, authenticity was understood from a psychological perspective which distinguishes between behavioural (directly observable) and mental (emotional) authenticity. Roberts (2014) defines authenticity as ‘a psychological and behavioural process whereby an individual lives in accordance with the true self ’ (p. 1) and specifies four key elements which operate within this process: self-knowledge, self-awareness, self-regulation and authentic behaviour. In this project, the pursuit of ‘authenticity’ in community narratives happened on both communal and individual level and was aided by two key characteristics of the Our Story app: (1) its open-ended design and (2) combination of multimedia. There are no templates in the app; users can create any stories they like. This means that there is no need to circumvent or limit participants’ narratives; they are in control and can regulate the exact nature of what is captured from their personal account and what is shared with others. We were keen to leverage the open-ended affordances of the app and in addition to using Our Story, we used AirWatch technology (http://www.airwatch.com/solutions/education/) in this project. AirWatch offers an enhanced and secure way of content sharing on tablets. This was crucial at a later stage of the project where parts of multimedia needed to be shared seamlessly and securely across various devices of participating children and community members.

Digital Personal Stories

135

The project Project partners There were several partners in the project, including the technology company Aerohive (a networking company) and Book Trust (a leading literacy charity in the UK). Their role was crucial in ensuring a smooth run of the project but was not central to the intergenerational story sharing which is described in this chapter. For this purpose, four partners were crucial in the project: the participating school (Swallowfield Lower School), the Open University (OU) researchers, the Community project created by Churches Together in Woburn Sands called Love Woburn Sands and the technology company AirWatch. All partners were keen to engage in a project within the local community and leverage their geographical proximity (all partners are based in Buckinghamshire). The partners shared a commitment to creating innovative products, and using new technologies to foster personalized education and connect local communities.

Project details In this chapter, I describe the Remembrance project which took place in 2014–2015. For this project, the school and, where appropriate, the community participants were provided with free access to the AirWatch mobile device security system and additional iPad hardware (on loan from the Open University). Over the course of six months, two classes of eight- to nine-year-olds engaged in the creation of personalized multimodal stories on the topic of Remembrance, using the Our Story app and additional web-based resources (including resources provided by the local archive of photographs). The community partner Love Woburn Sands provided access to community members interested in the project and paired them up with the participating classrooms. The OU team provided guidance and necessary support on using the Our Story app and aligning story-making techniques with curriculum objectives. The researchers acted as participant observers and employed ethnographic methods for data collection. AirWatch software facilitated secure and efficient storage and transfer of personal digital content. The theme of Remembrance provided a coherent frame for children’s stories and was broadly conceptualized to include the topics of memory, the Second World War and local heritage. The development of authentic community narratives proceeded in various stages. First, the children planned their interviews with the community members. Together with their teachers, they drafted some questions

136

Literacy, Media, Technology

and read over the interview protocol. The children interviewed elderly members of the community about their wartime experiences. Children audio-recorded the interviews but also took notes and photographs of the interviewees and various artifacts they brought to the interview (e.g. personal objects they had kept from the war). After the interview, children reviewed the data they collected and planned their stories on paper. Photographs were matched with transcribed sentences and enriched with information children found online. This process was followed by editing on the iPad, with children combining short audio recordings with text captions and digital photographs into multimodal assemblages. This part of the editing process was facilitated with the Our Story app. So, unlike in McKee and Heydon’s study (2015), the elders did not work together with the children on the stories, but they recounted their experiences and watched children putting them together on the iPad. However, many of them were familiar with the technology because of a sister project at the adjacent school where children taught IT skills to adults. Finished stories were shared at a school assembly orally and as printed booklets with pictures and texts put together by the children. Our approach to the data collection was qualitative, seeking to understand, at a level of detail, how a digitally mediated intergenerational story-sharing technique worked in the community and how it was perceived by the participants (including the teachers, children and the elderly participants). Data collection included videotaping classes, interviews with the teachers (informally recorded through field notes as well as audio-recorded), interviews with the children and community members participating in the project and video-stimulated interviews with the team members. We also analysed the stories children created and shared during the project (in printed and multimedia formats). These complementary data sets were analysed in response to several research questions linked to: the community aspect of story sharing; innovation in a primary school facilitated with new technologies and the ways personal narratives were constructed through multimedia. In this chapter, I focus on the role of technologies in mediating the creation and sharing of authentic community narratives and meaningful intergenerational dialogue. This inquiry is guided by the question: how did the use of iPads mediate the creation and sharing of authentic community narratives?

Intergenerational narratives This section captures the interview discussion with the teachers and our in-situ observations of what children learnt during the project. The teachers commented on children’s high levels of engagement and the ways in which

Digital Personal Stories

137

the interviews with elderly community members ‘brought history to life’ and enabled children ‘to have a dialogue’ with other members of community. It was evident that the possibility to share personal narratives with the Our Story app fostered meaningful intergenerational exchanges. For children, the possibility to record the narratives with new technology was appealing and motivating. The elders were motivated and keen to make their narratives as rich as possible by adding further detail, answering children’s questions and bringing personal artifacts to further illustrate their experiences. The extent to which this enthusiasm came about was no doubt influenced by the fact that the children and elderly could see their memories ‘come alive’ in historic pictures, audio recordings and short stories captured by the Our Story app. The gradual process of seeing the story ‘grow’ from an oral account to audiorecording and finally text enriched children’s understanding of how individual layers and aspects of a story can come together as a multimedia assemblage. Children were actively making choices about how to assemble the individual ingredients for their stories. The iPads thus served here the role of equipping children to become ‘competent techno-citizens’ (Marsh, 2002, p. 137) who use new technologies not merely to consume but also to collaboratively produce new content. In the following vignette based on video footage, I highlight the role of the iPads (and the Our Story app) in how such use of technology enriched children’s engagements with the past. Mark, Julia and Alex sit around one of the five small tables in the classroom, closely huddled around an iPad, loaded with Our Story. There are also pencils, scissors, crayons, sticky notes, cardboard and paper on the table. The children have finished drafting the storyboard on one of the bigger sheets of paper, and are now scrolling through the camera roll on the iPad. ‘This one!’ Julia shouts enthusiastically and drags a black-and-white picture into the storyboard. The picture was downloaded from the Internet and depicts an old house with blurred contours. Julia uses it to complement a sequence of pictures showing a story of one of the elderly they interviewed. Mark is not happy with the picture and drags it back to the picture bank with his middle finger: He scrolls down the gallery and locates a picture of an elderly woman sitting in front of a house. He smiles and says to Julia and Alex: ‘That’s her, look!’ Julie and Alex watch him attentively and let him drag the new picture onto the storyboard. Alex turns the iPad towards and taps the microphone button: ‘I do the sound’, he says and starts recording a short passage previously drafted with his peers.

Examples of collaborative working were evident also in the classroom in that children worked in pairs or small groups when editing their stories with the Our

138

Literacy, Media, Technology

Story app. Collaboration thus happened on two levels: between the children and the elderly, and between peers in the classroom. The multimedia stories were personally relevant, not off-the-shelf reports reproducing curriculum material. The teachers recognized this potential and talked during interviews about how such collaboratively produced content can act as a vehicle for teaching social skills (e.g. importance of story sharing) and support moral reasoning (e.g. citizenship, which was one of the topics they explored at school level that month). On a wider level, observing collaboration among the project participants was encouraging for us, researchers and project partners, as it reflected the collaborative ethos of the project itself.

Re-contextualizing remembrance with new technological tools Like McKee and Heydon (2015), we found that iPads facilitated the storycreation and story-sharing process. Our Story was useful in capturing the stories shared by the elders and together with the AirWatch technology, the app enabled children and teachers to securely store personally sensitive data and share them with selected users in the community. As such, technologies enabled cross-contextual story sharing and offered a unique opportunity to develop intergenerational dialogue not only immediately in this project but also for future generations. For example, data from the repository of resources in the local archive could be flexibly and coherently used in the present project, but also be stored and re-used in subsequent years. This highlights the advantages of re-contextualizing a traditional subject Remembrance with new technological tools such as iPads and personalized multimedia stories. Each year, the school focuses the English and History classes around Remembrance, with activities culminating on the 11th November, Remembrance Day.1 Key issues typically discussed in the classroom include reflection on the tragedy of war, and discussion on how conflict and flight can be avoided and how war victims might be supported. Over years, teachers have developed several materials and resources they use for the topic. Nevertheless, this year, they welcomed that they could develop new, innovative resources and take a new approach to present the topic. The use of iPads and the Our Story app enabled them to capture the real, lived perspectives of elderly members of the community. The possibility to take pictures, audio-record elders’ narratives and complement them with short texts, as illustrated in the story here, was an invaluable resource in the project. It added to the history collection and also provided a meaningful topic to practise children’s writing (relevant for the

Digital Personal Stories

139

English class). Furthermore, the direct contact with the community members added an important layer of authenticity and relevance to the Remembrance topic for the children. As one of the teachers commented: ‘I can explain and go on about this for days but it’s only when they [the children] hear it from the people who lived the war that they really understand the significance  …  like when Marielle [pseudonym] told them about how she never had bananas they began to see the relevance of it [the history] to their own lives’. Examples like this directly relate to the importance of authenticity where a personal account becomes a powerful tool for engaging children in reflection and introspection. In our classroom observations, we noticed several instances of children’s increased awareness of the significance of war to everyday life and their increased use of the iPads for information gathering and documentation. Children used the iPads to search for more information online, including information about the availability of fruit and vegetables during and after the Second World War in Britain. After they heard Marielle’s story, children also downloaded pictures of fruit and added them to their multimedia stories. With every interview undertaken with the community members, children were taken a step back, moving backward in time in the mental memory to a past life. Yet, with every activity undertaken with the iPad, they could provide a new representation of a memory, either with a photograph, short excerpt from a historical reference or their own reflections captured as a multimedia story. This back-and-forth way of capturing and representing memories was largely facilitated by the technological mediation, which related mainly to the multimedia and personalized nature of representation. Authenticity in this context meant that children could flexibly combine various excerpts of audio, textual and visual information, with no limitation of size or length for any of the data. The possibility to select, edit and share curated digital content provided an educationally sound experience for the learners. In addition, it ensured that stories shared by the elderly could be captured in their entirety, without any ‘intermediary step’ imposed by a pre-defined template. The possibility to have their stories captured in a visual, textual as well as audio mode meant that a high level of detail from shared narratives could be preserved and their unique character brought to the fore. Children blended pictures downloaded from the internet with pictures taken in the class or outside the class when interviewing the elders, further adding to the past and present coexistence of the elders’ memories and children’s representation of them. In this way, using AirWatch and Our Story-enabled iPads supported children to explore the relationships between personal, imagined and documented histories.

140

Literacy, Media, Technology

Another major theme apparent in the data was the notion of blending two seemingly opposite realities: the inter- and intra-personal nature of each partner’s practices and experiences brought to the project. On many levels, children’s confident use of technology was very much related to their existing practices and experiences while the elderly community members were their ‘anchors’ and support systems. In the project, the children and elders brought these personal and shared resources together, creating a communal body of knowledge and skills. Moll and colleagues (1992) first talked about the notion of culturally developed bodies of knowledge and skills in their studies of disadvantaged groups in the Mexican working-class community of Tucson, Arizona. They coined the term ‘funds of knowledge’ to refer to the bodies of knowledge and skills essential for household or individual functioning and well-being (p. 133), which are often undervalued in formal learning environments, but are essential for the survival of a group. While originally the term was used to refer to the skills, strategies and information utilized by households, which may include ways of thinking and learning and practical skills, the term has been applied more widely to include various skills and knowledge individuals bring to a community. In our project, funds of knowledge blurred the communal and personal connection to war or remembrance of the war. While each group of participants (children or the community members) brought something different to the process of story sharing, the final product (a personalized multimedia story) was based on their joint contribution. This relates to the theme of collaboration whereby a mutual exchange of funds of knowledge needs to happen to co-create a shared artefact. The finished story, very much a jumble of new and old, personal and shared, has become part of the school and local archive, thus further blending the individual and community contribution and heritage. In the future it will be important to ‘focus on the ways this history travels forward in time to new events through children’s personal interests’ (Rowe & Neitzel, 2010, p. 193).

Conclusion The present and future of intergenerational projects are very much influenced by the increased access and availability of technologies in our communities. The present status quo of the use of technology in communities indicates that elderly members are often excluded from technology-related projects and feel isolated when it comes to technology use. This project attempted to directly address this gap, supporting older community members to learn more about technology by

Digital Personal Stories

141

working alongside children who grew up with it. This, in turn, influenced the entire community, as Stef Muzz, Community Worker at Love Woburn Sands, summarized: ‘[The interviewees] enjoyed sharing their memories but some found it very emotional and difficult. We all found it very moving and were impressed with the courtesy, pride and dignity [the children] showed during their visit’ (quoted in Hoy, 2015, online). For children, the possibility to take part in a project in which elderly community members share their own personal narratives from the past enriches their understanding of historic events (such as the Second World War in this example). Importantly, it is aligned with the aim of providing children with opportunities to ‘gain the competencies and dispositions that will prepare them to be creative, connected, and collaborative life-long problem solvers and to be healthy, holistic human beings who not only contribute to but also create the common good in today’s knowledge-based, creative, interdependent world’ (Fullan & Langworthy, 2014, p. 2).

Note 1 In the UK, ‘Remembrance Day marks the day World War One ended, at 11am on the 11th day of the 11th month, back in 1918. A two minute silence is held at 11am to remember the people who have died in wars.’ From http://www.bbc.co.uk/ newsround/15492752 (Accessed 22 December 2015).

References Ba, H., Tally, W., & Tsikalas, K. (2002). ‘Investigating children’s emerging digital literacies.’ The Journal of Technology, Learning and Assessment, 1(4). Retrieved from http://www.jtla.org (Accessed 22 December 2015). Bereiter, C., & Scardamalia, M. (2005). ‘Technology and literacies: From print literacy to dialogic literacy.’ In N. Bascia, A. Cumming, A. Datnow, K. Leithwood, & D. Livingstone (Eds), International handbook of educational policy (pp. 749–761). Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer. Campano, G. (2007). Immigrant students and literacy: Reading, writing, and remembering. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Falloon, G. (2013). ‘Young students using iPads: App design and content influences on their learning pathways.’ Computers & Education, 68, 505–521. Flewitt, R., Kucirkova, N., & Messer, D. (2014). ‘Touching the virtual, touching the real: iPads and enabling literacy for students experiencing disability.’ Australian Journal of Language & Literacy, 37(2), 107–116.

142

Literacy, Media, Technology

Fullan, M., & Langworthy, M. (2014). A rich seam: How new pedagogies find deep learning. London: Pearson. Genishi, C., & Dyson, A. H. (2009). Children, language, and literacy: Diverse learners in diverse times. New York: Teachers College Press. Gregory, E. (1996). ‘Learning from the community: A family literacy project with Bangladeshi-origin children in London.’ In S. Wolfendale & K. Topping (Eds), Family involvement in literacy (pp. 89–116). London: Cassell. Gregory, E., Long, S., & Volk, D. (2004). Many pathways to literacy: Young children learning with siblings, grandparents, peers, and communities. New York: Routledge. Grover, S., & Pea, R. (2013). ‘Computational thinking in K–12 a review of the state of the field.’ Educational Researcher, 42(1), 38–43. Heydon, R. (2005). ‘The de-pathologization of childhood, disability and aging in an intergenerational art class: Implications for educators.’ Journal of Early Childhood Research, 3(3), 243–268. Heydon, R. (2007). ‘Making meaning together: Multimodal literacy learning opportunities in an intergenerational art program.’ Journal of Curriculum Studies, 39(1), 35–62. Hoy, K. (2015). ‘The “Remember” Project: iPads unite local communities.’ IDG Connect, Retrieved from http://www.idgconnect.com/blog-abstract/9889/theremember-project-ipads-unite-local-communities (Assessed 27 July 2016). Humphreys, K. (2000). ‘Community narratives and personal stories in alcoholics anonymous.’ Journal of Community Psychology, 28(5), 495–506. Jewitt, C. (2008). ‘Multimodality and literacy in school classrooms.’ Review of Research in Education, 32(1), 241–267. Kress, G. (2007). Multimodality: Exploring contemporary methods of communication. London: Routledge. Kucirkova, N., Messer, D., Sheehy, K., & Flewitt, R. (2013). ‘Sharing personalised stories on iPads: A close look at one parent–child interaction.’ Literacy, 47(3), 115–122. Kucirkova, N., Messer, D., Sheehy, K., & Panadero, C. F. (2014). ‘Children’s engagement with educational iPad apps: Insights from a Spanish classroom.’ Computers & Education, 71, 175–184. Marsh, J. (2002). ‘Electronic toys: Why should we be concerned? A response to Levin & Rosenquest’ (2001). Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 3(1), 132–138. Marsh, J., Plowman, L., Yamada-Rice, D., Bishop, J. C., Lahmar, J., Scott, F., & Winter, P. (2015). ‘Exploring play and creativity in pre-schoolers’ use of apps: Final project report.’ Retrieved from http://www.techandplay.org/reports/TAP_Final_Report.pdf (Accessed 22 December 2015). McKee, L., & Heydon, R. (2015). ‘Orchestrating literacies: Print literacy learning opportunities within multimodal intergenerational ensembles.’ Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 15(2), 227–255. Mishra, P., & Koehler, M. (2006). ‘Technological pedagogical content knowledge: A framework for teacher knowledge.’ The Teachers College Record, 108(6), 1017–1054.

Digital Personal Stories

143

Moll, L. C., Amanti, C., Neff, D., & Gonzalez, N. (1992). ‘Funds of knowledge for teaching: Using a qualitative approach to connect homes and classrooms.’ Theory into Practice, 31(2), 132–141. Nettles, S. M. (2005). ‘Examining school-community connections through stories.’ In: J. Phillion, F. Ming, & M. Connelly (Eds), Narrative and experience in multicultural education (pp. 17–36). London: Sage. Oulasvirta, A., & Blom, J. (2008). ‘Motivations in personalisation behaviour.’ Interacting with Computers, 20(1), 1–16. Renando, T. (in preparation). Reimagining Narratives: The Quest for Authentic Christian Spirituality. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from http://www.flavoryellow.com/ category/stuff-about-me/ (Accessed 2 December 2015). Roberts, L. T. P. (2014). Authenticity: Theoretical considerations, instrument development, and implications for leaders. University of San Diego. Roschelle, J. M., Pea, R. D., Hoadley, C. M., Gordin, D. N., & Means, B. M. (2000). ‘Changing how and what children learn in school with computer-based technologies.’ Children and Computer Technology, 10(2), 76–101. Rowe, D. W., & Neitzel, C. (2010). ‘Interest and agency in 2‐and 3‐year‐olds’ participation in emergent writing.’ Reading Research Quarterly, 45(2), 169–195. Tüzün, H., Yılmaz-Soylu, M., Karakuş, T., İnal, Y., & Kızılkaya, G. (2009). ‘The effects of computer games on primary school students’ achievement and motivation in geography learning.’ Computers & Education, 52(1), 68–77. Vygotsky, L. S. (1987). The collected works of LS Vygotsky. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer. Whitehurst, G. J., Arnold, D. S., Epstein, J. N., Angell, A. L., Smith, M., & Fischel, J. E. (1994). ‘A picture book reading intervention in day care and home for children from low-income families.’ Developmental Psychology, 30(5), 679–689. Wohlwend, K. E. (2012). Literacy playshop: New literacies, popular media, and play in the early childhood classroom. New York: Teachers College Press.

A mechanism for rewinding a film or tape: my player’s got a fast forward and rewind

10

Time Travels in Literacy and Pedagogy: From Script to Screen Becky Parry, Lucy Taylor and Nadia Haerizadeh-Yazdi

This chapter is dedicated to Katy Jones, who was an extraordinary woman, and whose generosity in interview was so important to the development of this chapter, with thanks for her passion for children’s storytelling in all media.1

Introduction In this chapter, we present an analysis of From Script to Screen,2 a learning resource created by BBC Learning that focused on the popular television series Doctor Who (Newman, 1963). This online and multimodal resource invited children to draw on their enthusiasm for the programme, and provided support for a range of related literacy activities. Our analysis found clear evidence that connecting with children’s experiences of popular culture in this way is part of a productive pedagogic strategy for literacy learning in schools. However, we also observed the ways in which contemporary literacy curriculum, with a focus on writing and skills, overly exerts limitations on the learning activities proposed. The analysis we present in this chapter draws on the New London Group’s (1996) multiliteracies theory which highlights the need to go beyond making connections with children’s experiences of popular culture with a stronger focus on the development of analysis, criticality and creative production. We use this theoretical framework to analyse the extent to which the resource takes into account more recent understandings of literacy as both multimodal and culturally diverse. In doing so, we attempt to imagine a literacy classroom which acknowledges the TARDIS-like potential of children’s experiences of television drama and narrative in popular culture. We argue that literacy in school should enable children to undertake meaningful, critical, creative and cultural explorations of the quickly evolving literacy landscapes they inhabit

148

Literacy, Media, Technology

both now and in the future. We also propose that curriculum must respond to this changing landscape, learning from but not ‘living’ in the past in order to empower others in the wider education context to do so. In a higher education context we often seek new ways of understanding the world and perhaps sometimes valorize new theory, concepts and tools. However, in the course of preparing this chapter, focused on a popular TV drama based on time travel, we have attempted to reflect on the past and present of literacy and English education. We believe this is important due to the recent and considerable ‘marketization’ of education where broadcasters, museums, galleries and theatres compete with multiple commercial organizations for the school market. A key attribute in the marketability of education resources is their orientation to curriculum; any resource of value must be seen to be delivering curriculum objectives or helping to improve attainment. Rather than looking to research for guidance or inspiration, the starting point for education resources is, predominantly, the contemporary curriculum. Curriculum is therefore increasingly reified, not only in school-based literacy resources but also often in those which children encounter in other, out of school, spaces. It is therefore important to attempt to understand the influence of contemporary curriculum on education resources and to reflect on the potential for research to play a stronger role in their development. For the purposes of this research we have revisited the New London Group’s (NLG) position paper on literacy (NLG, 1996). This has proved to be timely in a context of political rhetoric which persists in evoking anachronistic images of rote learning, spelling tests and cramming – time travels indeed. Meanwhile children’s cultures are increasingly moving image rather than print based. In the annual OFCOM3 (the official communications regulator in the UK) survey of children’s media practices, television retains its centrally significant role, despite the proliferation of screens and devices that it is viewed on. The NLG (1996) proposed that conceptions of literacy should be broadened and that literacy pedagogy should shift to accommodate this broader conception. Fast forward and the relationship between children’s engagements with popular culture and their literacy and identity practices is well established (Marsh, 2004; Merchant, 2009; Pahl, 2002) in research. It is widely acknowledged that the inclusion of popular culture in the curriculum not only increases children’s engagement and motivation, but perhaps more significantly, also enables them to make explicit understandings of the theories and concepts they have begun to use intuitively to help them make meaning from texts (Parry, 2014). Meanwhile in the, often, parallel universe of the school, the literacy curriculum, at times, appears to be taking a backward trajectory and has, in England,

Time Travels in Literacy and Pedagogy

149

been dominated by a focus on the written and spoken word and prescriptive pedagogic interventions. What has been most concerning is the way in which curriculum is devised without reference to key developments in the field. The work of Barton and Hamilton (2000) has had a significant impact, shaping understandings of literacy as a socially and culturally constructed practice. In response to changes in society and the role of new technologies, the NLG (1996) coined the term ‘multiliteracies’. The philosophy underpinning their ideology is that today’s world requires a broader view of literacy, which can address the different national and cultural experiences of individuals as well as the demands imposed on them as makers of meaning within their changing workplaces, public spaces and personal lives. By contrast, contemporary curriculum continues to map a narrow literacy landscape, ignoring many of the substantial changes in the way literacy is lived, researched and understood. For example, both recent iterations of the literacy or English curriculum (DfE 2008, 2013) have distanced themselves from earlier attempts to include an acknowledgement of the role of the moving image or multimodal texts despite concerns about the narrow focus on print literacy (Marsh & Millard, 2000; Burnett, Davies, Merchant, & Rowsell, 2014). The most recent (2013) changes to curriculum for England are shaped by a long process of review and reform in which the terms literacy and the subject of English have been contested. In the first iteration of the National Curriculum in 1988 the programme of study for English addressed the skills which are now associated with literacy, but within a broader context of what it meant to become literate. By 1998, when the curriculum was reviewed and what became known as the Literacy Hour was introduced, concerns were already being raised that Literacy is not Enough (Cox, 1998). Literacy came to be seen as a set of functional skills which reduced the broad study of English to secretarial and vocational skills through which children would ‘master  …  the code’ (Medway, 2005, p. 22) of language. The focus on basic skills has been a cornerstone of education policy under successive governments, with literacy skills being framed as both a democratic entitlement on one hand and as a reductive, utilitarian approach on the other. Today, in most primary schools in the UK the terms ‘literacy’ and ‘English’ have become interchangeable. However, literacy and English are not the same thing and the terms should not be left unexamined. The Literacy Hour was never intended to replace English in the curriculum, and when the curriculum was further reviewed in 2006, the structure of the hour became more flexible. However, with the increasing emphasis on high stakes testing in primary schools, the focus on ‘testable’ skills has not diminished. This has an impact on children’s experience of schools based literacy.

150

Literacy, Media, Technology

We undertook this analysis of the From Script to Screen project with this context in mind. Given the public discourses about children’s ‘lack’ of literacy and failure to achieve nationally set standards, it seemed pertinent to explore one project which set out to use the popularity of one television programme to engage children, boys in particular, in a series of literacy activities. Our analysis takes the concept of multiliteracies and the four elements of multiliteracy pedagogy as a critical framework for understanding both the activities proposed and identifying those that are absent. Although the field of literacy and pedagogy has evolved in the meantime (Burnett, Davies, Merchant, & Rowsell, 2014), we believe that it is timely to revisit the context and rationale provided by the NLG to enable researchers and educators to take global, social, cultural, technological and economic changes into account in their understandings of literacy. Given the multimodal nature of the resource we chose to analyse, the focus of this theory on the affordances of different media was of particular relevance. Influenced by his observations that children draw on a wide range of cultural resources in their reading and writing, Kress (1997) led the NLG to work with the idea of Design as a tool for rethinking literacy learning. To summarize, the cyclical process of designing commences with an engagement with existing tools and ideas which the NLG describe as the Available Designs. Using these Available Designs children make sense of texts and they Design their own. In their own texts they use existing ideas and resources but transform and Redesign them. These new designs in turn return us to the first stage in the process of the Available Designs (NLG, 1996). If we think about this in terms of moving image, it is possible to think of all the different modes of making meaning (uses of sound, light, gesture, editing, camera composition) and these have conventions children recognize which they then draw on and adapt in their own text production in a process of design and redesign. Not only does this heuristic tool enable us to see literacy as plural and multimodal, it also acknowledges the active way in which children engage with texts. The pedagogical framework or the ‘how’ of multiliteracies offered by the NLG comprises of four components: Situated Practice, Overt Instruction, Critical Framing and Transformed Practice (NLG, 1996): 1.

2.

Situated Practice: Immersion in experience and the utilization of available discourses, including those from the students’ lifeworlds and simulations of the relationships to be found in workplaces and public spaces. Overt Instruction: Systematic, analytic, and conscious understanding. In the case of multiliteracies, this requires the introduction of explicit metalanguages, which describe and interpret the Design elements of different modes of meaning.

Time Travels in Literacy and Pedagogy 3.

4.

151

Critical Framing: Interpreting the social and cultural context of particular Designs of meaning. This involves the students’ standing back from what they are studying and viewing it critically in relation to its context. Transformed Practice: Transfer in meaning-making practice, which puts the transformed meaning to work in other contexts or cultural sites. (NLG, 1996, p. 35)

The multiliteracies project has been criticized (Leander & Boldt, 2013; Jacobs, 2013) and revised and revisited recently by Kalantzis and Cope (2012) who are using it to propose a wider pedagogical movement ‘Learning by design’4 which takes the key tenets of this approach and adapts and applies them across subject areas. Recent articulations clarify and render more accessible the fundamental core components which have been used in the analysis that follows.

Research methods Our data are drawn from a small-scale research project which took place over a period of six months in 2013. Our analysis included: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Identifying references to the (2008) curriculum in the From Script to Screen online resource and accompanying lesson planning materials; Deconstructing the From Script to Screen resources, allocating them to a category based on the multiliteracy pedagogy components; Reviewing the summary of an evaluation of the project; Thematic coding of an interview with the associate producer, the late Katy Jones.

Doctor Who: From script to screen Katy Jones, who was Executive Producer at BBC Learning, led the development of the From Script to Screen resources. She described herself as from a family of teachers and a parent and school governor based in Manchester. These experiences led her to become interested in what she regarded as child-centred learning: ‘tapping into a child’s perspective on the world to help make learning fun and relevant’. Jones’s interview also highlighted her critical but pragmatic orientation to the literacy curriculum which was a key document in planning. She was concerned that contemporary children have increasingly limited access

152

Literacy, Media, Technology

to socio-dramatic play at school and that drama should be an important element of the activities. Jones stated that on arrival at the BBC in 2011 her motivation for undertaking the From Script to Screen project was an awareness of national figures for literacy achievement: Boys in particular were lagging behind at KS2 SATS, with one in five leaving primary school with poor levels of literacy. Doctor Who was simply the coolest show on television for children aged nine and over – and the ambition was to use the power of the brand to get children excited about writing. (Katy Jones, Interview, 2013)

As a result, in April 2011, BBC Learning and Doctor Who launched From Script to Screen – challenging children in upper primary schools (aged 9–11) to write a three-minute script for the Doctor. The prize was to have your script performed by the eleventh Doctor, Matt Smith, and broadcast on national television. To support the competition, BBC Learning produced a wide range of resources that were made available online. These included detailed lesson plans, which aimed to develop pupils’ confidence about writing over a period of time. The teaching resources included ‘how to’ films, featuring interviews with key members of the cast and crew such as the director, producer and set designer, talking about different aspects of writing and working from a Doctor Who script. Video challenges from the Doctor’s companions were also commissioned to accompany each lesson. For example, the Doctor’s assistant, Amy, asked the children to write her blog entry to help children to write ‘in character’. Her boyfriend, Rory, asked them to build a model of the world where they were landing to help them to imagine the setting for their story. Also available were downloadable sound effects; printable Doctor Who script writers’ notebooks; monster masks; and extracts from Doctor Who episodes along with the actual scripts and story boards, to see how they looked on the page.

Impact and evaluation During the seven weeks the competition ran, the resources were downloaded more than 300,000 times and over 100,000 children took part. The feedback from teachers, given directly to the BBC Learning team, suggested that the competition had a strong impact, particularly on reluctant writers who became ‘fully immersed in activities’. The survey measured teacher perceptions of the children’s enjoyment, motivation and engagement with the project and the

Time Travels in Literacy and Pedagogy

153

quality of the materials. An independent research company, Discovery, also collected some more detailed qualitative data from teachers which indicated a strong perception of the motivational qualities of the activity, especially with children who do not usually fully engage: The boys are sometimes hard to motivate and they absolutely loved it. It motivated kids that usually found literacy a bit of a struggle.

Interestingly, these comments highlight ideas which can be associated with the first aspect of the multiliteracies approach, ‘situated practice’. The children’s existing knowledge of a genre was being valued as an asset in relation to literacy and this is suggested as a key reason for both motivation and improvement. Our subsequent analysis revealed that this idea was well established in the resources, whereas other aspects of the process of Design, suggested by the NLG (1996), were less evident. We structure the remainder of our analysis of the resource under headings based on the components of multiliteracies pedagogy, beginning with ‘situated practice’, but acknowledging that the components intersect.

Situated practice Situated practice requires children to be involved in learning which explores or makes connections with ideas they are familiar with. As suggested above, traces of this approach were evident in the resources and in producer Katy Jones’s very clear aim for the children, ‘not to feel they were doing literacy, but that they were writing a script for the Doctor!’ Teachers clearly recognized the value of working with a text which was familiar and popular and reminiscent of what Bromley (1996) referred to as an almost universal, shared cultural experience: The Doctor Who element meant they were all working with a genre they understood and enjoyed. (Katy Jones, Interview, May 2013)

This was a strong aspect of Jones’ thinking when planning the activity: It was important for children to be able to inhabit the characters, to be familiar with the monsters, and have a clear idea of the world where they were setting their stories before they started to put pen to paper. (Katy Jones, Interview, May 2013)

Choosing to base a classroom literacy resource on a popular children’s or family television drama actively values what children already know about a text and

154

Literacy, Media, Technology

usefully connects with their own cultural worlds. The From Script to Screen activities encouraged the children to make use of their existing knowledge of Doctor Who and to be actively engaged in the sharing of their responses. Having been provided with a notebook template, one task required the children to make use of their existing knowledge of Doctor Who and to comment on his appearance, manner and personal attributes. Indeed a video clip accompanied each activity in the resource, and initiated regular group discussions, consistently encouraging the children to utilize their knowledge and understanding of the character of Doctor Who and the various planets he has visited and aliens he has encountered. This approach has been demonstrated by Marsh (2000), in particular, to be highly productive. We argue that the suggested literacy activities were positioned firmly within the realm of children’s cultural worlds (although we acknowledge the need not to assume all children are fans of a particular programme). However, in our analysis of the other categories we found a gap between what the children were drawing on in terms of media and what they were being asked to ‘design and redesign’.

Overt instruction Drawing on Vygotskian ideas about thinking and concept development, the need for Overt Instruction refers to the process of enabling children to make intuitive understandings they gain from reading texts explicit. The NLG argue that children need to undertake systematic analysis in order to develop a conceptual framework which would enable them to critically analyse a text. For television, this might mean looking at the way transitions signal movement in time, or the way a piece of music establishes mood. To return to the overarching idea of design, the children may implicitly comprehend meaning from film or television as they are watching but there is an advantage to enabling them to reflect on the different meaning-making elements such as sound or camera position. Through a process of analysis, guided by teaching which enables the use of overt prompts and overt conceptual tools, children are able recognize the available designs and by doing so make more intentional use of them. Sometimes thought of as grammar or language of film, the NLG invite us to think of this as semiotic tools, that is to say the metalanguage(s) of the moving image. Although there was evidence of overt instruction in the Doctor Who resources, these were not related to the metalanguage of the medium of film or television, but instead focused entirely on writing. For example, in Lesson

Time Travels in Literacy and Pedagogy

155

three (The Setting), the stated focus was on the use of imagination in order to construct a descriptive piece of writing, with an emphasis on the structuring of a report. The children were invited to use storyboards and newspaper templates in order to plan their report about a new planet. However, there was little mention of the metalanguage of a newspaper, and certainly there was no mention of any metalanguage of film or television drama. In order for this to have seemed to be a priority, the task would have had to shift to being a video or film production task. Carefully mapped on to the 2008 literacy curriculum the suggested learning outcomes of Lesson two were to develop an understanding of characters and to act, speak and write in character. Although the concept of character is one which crosses media or narrative form, the emphasis here was on unrelated writing skills such correct use of ‘tense’ and ‘vocabulary’, ‘headings’ and ‘bullet points’. A further objective of the lesson, linked to the idea of writing in character, was to learn how to write in the format of a blog or diary and how to edit this. However, no vocabulary appeared which might at the very least prompt an awareness of the affordances of a television programme in particular. The benefits of a visual and aural representation might have given the children great opportunities to say what they, as a character, saw or heard but this needed to be actively signalled by the resource. For example, throughout the resource the children were asked to write in the voice of a Doctor Who character in the form of a blog or diary using the templates offered to them. Teachers were invited to ‘make sure that the children know that a blog is an online journal or diary which is updated regularly’. Although this was clearly an attempt to demonstrate an awareness of contemporary social media forms, these were provided as paper-based templates for a blog and diary which conformed to a very traditional style of writing. The restrictions imposed on the students in the form of a writing template and the requirement to conform to the use of bullet points and headings while writing a blog/journal post resulted in an activity which became more about the performance of a skill in using tenses, new vocabulary, expressive and descriptive writing, report writing, blog writing, newspaper report writing and poster presentations all of which featured within the curriculum. In a further example of overt instruction the purpose of the lesson (Lesson four: Aliens) was to learn new vocabulary in order to describe, and to use research methods in order to find out facts and to help produce fact sheets. The children were asked to watch a video and use their existing knowledge of the Doctor Who characters in order to name the aliens from the show and to describe them. This was followed by an introduction to new words, which may have been

156

Literacy, Media, Technology

of use to the children when describing the aliens; the use of images also aided them understanding the alien names based on their features and characteristics. Again the task, which involved research and learning new vocabulary, was so focused on the written word that opportunities to explore the meaning created by the visual appearance of the aliens were potentially restricted.

Critical framing Being able to stand back from a text and consider its meaning in context is a demanding task. However, developing the ability to consider who made a programme, how it was made, which audience it was for and how it represents the world are important concepts associated with media literacy, which we can begin to lay the foundations for in the primary phase. The main concept found here in terms of critical framing related to the who and how of production, influenced by the strong ‘behind the scenes’ elements which are key to the pleasures of being a fan of Doctor Who. Activities which began to do this in the From Script to Screen resource included a suggested examination of Doctor Who scripts as well as storyboards which allowed the children to share and rehearse their interpretation of the text (both individual episodes and the whole set of ideas that characterize the programme) framed by an emerging understanding of media production practices. This sort of framing invites the children to imagine being a scriptwriter or a director involved in the development of a storyboard. This was extended in the task which followed where students were invited to watch a video clip of Steven Moffat, the writer credited with re-energizing Doctor Who for contemporary audiences. Moffat discusses what makes a good Doctor Who adventure, linked to an opportunity to watch and analyse an excerpt of Doctor Who and to work in groups and comment on different aspects of the plot. The stated aim of this session was to introduce the students to the project and to familiarize them with the layout, features and function of a script, for example, characters, pace, mood and plot. There was a strong focus on the development of skills: the lesson plan stated: ‘tell the children that during the next few sessions they will be developing the skills they need to write a script’. This is an interesting and complex modality which the children were invited to navigate, that is to say, the children were expected to engage with the Doctor as a character among other fictional characters and an actor alongside other actors and programme makers. While the use of the fictional world of the programme enabled children to work with the familiar, the production world was unfamiliar.

Time Travels in Literacy and Pedagogy

157

The children were asked to imagine themselves in the role of a scriptwriter, actor, costume designer, etc. for various activities. The closing of this session also suggested an opportunity for the children to act out a scene using stage directions to orientate themselves conceptually to the context in which the programme would be made, either a television studio or a location film shoot. The resource did, therefore, provide a clear critical framing in terms of how texts are made and a number of distinct pedagogical approaches to enabling children to engage with the idea of being a costume designer or script writer. However, there were further unexplored opportunities which could have been rich sources of learning. Given that Doctor Who travels back in time the children could have been asked to think about how historic places and events are represented. They could also have been invited to research the audience for Doctor Who and consider what it means to be a fan of the series. Even in terms of the taking up of roles in the question of ‘who is the maker of the text’, the children could have been invited to consider telling the story from the point of view of a child in order to see how that might shift the way the story is told.

Transformed practice In order to be transformative, the NLG argue that children need to explore the full range of meaning-making available to them, including the range of modes of the moving image. However, while From Script to Screen was a rich multimodal resource, the tasks the children were asked to complete were a limited acknowledgement of the changing digital context, such as using the internet in order to research the aliens or the creation of a blog. The lack of a distinctly moving image creative task in particular inhibited the possibilities for transformative practice. Our analysis led us to conclude that the least represented of the multiliteracy pedagogies in the From Script to Screen resource was the opportunity to engage in fully transformative practice. Ultimately the final task was a script, albeit one that could, if it won, be turned into a filmed sequence (but only one child’s entry received this treatment). Even so, had the emphasis been on a script as a working tool for television production, an approach which more closely mirrored the design approach of the multiliteracies pedagogy might have been possible. As it is, very often the written task was more influenced by curriculum linked learning objectives than following a logical sequence in teaching children about script writing. For example, a proposed learning outcome of Lesson five (The

158

Literacy, Media, Technology

TARDIS) was to learn how to write instructions. This was presented alongside the need to make children familiar with what a three-minute scene might consist of, through role play. Since gadgets feature heavily as part of the TARDIS, learners were encouraged to work in pairs in order to come up with a new gadget and were given ten minutes to write instructions for their new invention. Having been given an image of the TARDIS, the students were invited to label each gadget and feature of the TARDIS and to write instructions on how to land the TARDIS. This was a particularly clear example of the influence of curriculum. The written instructions could have been something which was subsidiary to the main activity but instead all the focus was on the written task and how to complete something which was a distinct learning objective. Indeed the proposed activity could be seen as an attempt to use the popularity of Doctor Who to sugar the pill of learning to write instructions. Although it emerges from the fictional world of Doctor Who, the act of compiling instructions does not emerge from the context of scriptwriting. Given the very limited time span of the project it was clearly a decision made on the basis of the curriculum requirements rather than one which would scaffold the skills of a scriptwriter. As a result a gap begins to emerge between the engaging task of creating an idea for an episode and the actual concrete tasks the children were asked to undertake. It is the strong emphasis on structure and outcome in the form of the written word, which overshadows and potentially hinders the content and context of the work produced by the children.

Conclusion: The multimodality gap The newest iteration of the curriculum for English, published after our analysis, states clearly that it wishes to ‘prepare children for modern life in Britain’ (DfE, 2013) but the only acknowledgement of the digital era can be found in the focus on computer coding. In the 2008 curriculum for literacy (DfE, 2008) the only mention of radio, film and television is included under ‘Listening to recordings.’ In this version (the main document referred to) no mention is made of film, television programmes or games in the texts children should be encouraged to engage with. ICT and news media are mentioned only in the context of nonfiction and non-literary texts. Although it is suggested that ‘Pupils could compose on screen and on paper’ which might imply film or game compositions, the focus of the learning is clearly on the language, vocabulary, style and form of the written word. No attention is paid to the different ways in which different texts or media make meaning and the need for children to read and compose texts

Time Travels in Literacy and Pedagogy

159

in different media, either as important in their own right or as related to and a means of developing and enhancing print literacy. While it may be the case that teachers could critically interpret the curriculum, finding ways to incorporate the moving image for example, there is little evidence of this being the case. The system of national standard assessments currently in place in England has a significant impact on the way schools and teachers choose to interpret curricula. Where a teacher may once have felt able to interpret the framework provided by the curriculum, she is now concerned with demonstrating progress, narrowly defined, which relates to curriculum content. The statutory elements of the 2013 curriculum for English (grammar, spelling and punctuation are specified for each year group) may make it less likely that teachers will take what they perceive to be risks in moving away from traditional definitions of literacy. The role of spoken language has been significantly reduced in the latest (2013) curriculum, to the extent that there is no longer a programme of study for speaking and listening. Spoken language is intended to be embedded in the teaching of reading and writing, but this leads to the risk that spoken language is seen only as a function in preparing children for writing, not as an end in itself. This further diminishes the likelihood that teachers will feel comfortable in engaging in any but the most traditional notions of literacy practice. The change from literacy to English in the latest form of the curriculum is significant. In many ways a positive move away from the reductive notion of literacy as a set of skills to be taught and learned, it can also be seen as reinforcing a more traditional view of ‘English’, with all the connotations of English literature (the approved, canonized sort) and English grammar. The stated aims of the authors of the new National Curriculum for English (2013) were not to dictate to teachers how the curriculum should be taught (Hough, 2013). Teachers were to be free to use whatever approaches, resources and subject content they felt allowed them to most effectively teach the skills the curriculum demanded. In many ways the curriculum does allow this flexibility. The requirement, in the Year 5 and 6 programme of study for reading, that pupils ‘identify  …  how language, structure and presentation contribute to meaning’ (DfE, 2013, p. 34) can be interpreted by an imaginative teacher in the context of a variety of different texts, from novels to animation. Interestingly, while the latest 2013 version of the National Curriculum is clear that the programme of study is English, not literacy, the statutory appendices of grammar, spelling and punctuation, along with the tests of these aspects of the curriculum, suggest that teachers will find themselves increasingly concerned with teaching them. Teachers encounter tensions between engaging

160

Literacy, Media, Technology

with pedagogic innovation and levels of accountability and scrutiny they and their schools face in terms of national testing (Austin, 2015). The 2013 curriculum seems to offer both additional freedom and additional constraints and in this context it would seem to be unlikely that either a multiliteracies approach or indeed a further innovation emerging from research will find a way to influence practice. Our analysis of the From Script to Screen resource suggests that the majority of the actual learning objectives and tasks of each lesson are designed primarily to deliver specific learning objectives stipulated in the curriculum. While this may seem like a pragmatic approach to ensuring teachers and senior managers engage with the resource, it is one which assumes that curriculum is enabling and informed by research. However, as we have demonstrated, although the work of the NLG (and numerous others) has been in existence for a number of years, there is very limited recognition in the National Curriculum for English of literacy as dynamic, plural and multimodal. The From Script to Screen activity provided a rich context in which a multiliteracies pedagogy could emerge, especially due to the situated approach at its heart, which clearly engaged children. However, our analysis revealed limitations in terms of the tasks the children were asked to undertake and the form these took. The suggested activities were demonstrably more influenced by traditional understandings of literacy, even in the context of a text which is fully transmedia in its nature. Interestingly many of the lessons ended with the phrase ‘If there is time’ with an invitation to teachers to utilize video footage, writing templates, images, storyboards and existing scripts provided by BBC Learning. These precious resources are products of a highly valuable public service broadcasting tradition where high quality drama is made for children. The curriculum, in each new form, bestows value on education activities, but this ubiquity is problematic and needs to be questioned. Perhaps we should hijack the TARDIS and fast-forward to a place where time is made for children to examine these cultural resources, not as a quick fix of fun to sugar the curriculum pill, but as content of value in its own right as a piece of children’s television and an aspect of children’s shared cultural lives.

Notes 1 http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/may/06/katy-jones, accessed 23 December 2015. 2 http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/teachers/doctorwhocompetition/, accessed 23 December 2015.

Time Travels in Literacy and Pedagogy

161

3 http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/research/media-literacy/media-useattitudes-14/Childrens_2014_Report.pdf, accessed 23 December 2015. 4 http://newlearningonline.com/literacies, accessed 23 December 2015.

References Austin, R. (2015). ‘Being a literacy co-ordinator: Anchor points and undertows.’ Paper presented at International Literacy Conference, Resisting the Standard: Language, Literacy and Power. University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK. June 2015. Barton, D., & Hamilton, M. (2000). Situated literacies: Reading and writing in context. London: Routledge. Bromley, H. (1996). ‘Did you know that there’s no such thing as Never Land? Working with video narratives in the early years.’ In Hilton, M. (Ed.), Potent fictions: Children’s literacy and the challenge of popular culture (pp. 71–91). London: Routledge. Burnett, C., Davies, J., Merchant, G., & Rowsell, J. (Eds) (2014). New Literacies around the globe: Policy and pedagogy. New York: Routledge. Cox, C. B. E. (1998). Literacy is not enough: Essays on the importance of reading. Manchester: Manchester University Press and Book Trust. Department for Education (DfE) (2008). National Curriculum for Key Stage 1 and 2 English. Retrieved from http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20100202100434/ http://curriculum.qcda.gov.uk/key-stages-1-and-2/subjects/english/keystage1/index. aspx (Accessed 23 December 2015). Department for Education (DfE) (2013). National curriculum in England: English programmes of study. Retrieved from https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ national-curriculum-in-england-english-programmes-of-study (Accessed 23 December 2015). Hough, J. (2013). Curriculum reform and English. London: Westminster Education Forum. Jacobs, G. E. (2013). ‘Reimagining multiliteracies: A response to Leander and Boldt.’ Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 57(4), 270–273. Kalantzis, M., & Cope, B. (2012). Literacies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kress, G. (1997). Before writing: Rethinking the paths to literacy. New York: Routledge. Leander, K., & Boldt, G. (2013). ‘Rereading “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies”: Bodies, texts, and emergence.’ Journal of Literacy Research, 45(1), 22–46. Marsh, J. (2000). ‘Teletubby tales: Popular culture in the early years language and literacy curriculum.’ Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 1(2), 119–133. Marsh, J. (2004) ‘The techno-literacy practices of young children.’ Journal of Early Childhood Research, 2(1), 51–66. Marsh, J., & Millard, E. (2000). Literacy and popular culture: Using children’s culture in the classroom. London: Sage. Medway, P. (2005). ‘Literacy and the idea of English.’ Changing English, 12(1), 19–29. Merchant, G. (2009). ‘Literacy in virtual worlds.’ Journal of Research in Reading, 32(1), 38–56.

162

Literacy, Media, Technology

New London Group (1996). ‘A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures.’ Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 60–93. Newman, S. (1963–To present day). Doctor Who. [Television Series]. UK: BBC. Pahl, K. (2002). Ephemera, mess and miscellaneous piles: Texts and practices in families. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 2(2), 145–165. Parry, R. L. (2014). ‘Popular culture, participation and progression in the literacy classroom.’ Literacy, 48(1), 14–22.

11

Children’s Writing in the Twenty-First Century: Mastery, Crafting and Control Clare Dowdall

Introduction This chapter draws from the findings of a doctoral research project that considered three children’s text production in Bebo, a then-popular social networking site. The data for this study were collected in 2010–2011, but the framework that emerged has relevance for the current educational context, particularly given the prescriptive and functional statutory requirements for writing found in England’s National Curriculum (DfE, 2013). At the time of this research, social networking was becoming a prolific youth activity in many parts of the technologically developed world, with research attention focusing on three key areas: the usage of social networking sites (Lenhart, Purcell, Smith, & Zickuhr, 2010; Livingstone & Haddon, 2010; OFCOM, 2011); the features of social networking sites (Dowdall, 2009a, b); and the concerns felt by parents and policy makers for children’s safety in these contexts (Byron, 2008; Byron 2010; Livingstone, Olafsson, & Staksrud, 2011). Less research focused on how children behave as writers or text producers in these informal contexts. This chapter will focus on this issue and consider the following question: How do children behave as text producers in online social networking sites, and what are the implications for teachers of writing?

Children’s writing in the twenty-first century In a study of creativity and writing, Grainger, Goouch and Lambirth identified that three paradigms within writing pedagogy could be observed in international contexts. These included paradigms of genre, skills and process (Grainger, Goouch, & Lambirth, 2005, p. 12). This observation draws from the

164

Literacy, Media, Technology

critique offered by Bearne (2002), who describes the reductive impact of the National Literacy Strategy (DfEE, 1998) on children’s writing in English schools and argues that this policy served to short-change Halliday’s ideational and interpersonal functions of language (Bearne, 2002). In a more recent study of writing pedagogy, Cremin and Myhill (2012) build on this articulation to argue that the teaching and learning of writing are conceptualized simplistically by some governments as ‘an unproblematic set of technical skills … increasingly focused on written outcomes, genre knowledge and skill mastery’ (p. 1). These arguments are framed by the high-stakes accountability measures that are in place currently in England’s education system (Cremin & Myhill, 2012). In the United States, Yancey (2009), writing for the National Council of Teachers of English, makes a similar argument, claiming that children’s writing process is still an under-researched and under-theorized area; and that research into writing as process (or process writing) that emerged between the 1960s and the 1980s has been truncated to allow for testing and to support teaching practicalities. Echoing prominent US-based scholars in the field of New Media such as Jenkins (2008) and Ito (2008), Yancey notes how the affordances of digital technology are supporting a proliferation of opportunities for self-sponsored writing (Brandt, 2001), writing that allows sharing, participation and convergence. She argues that the current era should be regarded as an ‘Age of Composition’ where children are supported to learn to compose in communities of co-apprenticeship, rather than through formal instruction alone, and that evolved pedagogies and classroom practices are required to support young writers (Yancey, 2009). Criticism about the oversimplification of children’s writing in educational contexts is not a new phenomenon. Vygotsky, writing in the early twentieth-century Soviet Union about young children’s language development, made a similar point stating: Until now, writing has occupied too narrow a place in school practice as compared to the enormous role that it plays in children’s cultural development. The teaching of writing has been conceived in narrowly practical terms. (1978, p. 105)

For Vygotsky, the teaching of writing (at that time) was a mechanistic act, focusing on letter tracing, rather than written language: an act that was akin to learning to play the piano without any involvement in the essence of the music (1978, pp. 105–106). These observations resonate with the work of Kress who distinguishes between composition and design when considering the production of twentyfirst-century texts in the new media age (Kress, 2010). In his full articulation of a social semiotic theory, Kress contrasts the act of ‘design’ with ‘composition’,

Children’s Writing in the Twenty-First Century

165

the term used in curricular documentation. For Kress, composition is a process that draws on information sharing using well-understood and settled generic conventions. It is a retrospective act that bows to convention and competence. Design, however, is a forward-looking act. It is a process where knowledge is made and recognition is given to the role of the text producer (Kress, 2010, p. 6). As Kress states: ‘Design, by contrast with competence, foregrounds a move away from anchoring communication in convention as social regulation. Design focuses on an individual’s realization of their interest in their world’ (Kress, 2010, pp. 133–136). The term ‘design’ has been appropriated for over twenty years by scholars of the New Literacy Studies (New London Group, 1996), and used to describe the intentional act of a ‘designer’, who draws upon and transforms available resources, to shape, represent and re-contextualize meaning. This is an holistic act, involving the textual, ideational and interpersonal functions of a text (Halliday, 1979) and includes the configurations of subjects, social relations and knowledge, giving rise to what the New London Group named ‘the redesigned’ – the new meanings that emerge, involving situated practice, overt instruction, critical framing and transformed practice. Kress (a member of the New London Group) has succinctly defined the design process as a process where the artifacts constructed from available representational resources are in fact motivated signs: ‘conjunctions of form and meaning, produced out of the interest of the sign maker, whose use of representational resources is agentive and transformative’ (Kress, 2003, p. 169). Cremin and Myhill have synthesized the work of a range of contemporary scholars to present design as a metaphor for current educational purposes. This metaphor incorporates conceptual thinking around creativity, fitness for purpose, available tools and materials, problem solving, choice and transformation (Cremin & Myhill, 2012, pp. 66–67), and, as Myhill states, allows written composition to be viewed from a cognitive, social, linguistic and creative perspective (Cremin & Myhill, 2012, p. 68). This is an holistic conceptualization where the ‘design’ metaphor enlarges our view of what children can do when they produce texts in a way that takes the process beyond the narrow definition for composition found within current curriculum documentation (DfE, 2013).

Children’s writing in the national curriculum In England, a new national curriculum came into force in 2013. In the programmes of study for English, writing is delineated under the separate headings of

166

Literacy, Media, Technology

transcription, composition, and vocabulary, grammar and punctuation, exemplifying through its very structure, the predominance of a skills-based, rather than ideational or interpersonal, perspective on the writing process. The language used to describe these processes involved in writing is constructed in terms of effectiveness, control and correctness (DfE, 2013, p. 5). Specifically, within the statutory requirements for children aged nine to eleven, emphasis is placed upon rule and terminology learning; using models for composing; selecting appropriate grammar and vocabulary; assessing the effectiveness of writing; ensuring consistency and correctness; and making appropriate choices (DfE, 2013, pp. 36–38). This choice of terminology constructs the writing process as a skills-based, functional process, where writing is a performance that is assessable in terms of correctness for purpose and accuracy. Interpreted literally, the language of the curriculum severs notions of the writing process from more holistic and socially attuned notions of writers and their acts of writing, text production or design. In the case of the English curriculum for writing (DfE, 2013), it can be argued that the identity and agency of the young writer, and the social arena in which their writing acts are undertaken, are unacknowledged as part of the developing writing process. Burnett, Davies, Merchant, and Rowsell (2014) in their call for a Charter for Literacy Education describe this disparate situation as they see it: We … are committed to the idea of literacies as living, being and making, and as meshed with other social practices. However this perspective is problematic, particularly for education. It begs the question, ‘Where does literacy begin and end?’ On the one hand we have literacy policies which reduce literacy to a decontextualised set of skills, and on the other we have literacy researchers whose interest seems to be moving ever further away from written texts. How then does and should new literacies research speak to literacy policy? (Burnett, Davies, Merchant, & Rowsell, 2014, p. 237)

Marsh (2014), in her paper exploring the purposes of literacy among young children in the Club Penguin virtual world, argues that these disparate paradigms could be brought into synthesis. Through her study of twenty-six children aged five to eleven, and drawing from Cairney and Ruge’s classification of literacy events (1998, p. 38) she identifies that children’s purposes for literacy in a virtual world have much in common with ‘offline’ (school based) purposes for literacy. Marsh further suggests that there is much consistency and continuity between children’s online and offline literacy events; and that children read and write because literacy events enable desires to be satisfied and social interaction around intertextual popular culture references to occur. In the light of this study,

Children’s Writing in the Twenty-First Century

167

Marsh recommends that policy makers, academics and educators examine the affordances offered by online spaces such as Club Penguin in order to identify what children gain as they playfully engage in the literacies that these spaces allow. In this way, these experiences can be built upon in a range of educational settings to develop purposeful and meaningful pedagogies. The following study of three girls’ behaviour as text producers in Bebo offers some insight into this issue.

Bebo and social networking The social networking site (SNS) Bebo was launched in 2005 and quickly established itself as a popular site for young people in the UK. Despite the minimum age for membership being fourteen years, it was rapidly adopted by pre-teenage children, and identified as the most-used SNS among UK children in 2008, alongside MySpace (OFCOM, 2008). Between 2008 and 2010, social networking grew exponentially, and by 2010, OFCOM reported that 47 per cent of ten- to twelve-year-old internet users had a profile on a SNS (OFCOM, 2011). Bebo’s popularity declined following this point, as Facebook and other SNS grew in popularity. Recent data show that only 20 per cent of under-twelveyear-olds who go online have a social media profile (OFCOM, 2014, p. 82). This is a significant reduction and reflects that the current context for social networking is quite changed from the early days, when young people avidly created sophisticated, multilayered, modular, multimodal texts that performed their identities and supported communication and co-authoring in framed spaces – away from the supervisory gaze of their parents and caregivers. Two reasons might account for this decline in usage: first, the act of social networking and profile creation among young people in SNS has been subject to a strong ‘protectionist’ discourse since the emergence of the sites. This discourse has been developed with the safety of children in mind, and is regarded as necessary by many policy makers, educators and parents. However, a protectionist discourse can also be regarded as a controlling force – and one that is enacted to restrict expression and opportunities for communication. I have argued elsewhere that the extent of the protectionist discourse that surrounded early social networking may have actually served to reduce opportunities for children to be supported to develop critical digital literacy (Dowdall, 2009a). Second, the development of microblogging sites alongside the increased use of mobile handheld devices has changed the practice of social networking. Sites

168

Literacy, Media, Technology

like Twitter and WhatsApp facilitate connecting with others through posting and reading brief messages, sharing photos and videos, following, liking and friending. However, they do not support the elaborate profile creation supported by earlier SNS like MySpace and Bebo. Accordingly, where profiles in social networking sites were regarded and theorized in the first decade of the twentyfirst century as sites for the highly creative performance of self through text (see boyd & Ellison 2007), now they can be more associated with the acts of curation and sharing (Potter, 2012, p. 5), possibly resulting in a reduction in their potential as sites for design, in relation to the holistic design metaphor invoked by Cremin and Myhill (2012). This notion is born out by current OFCOM data which show that the majority of eight- to eleven-year-olds who go online (92 per cent) do not perceive their activities to be ‘creative’ – a definition that includes ‘making videos, editing videos, creating avatars or identities, publishing your own material through blogs, vlogs etc’ (OFCOM, 2014).

Researching text production in Bebo This study located children’s text production within the process of social networking with the primary intention of interrogating the act of text production itself, rather than the nature of communication that the process facilitates. The principal aim of this study was to construct an account of how children behave as text producers in a dynamic screen based context, and to formulate implications for those responsible for supporting and educating them. An interpretive qualitative paradigm, which had the potential to construct and distil participants’ accounts, actions and experiences as text producers, was adopted. Charmaz claims that ‘interpretive theory calls for the imaginative understanding of the studied phenomenon’ (Charmaz, 2006, p. 126), and is necessarily emergent and provisional in its construction. This was certainly the case in this study, where the iterative process continued through and beyond each stage of the data construction and analysis, and the creation of a tentative theoretical framework. This study utilized Charmaz’s method of ‘constructivist grounded theory’ (Charmaz, 2006) to allow for the construction and interpretation of the participants’ accounts. Data were constructed using a case study approach, which allowed a detailed description of each participant to be presented, prior to a thematic analysis. Three pre-teenage girls, Jenii, Chloe and Elley, were purposively selected and interviewed three times each at their computers over a nine-month period. While childhood and adolescence cannot simply be defined in relation to biological

Children’s Writing in the Twenty-First Century

169

age (James and Prout, 2005; Ryan, 2011) the term ‘pre-teenage’ is used here as a descriptor. Preliminary research conducted in this area indicated that pre-teens were choosing to write a variety of texts (digital and paper based), beyond the school setting. A number of reasons for this were advanced, including the wish to affiliate with others, and to perform friendship and identity work (Dowdall, 2009a, b). This finding is widely supported (e.g. boyd & Ellison, 2007; Carrington, 2009; Livingstone & Haddon, 2010). These accounts served to confirm that pre-teenage children, despite being classified as ‘underage’ by the media involved, were prolifically producing texts (namely profile pages for various social media: Bebo, Facebook, MySpace) as part of the process of online engagement. However, alongside this boom in children’s voluntary text production, in formal educational settings in England, pre-teenage children’s text production continued (and continues) to be constructed from a deficit perspective: where high-stakes assessment and testing systems lead to children being described as failing and reluctant writers (Bew, 2011); and children’s social media use is dominated by notions of risk and toxicity (Alexander, 2010; Livingstone, Olafsson, & Staksrud, 2011; Palmer, 2007). Interviews were semi-structured and aimed to seek participants’ views about their text production in Bebo. During each interview, screenshots of the participants’ Bebo profile pages were taken and saved to complement the interview data. To construct data for analysis, interviews were transcribed. Screenshot summaries were drafted and then crafted as a form of ‘memo’ – an informal, analytic note (Charmaz, 2006, p. 72). For each interview a data set comprising a transcript, memo and screenshots was produced. Nine data sets were constructed and compared in total over the nine-month data collection period. Data analysis involved the use of line-by-line coding of interview transcripts, which was managed at the level of individual interjections, and the coding of screenshots, using the written descriptive memos (Charmaz, 2006, p. 72). Data sets for each participant were then synthesized to build richly descriptive case studies of each participant’s text production over time (Geertz, 1973). Thematic headings were constructed and then interrogated further, assimilated and organized as tentative categories. True to a constructivist grounded theory approach, theoretical sampling was utilized during the second and third interview, as required, to explore perceived gaps in the data, and to deepen the possibilities for conceptualization. Data from the three participants have informed the following presentation of ideas. However, for the sake of brevity, data constructed from one participant, Jenii, will be used to overview the main features of Bebo.

170

Literacy, Media, Technology

Introducing Jenii

Figure 11.1 Jenii’s profile page.

Jenii’s profile page (Figure 11.1) is a carefully designed textual artefact that contains her own original textual elements (modules) and elements uploaded from elsewhere. As such it is a highly crafted text. She has carefully selected a background ‘skin’ for her profile by browsing the websites of various skin designers. The colourways and triptych photographic images that form the banner are selected and adopted as part of this skin. Jenii has crafted the appearance and spelling of her own username, and has pasted song lyrics from a favourite pop group Paramore. She has uploaded a profile photograph of her with friends, and composed textual modules about herself: About Me and Someone Special (Figures 11.2 and 11.3). Further down the profile page (not shown here) she has included screenshots of selected performances from viral television moments of the time, for example, Britain’s Got Talent, and YouTube clips. By searching others’ profiles, she has found and uploaded interactive quiz and questionnaire modules that she has completed about herself for display. These are prepared as modules in waiting that can be uploaded, edited and moved around the profile for presentation, as wished. Jenii’s profile is also populated with the images of her ‘friends’, who automatically feature in her friends’ list. These images can be ordered by Jenii

Children’s Writing in the Twenty-First Century

171

to reflect their status. A ‘wall’ of friends’ comments, which are accompanied by the profile photographs of the comment makers, appears alongside of the profile. These friends can freely post comments to Jenni’s profile page. (heart)JENII/*;(star) Because I’ll never let this go, But I can’t find the words to tell you I don’t want to be alone But now I feel like I don’t know you Figure 11.2: Lyrics from a song by the band Paramore. There’s best friends, and then there’s Rachel (surname). She deserves more than a stupid paragraph, but im gonna write one anyway (: I’ve known her for not even a year, but it feels like we’ve been best friends for centuries. She’s the one that’s ALWAYS there for me, and I know she always will be. And the number of good times we’ve had! Which im not going to list because I wouldn’t know where to start, we would be here for years and no-one would understand anyway! But anyways, just thank you Rachel for being the best friend i could ask for ever. And I will also always be here for you (: Figure 11.3 Someone Special tribute.

Jenni’s profile contrasts with more contemporary SNS profiles, for example Facebook and Twitter. These newer sites’ templates are more formulaic in terms of their potential as a canvas for text creation, and the opportunities for design and crafting are restricted by their architecture. It can be observed that Bebo also restricts children’s text production through the architecture of its site; however, by offering space for modules such as ‘about me’ posts and other original textual elements (see Figures 11.2, 11.3 and 11.4), and the opportunity for profile owners to select skins and manage friends’ comments, profile owners are allowed more freedom to exercise creativity and crafting. Jenii’s Bebo profile therefore serves as a complex motivated sign: the inclusion of Paramore lyrics under her crafted profile name, and the selection of a ‘skin’ allows her to affiliate with others, position herself among her social network and perform her identity through the use of intertextual references and curation of others’ textual artifacts. Further, her choice to write ‘Someone Special’ and ‘About Me  …  I love everything …’ modules demonstrates origination, transformation and creation. These modules are circumscribed by the available resources, but are also acts of design, in Kress’s terms (Kress, 2010).

172

Literacy, Media, Technology i love everything about summer, apparently i laugh at anything but i don’t see how that can be a bad thing, i love my family and friends they mean a lot more than everything to me, i love music, it can help a lot sometimes, and i really like paramore + pendulum + fall out boy, im also actually in love with the song ultraviolet by the stiff dylans, I am pretty obsessed with Friends, i believe almost everything i get told, i don’t really care what people think of me, i have a lot of best mates that are boys, i make a lot of mistakes, first year at teign was pretty good, i’ve watched people change, for the better and for the worse, but i’ve made so many amazing new mates (:, im pretty happy with my life atm, its not perfect, but i wouldn’t change it for the world.

Figure 11.4 About Me statement.

Thematic analysis of children’s text production in Bebo Jenii, Chloe and Elley were interviewed on three occasions in a nine-month period about their profile pages. For each participant, a thematic analysis that demonstrated their individual nuanced behaviour as a text producer was constructed and is overviewed briefly here. Jenii was constructed as using text production to achieve social positioning within her social network. This practice has been well documented elsewhere in the literature (see boyd & Ellison, 2007). For Jenii social positioning was achieved using comments and posts directed to others. She sought affiliation with others by sharing links to popular cultural references, and she collaborated as she produced her profile, both online and physically alongside her friends at their computers, and in discussion about activity on Bebo. Jenii’s text production was additionally constructed as a pleasurable activity through which she derived personal satisfaction and entertainment as she willingly entered into the task of constructing and reconstructing her profile over time to achieve her desired result. Finally, her text production allowed Jenii to enact the role of the text producer. She behaved purposefully in role in a number of ways to construct her profile: as an organizer; as an editor; as an originator; as

Children’s Writing in the Twenty-First Century

173

an expert; and as a performer. For Jenii, her use of the Bebo platform was an act of agentive design. She invested in it and enjoyed crafting her profile to create a pleasing textual artefact. She described her profile with pride as ‘My Bebo’, and one of her main quests was to seek admiration and kudos through the look of her page. Three main themes were also constructed for the second participant, Chloe; however, these differed from the three themes constructed for Jenii. Chloe also found pleasure as a text producer, and used time on Bebo for recreation. However, while she regularly visited the site, she described that she was not addicted to Bebo and seemed to take a pride in the fact that it did not control her behaviour. Instead she explained that she adopted a responsible care-taking role, checking that other friends’ pages were not being defamed and by playing hacking games to change each others’ profiles, within her network. This gave her pleasure, but on her own terms. Like Jenni, Chloe also used her Bebo profile to position herself among her social network. Her profile included self-penned tributes and advice, along with links to popular cultural references. However, some of her posts were only meaningful to her inner circle of friends, through the use of negotiated language and in-jokes that were directed specifically to them (Figure 11.5).

Figure 11.5 Chloe’s profile page with self-penned tributes, advice and jokes.

174

Literacy, Media, Technology

In contrast to Jenii, Chloe was constructed as a controlling and critical user of Bebo, using it carefully to exert control over her social world while enacting her friendships. Chloe distanced herself from her Bebo profile, describing it as a force to be managed. She categorized other users by the appearance of their profiles using terms such as ‘chavvy’ or ‘EMO’ to describe and organize them. Her own friends on Bebo were an in-group, referred to as her ‘crewage’. Through this labelling, Chloe showed that she was aware of the impressions and exclusivity that could be created by profile page construction. Chloe described how she subverted the rules of Bebo by playing a hacking game with other members of her group, where, by sharing passwords, they would change each others’ profile pages for fun. She also adopted a role of social responsibility, moderating others’ profiles when they didn’t have access, and checking for defamation and bullying. Chloe, like Jenii, used Bebo to position herself, but in addition, she used her profile and role to control her position in her social network, making her a more critical and independent participant and text producer. By contrast, only one main theme was constructed for the third participant, Elley. Elley was most concerned with positioning herself using Bebo. She spent a lot of time looking at others’ profiles, and curating her profile from borrowed videos, song lyrics and selfie images. Over the duration of the research, Elley’s profile became increasingly pared back, including very little originated text. Elley was constructed as a cautious text producer, and the most aware of the potential for her profile to act in ways that she could not control. The main theme constructed for Elley was her use of Bebo to achieve social positioning. Her profile was an accessory and by-product of her social world, used for allegiance and affiliation through her actions as she searched and curated popular cultural references. She was a critical agent, but inhibited rather than empowered as an originator of text by her critical awareness. She seemed to lack the confidence to want to express herself through her texts and was more aware of how she could construct an image through intertextual references that might affiliate her to others. In this way, Elley sought and achieved social positioning, where the text is relegated to becoming an adjunct to her social world.

Categories of text production in the twenty-first century The use of the themes identified in the previous section that describe each participant’s text production is clearly an oversimplification of the nuanced behaviours that the participants were prepared to share with me, and that I was

Children’s Writing in the Twenty-First Century

175

able to construct from the data. However, the process supports the development of four categories that can be used to reflect how three pre-teenage children behave as text producers in social networking sites. This in turn supports the development of a tentative framework through which current pedagogy and curriculum policy for teaching writing in the twenty-first century can be considered and critiqued. The four categories that form the tentative framework are as follows: 1.

2.

3.

4.

Text production to derive pleasure: A universal behaviour, with each participant’s profile production being motivated by satisfaction and a drive for agency. Text production to achieve social positioning: This can also be regarded as a universal behaviour for each participant. As a category of text production it demonstrates children’s understanding that texts are indeed ‘motivated signs’ that represent who we are; and that they can be used to position us in relation to others in our social worlds. Text production to achieve social control: This category builds from the former. It can be regarded as a discrete category because it demonstrates an understanding about how texts can be used to control our position in our social worlds. This does not appear to be a universal behaviour in the study’s data, but can be regarded as a heightened ability to position oneself through text production and reception. In this study, Chloe achieves this to the greatest degree; Jenii and Elley desire to control their social worlds, but do not demonstrate the same degree of criticality and detachment as Chloe. Instead, they are more dependent on the persona of Bebo itself, or on the approval of the others in the social network to construct their pages. This means that they position themselves purposefully, but without the degree of ability to control the position that they achieve demonstrated by Chloe. For Chloe this is largely achieved by her claim for independence from Bebo; her awareness that contempt and knowledge can afford power in situations where ‘motivated signs’ are shared as artifacts of identity. Text production to enact the text-producing role: This is the least documented area in the literature around social networking, but of interest when considering how children behave as text producers. Jenii reflects on the impact of her texts as artifacts; she finds pleasure in their creation, has a relationship with ‘her Bebo’, being driven by its aesthetic. It can be argued that Jenii is working towards a status of text designer and crafter. This involves adopting the roles of organizer, editor, originator, expert

176

Literacy, Media, Technology

and performer. The end product is controlled by the available resources and structures, her social desire for kudos, and personal satisfaction with the text itself. Her text production is circumscribed by her social world and a quest for creativity and a pleasing aesthetic. This category demonstrates a concern for the design of the textual artefact and its appeal to others; an awareness of audience in relation to the role of text producer. Equally though it demonstrates a selfish pleasure, where the audience is disregarded temporarily, as the text producer takes an artistic, expressive delight in the design process itself.

Children’s writing in the twenty-first century: Building a framework I contend that the formation of these four categories highlights the opportunity for educators to support children’s endeavours as designers and crafters of text, in digital and non-digital contexts, within and beyond the school curriculum for writing in two distinct ways. First, educators must support children further with critical digital literacy skills, especially in relation to design, as digital contexts evolve. It is clear from my study that children can master social control to different degrees, and that explicit support in how to do this may be welcome. This would require that children’s text production in online spaces be reconstructed from an asset perspective, and sanctioned, rather than couched in alarmist and protectionist discourse. Awareness of social control through text design will be best achieved when children are aware of the potential for their textual artifacts to contribute to their social identity formation and subsequent positioning, a skill required to fully contribute in participatory culture (Jenkins, 2006, p. 56). This is a goal-orientated perspective (Bauman, 2004, p. 49), which educators can assist with. This notion requires that educators and policy makers engage with text production holistically returning to theoretical framings, such as Halliday’s ideational, interpersonal and textual functions of text (Halliday, 1979), to extend notions of text and text production beyond the current policy focus on composition for effectiveness and competence. This observation can be applied to the full range of contexts for twenty-first-century children’s text production: school-sanctioned and informal. Second, educators can focus on the crafting of texts and the development of the voice and role of the text producer. Jenii is driven to produce a page that

Children’s Writing in the Twenty-First Century

177

she finds aesthetically pleasing. As has been described already, this involves her adopting and enacting a number of roles: organizer, editor, originator, expert and performer as a text producer; and demonstrates her ability and desire to craft texts. Britton, Burgess, Martin, Macleod and Rosen (1975) studied children’s school-based writing and categorized it as fulfilling transactional, expressive and poetic functions. These categories are of their time, relating to a context in England that predates any formal curriculum for English. They were also subject to criticism relating to their rigidity and exclusivity (Cremin & Myhill, 2012, p. 18). Nevertheless, they resonate with the concepts of design and origination with a view to the aesthetic seen in Jenii’s profile; notions that not only apply to her acts of curation using intertextual references, but that also apply to her acts of textual creation, where a masterful awareness of the design process is required. Kellogg (2008) draws from Bereiter and Scardamalia’s (1982) work with competent writers to articulate three stages of writing competence that invoke mastery as a professional end-stage. Through schooling, he argues that developing writers move through two stages of competence: from knowledge telling to knowledge transformation, a learned ‘competence’, driven by curriculum and policy. Kellogg distinguishes between these competences by explaining that knowledge telling is a process that is driven by the needs of the author; whereas knowledge transforming is undertaken more critically and enacted for the benefit of the author (indicating a social awareness) and in light of the text under production (suggesting greater intentionality and agency). The requirement for children to write in a specified genre, observing curriculum conventions would be an example of Kellogg’s knowledge transformation stage. In the new national curriculum for English, with its requirements for rule and terminology learning, and the use of ideal forms as models (DfE, 2013, pp. 36–38), the ability to transform texts in a conventional and conforming manner is evident. Finally, Kellogg claims that the status of ‘knowledge crafting’ – a professional act – may be achieved. This crafting stage is an act of ‘design’, undertaken with consideration for the reader, text and author’s intentions. It is characterized by a three-way interaction between representations held in the writer’s working memory of the reader’s interpretations, the author’s interpretations and intentions, and the message contained in textual form. This professional act relies on there being sufficient executive attention for processing information in relation to the task content and working memory (building from Hayes & Flower’s cognitive process theory of writing, 1980). Kellogg argues that the status of knowledge crafter takes many years to attain, and is not attained by all.

178

Literacy, Media, Technology

Drawing from Kellogg’s stage model and the constructed categories from this study, I propose that a scale can be contrived for framing considerations of children’s text-producing behaviours in the twenty-first century, where the affordances of new technologies and the limiting force of the curriculum can both impact upon the process. This scale reflects a progression from mere composition and knowledge transforming to meet policy requirements and conventions (as they stand), to the ultimate professional act of crafting. This endstage requires the greatest degree of reflection in relation to aesthetic response to the text, awareness of audience and social impact, and criticality in the form of awareness of the effect of the text upon the author. Based on her desire to perform as a creator of text and the enjoyment that she derives from this role, I would suggest that Jenii is showing evidence of developing this crafting status. Jenii’s profile page is a carefully crafted endeavour that is circumscribed by her social world, and also affected by her desire for creativity. Her ability to craft texts in Bebo is supported by the architecture and affordances of the Bebo site itself. The use of templates, its modular format and the material realization of her audience in the form of comments and profile pictures support the professional crafting status by scaffolding Jenii in relation to design choices, audience presence and aesthetic feedback. In this way, Bebo liberates Jenii’s executive attention for processing information in relation to the task content and working memory and allows her to relish the status of professional text crafter. This professional act, which recognizes the intent, reflexivity and craft of the author, exceeds the statutory requirements of the national curriculum for English, with its emphasis on function, convention and form. Chloe, through her critical awareness of how text production can be used to control her position within her social world, is also embarking on the professional act of text crafting, although from a different perspective. While she does not appear to enact the role of text crafter in relation to aesthetic and kudos, her ability to understand how her texts can serve her social endeavours suggests that Chloe is also working beyond the functional parameters of the National Curriculum. Taken together therefore, I would like to suggest that the four categories of writing provide an holistic framework for supporting children to develop as text producers as they progress along a scale from competence to the professional act involving crafting and control. This framework exceeds the functional competence framework imposed by statutory requirements for writing that are currently presented within the National Curriculum in England and instead aims to articulate a model of text production as a form of mastery that involves

Children’s Writing in the Twenty-First Century

179

spectrums of crafting and control. The four categories reflect that children compose their texts for pleasure, to position themselves, to control their social world and finally to enact the role of text producer. Taken holistically, and in the light of existing cognitive and social models of children’s writing, these categories allow the potential for children to be constructed as critical and agentive designers, who relish in the aesthetic of their textual product as well as its social affordances. While Bebo is no longer a fashionable social networking site, there are opportunities for educators to harness other online spaces to support children’s mastery as text producers in blogs and evolving social networking sites. Equally I would like to suggest that educators and policy makers should be encouraged to harness notions of crafting and control in children’s text production, through the enrichment of current curriculum documentation.

References Alexander, R. (Ed.) (2010). Children, their world, their education: Final report and recommendations of the Cambridge Primary Review. Oxon: Routledge. Bauman, Z. (2004). Identity: Conversations with Benedetto Vecchi. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bearne, E. (2002). Making progress in writing. Oxon: Routledge. Bereiter, C., & Scardamalia, M. (1982). ‘From conversation to composition: The role of instruction in developmental process.’ In R. Glaser (Ed.), Advances in instructional psychology (Vol.2, pp. 1–64). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Bew, P. (2011). ‘The Independent Review of Key Stage 2 testing, assessment and accountability.’ Retrieved from https://media.education.gov.uk/MediaFiles/C/ C/0/%7BCC021195-3870-40B7-AC0B-66004C329F1F%7DIndependent% 20review%20of%20KS2%20testing,%20final%20report.pdf (Accessed 22 December 2015). boyd, D., & Ellison, N. (2007). ‘Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship.’ Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), 2010–230. Brandt, D. (2001). Literacy in American lives, New York: Oxford University Press. Britton, J., Burgess, T., Martin, N., Macleod, A., & Rosen, H. (1975). The development of writing abilities (pp. 11–18). London: Macmillan Education. Burnett, C., Davies, J., Merchant, G., & Rowsell, J. (Eds) (2014). New literacies around the globe: Policy and pedagogy. London: Routledge Byron, T. (2008). Safer children in a digital world: The report of the Byron review. Nottingham: DCSF Publications. Byron, T. (2010). Do we have safer children in a digital world?: A review of progress since the 2008 Byron Review, Children and New Technology. DCSF Publications: Nottingham.

180

Literacy, Media, Technology

Cairney, T. H., & Ruge, J. (1998). Community literacy practices and schooling: Towards effective support for students. Canberra: DEET. Carrington, V. (2009). ‘From blog to Bebo and beyond: Text, risk, participation.’ Journal of Research in Reading, 32(1), 6–21. Charmaz, K. (2006). Constructing grounded theory. London: Sage. Cremin, T., & Myhill, D. (2012). Writing voices: Creating communities of writers. London: Routledge. Department for Education (DfE) (2013). English programmes of study: Key stages 1 and 2, National curriculum in England. London: Department for Education. DfEE. (1998). ‘The National Literacy Strategy: Framework for Teaching.’ London: DfEE. Dowdall, C. (2009a). ‘Masters and critics: Children as producers of online digital texts.’ In V. Carrington & M. Robinson (Eds), Digital literacies: Social learning and classroom practices (pp. 43–61), London: UKLA/Sage. Dowdall, C. (2009b). ‘Impressions, improvisations and compositions: Reframing children's text production in social network sites.’ Literacy, 43(2), 91–99. Geertz, C. (Ed.) (1973). The interpretation of cultures. New York: Basic Books. Grainger, T., Goouch, K., & Lambirth, A. (2005). Creativity and writing: Developing voice and verve in the classroom. Oxon: Routledge. Halliday, M. A.K. (1979). Language as a social semiotic: The social interpretation of language and meaning. Baltimore: University Park Press. Ito, M. (2008). ‘Introduction.’ In K. Varnelis (Ed.), Networked publics (pp. 1–14). Cambridge, MA/London: The MIT Press. James, A., & Prout, A. (2005). Constructing and reconstructing childhood: Contemporary issues in the sociological study of childhood. London: Falmer Press. Jenkins, H. (2006). ‘Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st Century.’ Retrieved from http://digitallearning.macfound.org/ atf/cf/%7B7E45C7E0-A3E0-4B89-AC9C-E807E1B0AE4E%7D/JENKINS_WHITE_ PAPER.PDF (Accessed 22 December 2015). Jenkins, H. (2008). Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. New York and London: New York University Press. Kellogg, R. T. (2008). ‘Training writing skills: A cognitive developmental perspective.’ Journal of Writing Research, 1(1), 1–26. Kress, G. (2003). Literacy in the new media age. London: Routledge. Kress, G. (2010). Multimodality: A social semiotic approach to contemporary communication. Oxon: Routledge. Lenhart, A., Purcell, K., Smith, A., & Zickuhr, K. (2010). Social media and mobile internet use among teens and young adults, The Pew Internet and American Life Project. Retrieved from http://pewinternet.org/~/media//Files/Reports/2010/ PIP_Social_Media_and_Young_Adults_Report_Final_with_toplines.pdf (Accessed 22 December 2015). Livingstone, S., & Haddon, L. (2010). EU kids online survey executive summary. London: London School of Economics and Political Science. Retrieved from

Children’s Writing in the Twenty-First Century

181

http://www2.lse.ac.uk/media@lse/research/EUKidsOnline/Executive_Summary.pdf (Accessed 22 December 2015). Livingstone, S., Olafsson, K., & Staksrud, E. (2011). Social networking, age and privacy. London: EU Kids Online. Retrieved from http://www2.lse.ac.uk/media@lse/ research/EUKidsOnline/Shortsocialnetworkingsites.pdf (Accessed 22 December 2015). Marsh, J. (2014). ‘Purposes for literacy in children’s use of the online virtual world Club Penguin.’ Journal of Research in Reading, 37(2), 179–195. New London Group (1996). ‘A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures.’ Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 60–92. OFCOM (2011). ‘UK children’s media literacy’ Research Document. Retrieved from http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/research/media-literacy/media-lit11/ childrens.pdf (Accessed 22 December 2015). OFCOM (2014). Children and parents: media use and attitudes report. Retrieved from http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/research/media-literacy/media-useattitudes-14/Childrens_2014_Report.pdf (Accessed 22 December 2015). Palmer, S. (2007). Toxic childhood: How the modern world is damaging our children and what we can do about it. London: Orion. Potter, J. (2012). Digital media and learner identity: The new curatorship. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ryan, K. W. (2011). ‘The new wave of childhood studies: Breaking the grip of bio-social dualism.’ Childhood, 19(4), 439–452. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Yancey, K. B. (2009). Writing in the 21st century. Illinois: NCTE. Retrieved from http:// www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Press/Yancey_final.pdf (Accessed 22 December 2015).

12

How Does Boy 17 Read a Game? Julian McDougall

Introduction Media literacy education has wrestled with an enduring ethical dilemma for many years. This problem was captured in Williamson’s comparison (1982) of her struggles with teaching her student Astrid about gender representation to Sissy Jupe’s silence as ‘Girl 20’ in Dickens’s Hard Times (1854/1995). As we attempt to provide transformative experiences for students to reflect on the negotiation of identity in their mediated lifeworlds, we risk alienating them through an undermining of their own media cultures. As Turnbull asks, ‘is it empowering to reject one’s family and values?’ (1998, p. 100). The same applies to the risk of discrediting the textual lives of our students as we try to engage with new media literacy practices. This precarious operation has been at the intersection of debates about literacy and digital media in this century. Here, I will reflect on my personal experiences of researching the teaching of the most ‘popular’ of culture, videogames, against the grain of a conservative curricular context in England. In so doing, I will return to four videogame literacy ‘interventions’ in this field and re-appraise them as part personal reflection on working in ‘new hard times’ (Gonick, 2007), part re-appraisal of the questions raised by ‘Girl 20’. If the male gamer can be understood as a latter-day Sissy Jupe, then how does Boy 17 read a game? How does the radical pedagogue wrestle with the conundrum of relating Boy 17’s game life to questions of representation? Have the new media dynamics (Hartley, Burgess, & Bruns, 2015) changed how young people perform their gendered identities? Using ‘What does Girl Number 20 Understand about Ideology? (Williamson, 1982) as a frame will situate these current pedagogic concerns in the historical context of media education’s many contradictions.

184

Literacy, Media, Technology

Where are we now? I am not the first person to revisit Jupe via Astrid. It is helpful to enlist Gonick (2007, p. 433–434) for an account before proceeding: Girl Number 20 is a character in the novel Hard Times, written by Charles Dickens in 1854. Sissy Jupe is a young girl, living with a circus troupe, surrounded by horses, who when asked by the tyrannical school headmaster Mr Gradgrind to define a horse, is silent. Bitzer, a boy, steps in with an encyclopaedic definition of the gramnivorous, forty-toothed, coat-shedding, hoofed, quadruped. Girl Number 20 was first introduced to feminist debates by Judith Williamson (1981–1982) in her now classic piece, ‘What does girl #20 understand about ideology?’ Williamson’s Girl Number 20 was a student in a course she taught on representation of women in the media. Astrid, she writes, was her ‘worst problem’. Feminist educators have over the 20 years since Williamson’s piece appeared, periodically reinvoked Girl Number 20, with different names, in different contexts and places, but always a problem, to further a series of interrelated concerns about the relationships between girls’ silence in the classroom, teaching/learning ideology and the reading of media texts.

The reflexive study of videogame play as literacy practice by young people with teachers, in formal educational settings in England, has been marginal and awkward. It has been the subject of many pilot projects, often disseminated through the conferences and journals of associations such as the United Kingdom Literacy Association, but far from ‘mainstream’ practice. In 2015 the London-based Observer newspaper published Robert McCrum’s list of the 100 ‘best English-language novels of all time’, the author reflecting that to many readers this was, as an ‘enraged online critic’ put it, ‘an elaborate headstone for a defunct way of thinking about literature’ but then doing it anyway. While a discussion around how to define a ‘classic’ is integrated into the feature, the idea of the canon existing, or literature even ‘being a thing’, is not questioned. Going further, McCrum observes that: in the century that witnessed the making of the English novel, the genre was almost exclusively the work of upper or upper-middle class English writers, predominately male, and often with private means. Their novels were addressed to an elite minority, and expressed the concerns of a particular society.

But he proceeds to construct his list of the best of this ‘majestic art form’ regardless, seemingly able to bracket this context with little discomfort.

How Does Boy 17 Read a Game?

185

In the same year, Rowsell, writing in her edited collection (with SeftonGreen) on revisiting literacy projects, reflects on her own interpretation of a participant’s experiences of teaching classic literature (Dorothy, from Sri Lanka): Dorothy talks about how the canon … did not appeal to or interest all readers in her childhood classrooms … Dorothy is aware that teaching the canon, on its own, cuts out students who prefer vernacular texts like video games or texts that exhibit more cultural or racial diversity … I implicate myself in the revisit because, having studied English Literature over the course of my undergraduate and graduate years, I have a bias for reading the canon … which, of course, plugs into my account of Dorothy’s story. (Sefton-Green & Rowsell, 2015, p. 154)

Meanwhile, and related to these canonical struggles, Peim, writing in the preface to Doing Text (Bennett & McDougall, 2016), observes the failure in England of ‘Subject English’ to fall on its sword in the wake of digital media: That the more restricted forms of textual engagement that English offers remain at the core of the National Curriculum and that English retains a relatively elevated academic status are testament to the strange but powerful grip of an educational order that has been and remains difficult to shake off. The so-called ‘long revolution’ has indeed been ‘long’ as the young people say. We don’t know if the happy playground of Media Studies might in the very long run have some serious impact on the established academic order and might seriously challenge what Derrida has called the ‘violence’ that attends ‘the legitimization of canons’. At present – and from a certain detached perspective – it doesn’t look like it. My own inclination is to be grimly pessimistic on the matter. (Bennett & McDougall, 2016, in press)

These two examples serve to demonstrate the obvious point that teaching videogames is problematic for reasons most powerfully bound up with teacher identity, taste and how our own textual and educational experiences as children influence our practices as teachers. The ‘established academic order’ is as much about our own sidestepping of the ‘necessary symbolic work’ (Willis, 1990) of claiming a cultural space required by those with less cultural capital than us, as it is to do with imposed structures and educational management ‘from above’. Going further, at the time of writing, I am acutely aware that the research informed recommendations this chapter will make could not be further away from the educational reforms being implemented in English school and college classrooms. Changes to the curriculum and assessment for students aged fourteen to nineteen include three highly significant adjustments for teachers of popular culture, media and new literacies:

186

1.

2.

3.

Literacy, Media, Technology

The study and production of popular culture and digital media in the institutionalized form of Media Studies, assessed at GCSE and A Level1 with progression routes to related courses in universities, is to be substantially revised. This means that creative production will be reduced to the margins of teaching specifications and the study of ‘lesser quality’ texts and forms (including videogames) will be difficult to include. The removal of any requirement to engage digital texts during the study of English. This flows from a reduction in coursework and group learning, and prominence of ‘traditional’ subjects, examined through written essays and attacks on teaching training and teaching unions. At the same time a return to less ‘progressive’ pedagogy in the classroom is encouraged and obligated through the curriculum, assessment regime and international comparisons of pupil performance.

At a broader level, the potential for immersive, virtual and networked digital media engagement to be embraced as an affordance for The Long Revolution has most certainly not been harnessed. In re-appraising his own project in the wake of new digital media at the turn of the century, Williams observed, hopefully: What is now happening, in the existing institutions, is a steady pressure from the late capitalist economy and its governments to reduce education both absolutely and in kind, steadily excluding learning which offers more than a preparation for employment and an already regulated life … but use of the new technologies can add diversity and permanent availability to the most comprehensive institutions, above all in making them outward-looking taking their best knowledge and skills to a wider and more active society. (2015, pp. 110–111)

There is a strange ‘double think’ at work behind the current reforms that can only be briefly explained here, whereby media literacy is taken seriously within a hybrid discourse of protectionism (e.g. cyber-bullying, radicalization, distraction) and economic growth contribution (e.g. creative industries and coding) while Media Studies is derided. Reflecting this trend, the production of digital media is annexed to the ICT curriculum, with particular emphasis on coding. But a less functionalist, more critical or reflective learning about, with or through digital media in either a discrete subject or within English – where digital media production and coding would be conceived as literacy practices and text-conscious disciplines might ‘open out’ – is way off limits. Clearly, then, the interests of this chapter are somewhat out on a limb. Starting conversations about what it means to be literate, agentive and (potentially) civic in the ‘fused’ playing, study and production of digital games (see Potter, McDougall,

How Does Boy 17 Read a Game?

187

Parry, Bryer, & Cannon, 2015) is very difficult in the current climate. Likewise, a keen, theoretical and pedagogical interest in how this impact is experienced at home, in school and in the ‘third space’ (Gutierrez, 2008) between the two is, to say the least, at the margins of England’s highly conservative epistemological environment (in which young people’s media engagements are marginalized by a drive for ‘enrichment’ through exposure to high culture).

Still Just Gaming? Recent work in the related fields of literacy and media education has taken a turn to looking back at how we have responded to the affordances of digital, networked media in the classroom and to taking stock of the lived experience of this for both students and teachers set against the progressive, even emancipatory claims we made at the ‘2.0’ moment. In this chapter I return to projects that sought to ask questions about the situated literacy practices of young people who were being asked to re-contextualize the familiar by working with videogames in classrooms with teachers. In each case, research questions explored discursive and pedagogic tensions as well as opportunities. The ‘writing up’ and various forms of dissemination shared the work in physical spaces to teachers, academics, students and, during the heady New Labour/OFCOM days (Buckingham & Wallis, 2013), Members of Parliament. In sharing findings, we fought – often against the odds – to foreground the complexity of young peoples’ relationships with gaming practices, the many differences between game players and the importance of understanding gameplay as a performative, often highly reflexive, sometimes frivolous, frequently ironic and usually social form of literacy. This has always been very difficult. Audiences for this research have generally desired straightforwardly positive outcomes for the project of reframing literacy, often with problematic assumptions about engaging ‘non academic’ (code for working class) boys. Or the opposite – we got more attention for our project with Grand Theft Auto players (Kendall & McDougall, 2009) than for any other piece of research, but ‘stakeholders’ were generally unresponsive to our nonjudgmental thick description of the gender troubling we observed. Brief returns to completed projects fall short, however, of the kinds of longitudinal ‘revisiting’ exemplified by Burawoy (2003) and exemplified in SeftonGreen and Rowsell’s recent edited collection (2015). Literacy researchers in those cases re-connected with their participants to find out about the longer term impacts of literacy interventions but were mindful of ethical issues and that ‘the change we

188

Literacy, Media, Technology

are interested in observing is as much a dynamic property of the observer as it is of either of the sites or the people we work with over time’ (Burawoy, 2003, p. 4). Although I have not sought out my participants from these projects, and in any case insufficient time has lapsed to offer a longitudinal view, inevitably the act of relating, retrospectively, the findings of the projects, always-already filtered and constructed, to ‘Girl 20’ as a framing metaphor is a distance away from involving research participants in every stage of the research (Pahl & Khan, 2015). I choose ‘Girl 20’ for a number of self-serving reasons: it was a formative piece in my own trajectory as a media educator with particular political intentions; it fits with my interpretation of the current political context for my field; and for another collaborative project (Bennett & McDougall, in press) I am working with representations of austerity in contemporary popular culture, ‘Hard Times Today’, so Sissy Jupe is in my thoughts. Here, I will adapt Girl 20 to Boy 17 as a device to explore the correspondence principle between gaming practices outside of education and the study of games as a media literacy educational encounter. Boy 17, then, will be evoked as a singular metaphor to represent groups of students in order to reflect back on four projects over eight years, each two years apart.

Smethwick village life (2007) I think that if you are going to have a game which is educational then there needs to be more fun than there is learning built into it so that people don’t notice it as much. (Student interview, Smethwick Village project)

My first research project (McDougall, 2007) explored gaming as literacy practice (see Gee, 2003), whereby ‘the relationship between reader and text (player/ game) is differently mediated so that the “player as reader” of the “game as text” ’ is positioned as an agent in knowledge making practice rather than a recipient of ‘knowledge’ (Kendall, 2008, p. 18). This involved interviews with teachers and students and lesson observations in two phases at two further education colleges in England. In both colleges, students who self-identified as gamers were studying games as textual objects within the Media Studies curriculum at A Level – this was an optional topic chosen by a small minority of teachers. The key research questions were: 1. 2.

What degree of insulation between ‘pleasure learning’ and classroom learning exists? What is the relationship between game literacy and study and does the classroom experience reinforce, challenge or abstract such relations?

How Does Boy 17 Read a Game?

189

The two games being compared, for their representational qualities, were Medal of Honor and The Sims. My focus was on students’ experiences of formal educational study reaching out into their informal situated literacies in this way. In analysing their statements, I witnessed the discursive tension between common ideas about young peoples’ use of digital media and the ‘mission’ of the curriculum to enrich and survey students’ tastes. In addition, traditional epistemological and pedagogical discourses set up the teacher (albeit often a non-gamer) as the one who knows, and learning by and/or reading as playing are configured outside of this dynamic. Both teachers and students returned frequently in their discussions to ‘the exam’, and this served to delimit the pedagogic work. Boy 17 was able to speak, in the classroom, about gaming, but within the frames of reference available – the workings of the game industry and how the games’ themes relate to ideology. Unlike Sissy Jupe in Hard Times, these game players could articulate game literacy beyond factual definition, but like Williamson’s Astrid and despite the progressive intentions of their teachers, they were compelled to apply a new ‘preferred reading’ of games – as carriers of ideology. Often this was at odds with their thinking about the games as ‘just’ players. Students often said, and saw this as a failing on their part, that they were not really thinking any differently about games outside of the unit of study. Nevertheless at this early stage in the inclusion of game literacy in Media Studies, potential for these reflexive outcomes was evident, as this teacher observed: It is hard because on the one hand you have constantly got in your mind the fact that you have got to prepare them to write an essay in an exam, but on the other hand you I really like the open ended possibilities that this generates.

The project was funded by the university where I worked at the time; I was an early career researcher and this flavour of new territory pervaded the study – I was new to research, games were new as objects of study in Media Studies, and the teachers and students were working in this way for the first time. There was a feeling of us being at a key moment in the genealogy of textual education, a sense that within a few years new digital media forms would obligate new configurations of text, literacy practice, teaching and learning. At the time, the New Labour government were giving media literacy credibility, funds were available for educators to develop games for learning or to engage with ‘serious games’ and teachers were sharing good practice in cross-disciplinary, student centred approaches to ‘reframing literacy’.

190

Literacy, Media, Technology

The Baroque Showman (2009) Last night I began the story of Nico Bellic … (Student blog post, Just Gaming project)

The question of gender performance in gameplay was the focus of the second project I will reflect on here (Kendall & McDougall, 2009). For this study, we worked with male teenage gamers, sixth formers again, playing the infamous Grand Theft Auto. The game was not the object of study within their college curriculum but the participants were all students on English and Film or Media courses. We wanted to know more about how male players who were used to analysing texts as representational would articulate a meta-literacy, specifically around the gendered figured world at stake in GTA. How would Boy 17 understand this? Our motives were to challenge what we saw as a reductionist orthodoxy emerging in educational approaches to games. The multiple voices claiming that ‘digital literacies’ are developed from early ages were overlooked in the development of this overly ‘pragmatic’ agenda. Our intention was to inform the media literacy community by offering data that would be more discursive, complex and theoretically grounded. For the ‘Just Gaming’ project, ten sixteen- and seventeen-year-old players of Grand Theft Auto 4 were recorded blogging about the gaming experience. They were then interviewed about perceptions of their performances and identity constructions in the narrative of GTA4 and in the online spaces provided by the game. We found four literacy practices at work in our participants’ talking and blogging about their gameplay. There was importantly no one, fixed way of ‘being Nico’ (the protagonist in the game). Students demonstrated a tendency for switching and splicing, with the game, against or alongside the game. We encountered pastiche, first person (gamer), third person (character) or a combination (first person in character), knowing and frivolous provocation and ‘grandstanding’: I think to a certain extent there was a kind of competition because everybody wants their blog to be read and everyone wants people to laugh at their blog and they just want a chance to shine. (Student interview: Just Gaming project)

Participants adopted multiple positions both in their approaches to play and in their recounting of their play. We observed the centrality of performance in gameplay practices – bloggers evidently took pleasure in taking centre stage in these baroque performances (self-conscious, knowingly outrageous, even

How Does Boy 17 Read a Game?

191

carnivalesque) and enjoyed the opportunity to re-tell their stories: sorting, selecting, editing and glossing their experiences for maximum reader impact, for example: OK, its here. The fifth and final hour, the big one … oh yes, you know what I’m talking about … After shooting a few people down and evading various 1/2 wanted star levels, I get an invite to play online, fun. With the invite accepted I found myself in a lobby full of rowdy Americans wanting to kill me (in the game of course), the game mode is GTA Race meaning you race but can get out of your car at any point, picking up weapons along your way. Just as the game started I heard an overly-enthused American shout the words, ‘Holy shit, here we go!’ I hit the gas and aim my car at there wreckage, when i hit full speed i leap out the vehicle and watch it carrear into the mess. With the remaining bullets i have i pump the gas tank full of lead and gaze at the explosions as one the flaming carcases of my enemies falls to my feet.

For these participants it seemed that gaming offered an opportunity for performance and achievement but at the same time some reflection, with knowingness as important to the performance as the events in the game. This brought to the surface some interesting questions of identity. While the content of GTA and the effects debate that surrounds it were not our concern, the blog postings in particular tended to share traits of the baroque showman (e.g. performances to the wider blog community, an overlay of friends, college peers and Facebook contact trails). The absence of females along with their circulation as ‘other’ appeared to reproduce conservative textual practices and it was clear from both the online data and the interview elaborations that a highly performed and playful ‘male showing’ was at work. Perhaps because no assessment was taking place – the students were in college and studying texts but this project was ‘extra’ and they were incentivized with game vouchers – Boy 17 here was able to work reflexively with his experience; indeed that was the focus of the study. Whether we got further than Astrid is difficult to say because we were finding the kinds of gender troubling we expected and in this sense were doing the opposite of Williamson. We were kicking against the dominant view that male GTA players were looking for complexity, rather than trying to transform their relations to their own identities. And we weren’t teaching them, or judging them in any sense and this was made clear. Funded this time by two institutions and with the authors working across disciplines (literacy and media), the findings were shared with literacy educators, teachers from all sectors, game academics and policy makers. While, as stated

192

Literacy, Media, Technology

earlier, the latter group were generally less interested in the complexity, there was generally a readiness to see the potential for this kind of reflexive identity work in education and to move beyond the idea of reaching out to ‘disengaged boys’. There was a sense that we were moving beyond the mere inclusion of games in education towards a more interesting ‘curational’ space (McDougall & Potter, 2015) for helping students understand their game performances as identity practices.

The third space burger joint (2011) Within Second Life it is exactly as it says – a second life; I would prefer to escape real life playing a game, than actually escaping real life to start another life (even if it is virtual) where you just play yourself, just wandering and exploring as you would do in reality. (Student Journal: What our students taught us about virtual worlds and learning project)

This was the first project to be funded externally through the Higher Education Academy for a workshop on the use of virtual worlds in art, media and design education. In this project the emphasis shifted to the utility of the virtual world as a pedagogic space as opposed to bringing games from home into the classroom, but once again our interest was on the complexity of how students would situate themselves, as opposed to just whether or not it would work or could be transferable (McDougall & Sanders, 2013). The intervention consisted of teaching an undergraduate module in Second Life (at the time, this virtual world looked set to transform education but it has failed to deliver on its early promise), but as this module had postmodernism as its focus, a double layering of student engagement was afforded: how does Boy 17 curate his identity as an inanimate avatar? Our insider research enquiry here was into the extent to which self-identified gamers would feel more comfortable than other students with not only the experience in the virtual seminars but also the need to transfer game literacy into academic capital. We also wanted to know if the migration to the virtual realm would be emancipatory for those students who were alienated by features of the more orthodox curriculum or whether the ‘rules of the game’ would transfer intact to a Second Life context. In the research we conducted to evaluate the intervention (McDougall & Sanders, 2013), students all described their retrospective feeling that they had ‘been to’ the lectures and were not sitting at home or in front of a laptop

How Does Boy 17 Read a Game?

193

somewhere else. One student attended the sessions from her local McDonald’s as the broadband connection was faster and it was interesting to hear about these details as we were not aware of them during the work, although students were offered a venue on campus to attend if they needed to do so. The experience fostered a significant depth of interaction around the ontological questions that the module raised. While interacting with a richly developed environment and artifacts of their own creation, combined with the requirement to represent their identity though avatars of their own creation, it provided a unique opportunity for students to reflect on their own ‘hyper-reality’. However, the research suggested that the degrees of cultural capital required to self-present and to theorize this practice were largely in keeping with those required for more traditional forms of academic practice (book learning). They required students for example to articulate, to reflect and to be self-knowing. Students with the ability to achieve through traditional forms of learning were generally better placed to benefit and succeed in the assessment. For nontraditional but game literate students, the benefits of the experience fell below expectations. These students found it difficult to get past the idea that the virtual seminar space was an inferior version of a pastime they felt passionately about. In this way, and with great irony since this was our only attempt among these projects to explicitly ‘gamify’ literacy, these gamers’ reticence was the closest outcome to the silence of Sissy Jupe. As they struggled to translate their game literacy into academic capital, their non-gamer counterparts readily articulated the academic language game required.

Reading Cole Phelps (2013) I suppose in terms of looking at it as a text or otherwise looking at it as what you might call different types of text reader relations and I compare that to say ‘a book’ and does the author control the meaning of the book, audience reaction and it’s not too dissimilar in terms of interrogating who controls the game and arguably on the surface at least it’s the gamer that controls the game but then you’re in a fictional world which is set by somebody else so I don’t know if it’s that dissimilar to looking at any other texts. But if you wanted to say ‘here is LA Noire, the character here is Cole Phelps so let’s understand Cole Phelps’, well you’d need a lot of gameplay to stand up in front of a group of people and say ‘Cole Phelps is this kind of person’. (Teacher interview: Reading Games project)

194

Literacy, Media, Technology

The final project (Berger & McDougall, 2013) was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council under the ‘Digital Transformations’ theme. For the ‘Reading games as Authorless Literature’ study, the videogame LA Noire (Rockstar Games, 2011) was used by teachers and students as literature within the orthodox framing of the English Literature curriculum in further and higher education. We wanted to explore the potential for literacy or English educators to understand and work with games as digital transformations of literature and to investigate the implications of such a conception for the ongoing field of reframing literacy. Working with four groups of teachers and students in three geographical locations in England, our participants first contributed to a gameplay blog (the same method used for Just Gaming) for which they needed to wear two hats – those of literature student and of gamer and to reflect on these overlapping domains of practice. Secondly, our students taught our teachers to play the game and then worked together with a series of study resources which we designed to match up to the academic practices of Subject English, locating the game firmly as a literary text within this analytical lens, along with some creative activities to make things more interesting, one of which led to the tube map reproduced in Figure 12.1. Here, then, we were departing from the framings of the previous projects I have revisited. In those, we were dealing with games as other to literature and virtual worlds as other to classrooms. For ‘Reading Games’ the hypothesis was that a game of this kind could be literature. Finally, selected participants were interviewed and the resources modified in response to their feedback.

Figure 12.1 Just doing text.

How Does Boy 17 Read a Game?

195

Some important disclaimers. LA Noire is not any game. In taking it as our text we were complicit in its commercial imperative to be received as literary and thus we must situate this game as being the easiest to study within the frames of reference of English Literature: the game has a clear set of noir genre conventions, its intertextuality is multi-layered and there is knowing representation of gender, place and time. Sticking to the standard that is set by a game which carries film noir characteristics, the main protagonist is a flawed justice seeking detective. The interesting twist however is that we, the players, watch his rise, fall and eventual redemption. We see him love and we see this reciprocated, but equally we see him despised as his ‘bad behaviour’ is uncovered. Phelps is an interesting character to play, especially as through the facial mapping technology we play as a digitised actor rather than an avatar. (Student blog post: Reading Games project)

In the final week on the blog, the participants were set two Subject English style examination questions. The function of this final stage was to cement the research in the idioms of English Literature. Following the blog phases, the first interviews and trialling of the resources, the final set of conversations focused on the heart of the matter – the potential for games to be read in the classroom (albeit extended online to digital spaces) in a traditional way. We found many examples of what we might call partial reframing of the extent to which expert literacy can adapt for gameplay. The teachers had no problem with the question of LA Noire as a literary text for study, but often reinforced the assumption that mastery of the text is a prerequisite for teaching – a very different response to the collaborative phase of the research whereby students and teachers appeared to be constructing much more of a shared kind of reader reception. One teacher however offered a critique of the premise of the research: My criticisms of the game would be from a literary perspective. I think there are two weaknesses as a literary text – the limitations on character interaction as he (student) taught me, you can read a character is lying from their facial gestures, that’s Harry Potter-esque isn’t it, where she drops in those big adverbs. There’s a number of adverbs around the way Snape moves that tell you he’s bad and I think LA Noire is in that country with the exaggerated facial gestures. Secondly, just having looked at the opening to Things Fall Apart and what we were trying to discuss is what Achebe’s trying to put across, you know in postcolonial literature, so what the writer is trying to communicate is very important in literature, you’re not just searching for one meaning, but trying to uncover what the novel might be about. In the game, you have a much more active

196

Literacy, Media, Technology

participation as a reader you can determine the structure, you can digress to answer particular calls, you can’t digress in a novel unless the author wants you to and that has a particular significance. (Teacher interview: Reading Games Project)

This teacher’s response brings to our attention both the intertextual nature of literacy and the permeable categories of reading. We are offered comparative judgements about the game, a novel and a play without the need for a separate critical discourse for each. Furthermore, the distinction between more active reading (of games) and less active reading but more apparently productive second-guessing of author-intention (in literature) reinforces the elements of ‘Subject English’ (Peim, 1993) that most robustly deny learners a genuinely critical voice. There is no sense here that the teacher wittingly reinforces this and, indeed, s/he muses on the interesting differences between the attractions of literature and gaming later in the discussion. But a key finding was the teacher’s confidence in the clear difference between the two kinds of reading practice compared to the students’ ease with the blurring of such boundaries. Student responses to questions about the status of LA Noire as a novel were more consensual than their teachers. They dismantled the notion that it matters whether a game is like a novel. Consider this tube map produced by a student during the creative activity phase, and how it exemplifies a flattened textual hierarchy, beyond textual insulation, just doing text. At the conclusion of the ‘Reading Games’ project, the educational landscape was still such that we could speculate that obsession with authors in literacy education might be challenged by digital media reading practices. We suggested that the adaptation of literary texts into digital forms and their appropriation as critical frameworks for parodic, reflexive work could move the curriculum on from the delimiting effect of its media-specific textual silos. Boy 17 was able to do something that neither Girl 20 nor Astrid could do – not only ‘get to speak’ but transform the educational discourse to an extent. That said, three factors put limits on any over-celebration. The game chosen, as stated, is knowingly literary and thus there was some contrivance in the digital transformation at stake. The educational conversation, while negotiated and non-hierarchical in the first three stages, was finally closed off by the teachers’ less open summations and, equally, the students’ optimism was curtailed by the need for the teacher to be the expert. Games were not quite literature for the teachers, and because we chose a game that was literary, filmic and highly generic there was little space for a serious challenge to the notion of literature itself in our design of the project. And even if there were, both teachers and students agreed in conclusion that a game cannot be taught

How Does Boy 17 Read a Game?

197

without being read, mastered – finished. Nevertheless the project had proven its hypothesis, there was no problem with LA Noire being studied as literature. Students and teachers had worked through traditional English resources and highly conventional exam questions had been set. It seemed this would be the start of something important: we would develop the project on a larger scale and, in time, move from the limitations of the perennial pilot project to wholesale implementation. In the not too distant future, games could be read as literature. But that was then.

Where are we now? As described at the outset, at the time of writing, these projects look more like the luxuries of a short-lived age of promise than part of any long revolution. Students are being returned to a canonical diet of enrichment and the ideological construct of literature is once again a technology of moral training. And yet, for Williams, the revolution is long because popular culture is not only the stuff of texts but also the continuing resistant energy of the people: in the generality of their impulses and in their intransigent attachments to human diversity and recreation, they survive, under any pressures and through whatever forms, while life itself survives, and while so many people – real if not always connected majorities – keep living and working to live beyond the routines that attempt to control and reduce them. (2015, p. 106)

I hope very much that my application of the Jupe metaphor through Astrid to Boy 17 is not a distortion of Williamson’s feminist critique. In understanding male gamers as other and lacking voice in the textual classroom, I seek to draw attention to the urgent need to give voice to diverse textual practices in literacy education and how attempts to let students speak to gaming performance has been fraught with very similar ‘risky complexities of enacting pedagogical transformations in the classroom’ (Gonick, 2007, p. 451) to those encountered by Williamson with Girl No 20.

Note 1 General Certificate in Secondary Education (taken at 16) and Advanced Level (taken at 18).

198

Literacy, Media, Technology

References Bennett, P., & McDougall, J. (Eds) (2015, in press). Doing text: Media after the subject. Leighton-Buzzard: Auteur. Bennett, P., & McDougall, J. (Eds) (2016, in press). Popular culture and the austerity myth: Hard times today. New York: Routledge. Berger, R., & McDougall, J. (2013). ‘Reading videogames as (authorless) literature.’ Literacy, 47(3), 142–149. Buckingham, D., & Wallis, R. (2013). ‘Among the citizen-consumer: The invention of “media literacy” within UK communications policy.’ European Journal of Communication, 28(5), 527–540. Burawoy, M. (2003). ‘Revisits: An outline of a theory of reflexive ethnography.’ American Sociological Review, 68(5), 645–679. Dickens, C. (1995). Hard times. London: Penguin Books. (originally published in 1854) Gee, J. (2003). What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Gonick, M. (2007). ‘Girl Number 20 revisited: Feminist literacies in new hard times.’ Gender and Education, 19(4), 433–454. Gutierrez, K. (2008). ‘Developing a sociocritical literacy in the third space.’ Reading Research Quarterly, 43(2), 148–164. Hartley, H., Burgess, J., & Bruns, A. (Eds) (2015). A companion to new media dynamics. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Kendall, A. (2008). ‘Playing and resisting: Rethinking young people’s reading cultures.’ Literacy, 42(3), 123–130. Kendall, A., & McDougall, J. (2009). ‘Just gaming: On being differently literate.’ Eludamos: Journal of Computer Game Culture, 3(2), 245–260. McCrum, R. (16 August 2015). ‘The 100 hundred best novels: from Bunyan’s Pilgrim to Carey’s Kelly.’ The Guardian. Retrieved from http://theguardian.com (Accessed 23 December 2015). McDougall, J. (2007). ‘What do we learn in Smethwick Village?’ Computer games, media learning and discursive confusion.’ Learning, Media, Technology, 32(2), 121–133. McDougall, J., & Potter, J. (2015). ‘Curating media learning.’ Journal of E-Learning and Digital Media, 12(2), 199–211. McDougall, J., & Sanders, R. (2013). ‘Critical (media) literacy and the digital: Towards sharper thinking.’ Journal of Media Literacy, 58(1), 8–19. Pahl, K., & Khan, A. (2015). ‘Artifacts of resilience: Enduring narratives, texts, practices across three generations.’ In J. Sefton-Green & J. Rowsell (Eds), Learning and literacy over time: Longitudinal perspectives (pp. 116–133). London: Routledge. Peim, N. (1993). Critical theory and the English teacher. London: Routledge.

How Does Boy 17 Read a Game?

199

Potter, J., McDougall, J., Parry, P., Bryer, T., & Cannon, M. (2015) ‘Media and Digital Literacies special interest group symposium.’ Paper presented at the United Kingdom Literacy Association Conference, Nottingham, UK. July 2015. Rockstar Games. (2011). LA Noire [Playstation/Xbox videogame]. United States: Take Two Interactive. Sefton-Green, J., & Rowsell, J. (Eds) (2015). Learning and literacy over time: Longitudinal perspectives. London: Routledge. Turnball, S. (1998). ‘Dealing with feeling: Why Girl Number 20 still doesn’t answer.’ In D. Buckingham (Ed.), Teaching popular culture: Beyond radical pedagogy (pp. 88–106). London: University College London Press. Williams, R. (2015). A short counter-revolution: Towards 2000 revisited (ed. J. McGuigan). London: Sage. Williamson, J. (1982). ‘How does Girl No. 20 understand ideology?’ Screen Education, 40, 80–87. Willis, P. (1990). Common culture: Symbolic work at play in the everyday cultures of the young. Buckingham: Open University Press.

: a function that causes a recording (such as a videotape) to go forward at a speed that is faster than normal : a state in which something is quickly developing or progressing

13

Postdigital Literacies: Materiality, Mobility and the Aesthetics of Recruitment Thomas Apperley, Darshana Jayemanne and Bjorn Nansen

Introduction This chapter analyses the role of digital play in children’s learning and literacy by considering how digital play is being reconfigured through emerging gaming situations involving increasingly novel compositions of the digital and material. This analysis extends work examining hybridity in gaming products, such as connected toys that expand digital play experiences into physical objects, by turning attention to the production of play and practices of literacy that emerge through more distributed gaming interfaces involving entanglements of diverse devices, bodies and materials. We situate these arrangements within the concept of the ‘postdigital’, which points to the embedding and embodying of computational technologies throughout everyday life, while also seeking to critically interrogate experiences of disjuncture in the seamless imaginary of the digital. Through a number of examples of games that can be characterized as postdigital, we examine how diverse sets of bodies, sensations, devices and materials are recruited into the situation and experience of play. The chapter argues that new gaming literacies arise through the ‘aesthetics of recruitment’. In particular arguing that postdigital forms of play imply modes of literacy organized less around the interface as a determined object than various practices of interfacing across undeterminate arrangements.

Recruitment and literacy Scholars have long recognized the role that digital play has in learning and literacy (Apperley & Beavis, 2013; Gee, 2003; Steinkuehler, 2006); however, the

204

Literacy, Media, Technology

concept of digital play is undergoing considerable transformations in dialogue with wider cultural and technological change. In this chapter we address games and gaming literacies (Buckingham & Burn, 2007; Zimmerman, 2009) in relation to the concept of the postdigital (Berry & Dieter, 2015; Cramer, 2012). This term refers to the blurring of the digital and non-digital through widely distributed computational technologies and connectivity in our contemporary moment. However, the postdigital is also a critical interrogation of the disjunctures in the hegemony of the digital. In this sense, the concept highlights the complexity of the playful devices we describe, which work towards establishing a smooth segue between digital and non-digital spaces. We argue that in the contexts of gaming and its associated literacies, the postdigital situation can be conceptualized in terms of an aesthetic of recruitment. This aesthetic is characterized by devices that interweave virtual and actual elements in order to recruit new materials, bodies and experiences into emergent arrangements of play. As Burnett and Merchant point out (see Chapter 14), these new arrangements and flexible relationships disrupt common understandings. In this case we aim to make strange how teachers and teaching practitioners understand and approach postdigital playful devices in relation to the ongoing discussion of gaming literacy. Recruitment is a useful conceptual tool for considering how these devices can add to how we understand the literacy practices of students, learners and young people. It also signals how digital play may reconfigure the relationship between teacher, learner and text and recruit learning into wider (playful) contexts. The aesthetics of recruitment can be illustrated by everyday products that use near-field communication (NFC) to facilitate data mobility between games and consoles. Currently this is often done using collectable figurines with digital storage capacities. Notable examples are the Skylanders series (Toys for Bob, 2011), Disney Infinity (Disney Interactive Studios, 2013) and the Nintendo Amiibo. Postdigital forms of play can also be understood to include connected toys, augmented reality apps, computer-augmented board games and specialized input devices, which are adding new material elements and contexts to game play. These games and playful devices are part of the reconfigurations of material and digital elements in computing that are increasingly mobile, ‘pervasive’, ‘locative’, ‘augmented’ and ‘mixed’ (Montola, 2011), and which are often described through the concept of the ‘Internet of Things’ (Van Kranenburg, 2008). They can be characterized as postdigital in terms of playful behaviour that is continuous with, yet also exceeds, the digital through conditions

Postdigital Literacies

205

that are technical, historical, aesthetic and affective (Berry, 2014; Schinkel, 2014). Broadly, then, the postdigital ‘describes the messy state of media, arts and design after their digitisation  …  a media aesthetics which opposes such digital high-tech and high-fidelity cleanness’ (Schinkel, 2014), in which ‘the historical distinction between the digital and the non-digital becomes increasingly blurred … [and] computation is part of the texture of life itself which can be walked around, touched, manipulated and interacted with in a number of ways and means’ (Berry, 2014). The idea that digital games are ‘messy’ (Bogost, 2009) or assemblages of digital and non-digital interaction (Taylor, 2009) indicates the potential fruitfulness of the postdigital concept in thinking about the increasingly distributed arrangements of play, gaming and literacy. Our concern in this chapter is to consider how the postdigital media environment can contribute to a wider understanding of gaming literacy. It is clear that the postdigital acknowledges the pervasive connectedness of playful technologies, as illustrated by contemporary mobile phones and tablets, which combine computing resources and connectivity with a wide array of sensors and inputs. Here we can think of technologies such as cameras, wireless networks, geo-tags and other locative services, near field communication, RFID (Radio-frequency Identification), gyroscopes and other sensors, all of which are relevant to this discussion. These technologies are ones that have been utilized by game designers to shift the interface away from the screen and recruit other technologies and objects within the field of play. These innovations may supplement play, such as the downloading of a new avatar through a QR code in Kinectimals (Apperley & Heber, 2015), to becoming the core of the game mechanics, as in Ingress, which uses data from Google Maps and players’ own phones as an integral part of the game design (Moore, 2015). Even games utilizing conventional PCs or game consoles are increasingly hooked into the wider networked public of social media and video sharing, which expands their possibilities for co-play and communication. From this point of view, each digital game and device is a kind of media ecology (Fuller, 2005) in its own right, and thus literacy practices developed through play require understanding and analysis of the relations between devices, software and objects in this ecology, particularly when the connection between the what and how of objects is undetermined. Research has recognized that digital games are a key site for developing literacies that pave the way for participation in the ‘new’ media environment that

206

Literacy, Media, Technology

is increasingly dominated by interactive and user-generated media (Salen, 2007; Zimmerman, 2009). Often it is the practices of gaming communities that are used to exemplify how digital gaming and literacy are connected (see Apperley & Walsh, 2012). Examples of literacy practices taking place with gaming cultures include various forms of curation, creation and remix: 1. 2. 3.

4.

5. 6.

Creating, curating, sharing and commenting on photos, screen capture and live game play (Apperley, 2015a; Potter, 2012); Creating, curating and commenting on various forms of creative work inspired by digital games on online forums (Schott & Burn, 2007); Creating and contributing to collectively produced guides, walkthroughs and after-action reports that might take the form of text, images, or video on online forums (Ashton & Newman, 2010; Newman, 2008); Making, curating and commenting on short films called machinima that are made using game engines and other film-making software (Kringiel, 2011); Redesigning, curating and commenting on digital gaming by using ingame design tools (Sotaama, 2010); Designing new levels and other elements of digital games, using a software development kit (Peppler & Kafai, 2007; Zimmerman, 2009).

The literacy practices deployed and developed during play are also palpable (see: Gee, 2003), and typically involve taking on an experimental mind-set that accepts risk and failure as part of the process of discovery and achievement. Zimmerman, for example, argues that the ‘ludic attitude’ used in play is a ‘paradigm of innovation’ that ‘embrace[s] transformation and change’ (Zimmerman 2009, p. 27). In terms of delineating how the notion of ‘postdigital gaming literacies’ can add to existing discussions of gaming literacy, it underscores the importance of play for engaging with novel and emergent postdigital environments. One of the first things we tend to do with a new device is ‘just have a play’. It is through play that objects inculcate habits in human users and thereby become the ‘social’ nodes for the development of new literacies that can help in navigating the messiness of the postdigital environment (Apperley & Heber, 2015; Nansen, Vetere, Robertson, Brereton, & Durick, 2013; Nansen et al., 2014). In what follows we begin by locating the concept of recruitment within game studies scholarship, before considering how it plays out in different examples of postdigital games. We then move into an analysis of postdigital literacy through concepts of interfacing that produce embodied sensations and spatialities.

Postdigital Literacies

207

The aesthetic of recruitment Elsewhere (Jayemanne, Nansen, & Apperley, 2015) we have characterized the ludic devices and arrangements of the postdigital play situation in terms of an ‘aesthetics of recruitment’. The concept of ‘recruitment’ in our formulation refers to the somewhat ambiguous nature of the interactions that we are describing. Unlike the triumphalist marketing rhetoric that surrounds many hybrid gaming products, the idea of recruitment emphasizes the contingent and asymmetrical relations of postdigital play in which multiple elements can or should be enrolled. Aesthetically, recruitment designates game designs that make an appeal to the experience of play. But this appeal may be responded to in many different ways, according to the individual’s capacity to respond. Theoretically, the concept of recruitment also helps to emphasize the unpredictability of the arrangements of bodies and spaces associated with postdigital play. Each recruitment generates a new interfacial configuration and hence shifting possibilities or imperatives for literacies. This analysis is informed by materialist approaches within critical interface studies and serves to complicate the notion of ‘hybrid playful products’ (Tyni, Kultima, & Mäyrä, 2013). For Farman (2012) and other critics (Ash, 2015; Cramer & Fuller, 2008; Drucker, 2011; Galloway, 2012), interfaces are not stable demarcations between two symmetrically arranged types of space – the ‘real’ space of players’ bodies and hardware as opposed to the ‘virtual’ space simulated on the screen. Instead, interfaces arise and decompose in a more dynamic fashion as different bodies, sensations, devices and objects come into, and fall out of relations. Postdigital gaming literacies arise from this interface fluidity, and in turn consider play as critical to the experience and understanding of novel postdigital situations. The concept of recruitment in one sense reflects the appeal of play as an inherently attractive activity, particularly in terms of the varied life histories and material powers it can bring together. Innovative scholarship on branding was the first to consider digital gaming within the paradigm of recruitment. In Lash and Lury’s research on the FIFA brand, they argue that the FIFA digital games were a form of recruiting consumers to the brand (2007, pp. 54–55). Brands in the global media environment develop their ‘networks through media outreach, translation and transposition, through the recruitment of other objects’ (Lash & Lury, 2007, p. 55). Postdigital play is situated in such networks, yet makes the material processes of recruitment the subject of play, thus emphasizing the development of skills required for discerning what and how to recruit different

208

Literacy, Media, Technology

elements into an assemblage of play. Such skills are crucial because inherent in the notion of recruitment is the possibility of failure and botched attempts to gather bodies, devices and objects together in a given situation: the ‘recruitment drive’ only occurs when there is a deficit of membership that needs to be shored up. Recruitment can also have a coercive aspect, evoking concepts of the military draft. As game studies and human computer interaction research have shown, games and play can exercise powerful attractions, drawing people into new social experiments, spatial and temporal typologies, bodily practices and technical arrangements (Nansen, Vetere, Robertson, Brereton, & Durick, 2013; Nansen et al., 2014). Such research has also noted that these situations are often precarious (Apperley, 2015b). Examples include situations in which people are reluctant or unwilling to play; public spaces are unsuitable for or discouraging of unusual gestures; social, safety and behavioural codes are limiting; or, technical mishaps, failures or incompatibilities occur. These expanded conceptions, materialities and instabilities of the gaming interface are more capable of accounting for the literacies of postdigital play, because they do not pre-judge the types of bodies, devices, objects and spaces that will be organized around an interface but rather orient us to the processes by which such constellations are formed. This is particularly relevant to postdigital play, which is often represented as being capable of recruiting players into dynamic situations, which we explore through a number of examples below.

Postdigital play practices Osmo is a crowdfunded augmented reality product. It requires an iPad, a stand, a mounted mirror for the camera to observe the gamespace, an app for download and physical game pieces such as numbers, letters and the classic tangram puzzle. The app, advertised as ‘play beyond the screen’, extends the interface of the iPad by projecting it onto a surface, making the surface interactive through the use of visual software that recognizes objects allowing the iPad to react to activities undertaken on the physical surface. In this sense it exemplifies a postdigital playful device, which requires the recruitment of other objects to produce a fluid interface. Osmo play was observed as part of an ongoing research project exploring young children’s mobile and interactive media use in domestic settings. The research involved ethnographic techniques including household technology tours and interviews, as well as participant observation and demonstrations of young children’s media interaction. Two siblings (a girl aged three and boy aged

Postdigital Literacies

209

five) were observed playing with Osmo, which was set up on the living room floor. During this play the younger child attempted to follow the spelling app’s instructions to place a letter tile on the physical play surface, but it was unable to read the letter she was placing, presumably due to poor placement within the field of the reflector’s vision. After a number of unsuccessful attempts, she leant over and tried touching the letter on the screen. The older brother, who was sitting within reach, interjected into her play by pushing a number of additional letter tiles onto the physical play surface, causing the app to flash and issue visual instructions. It was unclear whether this act was intended to assist or disrupt his sister’s play, though failing to get feedback from her engagement she stood up and walked away. The brother promptly slid across the floor into the spot she had occupied in front of the screen and cleared the letter tiles from the play surface in order to begin a fresh game. The intensive potentials for postdigital play with Osmo and the practices assembled around it suggest that the aesthetic of recruitment involves an enrolment of players as well as many different material and digital elements that may be distributed through the postdigital play space. Children and many varied objects come together, and – as illustrated above -sometimes fail to coordinate, in their exploration of the Osmo’s different processes of interfacial assemblage. Cameras and other types of sensors, when combined with appropriate apps, diversify the number and types of bodies that can be recruited and hybridized through an expanded range of sensations and their inscription in a given play situation. In turn, the apparent ‘contagiousness’ or fascination of playful behaviour encouraged by these devices informs the need for negotiation between the different bodies, devices and objects recruited. Play, as exploration and experimentation, becomes the mode through which the process of recruitment is both mediated and understood, thus making it a core element to the literacy of postdigital devices. In contrast to the more familiar and standardized objects of Osmo play, the hardware package, MaKey MaKey, is a tool for turning everyday objects into input devices for computers. Clips can be used to attach electric sensors to a wide variety of objects – from bananas to a stairway – in order to incorporate them as ‘videogame controllers’ for things such as Super Mario Brothers. This then enables the objects to work as keys for inputting commands into a computer, opening up the possibilities for all sorts of objects to become recruited as new interfaces within a vastly expanded repertoire of hybrid play. The grammars and literacies established by MaKey MaKey tend to be far messier than those of Osmo, reflecting the wider gamut of objects and player behaviours which it can draw

210

Literacy, Media, Technology

into a hybrid system. The digital elements are, however, less diverse: generally, the technology has been used to control existing games such as PacMan, but the physical and tactile experience of play is considerably transformed by the introduction of highly unorthodox materials into the interface. This opens up radical new possibilities for interface processes to arise between simulated bodies on the screen and material bodies in the world. The aesthetic of recruitment expands the possibilities for new proprioceptive relations to game-space by forcing players to re-balance, re-configure and re-consider their habitual use of a versatile interface effect. Irrespective of how ‘gimmicky’ this destabilization of the interface is, it remains important for scholars of literacy because it marks a de-coupling of digital literacies from a particular interface and highlights the need for a more operational understanding of literacy in the postdigital environment. This understanding must account for the dynamic integration of information from multiple devices and senses (audio, haptic, proprioceptive, visual), which can conceptualize the role of play in connecting and sorting this information. Examining postdigital literacies in terms of the aesthetics of recruitment thus involves focusing less on predetermined gaming interfaces associated with desktop computers and gaming consoles, and instead considering the processes and practices of interfacing that negotiate multiple and hybrid bodies, devices and objects. If, as Taylor (2009) argues, we can speak of the ‘assemblage of play’, we argue that in postdigital play (and thus also literacy) the term ‘assemblage’ should be understood as verb as well as a noun, as play and the construction of the interface itself is a process of assemblage. Osmo and MaKey MaKey represent two different styles or ‘literacies’ of hybrid recruitment. Osmo draws players inwards to a relatively bounded space to play with a set of pre-made physical objects that serve specifically designed digital games. MaKey MaKey pushes a pre-existing virtual game world outwards to hybridize with the environment and objects in new ways. Such ambitions for recruitment are taken even further in games such as Hybrid Play, which wirelessly connects mobile game to a rubber grip with inbuilt sensors that are designed to be attached to numerous pieces of playground equipment in order to incorporate their movement into the screen based game. MaKey MaKey offers larger potential for asymmetrical recruitment because of the sheer amount of objects that are available for recruitment. These styles can, in turn, be contrasted with the hybridity offered by a postdigital toy like Sphero. This is a ‘connected toy’ consisting of a mechanized ball that can be rolled around by a phone app. The device can be manipulated in the hand in order to control and operate game apps designed for the iPhone. The

Postdigital Literacies

211

design is thus more directed and limited in the ways it can recruit objects, unlike the open recruitment provided by the interface of MaKey MaKey. However, by offering the possibility of manipulating both physical and digital space, Sphero suggests a more reciprocal mode of digital-physical recruitment. In each of these cases, we see the assembly of asymmetric sets of bodies, sensations, devices and materials. We argue that such arrangements imply a mode of literacy organized less around the interface as object than the various literacy practices of interfacing, which we explore in the next section by drawing on critical interface studies that conceptualize the role of interfacing in the production of bodies, objects and spaces.

Interfacing bodies, objects and spaces In 1994 Weiser, one of the pioneers of ubiquitous computing (‘ubicomp’), wrote an influential piece called ‘The world is not a desktop’. While Weiser overtly makes the case for ‘invisible’ interfaces and computing, what is of more interest in this context is the way he goes about doing so: that is, by expanding the set of metaphors that we use when we think of how interfaces operate. In particular, Weiser criticizes the tendency to imagine interfaces as replicating contemporary conscious forms and modalities of behaviour. Thus where the multimedia of the time sought to emulate the experience of legacy media such as TV, virtual reality sought to emulate unmediated experience, and intelligent agents sought to replicate human agents, Weiser suggests a certain, almost dialectical, relation between visible and invisible technology (and hence, interfaces between technologies and bodies): Invisible technology needs a metaphor that reminds us of the value of invisibility, but does not make it visible. I propose childhood: playful, a building of foundations, constant learning, a bit mysterious and quickly forgotten by adults. (Weiser, 1994, p.8)

Weiser’s nomination of childhood learning as a metaphor for interfaces suggests that as well as being a key thinker of ubiquitous computing he is also a forerunner for thinking about ubiquitous digital play – or, at least, that play and computing were profoundly connected. His description of ubiquitous computing resembles Caillois’ (2001) notion of the freeform paidea more than the rule-bound ludus; digital play expands throughout the street, the home, the park, the workplace and beyond. Importantly, Weiser’s metaphor addresses the processes of constant

212

Literacy, Media, Technology

learning and forgetting. The potential of diverse and pervasive playful computing shifts the critical goal from analysing this or that bounded play situation, towards tracing and navigating the emergence of what Fuller calls ‘seaminess’ (2005), the moments of intersection that take shape across asymmetrical powers of bodies, devices and objects for sensing, feeling and doing, which are hybridized in postdigital situations. The postdigital calls for a conception of play and literacy that is capable of engaging bodies and flows that we cannot necessarily predict without arbitrarily reducing either the asymmetry or the contingency of the play situation. The very mobility of many of these devices means that it is not possible to definitively prejudge their context of use. The boundary of the play space must be left an open question. Adding to work by game studies scholars such as Mäyrä, Tyni and Montola, as well as the tradition of human–computer interaction scholars who have focused on embodiment since Winograd and Flores (1986) and Dourish (2001), here we propose to draw on Farman’s ‘mobile interface theory’ (2012). This was developed to trace the locative and pervasive effects that arise in the use of devices such as mobile phones, and highlight the question of navigation and the orientation of embodied experience. Farman combines two major streams of thought – phenomenology and poststructuralism, with key references in Merleau-Ponty (1958) and Derrida (1998), respectively, in order to produce a theory of the ‘sensory-inscribed body’. In this context we will place the emphasis on the phenomenological aspects of the theory. Phenomenology facilitates a focus on the integral relation between space, practice and body: ‘embodiment is always a spatial practice… bodies always take up space and, as Lefebvre argued, are spatial in and of themselves’ (Farman 2012, p. 19). A particularly important nuance of this claim is that ‘embodiment does not always need to be located in physical space. As people connect across networks on a global level, what many are experiencing as they practice the space of the network is embodiment  …  we create our bodies across digital media’ (2012, p. 22). The creation of a body across digital media involves the adoption of determinate spatial practices in which the interface fades in and out of visibility. Farman describes how during a mobile phone call: the interface of the phone typically recedes and you are moved into the space of conversation. If, however, there becomes an extended period of silence, the sense perceptions immediately pull focus from the other person to the device … You will move the phone away from your ear to look at the screen, determining if you are still connected, if your reception is strong, or if your battery has died. (Farman, 2012, p. 28)

Postdigital Literacies

213

The shift between the co-location of interlocutors to the surface of the phone screen constitutes two kinds of embodied spatiality: two distinct ‘interface effects’ (Galloway, 2012). Farman also gives a more complicated example, which will be familiar to many scholars, of a student’s phone ringing during a lecture. The usual flow of the lecture space is disrupted by the ringing, producing the confused behaviour of the individual student, as well as the lecturer and the rest of the class, thus showing different processes of embodied spatiality, brought into focus at their moment of failure. Situations such as these indicate a need to reconsider the seemingly simple distinction between the virtual and the real. Farman (2012) suggests that as the ‘virtual’ interface and digital content do perfectly real things, the pairing ‘virtual/ actual’ is more helpful. He traces the concept of the virtual back to the term ‘virtue’, as it was used until the late 1400s, in the sense of the ‘virtues’ or powers and abilities of a given thing. However, it is not always the case that all the virtues of an object are actualized at once (as in the case of the mobile phone in the lecture theatre, where multiple possibilities for behaviour are urgently possible at the one embarrassing moment). Where the virtual/real opposition is a symmetrical relation in which the virtual ‘mirrors’ the real, the virtual/actual opposition is ‘asymmetrical’ both because the set of virtual possibilities tend to exceed any actual result, and because every process of actualization is different. Postdigital play, involving such instances of asymmetry, suggests a demand for a sensibility of risk-taking and experimenting. In turn, postdigital literacy suggests learning unfolds through playing with the repertoire of possible configurations of bodies, devices and objects recruited to produce an interface, in relation to the actualized connection, and in relation to affective and aesthetic outcomes of those potential connections. This virtual/actual pairing informs another crucial notion that Farman derives from phenomenology: the importance of the unconscious aspects of our embodied experience. This once again speaks to the processes by which interfaces come into and recede from ‘visibility’ (although it might better be termed ‘perceptibility’ because this refers to all the senses and not just sight). While those things that we are aware of and perceive are vital to our sense of being-in-the-world, our senses also work to block out much of the sensory input that we are bombarded with. Thus, embodiment depends on the cognitive unconscious… Imagine that while you were having a conversation with someone, that every other conversation in the room and every sound in the room became equally important … We function as embodied beings because we do not notice everything or sense everything. (Farman, 2012, p. 27)

The senses are not simply receptive, but actively screen and sort phenomena in the process of generating our self-image as spatially embodied beings.

214

Literacy, Media, Technology

Phenomenology terms this process ‘proprioception’ (Shinkle, 2008). At the same time, this sense of ourselves is inscribed by ‘cultural inscriptions of masculinity or femininity, the signifiers of our cultures, or sexualities, our religions, among other aspects of our embodied identity that we read in others and encode on our bodies for others to read’ (Farman, 2012, p. 32). Thus the act of assemblage of the hybrid interface, sorting through the connections that can be made between bodies, devices and objects in postdigital play, conveys information about the identity of the body at the interface that can be ‘read’ by others. Configuring the postdigital interface thus implies a mode of literacy beyond the moment and process in which play is produced to account for the meanings it performs. For example, postdigital literacy involves a form of identity play similar to what Potter describes as ‘curation’ of the ‘project of the self ’ (2012, p. 176). The configurations produced through processes of postdigital play signal a particular juncture of identity, but one which always has the potential to be other. The interface approach thus helps us to analyse the literacies of postdigital play – in each case, we can pose questions about how spatial forms (locative, pervasive, bounded) are produced in relation to what types of sensory-inscribed bodies. This allows us to place the ‘panoply of devices’ foreseen by Weiser into relation with players’ sensuous and cultural capabilities. Postdigital games (keeping in mind that videogames are, at least to a degree, natively postdigital) enjoin us to take account of how multiple embodied performances, experiences and spatialities are produced by the ensemble of devices and materials at work in a given gaming situation. In turn, postdigital literacy can be conceptualized as playfully produced through practices of experimentation with the operations and feel of recruitment involving multiple synchronizations and de-synchronizations in assemblages of play.

Conclusion The postdigital connects with a range of discourses around ambient and ubiquitous computing that suggest digital information sensing, processing and networking will change rapidly in the coming years. We expect it will spread into the physical world and operate at multiple scales: from the body, to the building, to the street. Yet, the postdigital offers an alternative concept for this blurring of digital and non-digital materials, drawing on more critical humanities traditions to interrogate this historical moment and its implications. In this chapter, we have explored the entanglements of senses, materials and devices in the production of

Postdigital Literacies

215

postdigital play, and considered what these reconfigurations may mean for the play literacies of children. Just as there are increasingly urgent questions about the kinds of programming literacy required by children to practically or critically engage with the operation of computation in everyday life, the postdigital is redistributing relations of play, with implications for children’s gaming literacies. Citing some examples of postdigital games, and drawing on materialist approaches within critical interface studies, we have suggested that new gaming literacies arise through an ‘aesthetics of recruitment’. This indicates literacy is organized less around the interface as a determined object and more around practices of interfacing that involve increasingly undetermined and diverse sets of bodies, sensations, devices and materials. For teachers and teaching practitioners this signals a shift in focus from the certainty of typical digital gaming platforms, such as desktop computers and gaming consoles. Rather, it suggests that teaching and teaching practitioners also consider the processes and practices of establishing interfaces that negotiate multiple bodies, devices and objects. Furthermore, this emphasis on the process of configuration indicates that literacy may also be usefully understood beyond the context of play, as part of an ongoing process of curatorial identity play.

Acknowledgements This research was supported with funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DE130100735) and Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project (DP140101503).

References Apperley, T. (2015a). ‘Glitch sorting: Minecraft, curation and the post-digital.’ In D. Berry and M. Dieter (Eds), Postdigital aesthetics: Art, computation and design (pp. 232–244). Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Apperley, T. (2015b). ‘Venezuela.’ In M. J. P. Wolf (Ed.), Videogames around the world (pp. 613–627). Cambridge: MIT Press. Apperley, T., & Beavis, C. (2013). ‘A model for critical games literacy.’ e-Learning & Digital Media, 10(1), 1–12. Apperley, T., & Heber, N. (2015). ‘Capitalizing on emotions: Virtual pets and the natural user interface.’ In J. Enevold & E. McCallum-Stewart (Eds), Playing with affections: The game love reader (pp. 149–162). Jefferson: MacFarland.

216

Literacy, Media, Technology

Apperley, T., & Walsh, C. (2012). ‘What digital games and literacy have in common: A heuristic for understanding pupils’ gaming literacy.’ Literacy 46(3), 115–122. Ash, J. (2015). The interface envelope: Gaming, technology, power. Bloomsbury : London. Ashton, D., & Newman, J. (2010). ‘Relations of control: Walkthroughs and the structuring of player agency.’ The Fibreculture Journal, 16. Retrieved from http:// sixteen.fibreculturejournal.org/ (Accessed 23 December 2015). Berry, D. (6 June 2014). The post-digital ornament [Web log post]. Retrieved from http:// stunlaw.blogspot.com.au/2014/06/the-post-digital-ornament.html (Accessed 23 December 2015). Berry, D., & Dieter, M. (2015). Postdigital aesthetics: Art, computation and design. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Bogost, I. (2009). Videogames are a mess. Retrieved from http://www.bogost.com/ writing/videogames_are_a_mess.shtml (Accessed 23 December 2015). Buckingham, D., & Burn, A. (2007). ‘Game literacy in theory and practice.’ Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, 16(3), 323–349. Caillois, R. (2001). Man, play, and games. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Cramer, F. (2012). ‘Post-Digital Writing.’ The Electronic Book Review. Retrieved from http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/postal (Accessed 23 December 2015). Cramer, F., & Fuller, M. (2008). ‘Interface.’ In M. Fuller (Ed.), Software studies: A Lexicon (pp. 149–152). Cambridge: MIT Press. Derrida, J. (1998). Of grammatology (G. Spivak, Trans.) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Disney Interactive Studios. (2013). Disney Infinity [Playstation/ Xbox/Wii/desktop videogame] United States: Disney Interactive Studios. Dourish, P. (2001). Where the action is: The foundations of embodied interaction. Cambridge: MIT Press. Drucker, J. (2011). ‘Humanities approaches to interface theory.’ Culture Machine, 12, 1–20. Farman, J. (2012). Mobile interface theory: Embodied space and locative media. London: Routledge. Fuller, M. (2005). Media ecologies: Materialist energies in art and technoculture. Cambridge: MIT Press. Galloway, A. (2012). The interface effect. Cambridge: Polity. Gee, J. P. (2003). What videogames have to teach us about learning and literacy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Jayemanne, D., Nansen, B., & Apperley, T. (2015). ‘Postdigital play and the aesthetics of recruitment.’ Proceedings of DiGRA 2015. Retrieved from http://www.digra.org/ digital-library/ (Accessed 23 December 2015). Kringiel, D. (2011). ‘Machinima and modding: Pedagogic means for enhancing computer game literacy.’ In H. Lowood & M. Nitsche (Eds), The Machinima reader (pp. 257–273). Cambridge: MIT Press.

Postdigital Literacies

217

Lash, S., & Lury, C. (2007). Global culture industry. Cambridge: Polity. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1958). The phenomenology of perception (C. Smith, Trans.). New York: Routledge. Moore, K. (2015). ‘Painting the town blue and green: Curating street art through urban mobile gaming.’ M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 18(4). Retrieved from http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/1010 (Accessed 23 December 2015). Montola, M. (2011). ‘A ludological view on the pervasive mixed-reality game research paradigm.’ Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 15(1), 3–12. Nansen, B., Vetere, F., Robertson, T., Brereton, M., & Durick, J. (2013). ‘Habituated interactions and social objects.’ In Proceedings of the workshop ‘Habits in HCI’ at BCS HCI 2013. London, UK: Brunel University. Nansen, B, Vetere, F, Downs, J, Robertson, T, Brereton., M, & Durick, J. (2014). ‘Reciprocal habituation: A study of older people and the kinect.’ Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (ToCHI), 21(3), 1–20. Newman, J. (2008). Playing with videogames. London: Routledge. Peppler, K., & Kafai, Y. B. (2007). ‘What video game making can teach us about learning and literacy: Alternative pathways into participatory culture.’ In A. Baba (Ed.), Situated play: Proceedings of the Third International Conference of the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) (pp. 369–376). Tokyo, Japan: The University of Tokyo. Potter, J. (2012). Digital media and learner identity: The new curatorship. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Salen, K. (2007). ‘Gaming literacies: A game design study in action.’ Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, 16(3), 301–332. Schinkel, W. (9 July 2014). ‘What is “Post-digital”?’ [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://rsearch.tumblr.com/ (Accessed 23 December 2015) Schott, G., & Burn, A. (2007). ‘Fan-art as a function of agency in Oddworld fan-culture.’ In A. Clarke & G. Mitchell (Eds), Videogames and art (pp. 238–254). Bristol: Intellect. Shinkle, E. (2008). ‘Video games, emotion and the six senses.’ Media, Culture & Society, 30(6), 907–915. Sotaama, O. (2010). ‘Play, create, share? Console gaming, player production and agency.’ The Fibreculture Journal, 16. Retrieved from http://sixteen.fibreculturejournal.org/ (Accessed 23 December 2015). Steinkuehler, C. (2006). ‘The mangle of play.’ Games and Culture, 1(3), 199–213. Taylor, T. L. (2009). ‘The assemblage of play.’ Games and Culture, 4(4), 331–339. Toys for Bob. (2011). Skylanders [Playstation/Xbox/Wii/desktop videogame]. United States: Activision. Tyni, H., Kultima, A., & Mäyrä, F. (2013). ‘Dimensions of hybrid in playful products.’ In L. Arthur et al. (Eds), Proceedings of academic mind trek ’13 (pp. 237–244). New York: ACM Press. Van Kranenburg, R. (2008). The internet of things: A critique of ambient technology and the all-seeing network of RFID. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures.

218

Literacy, Media, Technology

Weiser, M. (1994). ‘The world is not a desktop.’ Interactions, 1(1), 7–8. Winograd, T., & Flores, F. (1986). Understanding computers and cognition: A new foundation for design. Norwood: Addison-Wesley Professional. Zimmerman, E. (2009). ‘Gaming literacy: Game design as a model for literacy in the twenty-first century.’ In B. Perron & M. J. P. Wolf (Eds), The video game theory reader (pp. 23–32). New York: Routledge.

14

Assembling Virtual Play in the Classroom Cathy Burnett and Guy Merchant

Introduction In an era dominated by the rapid advance of mobile technologies, the internet of things, augmented reality apps and so on, it is perhaps surprising to find a triumphant refrain in the literature on virtual worlds and videogames in education. This literature proclaims a new era of possibility – according to the popular expression ‘the future has arrived’, and with it something new, something different. This refrain plays along with discourses about the transformative potential of new technology and the more or less radical break with ‘old literacies’ in the classroom. But of course the future can never really arrive in the present, and despite the hype, the transformative effect of educational technology has yet to be realized – at least not in the domain of compulsory schooling. Screen-based environments – the ones that look a bit like ‘worlds’ – have been around for a while, and if we are to believe the large-scale surveys, they feature significantly in the everyday play of children and young people (see Merchant, 2015). The notion of virtual play – a term that for us captures the on/off-line nexus of activity that swirls around virtual worlds and videogames – helps to normalize what children and young people get up to, as this relatively new form of entertainment takes its place in imaginative play, fantasy play, role play, sociodramatic play and all the other kinds of freestyle activity so keenly enjoyed by those growing up, as well as those who have already grown up. And it is this idea of virtual play, and how it assembles, that we focus on and explore in this chapter. As virtual worlds come of age, they have become more ordinary. The futuristic shine evoked by talk of ‘avatars’ that ‘teleport’ to locations in ‘virtual cities’ may have lost its lustre over time, but for those who worry about such things, how children make sense through virtual play still holds an attraction, and remains

220

Literacy, Media, Technology

an important area for investigation. And in that hall of mirrors called social science, this in turn raises questions about how we make sense of children and what they do, and how that sense-making emerges in the spaces that are produced – in the locations, friendships, software programmes, laptops and the more general social arrangements – including our presence, observations and interactions that give shape to such things. A short history of research into virtual worlds in classrooms might then show how screen-based worlds have slowly become commonplace. They are discussed and investigated regularly, they are the topic of various scholarly books and they have become an established feature of many conference programmes. They are investigated by those with an interest in software, game design and development, in learning technologies, in multimodality and in bridging the home–school divide – and they attract the attention of mainstream media, as well. Located in the field of literacy studies, our recent work has explored the complexities of action and interaction between children, adults and machines, between ideas, discourses and imagination – and all those things that are involved in assembling instances of virtual play in the classroom. Not only does this work re-animate virtual play, but for us at least, it evokes the sort of enchantment that Bennett (2001) refers to, by providing more generous accounts of what children say and do, what classrooms might be and what possibilities educational spaces open up – in short, their potentiality. Enchantment might be conceived of as a mixed bodily state of joy and disturbance, a transitory sensuous condition dense and intense enough to stop you in your tracks and toss you onto new terrain and to move you from the actual world to its virtual possibilities. (Bennett, 2001, p. 111)

In what follows we illustrate our thinking with examples of virtual play in the classroom that provoke this sort of disturbance. Here the ‘virtuality’ popularly associated with being online, with avatars acting and interacting in screen-based worlds, is entangled with the actual world of bodies and machines in classrooms. And in examining our enchantment with these entanglements we evoke another kind of of virtuality – a virtuality that offers up possibilities for seeing things differently. Interestingly, in doing this, the technology itself shifts in and out of view becoming one part among many, as virtual play assembles and re-assembles in the classroom. This is partly because a virtual world itself means different things to different people at different times, and the shifting topography of virtual play can, we believe, prompt new ways of thinking about children, teachers and

Assembling Virtual Play in the Classroom

221

classrooms. If virtual worlds are interesting in themselves, then it is important to make sense of how children make sense of them. Finding new ways of conceptualizing this sense-making is particularly pressing for us in a climate in which educators are obliged to see students as ‘cohorts’ that perform well, or less-well in comparison to others.

The town that vanished In the summer of 2005 work began on the construction of a new town which was to be located in the rolling hills of northern England. It was a landscape steeped in history, and the town itself a mix of brick and stone buildings. Cafes and shops faced onto a small square just around the corner from an imposing three-storey town hall. Behind its ornamental gardens a wooden latch gate opened out onto a sunny park with a children’s playground, a bandstand and a small boating lake. The whole place was built on a simple grid. One that allowed for roads, narrow thoroughfares between buildings and the steep contours of the surrounding countryside. Photographs were pasted onto the fronts of the buildings to make them look like real shops, walls were given texture, and the rolling hills were coloured green and sometimes planted with woodland. For the children who visited Barnsborough, playing there was a bit like playing the videogames that were on the market at the time, except there were no guns, no challenges and no missions to fulfil. But that didn’t seem to matter. It certainly didn’t stop children from seeing weapons in the shadows cast by trees, or teachers from playing games of hide and seek with them, and children soon discovered the keyboard shortcuts that made their avatars run and fly. Whatever rules were hastily invented were just as quickly broken. And children’s play spilled out across the world and into the classroom where they played it, and their interactions – their friendships, their taunts and jokes, moved, without obstacle, back into the world from the classroom. And so the very boundaries we adults imagined, the boundaries between the actual and the virtual, between work and play, between on- and off-screen were, in the fullness of time, dissolved. Barnsborough eventually changed hands, and with a small grant we were able to pay for server space to host the world ourselves. Prior to this its ownership had been rather vague, based on an informal agreement between an education authority and a private company. But this all changed as we, for the first time, became proud owners of the world. As it turned out, ownership was not without its problems. With no specific technical expertise it was challenging to provide

222

Literacy, Media, Technology

schools with access – and when we could, they had firewall issues, safety protocols and hardware that was simply not compatible. So finally getting new schools involved seemed like a minor miracle, and even then, in-world links were dead and some functionality was intermittent. There were warning signs. Not all visitors were able to use an avatar, and eventually all were reduced to small black triangles to mark their place in the world. And then in July 2013, the world ended. Not with a bang but with a whimper. There was simply no money to pay the hosting fee, no resource for support, maintenance or development. Barnsborough was no more.

On assembling In a way the foregoing account is a partial truth. Partial because it smooths over the gaps and disconnects between how the virtual play was taken up by different children, teachers and research teams. The virtual world in question was in some ways more like a project, or a series of projects. It was among other things a stimulus for classroom activity, a disruption to orderly school life, a source of frustration, a thing to spend money on and a context for virtual play. It has now also achieved a sort of afterlife in what has subsequently been written and said about it. And in common with other things that intervene in classroom life it has a shape-shifting quality you could describe as ‘multistability’ (Ihde, 1993). It is this multistability that interests us as we use the work of Law, and Bennett, to offer an account of how virtual play assembles itself and how that changes how we see classrooms, in short how we fall into enchantment. Thanks to the work of post-foundational thinkers (such as Barad, 2007; Bennett, 2001, 2010; Braidotti, 2013; Law, 2004; Latour, 2005) the Deleuzian concept of assemblage has achieved considerable popularity in the contemporary social sciences. At times a certain intellectual lassitude overcomes us as we staple together a few seemingly unrelated nouns and call them an assemblage in our clumsy attempts to describe complex phenomena. But if it seems that this is what Bennett (2010) does in the book Vibrant Matter when she encounters the glove, pollen rat, cap, and stick assemblage in Baltimore, we are mistaken. She uses this as a device to develop a more nuanced account that includes observations on affect, materiality and perception. Still, the assemblage concept is slippery. For most of us it comes through Massumi’s translation of the French word agencement which Deleuze and Guattari (1987) use to capture the different dimensions of multiplicity (p. 9), the convergence and divergence of semiotic,

Assembling Virtual Play in the Classroom

223

material and social flows (p. 25), and the complex influences that determine the use of tools (p. 439). In thinking with this Deleuzian concept we have found it productive to acknowledge the fluidity that is evoked by subsequent work in post-humanism and new materialism, preferring instead the verb assembling which seems to us to capture the ongoing and ever re-constituting dimension of phenomena, of everyday life, and of the lives in classrooms that interest us. And consequently when machines (computers, laptops or iPads) that display virtual worlds (imaginative, semiotic environments) arrive in classrooms (rooms populated by young and not-so-young humans and things), they enter into the social space of children-and-teachers-at-school and we can witness, and participate in the assembling and re-assembling of specific episodes or instances of virtual play. And indeed it is this assembling and re-assembling of virtual play that provokes our enchantment. With this in mind, we offer an account of virtual play, based on fieldnotes from one particular encounter with Barnsborough. On this occasion twelve 9to 10-year-olds (ten boys and two girls) had opted to explore Barnsborough, while other children were attending the school talent show. They were spread out around the classroom, each with a laptop and iPad. They were given no instructions but simply invited to log-on and explore Barnsborough and use the iPads to make a record of their discoveries if they so wished. Their teacher told them they might meet an avatar there – ‘Guy Merchant’ – and that ‘Guy Merchant’, who was known to the teacher, was safe to approach. The example below is an impressionistic account of these first explorations crafted from Cathy’s fieldnotes. In the discussion that follows, we draw on these to examine how enchantment manifests in this virtual play, to illuminate its role in our research, and its potential for provoking pedagogical change.

Visiting and revisiting virtual play I watch Josh who is sitting in the middle of the classroom on his own. He logs on, ‘I’m on’. When Barnsborough appears there’s a sound which brings two other children over to see what’s happened. They rush back to their own screens and, having logged on themselves, start to explore. They give running commentaries on their discoveries and encounters, ‘I think I can see a police car’, ‘I just walked through a wall.’ Sometimes these comments manifest as song and dance, ‘I’m in the kitchen dum de dum, I’m in the kitchen dum-de-dum’, ‘we’re on the

224

Literacy, Media, Technology

roof  …  we’re on the roof having a party- everybody dance now’ or chants, ‘I found the tardis, I found the tardis, I found the TARDIS’ while jumping up and down. All the children seem to rush through the world at similar breakneck speed, just slow enough to explore every nook and cranny and mark the boundaries of everywhere they go. There is a relentless rhythm to this, broken only when they slow to look at something, a poster of a lost dog, some boxes marked ‘poison’. Josh reaches the outer walls – grey stone walls rising up from an empty green hillside. No-one else is there and he calls me over to show me what he’s found. Mikey keeps moving round with his laptop to sit on different chairs. One time I ask him why and he explains that the person he was sitting by kept jumping on his head (on screen); when he moved away physically, this online attack ceased. Meanwhile Sam finds the ringing telephone in the phone box and tries to listen to the message. There is so much noise in the classroom that he has to go into a corner of the room and hold the cumbersome laptop up at an angle so his ear is close to the speaker.

So what is enchanting about an episode like this one? Firstly, we are enchanted. We are enchanted by how the children engage with Barnsborough, how they are compelled to keep searching, delighted and amused by what they find, and what becomes possible – galvanized by what their classmates are doing. Secondly, we sense the ways in which they are enchanted, enchanted in virtual play that seems to assemble in different ways, in on- and off-screen actions and interactions, spurring, interrupting and blending with one another. They play in the world as they run through it, with it in light-hearted avatar exchanges, and around it, as they interact with each other and the laptops they use. This fluid movement reminds us of the ways in which mobile communication is so often intertwined with the business of everyday life. The complex nature of this intertwining is carefully captured by Davies in her study of a group of young hairdressers that focuses on the role that social media plays in their lives. Davies (2014) describes how [t]he very materiality of the young women’s lives was drawn into and reflected within digital spaces, so that they often regarded themselves on a moment by moment basis, within the ever-evolving ‘glass cabinet’ of the online world, being at once within and ‘looking out’, but also materially rooted without while ‘looking in’. (Davies, 2014, p. 73)

We see something of these (im)material interruptions and convergences in these children’s virtual play. The children seem to both look at the world, manipulating

Assembling Virtual Play in the Classroom

225

what they can see, and exist within it. They play with each other on-screen and off, at once together and apart, and these different realities ‘interface with each other’ (Law, 2004, p. 61) as on-screen drives off-screen and vice versa: moving chairs in response to an on-screen assault or searching for a new location as someone else shouts out what they’ve found. The sounds, comments and the sharing of images – holding up a laptop to show others where they are in Barnsborough or beckoning other children over to see  – at times generate a togetherness. When one faces a problem, ‘the door’s locked’, another shouts instructions across the classroom to help them escape: ‘Go downstairs.’ Sometimes they find something, ‘I’ve found the town,’ and another rushes across the classroom to see, then rapidly returns to their own screen to find it too. These brief partnerships quickly dissolve. Usually they follow their own path, zooming around, but sometimes slowing briefly to greet others, ‘Hi Beth’, ‘Hey Theo’ before rushing on. At one point Harry calls out repeatedly, ‘Let’s work together’ but no-one replies. Any encounters with Guy’s avatar are announced to the class, ‘I saw Guy thingy,’ or ‘Guy’s on the roof ’ and this echoes round the room as others see him too- ‘Guy’s on the roof.’ They often comment on what Guy’s doing, ‘Guy’s flying again- he’s such a drama queen’. Some follow him for a while and others start to story him as a villain, ‘Guy Merchant’s trying to trick us’ and at one point alarmingly, ‘He’s got a gun.’ While a sighting of Guy Merchant seems to bring them together, they disperse quickly and resume their individual dash around Barnsborough. Not many children keep a record but some do. Becky, Jess and Jo go round in a group, taking photos with their iPads of scenery: for example, taken from the brow of the hill looking over Barnsbrough. David carefully makes a note of everything he finds. Occasionally they play with possibilities: Harry spots another avatar and shouts across to the child who owns it, ‘I’m gonna wave’ which he does using his avatar, and checks, ‘Did you see me wave?’ Later the teacher tells them they can change their avatars. Some boys immediately change their avatars to girls, and a whole group change theirs to ‘Guy Merchant’s: ‘There’s loads of Guy Merchants.’ Another spots a friend’s avatar. As he runs towards it on-screen, he screams (horror film-esque) then over-layers it with his own and the two avatars blur together: ‘I’m inside you’, he says.

In these accounts, the virtual world is a participant too, offering up places and noises, as well as ways of moving and being. And so are the things in the classroom, the devices, chairs and so on, the teacher, ourselves (as researchers we make this kind of activity permissible), and the multiple experiences, histories,

226

Literacy, Media, Technology

and processes implicit within and evoked by all our contributions. Folded into children’s reading and making of Barnsborough on this morning are their experiences of horror films, mystery stories, of other physical and virtual worlds, and not least of schools and classrooms. On this occasion, play is dominated by exploration; of the world on-screen and its possibilities. On other occasions we have observed, play took different directions (e.g. Bailey et al., 2013; Merchant, 2010). And so, the children, world, things, teacher – and us – convene in the moment in unique ways. Accounts assemble too. Here they are contrived from brief notes made about whatever caught Cathy’s attention at the time, constrained by what she was able to record in the moment, and re-shuffled into the narrative above. In the noisy classroom the moments recorded are extravagant ones: sudden noises, things she found hilarious (Guy’s got a gun), uplifting (the singing1) or endearing (children helping one another). There is nothing in her account of the rapt concentration we have noted during other Barnsborough excursions, although of course this may have been going on too. As researchers we assemble with the data, bringing to it our own theories, experiences and fascinations, our own affect in the moment. And now, as we pore over it and try to craft this chapter, working to connect these moments with theory, we are still affected by what Maclure (2011) calls ‘wonder’, about what happened as these children, their teacher and the multiple threads of on- and off-screen activity assembled that morning in ways that seemed to trouble the ordered nature of schooling. For Bennett, giving oneself to this sort of enchantment is an important political act. She argues that enchantment can foster ‘an ethical generosity of spirit’ (2001, p. 11), one that can drive social justice. And for us enchantment evokes an uncertainty or unknowing that is an important counterpoint to the certainties that underpin the rigid autonomous accounts of literacy policy and ‘reform’ that currently circulate. Importantly for research in new media it allows recognition of the excessive, the ebullient, the vivid and the felt. In doing so, enchantment allows us to do more than observe; it prompts us to act, and to stoke our commitment to working for positive change. Enchantment then is not just important because it honours complexity in the lives of children, teachers, texts, and on- and off-screen actions and interactions, but because it provides us with ways of experiencing the here-and-now, the ephemeral and the incoherent in order to generate ‘openings, ambiguities and lines of flight within systems of power, and in doing so work positive effects within and upon the system’ (Bennett, 2001, p. 116).

Assembling Virtual Play in the Classroom

227

Moments in time Our enchantment with virtual-play-in-the-moment rests on fluid minglings of multiple timescales. Our own lived experience of the ‘scrumpled geographies’ (Edwards, Ivanic, & Mannion, 2009, p. 496) of Barnsborough sits in other time frames that allow us to trace various movements and entanglements which play out in our own writing. We see this in the development of ideas, for example, wrought through Guy’s repeated visits to Barnsborough over a ten-year period (Merchant, 2009, 2010), or Cathy and Guy’s theoretical explorations based on a recent project (Burnett & Merchant, 2014, 2016). Or when the same children were invited to create a virtual community in Minecraft and named it ‘Bradborough’ – thus paying homage to Barnsborough, their first experience of virtual play at school (see Burnett & Bailey, 2014). Even objects have a complex life in our writings. Cathy focused on the laptops used to access Barnsborough in an earlier study of this classroom, capturing the children’s responses as they were introduced for the first time (Burnett, 2014). These examples suggest the multitude of ideas, experiences, feelings that mesh with all kinds of other episodes for all participants, a web of shared histories, synchronicities, emergent possibilities and lines of flight. And these provoke our shared interest in how we, as researchers, entangle ourselves with these multiplicities, both in the moment of being there, in the moment of being with the data, and in the moments of writing and revising. This in turn brings us to revisit many of the certainties generated through more rational and linear orderings in contemporary education. One reason why we are so interested in the take-up of new technologies in classrooms is that the use of the digital, of devices, and of screens and connectivity so often seems to disrupt dominant ways of doing things, and for us as researchers this disruption helps us to make strange the whole business of teaching and learning. Take teachers, learners and texts, for example. How do teachers, learners and texts assemble? Through schooling, children learn how to ‘do’ being a pupil, teachers learn how to ‘do’ teaching and both learn how to do ‘reading’ too. These doings – and the associated ways of being – are well documented in ethnographic accounts of classrooms. But of course ‘teaching’, ‘learning’ and ‘reading’ assemble in multiple other ways too, many of them unofficial and off the radar (see Burnett, 2011, 2013). Teachers, learners and texts start to seem different when they assemble in the context of virtual play. Thinking about this disturbs the rather static teacher-pupil-text triad that has been at the heart of literacy learning for so long.

228

Literacy, Media, Technology

Inflected by the discourse of accountability that seeps into so much that happens in schools, texts become things to be mined for information or scrutinized for evidence. In Barnsborough, the notion of texts is inescapably fluid. It only assembles as world as they play, in the interactions, interpretations and movements that happen on- and off-screen and through the multiplicity of ‘intra-actions’ (Barad, 2007). The mining model of reading that dominates official documentation can’t work here. Similarly cherished distinctions between teachers and learners begin to unravel. Learners take different routes – on some occasions they take the lead, on others they follow, creating their own games and aims as they discover what is possible. The teacher does not provide guidance of the ‘model-guide-participate’ variety. She provides resources – setting up the world, flagging possibilities children haven’t discovered such as teleporting, and following their suggestions, making sure things work and smoothing things over when they don’t. Sometimes she is simply someone to tell if no one else is listening, or someone to play with. This quiet pedagogy perhaps assembles with virtual play in ways that feel supportive, safe and enabling.

Virtual possibilities Searching for ways of accounting for virtual play in classrooms has led us to the idea that it assembles in the moment. It assembles in ways that are always novel, that repeatedly surprise us and that continue to defy linear description. And we are woven into this dense entanglement of activity in which bodies, machines, semiotic and imaginative resources begin to shed their distinctiveness. As we fall into this enchantment we are, as Bennett suggests, already in a new terrain, the terrain of virtual possibilities. Arguments about the readerliness and writerliness of texts were being waged long before screens and the games and worlds they mediate became so entangled with children’s lives (e.g. Rosenblatt, 1938). However, our enchantment with virtual play prompts us to revisit these ideas and re-position ourselves in relation to other schooled literacy practices. What if reading a novel in class was like assembling virtual-play-in-the-moment? What if literacy learning was characterized by fluid movement between on- and off-screen activity? What if teaching was conceptualized as a process of play, always alert and open to emergent possibilities? What if schooling could be acknowledged as a shifting assemblage of children, adults, things, times, spaces, topics, activities and ideas? And what if school improvement could be driven

Assembling Virtual Play in the Classroom

229

by reflexivity about what assembles in official accounts of schooling, and how things could or should be otherwise? As Facer argues: If we want to challenge the orthodox future in education, we need to recognize that the future is a dynamic and emergent reality. It is produced out of the ideas and assumptions people have about the future, out of contemporary and emergent resources at hand, and out of structural inertia that works against change. In other words the future isn’t an empty space that ‘exists out there’ for us to shape with no constraints; it is not virgin terrain, it is already being produced by the historical forces that are in train. Nor is the future predetermined; it can be shaped by our actions and aspirations. (Facer, 2011, p. 5)

Of course enchantment does little to produce the analyses of power and structure that are needed to effect positive changes. But it can stop us in our tracks and disturb taken-for-granted logics. Perhaps what we need to imagine is a more creative, empowering and enabling future for children that involves new ways of being in the moment. Imagining the future may require an enchantment with the present, and a turn to the virtual world of possibility.

Note 1 For a closer account of children’s spontaneous singing in virtual play see Bailey (2016).

References Bailey, C. (2016). ‘Free the sheep: Improvised song and performance in and around a Minecraft community.’ Literacy, 50(2), 62–71. Bailey, C., Burnett, C., Monkhouse, J., Daniels, K., Merchant, G., Gill, E., Rayner, J., & Taylor, R. (2013). ‘Zombie Apocalypse: Problem-solving in a virtual world.’ English 4–11. Summer 2013, 48, 7–10. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bennett, J. (2001). The enchantment of modern life: Attachments, crossings, and ethics. New Jersey : Princeton University Press. Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Braidotti, R. (2013). The posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Burnett, C. (2011). ‘Shifting and multiple spaces in classrooms: An argument for investigating learners’ boundary-making around digital networked texts.’ Journal of Literacy and Technology, 12(3), 2–23.

230

Literacy, Media, Technology

Burnett, C. (2013). ‘Investigating children’s interactions around digital texts in classrooms: How are these framed and what counts?’ Education 3–13, 43(2), 197–208. Burnett, C. (2014). ‘Investigating pupils’ interactions around digital texts: A spatial perspective on the ‘classroom-ness’ of digital literacy practices in schools.’ Educational Review, 66(2), 192–209. Burnett, C., & Bailey, C. (2014). ‘Conceptualising collaboration in hybrid sites: Playing Minecraft together and apart in a primary classroom.’ In C. Burnett, J. Davies, G. Merchant, & J. Rowsell. (Eds), New literacies around the globe: Policy and pedagogy (pp. 50–71). Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Burnett, C., & Merchant, G. (2014). ‘Points of view: Reconceptualising literacies through an exploration of adult and child interactions in a virtual world.’ Journal of Research in Reading, 37(1), 36–50. Burnett, C., & Merchant, G. (2016). ‘Boxes of poison: Baroque technique as antidote to simple views of literacy.’ Journal of Literacy Research. Davies, J. (2014). ‘(Im)material girls living in (im)material worlds: Identity curation through time and space.’ In C. Burnett, J. Davies, G. Merchant, & J. Rowsell (Eds), New literacies around the globe: Policy and pedagogy (pp. 72–87). New York: Routledge. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Edwards, T., Ivanic, R., & Mannion, G. (2009). ‘The scrumpled geography of literacies for learning.’ Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 30(4), 483–499. Facer, K. (2011). Learning futures: Education, technology and socio-technical change. London: Routledge. Ihde, D. (1993). Postphenomenology: Essays in the postmodern context. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Law, J. (2004). After method: Mess in social science research. London: Routledge. Maclure, M. (2011). ‘Qualitative inquiry: Where are the ruins?’ Qualitative Inquiry, 17(10), 997–1005. Merchant, G. (2009). ‘Literacy in virtual worlds.’ Journal of Research in Reading, 32(1), 38–56. Merchant, G. (2010). ‘3D Virtual worlds as environments for literacy teaching.’ Education Research, 52(2), 135–150. Merchant, G. (2015). ‘Moving with the times: How mobile digital literacies are changing childhood.’ In V. Duckworth, & G. Ade-Ojo (Eds), Landscapes of specific literacies in contemporary society: Exploring a social model of literacy (pp. 103–116). London: Routledge. Rosenblatt, L. (1938). Literature as exploration. New York: Noble and Noble.

: ready or available for immediate action or use

15

Past, Present, Future Cathy Burnett, Guy Merchant and Becky Parry

The stuck record At the 1999 Australian Council for Education Research conference, Ilana Snyder presented a keynote address with a title that was eerily similar to the title of this volume: ‘Literacy and technology studies: past, present, future’. She reflected on ‘what we have learnt about the complex relationships between literacy, technology and learning’, stating that: New technologies have radically altered everyday modes of communication. Indeed, they are becoming so fundamental to society that most areas of social practice in day-to-day life are affected by the so called ‘information revolution’. In a world increasingly mediated by communication and information technologies, literacy researchers simply cannot afford to ignore the implications of the use of new technologies for literacy practices. (Snyder, 2000, p. 98)

Sixteen years on, this point feels very familiar. Like others, we have been making similar arguments for years now and written many such paragraphs to open book chapters, articles and research grant applications. Much of this has led to lively and promising activity. However, mainstream educational practices have shifted little, and while digital technologies have made their way into schools – sometimes with a flourish, often faltering – schooled literacy in many jurisdictions still privileges the reading and writing of print texts. In many classrooms, we regularly see instances of what Snyder critiqued as the ‘technologization’ of literacy teaching, with conventional print texts projected onto electronic whiteboards for example, or programmes used to ‘train up’ children in specific literacy ‘skills’. But, re-workings of school provision have, on the whole, been far from radical and for many have failed to properly take account of developments in literacy, media and technology.

234

Literacy, Media, Technology

There have been some shifts since 1999. In her piece Snyder proposes drawing on Kress (1997) to focus on the visual as well as the verbal in literacy research and practice. Since then much has been done to account for multimodality in literacy work and some of this is now embedded in state frameworks, for example, in the USA (NGA, 2012) and Australia (ACARA, 2013) if not in the UK (DfE, 2013), although assessment frameworks still do little to acknowledge or encourage this emphasis. However, the need to fully account for operational, cultural and critical dimensions of new communicative practices (Green, 1988), as Snyder argued, seems just as pertinent now as then, particularly since many attempts to re-frame literacy education have been frustrated by curricula that would have looked very much at home twenty years ago (if not longer). Several chapters in this volume (Dowdall; McDougall; and Parry, Taylor and Haerizadeh-Yazdi) tackle these issues head-on. Together they provide a powerful critique of the curriculum in England and tease out many of the tensions that are working to erode what had been a move towards greater integration of digital media (see McDougall in this volume). A political turn of events has seen such attempts founder, and researchers and practitioners working with literacy, media and technology are left defending ground that arguably should have been won decades ago. We are faced with something of a stalemate: while research designed to investigate and conceptualize new communicative practices has moved on apace, many education systems just haven’t caught up. Calls for curriculum change, in England at least, begin to feel like a stuck record, a metaphor perhaps relevant both for its evocation of the materiality of media (see Chapter 1), and the time-warping resurgence in the popularity of vinyl. It also evokes a visceral sense of the irritation associated with curriculum change: a repeated pattern of a lurch forward in practice followed by a rapid reining in. Moves to innovate or transform in the short term have been hampered by intransigence in the long term. This intransigence may be partly traced to established educational practices. Flexible, creative responses to digital media in education don’t necessarily sit easily with the ‘temporalities of schooling’ (Compton Lilly, 2013), the relentless succession of lessons, terms and years punctuated by age-related expectations and fixed-point assessments. But intransigence is reinforced by political ideology that blends the future-facing short-termism of the market with ‘traditional values’. It is no accident perhaps that, in England, a successful attempt by the computer science lobby to argue for the inclusion of computing in the curriculum (see Chapter 12) involved re-branding computer science as the ‘new Latin’, appealing to the Secretary of State’s predilection for the classics while making a play for

Past, Present, Future

235

‘the new’. Perhaps this combination conveniently tamed the new, bestowing on it an easy logic, a disciplined approach aligned with systematic thinking and promising future economic growth in ‘uncertain’ times. By contrast the new of new media may too readily associate with the anarchic feel of citizen journalism, parody videos, flash mobs, crowdsourcing or the dangers of unfettered surfing – in short the whole sweep of moral panic. Against this background, it may be that by bunching technology, media and literacy together under the umbrella of the ‘new’, we as researchers make it stand apart; addressing it becomes something separate, disconnected from present imperatives. Perhaps this even makes it easier to leave the ‘traditional’ unquestioned. It’s familiar; it’s what we know. In this chapter, which problematizes the linear march through time implied through ‘past, present, future’, we confront the stuck record phenomenon by exploring complex relationships with ‘the new’. We propose that one of the challenges faced when working to reconfigure relationships between literacy, media and technology is that a preoccupation with the new tends to smooth out these complexities. We begin by exploring the pervasiveness of the new in our working and everyday lives, locating this within neoliberal discourses and problematizing the way ‘the new’ gets operationalized. We explore how ‘newness’ can neglect the situatedness of practices involving literacy, media and technology, and distract from possibilities that are more enduring, more nuanced or even more ephemeral. Next we consider how a mood of enchantment might be productive in thinking (or feeling) differently about how things are assembling and reassembling in current practice and considering what might be possible in education.

The corrosive power of the ‘new’ The restless appetite for the new can be seen as an expression of neoliberalism. Cultivating the desire to upgrade and renew is a basic tenet of a market economy and nowhere is this more apparent than in the marketing of new technologies, as ‘old’ phones, for example, are replaced with new ones – smaller, faster, slimmer or bigger – or well, just better. Much has been written about this preoccupation with the new and its relationship to the activities of multinational corporations, to the working conditions of those involved in manufacture, to social relations and to the more or less hidden degradation of the natural environment and damage to eco-systems (e.g. Bauman, 2005; Heynen, McCarthy, Prudham, & Robbins, 2007). However, here we are

236

Literacy, Media, Technology

concerned with how ‘the new’ has been operationalized in educational research, and in particular its implications for how developments in literacy, media and technology are conceived and taken up. In schools and educational institutions we can trace an emphasis on endless renewal in the targets and key performance indicators associated with pressure for continuous improvement in new managerialist conditions (Deem, Hillyard, & Reed, 2008). Of course there are few researchers and practitioners working in education who would argue with the idea of striving to make things better for children and young people through generating new insights or exploring new possibilities. But the notion of demonstrable ongoing progress all too often rests on closed ideas of what progress looks like. Analysis of rising or falling ‘standards’ for example, relies on an obduracy of testing and accountability arrangements that lack the agility needed to reflect the changing nature of literacy-mediatechnology; ironically success in making ‘new progress’ in literacy, for example, is judged using old measures designed to assess print literacy. These fixed ‘measures’ of ‘progress’ narrow our field of vision and distract from the reflective, critical appraisal of practice needed to think radically and imaginatively about the future of education. This appetite for the new is written into our lives as researchers, too. It is fuelled by endless competition for dwindling research funds and pressure for high performance in league tables and research assessment exercises. In embracing market ideologies, universities reward ‘new talent’, ‘new impact’, ‘new partnerships’ and ‘new funding streams’, and individual academics compete to be the ones making ‘new contributions’ or to signal a ‘new turn’ or ‘new paradigm’. This drive for the new plays out in journal and project titles that brand our work in snappy phrases designed to compete for attention with our peers and the wider public. And as editors of this volume, we are not, of course, immune to the power of the new. We work in a field defined by newness: new literacies, new media, new technologies, New Literacy Studies. And one of the reasons for compiling this book was to explore new ways of thinking about new media practices. One of the difficulties of ‘the new’, however, is that it is relative; it defines itself through contrast with what came before. And yet the new can only be realized in consort with the old, the established and the ongoing. We see this in the historical tracings and reflections in chapters by Gillen, Mackey and Marsh, which suggest continuity and recurrence as much as change. ‘Histories of the new’ are not determined by the shifting affordances of digital technologies but enmeshed with social, cultural, political and economic imperatives. In Chapter 5,

Past, Present, Future

237

for example, we read how the digitization of bureaucratic functions makes it virtually impossible to conduct our lives without connection. For those without access at home, the public library provides the only means of going online – but library services are being cut, as if they no longer have contemporary relevance. Jones’s chapter illustrates how people’s lives are inflected by changes operating across multiple timescales. These changes are not just framed by the speed of technological innovation but by the rhythms of family life, by economic and political cycles, and by rates of decay or degradation of existing resources. Time is ‘always folded’ in the way that Latour describes. And activity in different timescales interfaces: ‘the idea of synchronic interaction where all the ingredients will have the same age and the same pace is meaningless […]. Action has always been carried on thanks to shifting the burden of connection to longer – or shorter-lasting entities’ (Latour, 2005, p. 201). Technological advances are experienced in multiple ways linked to a coalescence of personal, social, political and economic trajectories. This recognition of complexity problematizes the new. While we move forward through clock-time, there is no singular linear progression. In everyday life, practices are testament to the ‘patterns of rhythmicity, periodicity and cyclicality’ of time (Adam, 2008, p. 2). Research and innovation in educational practice is also marked by retracings, anachronisms and contradictions. In Parry et al.’s chapter, for example, we see the New London Group’s1 proposals for a pedagogy of multiliteracies (published in 1996) being used to critique curriculum materials produced nearly twenty years later. Potter and Bryer describe how ‘established’ filmmaking practices were at odds with those developed by children using iPads: film-making practices introduced by mentors and ‘new’ to schools seemed like ‘old news’ when children developed practices more suited to newer equipment. Dowdall draws on children’s identity work on the once popular Bebo to argue persuasively for a re-working of ‘writing’ in the curriculum; and we read of the repeated re-booting of McDougall’s work on gaming literacies through four successive projects, each shaped differently given a different nexus of academic interests, policy context and funding mechanisms. These movements back and forward through time play havoc with notions of progression in ideas and practice. And yet in a neoliberal policy environment, we suggest that ‘the new’ gets put to work in a number of ways that smooth out these complexities. Firstly, a quest for the new can erase the significance of what happens in the present. As Facer (2011) explores, much debate around the future of education is framed by two narratives: the challenges of equipping workers for an increasingly global and technologized economy, and the failure of schools and teachers to

238

Literacy, Media, Technology

respond to such challenges. Teachers, the story goes, are stuck in the past and we need new solutions for a new age. Of course many practitioners are finding ways to work across current constraints and explore relationships between literacy, media and technology in empowering ways in spite of structures that get in the way (Lewis Ellison, Ehret, McDougall and Kurcikova provide examples in this volume). Similarly, supportive and mutually enhancing academic communities survive in the competitive environment of neoliberalism, as does intellectual challenge and engaged, ethical debate. However, in order to get heard, such work often has to frame itself as the ‘new new’ and define itself through a break with the past. We see this perhaps in the endless stream of projects that typify research in literacy, media and technology, rarely allowed to mature but re-imagined or re-worked in new manifestations. By emphasizing innovation, such work may disrupt – or simply miss – the continuities needed for any of this newness to happen, the quiet work that helps to sustain and maintain relationships, for example. A focus on the new can also distract from much that happens off the radar, that eludes description or that happens over and above the ‘new initiative’ or ‘new approach’. Innovations are always interpreted by schools and teachers in multiple ways (Fenwick & Edwards, 2010) and children will always improvise with what they have been asked to do (e.g. see Dyson, 1993; Maybin, 2006). If we look to the new as conceived in neat packages, then we may miss the diverse ways in which teachers and children are making sense of opportunities in relation to what else is going on. Second, foregrounding the new can erase the past, disrupting collective memories and shared histories. As Wertsch (2008) argues, telling stories is one way in which we preserve our collective memory, and uphold shared values. As literacy researchers and educators we can trace several powerful narratives that surface repeatedly in our own work: of the agency and creativity of children; of playful, open, even anarchic spaces; and of the diversity of practices which sometimes empower and sometimes inhibit. Stories of how things have been otherwise are important as they allow us to dream of other ways of organizing learning, of different sets of values. A preoccupation with the new, however, can undermine collective memories and community narratives that help sustain us to think and be differently. The onslaught of educational innovation in education in England in the last fifteen years or so illustrates this. Not only has ‘innovation fatigue’ bemused and frustrated overworked teachers, but we now have a generation of practitioners for whom the continued introduction of new approaches, new directives and new standards has become the norm. Of course, new teachers will always learn from those they work with and explore

Past, Present, Future

239

diverse educational thought and practice through dialogue, conferences, further study and so on. However, a preoccupation with the new can devalue, disrupt or undermine the living archive of experiences held by teachers who taught in other ways in other times (Kamler & Comber, 2005). This is particularly ironic given that many of the practices and principles which underpin recommendations for transformative pedagogies for a digital age are in fact far from new. The ‘Connected Learning’ movement (http://connectedlearning.tv/), currently gathering pace in the United States and elsewhere, for example, identifies nine foundational principles, nearly all of which can be traced to a legacy predating the digital age linked to progressive education. Similarly, many of the descriptions of ‘flipped learning’ are not new – just re-named. Insofar as these recommendations legitimate creative and worthwhile practices they provide an important counter-narrative to dominant discourses – but novelty itself is rarely enough.

Assembling otherwise In Chapter 1 we explored how literacy, media and technology assemble together differently in diverse communicative practices and a number of chapters have drawn on the concept of assemblage to explore what happens as literacy-mediatechnology come together in different configurations and contexts. Assemblage, as conceived of in Chapter 14, can be seen as a: process of bundling, or assembling, or better of recursive self-assembling in which the elements put together are not fixed in shape, do not belong to a larger pre-given list but are constructed at least in part as they are entangled together. (Law, 2004, p. 42)

A number of contributors illustrate how the meaning-making opportunities associated with confluences of literacy-media-technology can fall apart when they assemble with policies and practices associated with neoliberal educational policy (e.g. Dowdall; Parry et al.). Partly because of this uneasy fit, it has become common in the last decade to question whether formal education, as currently instantiated, has any role to play in the twenty-first century. The very idea of fixed groups of children (positioned as pupils) spending fixed amounts of time with adults (positioned as teachers) in fixed places to learn a fixed set of things can seem anachronistic in an era of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), networked learning, virtual classrooms and the like. And there have been many

240

Literacy, Media, Technology

re-imaginings of what schooling might look like if it were configured differently in time and space. These re-imaginings often involve vast amounts of investment and of course more emphasis on the new (new buildings, new pedagogies, new subjects, new sponsors and so on). In addition to considering more radical re-workings, some of which may indeed prove valuable in the future, we suggest it is also valuable to look askance at things as they are. Perhaps by looking to the future we are looking in the wrong direction and need to avoid being tempted to propose another new framework, another new set of ideas, another new curriculum or another new reform. After all, the ‘new new’ quickly becomes the ‘old new’ as another frame, perspective or approach moves into the limelight. A different response is to stay with the idea of assemblage, to explore how things group together, how shifts occur, and what is foregrounded and omitted as a result. Instead of looking to the future, then, perhaps we need to take more time to look at what teachers, children and young people are doing now with the things and ideas available in diverse local settings. Perhaps we need to linger as we review the past, and to pause as we contemplate the present. If we are to value other ways of doing things, then perhaps we need to diverge – as researchers and educationalists – from our endless pursuit of the new. Rejecting the deficit discourses about schools and teachers so often used to leverage restrictive educational reforms, Comber defines a school as a place that brings together a diverse community of people with distinctive histories, roles, and resources. Together they co-create the school as a particular kind of meeting place that produces its own affordances for learning. (Comber, 2013, p. 369)

This notion of school as a ‘meeting place’ resonates with the idea of assemblage, of the coming together of people to explore possibilities with available resources. Extending Comber’s idea, a fruitful direction might therefore be to reflect on the material-discursive-semiotic assemblings that are and could be generated in schools. This involves taking seriously the multiple possibilities and inequities that emerge as people-things-ideas-structures assemble together. From this perspective, making a film or digital story, for example, is not just about the techniques of composition but about what and who is excluded or included, about beliefs and values, about the weight and feel of a video camera, the stuff in (and out of) the frame. It is about what happened earlier as well as hopes and intentions, and about the friendships, loyalties, shared histories and responsibilities that oil the wheels of production as much as they play out

Past, Present, Future

241

in what gets produced. It is also about the funding metrics, policy decisions, social and economic inequities and environmental implications that are also part of these assemblings in the moment. In this volume, we see different dimensions of this, for example, in Ehret’s reflections on Nolan’s film-making, and in Lewis Ellison’s use of artifacts to ‘leverage the kinds of stories and texts valued by students and adults to understand meaning making in embodied ways’. Mapping text making as assemblings foregrounds a whole range of concerns and possible focuses for reflection (by educators and those they work with) that are written out of linear accounts of literacy development, or indeed some new literacy projects. This involves thinking divergently about the dilemmas, tensions and opportunities that are evoked as literacy-media-technology assemble together with different people, places, purposes and structures. Burnett and Merchant’s musings on pedagogy emerge because things reshuffled, remixed and constantly re-assembled during virtual play. McDougall’s reflections on the tensions of working with popular media are generated through the juxtaposition of multiple projects. Such reflections emerge through a process of trying to apprehend differently and through setting out to disrupt ordered ways of knowing. Chapter 14 explored what might be gained through cultivating enchantment. ‘To be enchanted’, as Bennett (2001, p. 4) writes, ‘is to be struck and shaken by the extraordinary that lives among the familiar and the everyday’. This enchantment has a political purpose as, to reiterate Bennett’s words, it emphasizes ‘the openings, ambiguities, and lines of flight within systems of power, doing so to work positive effects within and upon the system’ (Bennett, p. 116). Perhaps enchantment is what is needed to look askance at literacy-media-technology and to examine carefully what assembles through communicative practices in and out of school. In challenging dominant educational discourses, then, instead of valorizing the new, perhaps we need to focus more on the mundane, the taken-for-granted, the ephemeral. We need, as Potter and Bryer suggest, to ‘put people and their practices at the heart of what we want to explore’ (this volume) and, as many of our contributors have done, to foreground the dimensions of experience, such as criticality, creativity, relationships and ethics that transcend the easy logic of neoliberalism. This is not an endorsement of complacency, or indeed a kind of hopeless retreat to familiar ground. Rather, by approaching practice in a mood of enchantment, we might be more alert to what we can learn from the assemblings that do occur, and to what might be generated through re-assemblings.

242

Literacy, Media, Technology

Note 1 Perhaps we should point out that this is a slightly different ‘new’ – the new of the place, New London!

References Adam, B. (2008). The timescapes challenge: Engagement with the invisible temporal. Keynote for project launch of Timescapes (ESRC Longitudinal Study). Leeds, UK: University of Leeds. Retrieved from http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/socsi/resources/ Leeds%20talk%20prose%20Timescapes%20Challenge%20250208.pdf (Accessed 23 December 2015). Australian Curriculum and Reporting Authority (ACARA) (2013). The Australian Curriculum. Retrieved from http://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/ (Accessed 23 December 2015). Bauman, Z. (2005). Liquid life. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bennett, J. (2001). The enchantment of modern life: attachments, crossings, and ethics. New Jersey : Princeton University Press. Comber, B. (2013). ‘Schools as meeting places: Critical and inclusive literacies in changing local environments.’ Language Arts, 90(5), 361–371. Compton Lilly, C. (2013). ‘Temporality, trajectory, and early literacy learning.’ In K. Hall, T. Cremin, B. Comber, & L. Moll. (Eds), International handbook of research on children’s literacy, learning and culture (pp. 83–95). Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Deem, R., Hillyard, S., & Reed, M. (2008). Knowledge, higher education and the new managerialism: The changing management of UK universities. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Department for Education (DfE) (2013). National Curriculum in England: English programmes of study. Retrieved from https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ national-curriculum-in-england-english-programmes-of-study (Accessed 23 December 2015). Dyson, A. H. (1993). Social worlds of children learning to write in an urban primary school. New York: Teachers College Press. Facer, K. (2011). Learning futures. London: Routledge. Fenwick, T., & Edwards, R. (2010). Actor-network theory in education. London: Routledge. Green, B. (1988). ‘Subject-specific literacy and school learning: A focus on writing.’ Australian Journal of Education, 32(2), 156–179. Heynen, N., McCarthy, J., Prudham, S., & Robbins, P. (2007). Neoliberal environments: false promises and unnatural consequences. London: Routledge.

Past, Present, Future

243

Kamler, B., & Comber, B. (2005). ‘Turn-around pedagogies: Improving the education of at-risk students.’ Improving Schools, 8(2), 121–131. Kress, G. (1997). Before writing: Rethinking the paths to literacy. London: Routledge. Law, J. (2004). After method: Mess in social science research. Abingdon: Routledge. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Maybin, J. (2006). Children’s voices: Talk, knowledge and identity. Basingstoke: Palgrave. National Governors Association (NGA) (2012). Common Core State Standards Initiative: Preparing America’s students for college & career. Retrieved from http:// www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy (Accessed 23 December 2015). New London Group (1996). ‘A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures.’ Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 60–93. Snyder, I. (2000). ‘Literacy and technology studies: Past, present, future.’ The Australian Educational Researcher, 27(2), 97–119. Wertsch, J. V. (2008). ‘The narrative organization of collective memory.’ Ethos, 36, 120–135.

Index AirWatch 129, 134, 135, 138, 139 Appadurai, A. 6–7, 42, 47, 55 apps 53, 93, 94, 112, 132, 133, 142, 204, 209, 210, 219 artefactual literacies 80, 81, 90 assemblage xv, 42, 43, 98, 106, 136, 205, 208–10, 214, 222, 228, 239–40 assembling 6, 220, 223, 228, 239 augmented reality 204, 208, 219 avatars 168, 193, 219, 220, 221, 225 Barnsborough 221–8 Barton, D. & Hamilton, M. 65, 74, 96 BBC Learning 147, 151, 152, 160 Bebo 163, 167–9, 171–5, 178–9, 180, 237 bricolage 43, 53 Burnett, C. 25, 97, 107, 114, 124–5, 149–50, 161, 166, 179, 204, 227, 229, 230, 241 cameras 38, 93, 98, 113, 205 Carrington V. 42, 56, 169, 180 Club Penguin 49, 57, 166–7 Comber, B. 65–6, 76, 96–7, 107, 108, 239–42 convergence 4, 112, 116, 117, 123, 164, 222 curriculum 113, 115, 135, 138, 147, 148, 149, 151, 155, 157, 158, 159, 160, 165–6, 175–9, 185–6, 188–90, 192, 194, 196, 234, 237, 240 Davy Crockett 44–8, 50–4 digital literacy 43, 83, 103, 106, 130, 132, 167, 176 Disney 6, 42–50, 53, 204 Doctor Who 147, 151–8 Dowdall, C. 163, 167, 169, 234, 237, 239 DVD 25, 30, 31–3, 48 Dyson, A. H. 42, 53, 131, 238 embodiment 97, 212–13 ephemera 15

ethnographic 64–5, 67, 82, 131, 135, 208, 227 everyday literacy 63–5 Facebook 3, 45–50, 72, 167, 169, 171, 191 FIFA 207 film 42, 43, 55, 58, 113–24, 196 film-making 100, 114–25 Frozen 41, 42, 44–53 gaming 41, 71, 187–91, 196–7, 203–15, 237 Gee, J. 86, 95, 188, 203, 206 Gillen, J. 4, 11–12, 15, 17, 18, 21, 236 Girl 20 183, 188, 196 gramophones 26 Grand Theft Auto 187, 190 Guatarri, F. 98, 100–2 haptic 111–13, 210 hybrid 43, 186, 207, 209–10, 214 iMovie 82, 93 Instagram 3, 12, 21, 94, 105 internet 6, 22, 41, 46, 50, 53, 83, 93, 130, 133, 139, 157, 167, 219 intertextuality 42, 195 iPads 83, 97, 122, 130–2, 136–9, 223, 225, 237 Jenkins, H. 43, 55, 164, 176 Kress, G. 18, 21, 54, 81, 84, 132, 150, 164–5, 171, 234 LA Noire 193–7 Latour, B. 5, 222, 237 ludic 206–7 machinima 6, 49, 206 Mackey, M. 30, 33, 35, 37, 56, 236 Marsh, J. 38, 41, 42, 44–9, 53, 55, 133, 137, 148–9, 154, 166–7, 236

Index McDougall, J. 27, 113, 185–8, 206, 208, 234, 237–8, 241 media education 114, 116, 183, 187 media panics 22 Media Studies 185–6, 188–9 Mediascapes 47 Merchant, G. 12, 17, 25, 97, 114, 124, 148, 149–50, 166, 204, 219, 223, 225–7, 241 mobile phone 205, 212–13 moral panic 50–1, 235 movie 34, 82, 93 multiliteracies 147, 149, 150, 151, 153, 157, 160, 237 multimodality 16, 84, 158, 220, 234 musicking 49–50 MySpace 167–9 narrative 3, 6, 29–31, 35, 42, 48, 54–5, 99, 117, 120, 121, 131, 147, 155, 190, 226, 239 Netflix 26, 30–1 New Literacy Studies 95–6, 165, 236 New London Group 147–8, 165, 237 Ofcom 41 Opie 43, 45–6, 51–2 Osmo 208–10 Our Story 129–30, 133–9 Pahl, K. & Rowsell, J. 43, 79–81, 85–7 pedagogy 111, 116, 120, 123, 124, 148, 150, 151, 153, 157, 160, 163, 164, 175, 186, 228, 237, 241 photograph 12, 20, 139, 170 Pink 67, 97–8, 101 playing 7, 38, 57, 59, 92, 198, 215, 217, 230 postcard 11–13, 15, 17, 19, 21–2 postdigital 203–10, 212–15 Potter, J 127, 181, 198, 217 protectionist 167, 176

245

qualitative 131, 136, 153, 168 recruitment 203–4, 206–11, 214–16 Script to Screen 147, 150, 151–2, 154, 156–7, 160 Second Life 192 selfies 11 smartphones 83, 96–7, 111–12 Smethwick 188 Snapchat 5, 11–12, 21, 94 Snyder, I. 23, 233–4 social media 20, 180 social networking 2, 6, 12, 47, 49, 50, 81, 163, 167, 168, 175, 179 storytelling 79–85, 89–91, 130, 147 Street, B. 65, 77, 109, 112, 127 tablet 27, 94, 111–25 television 25–9, 57–8 text production 54, 123, 150, 163, 166–72, 174–9 transmedia 4, 42, 53, 57, 160 Tumblr 94 Twitter 4–5, 12, 17, 47, 50, 71, 168, 171 video 6, 25–7, 43, 50, 67, 71, 74, 82–5, 94, 98–107, 116, 136–7, 154–60, 185, 205–15, 240 virtual worlds 43, 49, 96, 192, 194, 219–29 Vygotsky, L. 42, 81, 132, 164 Walkmans 26 websites 45, 93, 170 Williams, R. 27, 121, 186, 197 Wohlwend, K. 42, 132 YouTube 6, 20, 26, 30–1, 45, 47, 49, 94, 98, 170