Suzanne Smythe

Video Making, Production Pedagogies, and Educational Policy.

The promise of “21st century learning” is that digital technologies will transform traditional learning and mobilize skills deemed necessary in an emerging digital culture. In two case studies of video making, one in a Grade 4 classroom, and one in an adult literacy setting, the authors develop the concept of “production pedagogies” as complex multiliteracies embedded in video production oriented to meaningful social ends. Drawing upon concepts of translation in Actor Network Theory (ANT) and the “workaround,” the authors trace how in spite of the imaginary of “21st Century Literacy,” policy regimes privileged networks oriented to “minimal proficiency” print literacy. They theorize that the workarounds in which practitioners engaged illuminate three nodes or sites of action to strengthen production pedagogy networks: how learners are defined or problematized in literacy projects, how people get access to powerful digital literacy tools for learning, and how time-space regimes of traditional schooling are reconfigured.

Voices from the “Heart” Understanding a Community-Engaged Festival in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside

This study presents findings from an ethnographic case study of a community-engaged festival held annually in Downtown Vancouver. It explores how the festival functions as a small group that contributes to the establishment of local culture and place identities in order to resist engrained stereotypes. This study also examines the ephemeral space of the festival as an interactional arena where participants co-engage in the construction of community, identity, and meaning. The study expands the discussion of community festivals as socially meaningful devices for collective action, community building, and multiliterate meaning-making in urban environments.

Ten Years of Adult Literacy Policy and Practice in Canada: Literacy Policy Tensions and Workarounds

The years 2003 – 2013 marked a coming-of-age in the adult literacy field in Canada, as it reconciled the politics of international literacy surveys and their accountability regimes with the actualities of literacy work among people caught in the nets of neoliberal economics. The concepts of policy networks, powerful literacies and workarounds are used to capture how educators attempt to escape or repair the effects of standardized accountability regimes to create new networks of adult literacy practice that reflect local learning needs and interests. The nexus of this struggle suggests consequences for the work of all educators within an emerging ‘new precariat’ and downgrading of public education spaces.

The LinkVan Project: Participatory Technology Design in Vancouver

This article tells the story of “LinkVan,” a project that explores approaches to participatory technology design to forge more equitable digital and social relations in the Downtown Eastside (DTES) community of Vancouver, British Columbia. LinkVan began as a project to create a literacy-friendly online service directory for low-income and homeless citizens. We trace the experiences and patterns of digital inequality that led to the formation of the project and describe the evolving approach to technology design oriented to “the direct involvement of people in the co-design of the technologies they use” (Simonsen & Robertson, 2013 p. 2). We consider insights from 58 user experience interviews that suggest the precariousness of access, the centrality of digital literacy education in participatory technology design, and the potential of side-by-side ‘conversations at the interface’ (Attar, 2005; Barbatsis, Comacho, & Jackson, 2004) to imagine new digital landscapes and new social relations.

Adult Learning in the Control Society: Digital Era Governance, Literacies of Control, and the Work of Adult Educators:

This article reports on a study of adult literacy and learning in a public computing center where people contend with the new literacy demands of online government and other automated technologies. The study asks, (1) What literacy and learning practices are associated with digital governance? (2) What pedagogies support people to navigate digital government and automated technologies? (3) What are the broader implications of digital government for the work of adult educators? Bringing together sociomaterial theories of learning and methodologies of ethnographic case study, the study maps the literacies and pedagogies of digital government in the context of Deleuze’s society of control, arguing that digital-era governance spurs new forms of cognitive labor, new digital literacies and new pedagogies that are reshaping adult learning and the work of adult literacy educators. The article considers potential openings to “more than human” research and pedagogies that reconfigure adult literacy research and practice as sites of resistance to the control society.