Bodies that move and matter: Literacy pedagogies assembling in primary teachers’ hi/stories of classroom practice
Submitted by:
Stavroula Kontovourki
Abstract:
This paper explores how literacy pedagogies emerge in primary teachers’ narrated hi/stories of L1 teaching across their lifespans and professional careers. I particularly focus on stories told by teachers of six cohorts that correspond to recent decades of institutional history in the Republic of Cyprus (mid-1950s to mid-2010s), to offer a means and method to read literacy pedagogies as framed by official policy and mediated research, but nevertheless formed in local sociomaterial assemblages. I thus explore the question: What doings of literacy emerge when established and/or new notions of literacy, material conditions, tangible objects, and humans come together to form action?
The presentation is theoretically informed by Bennett’s (2010) notion of vibrant matter, which helps understand how material objects, human and non-material bodies (including bodies of knowledge) are sources of action with trajectories of their own that come together, affecting one another and forming literacy teaching. Teachers’ stories shared in this presentation are part of a research project that was methodologically grounded in biographical research and life history interviewing, and involved 30 primary teachers, who entered the profession between mid-1950s and mid-2010s, to explore their constructions of professionalism and disciplinary knowledge. I particularly focus on stories told about L1 teaching that teachers experienced as children and teachers in public school classrooms and bring these in relation with policy documents (rendered relevant in teachers’ stories) and material objects that teachers brought (physically or through storying) in the interview assemblage.
I present examples of narrated practices as actions formed when, for instance, texts’ materialities come together with children’s bodies to maximize learning; technologies, as material entities and immaterial forces, enter pedagogical relations to innovate practice; or orchestrated human action in school assemblies affectively moves bodies to serve the ethno-political purposes of schooling. Tracing such practices over time offers a way to “look down” and “look out” the wide cast of forces, “both human and nonhuman, local and distant, invited and uninvited” (Ferguson, 2021, p. 19) that form literacy pedagogies in everyday classrooms. The presentation thus invites audiences to discuss how literacy pedagogies are mingles of epistemological and official policy shifts entangled with materiality and spatio-temporality, each affecting the other but never possible to fully determine, even when they appear as not moving (Wohlwend, 2021).
References
Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Duke University Press.
Ferguson, D. A. (2021). “WE LOST THE PLADO”: Tracing privileged school literacies in one kindergarten. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, OnlineFirst, https://doi.org/10.1177/14687984211042055.
Wohlwend, K. (2021). Literacies that move and matter: Nexus analysis for contemporary childhoods. Routledge.