Interplaying resources
Submitted by:
Christina Olin-Scheller
Abstract:
The increased digitalization of classrooms, leading to changing literacy practices, challenge not only teachers and students but also researchers who wants to conceptualize teaching and learning processes. In these processes new digital literacies interplay with already established print based literacies. From the resaerchers’ point of view this calls for a need for rethinking research methods in order to understand and capture emerging literacy practices in connected classrooms. The aim for this presentation is two folded: 1) to discuss the use of digital resources in recently connected classrooms 2) to examine how we methodologically can study the interplay between different resources in relation, the meaning of digital literacies as a concept. Theoretically, we frame this discussion departing from the field of New Literacies (Lankshear & Knobel, 2011) and the concepts ‘new technological stuff’ and ‘new ethos stuff’. This means that we highlight aspects that relate to changed conditions for multimodality and digital resources (technological stuff) as well as the changed possibilities that this brings for co-producing, sharing and distributing texts in a participatory culture (ethos stuff) (Jenkins, 2008).
In our analysis we use video ethnographic data from two larger corpuses collected for the projects Textmöten (Finland) and Connected Classrooms (Sweden) (Olin-Scheller, Sahlström & Tanner, forthcoming). Data consists of recordings of upper secondary school students’ literacy activities, focusing face-to-face interaction, use of digital as well as analogue technologies, where smartphone use has been screen mirrored. All in all, the material consists of 163 hours of video recordings (the Swedish material about 50 hours, the Finnish material 113 hours) from lessons in upper secondary school classrooms.
Through this method we have been able to capture and analyze, from a student perspective, the multifaceted visuality of how different resources interplay in digital literacy practices in classrooms. Results show that embodied and material aspects play a vital part in the development of new literacies as the students respond to teacher instructions and try to integrate aspects of new technological as well as new ethos stuff. Developing a participatory culture becomes a challenge in the connected classroom both in relation to the technological potential and in relation to the possibilities for teacher-student interaction, since the student activities that take place through digital resources often become invisible for the teacher. Methodologically, with an interest in the interplay between different resources, the digitally rich classroom call for expanded video recordings, that catch digital literacies and print based literacies, from both the students’ and the teacher’s perspective.
References:
Jenkins, H. (2008). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. ([New ed.]. New York: New York University Press.
Lankshear, C. & Knobel, M. (2011). New literacies: Everyday practices and social learning. Maidenhead: Open University Press
Olin-Scheller, C., Sahlström, F. & Tanner, M. (forthcoming). Editorial introduction: Smartphones in classrooms: reading, writing and talking in rapidly changing educational spaces.