On Thursday, April 22, the Permanent Seminar on Educational Innovation, Leadership and Literacy (SIELL) organized by the University of Guadalajara, Mexico, took place. Dr. Eduardo García-Jiménez and Dr. Fernando Guzmán Simón, from the LITERACIES research group (HUM 1044, University of Seville) gave a lecture entitled "Improving Multiliteracy in childhood (3-8 years): development of an inclusive model in Areas in Need of Social Transformation (MATILDA)".
The research group LITERACIES (HUM1044) aims to study literacy from a socio-material and post-humanist perspective, where the analysis of social values in different spaces of interaction is promoted. Literacy studies have deep relationships with research on identity, social change and power relations between the cultural, educational, social and digital identities that emerge with the creation of spaces through everyday interactions with people, artifacts and screens.
The background of the MATILDA project (PID2019-104557GB-I00), which stands for "Improving multimodal literacy in childhood (3-8 years): development of an inclusive model in areas with social transformation needs" is as follows:
- CÓMPLICE Project (EDU2013-44176-P): Improvement of the Linguistic Communication Competence of Early Childhood and Primary Education Students.
- APErtURA Project (EDU 2017-83967-P) Literacy as a social practice in Early Childhood and Primary Education (5-7 years): Research and intervention for children at risk of social exclusion in urban contexts.
MATILDA's theoretical framework establishes the literacy event as an intervention in the world, "A continuous process of feeling, becoming and relating" (Massumi, 2011), "Creating implies feeling" (Pahl & Rowsell, 2020). We seek to create a new literacy model that must start from the complexity and heterogeneity of literacies in our school and family environment.
MATILDA's objectives are as follows:
- Belonging: developing a sense of belonging to a heritage culture in children through the materiality of writing of both children and their families.
- Involvement: improving the involvement of families in educational processes in general, and multimodal literacy in particular.
- Community(ies): strengthening the development in various communities of children and their families through collaborative research on the materialization and affect of literacy. affect de la alfabetización.
- Literacy: development of inclusive multimodal reading and writing strategies based on dialogue between communities.
The project's methodological framework comprises the following elements: art-based research, collaborative ethnography, posthuman approach and diffractive analysis. The participants involved are:
- Children from 5 to 7 years old who reside in urban zones in need of social transformation.
- Low-income families and neighborhoods from urban zones in need of social transformation.
- Teachers from two schools located in these communities.
The research focuses on a diffractive analysis of the data and on the search for the "undoing", the emergent and non-representational intra-action of human and non-human agents.
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