Blurring boundaries in L1 Classrooms: spatial hybridization, mediation and materiality in literacy practices
Submitted by:
Evie Poyiadji
Abstract:
This paper presentation examines how technology transforms L1 education by reshaping spatial dynamics through hybrid learning environments. In this process, school literacy is reconceptualized as technology-mediated materiality, challenging and enabling hybridization through transitions between physical and digital domains. These transitions reshape literacy, redefining teacher and student identities within evolving spatial frameworks where agency, materiality, and technology mediate learning.
Methodologically, this study draws on a case study of a Cypriot fifth-grade classroom, exploring how technology-mediated transitions (re)configure literacy across offline and online spaces. The theoretical framework integrates post-structural views of literacy as a performative identity practice with sociocultural theories, conceptualizing school literacy as a social and spatial practice. Space is both material and immaterial, shaped by mediation, objects, and embodiment (Burnett, 2011). Simultaneously, literacy is seen as an emergent spatial phenomenon shaped by material and immaterial forces.
In this hybrid learning context, teachers and students engage with digital and non-digital tools, online and offline spaces, and embodied interactions, navigating literacy in an environment where boundaries between traditional and digital practices remain fluid (Burnett & Merchant, 2018). Performativity offers a lens through which classrooms are understood as spaces of constraint and possibility, shaped by literacy identities (Kontovourki & Siegel, 2021; Poyiadji & Kontovourki, in print).
Findings show that technology fosters 'playful' engagement, expanding learning beyond traditional classrooms in paradoxical ways. Rather than disrupting pedagogical structures, digital tools create spaces for teachers and students to reconstitute themselves as literate subjects, while digital literacy is hybridized and reshaped within the school environment. In this hybrid literacy space, where physical classroom merge with digital interactions, shifting roles, identities, and expectations expose tensions between transformation and continuity (Green, 2012).
Ultimately, this study shows how technology redefines school literacy as a dynamic, negotiated process, unveiling new possibilities for reconfiguring it as a fluid construct shaped by material and immaterial forces. By examining the spatial hybridization of literacy classrooms, this study contributes to understanding how these processes challenge and reconfigure dominant conceptions of school space, literacy practice, and student/teacher subjectivities.
Keywords:, school literacy, language arts/L1 education, primary schools, spatial dynamics, technology-mediated literacy, hybrid learning environments
References:
Burnett, C., & Merchant, G. (2018). New media in the classroom: Rethinking primary literacy. SAGE.
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), p. 192-209. doi: 10.1080/00131911.2013.768959
Burnett, C., Merchant, G., Pahl, K., and Roswell, 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.
Green, B. (2012). Subject-specific literacy and school learning: A revised account; Contextualization and commentary. In B. Green & C. Beavis (Eds.), Literacy in 3D: An integrated perspective in theoy and practice (pp. 2-38). ACER Press.
Kontovourki, S., & Siegel, M. (2021). “B is for Bunny”: Contested sign-making and the possibilities for performing school literacy differently. Reading Research Quarterly. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.376.
Poyiadji, E., & Kontovourki, S. (in print). Human and non-human agency in elementary literacy classrooms: Examining ClassDojo as part of pedagogical practice. In T.P. Nichols & A. Garcia (Eds.), Literacies in the platform society: Histories, pedagogies, possibilities. Routledge.