Ahampoum! Exploring Children’s Meaning-Making Through Meaningless Words
Submitted by:
Marina Georgiou Moria
Abstract:
The aim of my presentation is to share with you a part of my doctoral dissertation which delves into the sociomaterial assemblages that are continually reassembling while digital writing is materialized in the classroom and explores children’s ever emerging meaning-making. It draws on the sociomaterial theory (Burnett & Merchant, 2020· Fenwick & Landri, 2012) which challenges the human superiority against the matter and emphasizes that all matter has some form of agency and all entities emerge from their relations with other bodies. In order to understand this relational connection, my dissertation borrows the concept of “intra-action” from Barad’ s theory (2007) which assumes that no “person” pre-exists as such, but rather is realized through intra-action, that is, its relationship with all other entities that are also active agents in any “assemblage” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) emerged in literacy-as-event encounters (Burnett & Merchant, 2020). My research work is also interested in the affective, embodied and material dimensions of digital writing practices as part of any emerging literacy assemblage (Boldt & Leander, 2020. Burnett & Merchant, 2020. Leander & Ehret, 2019. Lenters & McDermott, 2020).
While my work is still “in progress”, I will attempt to present an early analysis of a literacy-as-event (Burnett & Merchant, 2020) through the theoretical lens of transmediation (Siegel & Panofsky, 2009) focusing on the ephemerality and emergence of meaning-making. Using footages, the analysis will revolve around a seemingly meaningless word, produced by a student, while he and his team were writing their own twisted fairy tale on a laptop. I will examine the children’s creation of “code” from already available codes and the ways they give meaning to them. Also, I will discuss how this “code” is mediated by the way the children defined the situation as "play", by their friendships, their interests, and the way they defined themselves as writers. Finally, the affective, embodied and material dimensions of this literacy-as-event will be highlighted through a sociomaterial perspective in order to map the relationships between the “things” involved in the changing assemblage, i.e. students, teacher, digital device, WiFi, curriculum, pedagogies, practices, time and space.
REFERENCES
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics and the
Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press.
Boldt, G. & Leander, K.M. (2020). Affect Theory in Reading Research: Imagining the Radical Difference. Reading Psychology, 41(6), 515-532.
Burnett, C. & Merchant, G. (2020). Undoing the Digital-Sociomaterialism and Literacy Education. Routledge.
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Translated by B. Massumi. University of Minnesota Press.
Fenwick, T. & Landri, P. (2012). Materialities, textures and pedagogies: sociomaterial assemblages in education. Pedagogy, Culture and Society,20 (1), 1-7.
Leander, K., & Ehret, C. (Eds.). (2019). Affect in literacy learning and teaching: Pedagogies, politics and coming to know. Routledge.
Lenters, K., & McDermott, M. (2020). Affect, embodiment, and place in critical literacy. Routledge. https://doi. org/10, 4324(9780), 4.
Siegel, M., & Panofsky, C. P. (2009). Designs for multimodality in literacy studies: Explorations in analysis. In 58th yearbook of the national reading conference (pp. 99-111). Oak Creek, WI: National Reading Conference, Inc.