The International APERTURA: Literacy as a Social Practice conference took place between June 11 and 12, 2019, and consisted of a series of conferences, workshops, and roundtables:
Tuesday, June 11th, 2019:
The first day opened with a lecture by Cathy Burnett (Sheffield Hallam University, UK), entitled Literacy in the edgelands: stories of children’s meaning making in contemporary classrooms. The lecture used data from previous projects to explore how children improvise with available resources and opportunities to build literacy in ways that sometimes clash with how literacy is built in schools. It considered the implications of this for the perception of existing literacy in the educational field, and defended the vision of literacy as relational, not individual.
Two workshops also took place, one by Cathy Burnett entitled Investigating multiplicities through stacking stories, and the other by Julia Gillen and Uta Papen, entitled Peer to Peer Deaf Multiliteracies: research into a sustainable approach to education of Deaf children and young adults in the Global South.
There were also two roundtables:
- Session 1: Literacy, emotion and identity, with the following discussions:
- "This is my puzzle": Construction of cultural identities of immigrant girls and boys. An approach from collaborative ethnography - Celia Moreno-Morilla, Soledad Romero-Rodríguez
- The role of linguistic competence in communication for the expression of emotions and feelings - PLC analysis. A case study - Daniel Traverso Macías
- Children's musical education in literacy processes - Jesús Osuna Rodríguez
- Session 2: Literacy in multilingual contexts, with the following discussions:
- Academic literacy in heritage Spanish: a pilot study - María Cecilia Ainciburu, Eva Gómez García
- Reading performance of elementary school students with sociocultural disadvantage in a foreign language. Proposal for an educational intervention. - Analí Fernández Corbacho
- The multisensory nature of silent reading fluency in L2: orality, literacy and musical experience - José Manuel Foncubierta
Wednesday, June 12th, 2019
The second and last day began with a conference by Julia Gillen (University of Lancaster, UK), A day in the digital life of children aged 0-3, followed by a workshop by Uta Papen and Julia Gillen named Peer to Peer Deaf Multiliteracies: research into a sustainable approach to education of Deaf children and young adults in the Global SouthThe next event of the day was another workshop, this one by Carolina Fernández-Quintanilla, entitled Training workshop in narrative analysis.
This was followed by the last two roundtables:
- Session 3: Ethnography and affective structures, with the following discussions:
- Emotional literacy in secondary education teachers through personal coaching - José Manuel Huertas Fernández and Soledad Romero Rodríguez
- Improved Critical Artifacts and Incidents: construction of the discourse on the life and professional trajectories of non-traditional Master students - Soledad Romero-Rodríguez, Celia Moreno-Morilla, Pilar Figuera-Gazo and Mercedes Torrado-Fonseca
- Session 4: Artifacts and digital culture, composed of the following tables:
- Literacy and ICT: a study between first year Primary Education students at risk of social exclusion - Miguel Ángel Gómez Ruiz, Ana María de la Calle Cabrera, Manuel Rafael de Besa Gutiérrez and Victoria Quesada Serra
- The embodiment of digital literacy practices in Primary Education - Alejandra Pacheco-Costa and Fernando Guzmán-Simón
- “Let me tell you a story”. Experiences with silent books in the framework of early literacy - Giulia de Sarlo and Elena Guichot silent books en el marco de la alfabetización temprana – Giulia de Sarlo y Elena Guichot
The International APERTURE Conference closed with a lecture by Uta Papen (University of Lancaster, UK), Revisiting the ideological model of literacy: conceptualising literacy as social and ideological practice and implications for research. It explored what it means to think about literacy as a social and ideological practice, starting from the ideological model of literacy by Brian Street (1993), which is a fundamental pillar of the New Literacy Studies and offers a critical point of view to examine what people do with literacy, both inside and outside of education. The ideological model also allows one to critically examine educational policies and teaching strategies, and what opportunities these offer to interact with different literacies.
However, the dominant view of literacy in education is that reading and writing are an autonomous set of skills or cognitive abilities. While it is known that this view is itself deeply ideological, it is necessary to recognize that the view of social practices of literacy is challenged by the tenacity and (historical) durability of the autonomous model.
The conference focused on a discussion on the challenges and opportunities for literacy research, specifically on linguistic ethnography, in a context of educational policy formulation and research funding where autonomous visions of literacy and (scientific) knowledge prevail. In this context, Professor Papen argued, it is necessary to continue producing knowledge about literacy that is emancipatory and 'democratic' and that challenges established ideas about what literacies count, in education and beyond (Rowsell et al. 2019).
Drawing on her own research, she showed how diachronic and multi-sited forms of (linguistic) ethnography (Bartlett and Vavrus 2014) allow us to capture the complexity of the interconnected and multi-layered contexts in which literacy takes place. Using a research project on multiple literacy for deaf people (Gillen et al. 2018; Papen and Tusting 2019) as an example, she illustrated the need for participatory research approaches that consider the views of students and tutors on general literacy and their existing literacy. Finally, using her research on the policy and practice of literacy in primary schools in England (Papen 2016, 2019), she argued for the need to bring discourse analysis to classroom-based ethnographies, which would allow policy challenge simplistic and media explanations of 'what works' in literacy by showing how teachers and students engage with policies and develop their own locally adapted, diverse and successful practices.
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