Literate practices and literate identities in the machine: Examining human-software complementarities in commercial-educational platforms and applications

Submitted by: Scott Bulfin
Abstract: Schools and classrooms in many parts of the world are seeing an increasing uptake of commercial-educational software platforms and applications as part of the ‘business’ of schooling. Platforms technologies and applications, such as ClassDojo, Edmodo, Canvas, PebblePad and Kahoot!, are playing a prominent role in teachers’ work and in student learning. Many of these platforms package together ‘educational’ media, curriculum content, assessment and reporting, teacher-student-parent communications, and behaviour management into a single interface (Selwyn, Nemorin, Bulfin & Johnson 2018; Williamson 2017). Because they offer convenience to schools and teachers, and are often marketed as ‘free’ to use, they have become very popular across educational contexts.

This paper reports on a study investigating the uses of these platform technologies and applications in the L1-English classroom, and the implications of these technologies for producing and managing specific forms of literate subjectivity based in emerging human-software relations and complementarities. The paper presents a ‘close reading’ of sample commercial-educational platforms widely used in Australian schools to explore how these educational technologies work to (re)constitute and (re)compose both literacy learning and literate identities within school sanctioned language and literacy learning. We also draw on a set of interviews with secondary L1-English teachers who use these platforms in their work. The study examines the following questions:

• What kinds of literacies are privileged and what kinds of reading and writing positions are produced by these platform technologies? How?
• What literacy pedagogies and practices of literacy learning are engineered, called forth and made visible via these technologies, their design and use?
• What understandings of (preferred) literacy teacher and student identities are evident in the design, language, and functionality of these platforms?
• In what ways do these texts form linkages with other ‘technologies’ of literacy and identity, such as curriculum and assessment?

In addition to offering a reading of particular sample platforms, and providing a perspective on a group of L1-English teachers’ work with such platforms, the paper outlines a broader research agenda based on the questions above. As a key part of this research agenda, we argue that L1 researchers must re-attune their research imaginations to examine emergent forms of school sanctioned literacy and literate identities. These forms of literate subjectivity are anchored in emergent forms of ‘human-software complementarities’ (Shestakofsky 2017) that provide opportunities for teachers and students. However, these complementarities also require urgent critical attention.


References

Selwyn, N., Nemorin, S., Bulfin, S., & Johnson, N. (2018). Everyday schooling in the digital age: High school, high tech? New York: Routledge.

Shestakofsky, B. (2017). Working Algorithms: Software Automation and the Future of Work. Work and Occupations, 44(4), 376-423. doi:10.1177/0730888417726119

Williamson, B. (2017). Big data in education: The digital future of learning, policy and practice. London: Sage.


Biographies

Scott Bulfin is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Monash University and director of graduate research. His research and teaching focus on the sociology of schooling and technology and L1 teacher education. His latest book is, Everyday schooling in the digital age: High school, high tech? (Routledge, 2018).

Fleur Diamond is a lecturer in English and literacy education at Monash University. Her research is focused on the areas of English/literacy teaching, teacher education and literacies. Her latest publication is “University-school partnerships in English pre-service teacher education: a dialogic inquiry into a co-teaching initiative (Diamond, Parr & Bulfin, 2017) in Changing English.