[This entry is an archive for the seminar organized by the Doctorate of the University of Seville and the research team of the R+D+i MATILDA Project (PID2019-104557GB-I00) as part of the Doctoral Education Program.PID2019-104557GB-I00), que tuvo lugar el 9 de marzo de 2021]
In this seminar, which took place on the 9th of march of 2021, the author explored her book Living Literacies and the concept of how literacies are experienced in all aspects of everyday life. The book was born of a discussion with fellow author Jennifer Rowsell about how, when carrying out research in schools, homes, playgrounds and communities, they experienced literacy as lived. From this realization stemmed the idea of a book based around a series of verbs: living, knowing, creating, hoping, seeing, disrupting and making; in order to capture the living of literacies, the on-the ground seeing of the everyday. It draws from Brian Street’s idea of literacy as a series of practices, patterned through the cultural living of the everyday. The main point was for the everyday to shine – the concept of ‘schooled’ literacy practices reduces the multi-faceted work of literacy to something around cursive script and correct spellings.
The presentation introduced the idea behind Living Literacies, and described some of the studies that make up the work, such as ‘Writing in the Home and in the Street’, Language as Talisman’ and ‘Imagine’ as well as a recent study on zine-making in Uganda, ‘Questioning the form’. zines Through these studies, the author argued for a recognition of the materiality of literacy and its potential to empower participants through crafting and creating literacies within communities; as well as reflected on the ways in which doing this engaged community research changed her understanding of literacies and led to the recognition of living literacies as a way of understanding literacy research (Grenfell and Pahl 2019). living literacies como una forma de comprender la investigación de la alfabetización (Grenfell y Pahl 2019).
She began by posing the need to re-think what is and find new ways of recognizing literacy, and how it can be harnessed to meet the demands of everyday life. This would require new ways of knowing and making it possible for young people to reposition their learning and understanding, and central to these new ways would be an expansive and nuanced understanding of what literacy could become, which are the following concepts:
- Literacy as transformational: as children are drawn into culture, ‘what is to hand’ becomes more and more than which the culture values and therefore makes readily available. The child’s active, transformative practice remains, but it is more and more applied to materials which are already culturally formed. In this way children become the agents of their own cultural and social making. (Kress 1997: 7)
- Literacy as material: the tangible parts of one’s heritage. The example used was the textile side of a family’s heritage, which came from the women in the family, both from older relatives that did appliqué, crochet, embroidery, sewing and knitting; and from the younger sister, who loved craft type of activities and sewing and fabric work, especially on birthdays, Christmas and Eid.
- Literacy as oral and written: there is an interrelationship between writing, material object and speech that has yet to be researched (Maybin 2013), which begs the question “how can the production of knowledges be tied explicitly to a politics of social change favoring less privileged communities and places?” (Nagar 2014:82)
- Prose and poetry: “verbal forms, in other words, were not always distinct from dance and music. Within music, we argued, there was close correspondence between verbal and melodic tones: within metrical lyrics, the poetic text was inseparable from the tune; and the folktale often bore an operatic form with sun refrain as an integral part. The distinction between prose and poetry was absent or very fluid.” (Ngugi Wa Thiong’o 2012: 61)
- Literacy practices in homes: literacy cannot be separated from what people are doing, how they are doing it, when, where, under what conditions and with whom they are doing it; metaphorically, there is no separation of the dancer from the dance (cf Yeats 1962). (Bloome and Green 2015 p.20)
- Literacy as lived: the literacies were lived and experienced with people, and the construction of the data was produced in experience and within sites and space. This was not a model of research that took data ‘from’ a site but instead, produced it within a site, as a co-production. The co-production process included co-analysis, and co-inquiry as projects were developed in collaboration with community researchers such as Zanib Rasool (Campbell et al 2018).
Literacy, as a term, can be used to describe communicational practices that include oral, written and crafted multimodal texts (Finnegan, 2007). This view of literacy begins to account for embodiment, feeling and affect that takes in a much wider spectrum of communicative practices into a definition of literacy (Enriquez et al., 2016).
It was highlighted how the field of literacy and language ethnographical research in general needs not only to understand what knowledge is produced but also who is producing it, and how it is framed and presented. It is here that the tensions around issues of identity/voice, of story/storyteller, speaker/listener, insider/outsider and producer/product, bring into focus the power, the politics and the ethics of our various identities and positionalities and the struggles involved in navigating the patterns and normative practices of our sociocultural contexts. (McLean, 2019, p.104)
The seminar was concluded by raising several key themes of reflexive literacy work:
- Participant-led ideas about literacy.
- Co-production and collaborative methodologies.
- Time and space as a significant part of the studies.
- Power and agency within literacy studies.
- Affect and emotion within literacy studies.
The seminar was organized by the LITERACIES research group (HUM1044) and the R+D+i MATILDA research team (PID2019-104557GB-I00).
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