Kate Pahl

Literacy and Education: Understanding the New Literacy Studies in the Classroom.

Introduction Taking Account of the Local The New Literacy Studies and Teaching Literacy Where We Were and Where We Are Going Multimodal Literacies New Ways of Reading and Writing Childrens Texts go to School Bridging Local and Global Literacies Literacy and Identity Who are the Meaning-Makers? Navigating New Literacies for New Times Shaping Curriculum and Pedagogy Conclusion Literacy Today ... and Tomorrow

Ephemera, Mess and Miscellaneous Piles: Texts and Practices in Families

This article examines children’s meaning making in the home, drawing on an 18-month long ethnographic study of three low income families of 5–8 year-old boys. It is argued that children’s meaning making in the home is a complex activity shaped by family structure and family narratives.There needs to be a more rigorous theoretical framework in which to set children’s communicative practices, visual, textual and artefactual, in the home; one that both attends to the way the home is structured and the cultural resources the home draws upon. In order to make this argument material is presented from the three homes, including the words of the children’s parents. In particular, the article looks at the concept of ‘mess’ in the home and how this impacts on children’s text making.While much of children’s text making may appear ephemeral it is suggested that it deserves serious theoretical attention in order to begin to construct home-based pedagogical structures that support and credit the ever changing landscape of communication that is the home.

The (im)materiality of literacy: the significance of subjectivity to new literacies research

This article deconstructs the online and offline experience to show its complexities and idiosyncratic nature. It proposes a theoretical framework designed to conceptualise aspects of meaning-making across on- and offline contexts. In arguing for the ‘(im)materiality’ of literacy, it makes four propositions which highlight the complex and diverse relationships between the immaterial and material associated with meaning-making. Complementing existing sociocultural perspectives on literacy, the article draws attention to the significance of relationships between space, mediation, materiality and embodiment to literacy practices. This in turn emphasises the importance of the subjective in understanding how different locations, experiences and so forth inflect literacy practice. The article concludes by drawing on the Deleuzian concept of the ‘baroque’ to suggest that this focus on articulations between the material and immaterial helps us to see literacy as multiply and flexibly situated.

Multimodality and ethnography: working at the intersection

This special issue of Qualitative Research was produced in the context of a comparatively recent surge in qualitative ‘multimodal’ research. A number of scholars from diverse disciplinary and theoretical traditions have turned to multimodality in their endeavours to understand everyday communication and interaction in contemporary social life, often foregrounding certain tensions with more established research traditions, such as ethnography. In this issue, we focus on the methodological and theoretical implications of bringing multimodality and ethnography into dialogue with each other – a development that, we think, throws up some provocative issues for qualitative research methodology. These include questions about the ‘epistemological compatibility’ of different approaches, when each carries particular theoretical and methodological histories and associations, and what might be gained and lost in endeavours to bring together their respective descriptive and analytic conventions.

Timescales and ethnography: understanding a child's meaning-making across three sites, a home, a classroom and a family literacy class

This article describes a multi-sited ethnographic study of a Turkish child, Fatih, and his mother, Elif, over a period of three years. The study was a longitudinal ethnographic project that focused on childrens multimodal texts in the home. Additional research was also carried out in the classroom. This article describes the researchers developing understanding of the meanings of Fatihs texts, and considers how the use of time scales in ethnographic work can aid understandings of texts.

Texts as Artefacts Crossing Sites: Map Making at Home and School

This article compares a child’s drawings at home with a child’s drawings at school. The drawings were of maps, which had been a school topic. As part of a longitudinal study looking at children’s text making at home and at school three particular homes were focused on for eighteen months. This article looks at one home – that of a six year old Turkish boy who lives with his mother and brother. The case study illustrates how children can take something learned at school and transform it at home. The article starts with discussing the text created in the home, then compares this to texts created at school. The point is made that children can activate meaning in a different way at home than at school. While this is one case study, it suggests that transforming artefacts across sites may be something children do that often goes undocumented.

‘I don’t know what literacy is’: Uncovering hidden literacies in a community library using ecological and participatory research methodologies with children

This article describes an ecological study in Eastside, a particular area of Rotherham, a town in the north of England, UK. The purpose of the study was to collect information about literacy practices in a community setting, focusing on a library. The researchers used an ecological approach to data collection. The methodology included approaches such as a community walk around; using Flip video cameras, to record literacy practices; an audit of leaflets and literacy materials in local shops, libraries and other places; a visual log using photographs of the library and its surroundings; and fieldnotes, including observations of parent groups and craft groups, which were written up after each visit by two researchers. Following this, a regular weekly meeting called Research Rebels was set up by a group of young people aged between 6 and 13. This was a participatory project researching literacy in the community and in the library. The project was part of a longer study assessing the impact of a community literacy project in Rotherham. Analysis of the data revealed that the children’s perceptions of literacy included some practices that were less visible to adults. We argue that an understanding of space and place is critical to recognise the way in which children inhabit and use the spaces of literacy practices.

‘Living Your Life Because it’s the Only Life You’ve Got’

This article explores the processes and practices of doing participatory research with children. It explores how this process can be represented in writing. The article comes out of a project funded by Creative Partnerships UK, in which a creative agent, three artists and a researcher all worked within an elementary school in South Yorkshire, UK, for two years, to focus on the children’s Reasons to Write. It considers whether it is truly possible for children to enter the academic domain. Using a number of different voices, the article interrogates this. It particularly focuses on children’s role in analysing and selecting important bits of data. It engages with the lived realities of children as researchers. It considers ways in which children’s voices can be represented, and also acknowledges the limitations of this approach for adults who want to write academic peer reviewed articles. Ideas the adults thought were clever were found to be redundant in relation to children’s epistemologies. The article considers the process that is involved in taking children’s epistemologies seriously.

Birds, frogs, blue skies and sheep: an investigation into the cultural notion of affordance in children's meaning making

Abstract This article draws on an ethnographic research study of children’s text making in the home, as well as interviews with visual artists in South Yorkshire, to explore the idea of affordance as cultural (Kress 1997; Kress and van Leeuwen 2001). The article draws on Kress and van Leeuwen’s concept of the affordance of a mode, and argues that in the case of children’s meaning making, affordance has to be seen as being shaped by culture. This means attending to children’s cultural and physical spaces, their worlds, in order to trace back and understand meanings inside their texts. The article takes particular instances of practice and then traces back their meaning, in order to show how cultural meanings sediment into texts. The article argues that English teachers can use this lens of texts as traces of practice to make sense of the multimodal texts children produce in classrooms.

An inventory of traces: children’s photographs of their toys in three London homes

This article draws on a longitudinal ethnographic study of three London homes. It considers photographs taken by three 5-7 year old boys of collections of toys, arranged on floor spaces and bedrooms, and objects within homes. Two households were working class, and the third home middle class. Using the concept of the inventory, representations of toys and their semiotic affordances are considered. Time and space are considered with regard to the collections photographed, as well as the implications for a visual ethnography of the home in the context of the ethnography of everyday life.