Full Conference Programme 2024
Friday 14th June (The Wave)
Keynote 1
Utopian Approaches to Designing for Consequential Literacies Professor Kris Gutiérrez, University of California (Berkeley) Introduction by Dr Christina Tatham, University of Sheffield (Workroom 3).
This keynote talk focuses on utopian methodological approaches taken up by social design-based experiments, their conceptual underpinnings and commitments. The methods discussed are drawn from Gutiérrez and colleagues’ empirical work across decades and detail ways of seeing and capturing human learning activity crucial to envisioning and enacting new social futures with radical possibilities for those from historically nondominant communities. The talk elaborates a methodological commitment to seeking complexity in human learning activity, as it centres equity understood as world-making. To capture the dynamic and expansive nature of youth and intergenerational learning, a review of a range of methodological and conceptual tools employed across studies is presented—from an analytical focus on how people’s repertoires of practice are constituted through participation in everyday activity, as they move in and across the ecologies of everyday life.
Keynote 2
Dis/Re/Orientating Critical Literacies: Following the lines of imagination and affect Dr Navan Govender, University of Strathclyde: Institute of Education Introduction by Dr Aneesh Barai, University of Sheffield (Workroom 3).
What are the directions that critical literacies point us toward or away from? What happens if we turn critical literacies in different directions or toward different objects? And, what are the effects of “following the line” or treading new lines in the context of established and institutionalised traditions of English language and literacy teacher education?
In this presentation, I explore two ‘stories’ of doing critical literacies with (student) teachers. Pulling together critical literacy scholarship with Sara Ahmed's work in affect theory and queer orientations, I trace the lines of reasoning, imagining, and feeling that we draw (separately and together) – as they surface across multiple modes and literate practices.
The first story explores the discursive design and negotiation of safe, brave, and contested spaces in English language and literacy teacher education in Scotland. I try to understand the role of texts and meaning-making in fostering asset-based pedagogies and mediating multiple perspectives.
Story two is a collaborative study with Professor Belinda Mendelowitz (Wits University) which explores how teacher-postgraduate students redesign the discursive constructions of gender, race, and coloniality in South African higher education. (Auto)ethnographic data works alongside the texts that (student) teachers collect, create, and curate to illustrate the complex entanglements of critique, imaginative and multimodal redesign, and a range of affective responses.
Following these lines reveals certain limits in critical literacies, potentials for empathy as solidarity’, and (re)imagining more equitable futures in/through English language and literacy education.
Breakout Sessions 2
Poster Session
Utilising Poetry and its Metre to Teach English as a Foreign Language - Dr Victor Carreão, State University of Campinas.
Neoliberalism, Post-feminism and Digital Intimacy Education: Examining Intimate Relationship Strategies on Chinese Social Media - Shuangyunyi Chen, University of Sheffield.
Re-Imagining the Design of Graphic Symbol Communication Systems for Children who are Non-Speaking in order to Embrace Communication Difference and Reject a Deficit Based Viewpoint of Language Use - Helen Robinson, Manchester Metropolitan University.
Exploring Teachers’ Perceptions and Uses of Digital Simulation and Other Game Designs for Teaching Primary School Students in Kuwait: A Pilot Study - Abdulaziz Alrashed, University of Sheffield.
Deficit Based Language Discourse in Education Policy and Practice: The Crafting of Race and Class Injustice in East Lancashire Secondary Schools - Chiara Colombo, Edge Hill University.
Exploring Multimodality and Reggio Approach through Design-Based Research: Art Educational Workshops for Adults in Museums and Galleries - Pei Liang, University of Sheffield.
Research Literacy in a Networked, Digital Environment: An Interview with the Reference Management Software Zotero - Jingyi Zhang, University College London.
Sheffield Literacies and Language Awards and Scholarly Celebration
Sheffield Literacies and Language Student Research Prize Runners-Up: Giovanna Caetano da Silva and Lianxin (Megan) Li to present for 20 minutes on their research. Winner: Maira Klyshebekova to present for 20 minutes on her research.
Sheffield Literacies and Language Innovative Teacher Award
Clare Feeney, Teaching and Learning Lead at St Thomas More Catholic High School to present for 10 minutes on her career and teaching practice. 19.30
Keynote 3
Spoken language, social (in)justice, and the politics of ‘evidence’ in educational settings Dr Ian Cushing, Manchester Metropolitan University and Professor Julia Snell, University of Leeds Introduction by Dr Jessica Bradley, University of Sheffield (Lecture Theatre 5).
There is increasing impetus on educational practitioners in England to draw on ‘research evidence’ in their practice, especially in relation to issues of spoken language, and especially when framed under a narrative of social justice where it is (mis)assumed that racialised and working-class children can experience equality through the modification of their language.
In this keynote we take a sceptical stance on these trends and initiatives, demonstrating how current policy is informed by both flawed theories of spoken language and flawed theories of social justice. We expose the normative ideologies about language which lie at the core of England’s education system. We critique the academic knowledge production about language which informs this system. We question the theories of social justice which characterise current policy, and how these place responsibility on marginalised children to modify themselves whilst deflecting away from broader, structural determinants of oppression.
Breakout Session 1
Option 1 - Seminar Room 4
1) Resisting Retelling the Story: Young Children's Fractured Engagement with Storyworlds - Samantha Jayne Hulston, University of Cambridge.
Within Early Years literacy policy there is consistent emphasis on children intentionally making and expressing meanings about texts, often through the rational and sequential verbal recounting of stories. However, researchers associated with the affective turn have re-positioned meaning-making as embodied, unexpected and expansive. Moreover, researchers associated with reader response theory have suggested meaning-making often involves brief and unpredictable moments of intense engagement.
Drawing together and building upon such research, this paper mobilises the concepts of affect and literacy-as-event to explore young children’s engagement with the storyworlds of picture books during a playful activity, within English Reception classrooms. Based on the video observations of 16 children (aged 4 – 5), gathered over a period of five months, the paper illustrates how young children’s engagement with storyworlds was rarely purely rational and sequential. Instead, challenging policy preferences, young children’s engagement with storyworlds was fractured - through fragments, lingerings and intermittence. Underpinning these qualities of engagement were myriad planned and unexpected material and social interactions, drawing attention to the relational components of embodied engagement. These contrasting qualities of fragmentary, lingering and intermittent engagement led to generative changes in sensations and subsequent unexpected extensions in engagement, with engagement ricocheting, amplifying and crystallising through the children’s movements.
Given these findings, the paper concludes by arguing for the value in providing young children with playful opportunities for embodied engagement and staying open to unfolding and extending possibilities during such opportunities.
2) Post Study Reflections of an Early Literacy Researcher - Dilemmas and Finding Resolution in Bergson - Dr Karen Daniels, Sheffield Hallam University
Observational studies of young children’s meaning making practices during literacy activity have drawn attention to the significance of the ongoing movement of the body. The use of methodological tools such as audio and video recording have further propelled interest as micro-moments and repeated watching of footage has made close observation of bodily movements possible. Ongoing bodily movement can be seen as an affective, visceral experience, as the body moves through different states of being moment-to-moment. However, accounting for and representing ongoing movement and the affects it produces, brings with it methodological challenges.
I argue that returning to fundamental philosophical concepts, specifically, those of Bergson, may provide some resolution for the researcher attempting to account for the ephemeral and elusive feelings and sensations experienced during observational fieldwork. Such affective intensities have significance for understanding the process of literacies as these come into being. According to Bergson, perception interplays with sensation and memory, as micro-movements of bodily affects. Bergson highlights the difference between pure perception, of life in flux, and a kind of empiricism that isolates objects and events for close examination, detaching the objects under examination from the totality of the whole.
I will share two instances: ‘dilemma in the field’, and ‘dilemma at the desktop’ from my own experience and draw on Bergson’s concepts of perception and duration in to propose resolution to the tensions that can arise as we try to reconcile the affective intensities experienced during fieldwork with the empirical nature of the task at hand.
3) Extra-ordinary Literacies in Spaces of Waiting and Confinement: Newly Arrived Young People in Temporary Accommodation Settings in the West Midlands - Dr Mary-Rose Puttick, University of Wolverhampton.
In Western educational policy-making, the importance of learning through the body is largely overlooked and undervalued. Yet this absence of the body negates important aspects of in/formal schooling that occur through embodied ways of knowing: the literacies of becoming a young person in new spaces; the sensory literacies of smelling and being in new places. Through our bodies we experience both liberation and oppression: pain, joy, tiredness, exasperation, love, and energy, possibility and freedom, that is simultaneously ignored, controlled, ‘allowed’.
What then when newly arrived young people’s bodies are controlled by spatial confinement to a solitary hotel room or a single hotel room with several family members? When choices of how to fuel the growing body are taken away as well as opportunities to build community through cooking and eating together? When young people’s bodies experience exhaustion through the lethargy of waiting and the unknowing of ‘what next’?
The ‘Waiting for School’ participatory project drew on the expertise of professionals across three societal sectors, schools, local authorities, and the third sector across three cities in the West Midlands. Practitioners from a therapeutic arts organisation shared the way they worked against the body restraints of everyday formal schooling: engaging young people in ‘superheroes you can eat’, 'role plays for freedom' and 'creating movements': nourishing human and nonhuman connections and celebrating the body as ‘maps of power and identity’ through which young people are supported to navigate their extra-ordinary new worlds.
Option 2 - Workroom 3
1) Toward Methodological Scenorma - Professors Vaughn Watson & Joanne E. Marciano, Michigan State University.
We consider the interplay of the conference theme, “Towards (Extra)ordinary Literacies and Linguistic Futures,” and what we’re referring to as Past Future Presences – where presences implies approach and stance toward co-designing literacy futures with Black African immigrant and multiracial youth that intentionally historicizes individuals’ and communities’ pasts. Presences involves co-designing approaches to participatory literacy research, and stances in teacher education and practice that affirm youth’s envisionings of how literacy research, teaching, and teacher education to come may more intentionally build with heritage literacies, languages, and contexts of learning in and with communities and elders. Specifically, we draw across two ongoing qualitative, participatory inquiries with racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse youth and community educators in the U.S., and our research collaboration with teacher educators and researchers in Pretoria, South Africa.
We further gesture to an exhibition space titled “Scenorama,” in the Javett-UP Art Centre at the University of Pretoria. “Scenorama combines the words ‘panorama’ and ‘scene’ … to present a viewpoint of shared networks of experiences, belief and knowledge systems across different localities in Africa and the Diaspora”. We conceptualize Past Future Presences as “methodological scenorama,” involving five moves: Scenorama 1: “The centrality of diasporic tellings;” Scenorama 2: “Diasporic tellings grounded in African and Black feminist onto-epistemologies;” Scenorama 3: “Extending African and Black feminist onto-epistemologies to onto-axio epistemologies;” Scenorama 4: “Envisioning onto-axio epistemologies as speculative seeing;” and Scenorama 5: “Speculative seeing as research methodologies.” We discuss applications and implications for literacy research present, and to come.
2) Resisting Linguistic Injustice: Pedagogy and Practice in a Secondary School English Classroom - Clare Feeney, Teaching and Learning Lead at St Thomas More Catholic High School.
In England, deficit-based language ideologies permeate education policy. One manifestation of this is the privileging of white middle-class language as standard English and the language of the classroom, resulting in educational practice that stigmatises the speech of students from marginalised backgrounds. However, there are opportunities for teachers and students to interrogate and resist linguistic inequities.
In this paper, I outline the steps taken by a secondary school English department in the North East of England to combat linguistic injustice by embedding critical language awareness work in their Key Stage Three curriculum. I explore the anti-discriminatory pedagogy which underpins the work and the rich, critical knowledge about language that students develop in the classroom. I also illustrate how teachers position themselves as language activists through classroom approaches which affirm students’ language/s and linguistic repertoires, counter deficit views and challenge discriminatory power structures. Finally, I argue that if we want to imagine a future free from language prejudice and discrimination, where our young people can find a sense of belonging in every classroom because their authentic expression is valued, then we must advocate for language education in the English curriculum that is critical, compulsory and agentive.
3) Young Children’s Translanguaging in Multilingual Home Learning Environments: Posthuman Perspectives - Professor Rosie Flewitt, Manchester Metropolitan University & Professor Julia Gillen, Lancaster University.
In this paper, we reflect on findings from the ongoing, ESRC-funded study ‘Toddlers, Tech and Talk’, which focuses on the under-researched phenomenon of how digital technologies shape 0-36-month-old children’s early talk and literacy experiences at home in diverse minority and majority communities across the UK. We’ll briefly outline the study aims, design, and ethical commitment to respond flexibly and imaginatively to the preferences of ethnically and socio-economically diverse families. Focussing on our work with multilingual families, we’ll discuss how very young children enact rich translanguaging repertoires as they interact with distant family and friends via video and audio chat apps as part of their family’s rich media and linguistic ecology.
Our theoretical approach brings translanguaging into conversation with posthuman theorisation to consider the ecological relations between human and non-human, material actants that characterise contemporary home learning environments, and to illustrate how social media can enrich opportunities for very young children’s ‘heritage’ language learning.
Option 3 - Seminar Room 5
1) Disruptions of Learning and Students’ Evolving Relationships with Place, Technology, and School - Professor Bronwyn Williams, University of Louisville.
We live in a world of disruptions large and small, from climate breakdown, the pandemic, economic precarity, political extremism, and more. The impact of these disruptions for students, however, is in more than just perceived learning loss. Instead, such experiences often disrupt normalized practices of learning and writing and highlight for students changes in how they perceive evolving relationships to place, technology, school, and their embodied needs.
In this presentation I focus on student experiences during the pandemic to explore how the disruptions of where and how students learned revealed, and often challenged, their long-standing conventions and assumptions about their identities as students and writers. This research involved a series of interviews with more than 30 US university students, across a range of grades and disciplines, between April 2020 and February 2022 about the effects of the pandemic on their literacy and learning practices.
I discuss how I understand these student experiences of learning in terms of evolving relationships to place, technology, and school. Attending to relationships both draws on sociomaterial theories of assemblages, but also engages the roles of affect, social interactions, and rhetoric in how practices and identities of reading and writing emerge and develop. Engaging with this fluid weave of elements and forces, I discuss how, as students remade places, worked through digital media, or rethought interactions with instructors, more than their practices changed. These experiences changed how students felt and articulated their relationships with place, technology, and institutions. Understanding the effects of ongoing disruptions on such relationships offers insights into the ways that students construct their identities as writers and learners in uncertain times.
2) Finding an (Ecological) Niche in the Post digital Taskscape: The Role of Strong Literacy and Poor Pedagogy in Primary School Pupils’ Multimodal Literacy Practices - Dr Sara Hawley, University College London.
This paper uses a post digital lens to analyse two multimodal literacy interventions in an inner London primary school. It understands a post digital approach to education as one which acknowledges the imbrication of technology in our everyday life without valorising it. It unpicks what happened when students composed multimodal texts beyond the traditional literacy classroom. Both interventions were guided by ideas of ‘strong literacy’, a literacy that is multimodal, embodied and broad enough to take account of the more-than-human, and ‘poor pedagogy’, one which eschews profits, surveillance and monitoring in favour of inviting us to pay attention as we follow trails.
Using a post-phenomenological approach, it looks at the materiality of the technology in praxis in the different spaces where it was used. It uses as a heuristic Ingold’s concept of the taskscape, recently developed by various scholars as a site not of romantic bucolic human activity but as somewhere where sociomaterial practices are contested as we wrestle for resources within our immediate environment.
As students travel between these different taskscapes of home, school and the wiki, it examines how they enact the affordances around them in their transformation from apprentices to more skilled practitioners of literacy. It follows their trajectories-of-becoming when they move between these taskscapes, growing into knowledge as they weave lines of literacy across online and offline spaces. It argues that reviving Gibson’s notion of the ‘ecological niche’ allows us as educators to understand how to enable traversals between these spaces for all students.
3) “Yeah, I’d kill a pig in Minecraft – it’s just a game”: Exploring children’s curatorship in Minecraft - Stefan Kucharczyk, University of Sheffield.
This presentation will offer preliminary findings from my PhD research which seeks to re-examine the concept of curatorship in the context of young children’s engagement with the world-building video game, Minecraft. The title contains a quote from a child participant: when thinking aloud about the ways in which her real-world identity – in that particular moment, as a Muslim - were relevant to how she played Minecraft, she points to the ways in which virtual spaces can invite exploration of identity, agency and knowledge.
Research into new literacy studies and related fields has, in the last decade, shifted focus to consider children’s literacy practices in their own right. Video games such as Minecraft are increasingly recognised as an important space which can enable and engender such practices in ways that are deeply meaningful for children. They also allow them to co-construct knowledge with other players in a way markedly different than in school. Accordingly, my research seeks to highlight the importance of acknowledging children’s expert knowledge both about Minecraft and their own lives and experiences.
As young children navigate a complex post-digital world of play and learning, it is timely to foreground children’s perspectives on the things that matter to them. Particularly so, in light of the ‘catch-up’ and ‘deficit’ narratives prevalent in education policy in the aftermath of the Covid 19 pandemic.
Option 4 (Workshop) - Seminar Room 1
Exploring Futures, Flows and Intensities in Research: Beyond and Besides Language - Dr Sally Thomas, Dr Jessica Bradley, Charlotte White, University of Sheffield and Dr Lottie Hoare, University of Cambridge.
This interactive arts-based workshop invites you to participate in thinking about futures, including how we might question and push back against the centrality of language in our ways of communicating, knowing and being in and through research. Arts-based orientations to research seek to destabilise accepted ways of knowing, unsettling established knowledge hierarchies and making space for alternative readings and re-readings. They also destabilise language, aligning with what Maggie MacLure has described in terms of the ‘witch’, who ‘does not seek to understand, but to transform from within, by sensing and redirecting the flows and intensities of that which is coming into existence’.
Our workshop draws on creative methods and approaches which stem from across three current research projects in the School of Education at The University of Sheffield. The first is an ongoing doctoral project which engages with young people’s feelings about the future. In this work, doctoral researcher and art therapist Sally Thomas has drawn on diverse creative methods, including collage, drawing and model making, to explore young people’s hopes and fears. The second is an earlier stage doctoral project in which Charlotte White’s work considers how Autistic girls and women experience education. Charlotte has experimented with creative documentation of research processes, relationships and literature, in addition to creative methods for generating data. In the third example, Jessica Bradley has drawn on creative methods, including drawing, ceramics and painting, in an ethnographic study of creative journaling for mothers and birthing parents. Across all three projects, shared questions are arising including how we account for our own embodied experiences when undertaking research in diverse contexts, and how we might bring these experiences to the surface using creative methods. In particular, a theme that has arisen across our conversations and engagements with theories and emerging data relates to space and our movements through and negotiations of space.
We invite participants to pause a moment and participate in this exploratory arts-based research workshop. We won’t ‘seek to understand’, instead we will reflect on embodied experiences, ‘flows and intensities’, and how we bring these to our ways of knowing, beyond understanding. We will start with a map of a particular location which has meaning to you and your research, and build on it to examine how what is often unsaid and unsayable in research can be brought to the fore through creative methods. The workshop is led by postgraduate researchers Sally and Charlotte, supported by Dr Jessica Bradley, and we are delighted to be joined by arts-based researcher and practitioner and historian of education Dr Lottie Hoare who will offer us her insights as a discussant.
Materials will be provided but we ask all those participating to bring some kind of map (paper or digital) which you are happy to use as the starting point for a creative artwork (i.e. that you don’t mind drawing and painting on, or even cutting up into pieces!). We will also provide place-based maps as needed so don’t worry if you forget yours or don’t have one to hand.
Breakout Session 2 (Friday 14th 15.00 - 16.30)
Option 1 - Seminar Room 4
1) The ‘One Curriculum – Many Textbooks’ Policy: How Ready have English Teachers been to Implement this Reform? - Nguyễn Thị Mai Hươn, University of Languages and International Studies, Vietnam National University.
A recent breakthrough in the innovation of instructional materials in the Vietnamese education system resulted in the ‘one curriculum – many textbooks’ policy, which aims to gradually encourage teaching and learning in schools without textbooks, thereby unleashing the creativity of teachers and learners in teaching and learning.
In order to assess how ready English teachers have been to implement this policy, a case study was conducted to examine how a group of high school English teachers in a school in a Northern province of Vietnam demonstrate second language acquisition knowledge in using and designing their instructional materials. The data collected from in-depth interviews, samples of materials design and a reflective task show that their material creation is heavily test oriented and mechanical. The use of instructional materials, including the use of textbooks, therefore, does not support language skills development or foster learner creativity. These teachers, however, demonstrate high adaptability to coping with two different types of student assessment.
This paper argues that the role of the academic managers at the provincial level is very important as they are able to allow more teacher autonomy and place less emphasis on the grades of students when appraising teachers. This would create more space to cultivate creativity for both the teachers themselves and their students in the classroom.
2) Understanding Australian Students' Motivation for Language Learning: Challenges and Hope for the Future - Louisa Field, The University of Sydney.
Participation in language courses in Australian schools and universities are at record lows across the nation. While there is an abundance of numerical data documenting the decline, there is a shortage of studies examining individuals’ motivations for studying a language. This mixed-methods study examines the choices made by Australian high school and university students to learn a language at elective levels and the influences which motivated this choice. By surveying 700 high school and university students, conducting focus groups with 5 groups of university language students, and conducting 3 narrative interviews with university undergraduate language students, this study investigates the complex motivations which impact students’ choice to study languages. This approach allows an examination of student motivation as a multifaceted and dynamic system, accounting for variation in different contexts and as developing over time.
Preliminary findings reveal the importance of students’ personal identification with a language and the vital importance of students’ perceived value of languages in Australian schools and in wider society. Meanwhile, commonly cited justifications for language study such as career opportunities and financial gain has been shown to have negligible impact on student motivation, despite being a commonly used promotional tool for languages education in Australia. Understanding the motivational dimension of the choice to study a language offers powerful tools to combat key issues and allows both participation and outcomes to be improved. This study, with its novel approach, will provide vital information to schools, institutions and policy makers about the influences motivating students’ choices to study a language.
3) Understanding the Role of Reflection in Influencing the Development of Ideal Multilingual Selves - Dr Tianyi Wang, University of Sheffield.
This study conducted a longitudinal qualitative investigation into how reflections at different cognitive levels influenced the development of ideal multilingual selves (i.e. language learners’ aspirations of being multilingual in the future) in the context of learning languages other than English (LOTE). This study responded to the call within the field of language learning motivation to pivot from emphasising the instrumentality of language learning to recognising the role of multilingualism in enhancing individuals’ holistic linguistic competence. Five rounds of interviews and two rounds of written journals were collected from nine Chinese learners of German over 28 months.
Findings suggested that the majority of participants reflected on their cross-linguistic experiences at lower cognitive levels (guided or incidental reflections). Such reflections, although enhancing their emotional attachment to a multilingual future, did not contribute to maintaining this vision in the long term or integrating it into learners’ overall sense of selves. In comparison, learners who continued to strengthen their ideal multilingual selves tended to demonstrate higher levels of reflections on cross-linguistic interactions (e.g. deeper retrospective or prospective reflections). Interestingly, learners who had higher levels of reflections were likely to hold a more holistic view of languages and activate more languages, especially their first languages, during the reflective process. This seemed to be because the activation of languages that participants had better knowledge of contributed to encouraging deeper reflection on multilinguistic and multicultural issues. Pedagogical implications pointed to the importance of encouraging high-level reflections on cross-linguistic interactions in language classes.
Option 2 - Workroom 3
1) Teaching in Strange Times: Rethinking Possible Futures in the Pandemicine - Professors Linda Laidlaw & Suzanna Wong, University of Alberta.
In the province of Alberta during a time when teachers have experienced pandemic related challenges, the conservative United Conservative Party (UCP) government chose to implement a regressive ‘back to basics’ curriculum that—instead of looking ahead— mirrored shifts seen in conservative American states, and included retrogressive policies against trans students and sex education, among other moves. The context of teaching and learning for literacy educators has shifted, as well. While the “new” curriculum has been widely viewed as problematic across curriculum areas, it presents additional challenges for teachers working in the area of language arts education, where areas of critical literacy, comprehension, digital literacy and writing have been overshadowed by approaches informed by ‘Science of Reading’ and ‘structured literacy’. Literacy teachers have also experienced a narrowly defined focus on ‘learning loss’ that has added new burdens of testing and reduced time for classroom instruction and student learning. Other areas where pandemic learning created enduring impacts (e.g. social interaction and language) have reduced opportunities.
Using the notion of the pandemicene and post-human theories, our paper will share findings from a qualitative study of teachers primarily located in Western Canada who participated in surveys and interviews examining their experience of teaching from March 2020 to Winter 2024. We share teacher perspectives, concerns, unexpected learnings and insights in connection to their experiences of teaching in ‘strange times’ with a new curriculum that presented conflicts with teacher practices, knowledge and beliefs. Finally, we conclude by analysing the impacts of political pressures on literacy curriculum.
2) Teachers’ Professional Identity Construction: Exploring Dialogic Experiences, Spaces, and Possibilities - Laurel Smith, Sheffield Hallam University.
Dialogue and spoken language have long been recognised as central to thinking and learning, and as the foundation for reading and writing. Although much is understood about how dialogic approaches within the classroom can support this, it remains a complex area, resistant to fundamental shifts in teaching practice. Whilst research predominantly focuses on classroom dialogue as a pedagogical approach, attitudes and beliefs are understood to be highly influential in the development of dialogic teaching practices. Yet, little is known about how teachers’ own educational experiences and personal and professional dialogic experiences shape these.
This presentation draws on a doctoral study which seeks to address this significant gap within research and recognises that the challenges of realising the benefits of a dialogic approach may be inherently bound up in questions of identity. It resists a narrow pedagogic focus, disrupting an understanding of dialogue as pedagogy and repositioning this to one of dialogue as identity. A creative methodological approach is taken to explore how student teachers’ dialogic experiences and identities influence their navigation of dialogic spaces and possibilities within their teaching practices and professional roles. Initial findings suggest this is a complex and dynamic ongoing journey, where dialogue shapes and is shaped by teachers’ conceptions of self. Reflecting the need for broader conceptualisations of dialogic practices, it offers rich, new perspectives which may move us beyond the limits of our “inherited educational culture”.
3) The lore and language of schoolchildren in post-war Britain: The role of teachers in the research of Iona and Peter Opie - Dr Julia Bishop, University of Sheffield.
Iona and Peter Opie were folklorists who undertook a national survey of children's oral culture and games in Britain during the third quarter of the 20th century. Collecting from children themselves, their now-classic books shone a light on the lore, language and multimodal literacies of children’s lives and cultural worlds.
The relatively recent availability of the Opies’ archival collection is now allowing us to formulate more detailed and critical understandings of the Opies’ methods. Working at a time before domestic availability of sound and moving image recording technologies, and on a national scale, the Opies used written methods operationalised through a network of teachers in primary and secondary schools to gather their data.
Drawing primarily on the correspondence between the teachers and the Opies contained in the archive, this paper will present what we have discovered so far about the hitherto little-known role of the teachers in the Opies’ research. It will consider the educational context of the time and way that the ‘beyond standard’ language and literacies sought by the Opies had the potential to disrupt contemporary pedagogical norms and curricula. How did the teachers orchestrate the collecting process, what were their own motivations for taking part, and how might these things have impacted on the nature of the data collected and who it was collected from, and so the Opies’ published findings?
Option 3 - Seminar Room 5
1) Transgressing Boundaries: Semiotic Creativity and Cross-platform Tongren (Dojinjiu) Practices in the Chinese Context - Dr Sumin Zhao, University of Edinburgh.
Dojinjiu is a subculture practice that originated in Japan, wherein amateur and professional artists create and self-publish fiction and manga art based on characters from popular works. Over the last two decades, Doujin culture has spread in China, initially through subcultural online forums, and more recently on mainstream social media sites. In the Chinese context, this practice is known as Tongren (同人). Focusing on an exclusively women’s Tongren community centred around characters from 'Slam Dunk' by Takehiko Inoue (a top-selling Japanese sports manga), this paper aims to investigate Tongren practices across various local platforms (e.g., WeChat, Weibo, Little Red Book, and Lofter) and global online forums and social media sites (e.g., Twitter and Archives of Our Own).
By integrating translanguaging and multimodality perspectives, I aim to theorize the interplay between semiotic creativity and digital technologies. I employ a discourse-centred digital ethnography and a framework for analysing semiotic technologies, zooming in on how the technological affordances of various social media platforms facilitate and constrain Tongren practices. Specifically, the analysis explores two dimensions of semiotic creativity. Firstly, it looks at the innovative ways in which content creators break semiotic "rules" in their blending of different languages and visual modalities in Tongren semiotic artefacts, such as illustrations, comic strips, video clips, and manga fanfictions. Secondly, it examines how Tongren creators transcend the boundaries of material and digital spaces, creating a cross-platform movement of semiotic artefacts and communities. Through this analysis, the paper aims to demonstrate how women engage with digital spaces creatively to challenge conventions of genres, mainstream social media practices, and normative discourses about gender and sexuality.
2) Virtually Disrupting Ethnographic Practices in Critical Visual Literacies Research: Bracketing Child-iPad-Researcher Assemblages - Dr Diane Collier, Brock University.
This presentation will tell a story about connecting across digitized spaces and a counter story of sorts about the disconnect that is associated with virtual online connections. It is also an accidental experiment in shifting thinking about literacies and about researcher/participant, adult/child relations.
During online research with children and an educator in Eastern Canada, we were all challenged to find effective ways to communicate. Children were writing, taking, and editing photos, and creating and sharing a range of multimodal texts. I joined their primary class through my laptop and children took care of me while I connected online with their class via an iPad. We started to refer to this practice of children taking responsibility for me in an iPad ‘babysitting’. This assemblage involved a bracketing of the space between child babysitters and the iPad across the fibre-optic cables to and from network towers to my router and my laptop connected to Wi-Fi in my office at home.. Agency and voice are seen as part of the assemblage, rather than belonging to children, devices, or to me.
The unfolding research created a literacy-in-relation–relational research and relational pedagogies –that can elevate or make more visible the roles and impact or affective relations of literacy practices and literacy learning. The presentation will also include a discussion of the uses of and beliefs about iPads in classrooms, popular discourses about digital literacies, and literacies futures, and the potential for a relational framing of online/video research.
3) Co-producing Digital Educational: Secondary school student storytelling on Utopian and Dystopian futures - Drs Katherine Easton & Richy Cook, University of Sheffield.
In 2022, 18% of children aged 7 to 16 in the United Kingdom are likely to have a mental health issue, with many reporting challenges such as sleep problems, loneliness, low mood, and social media-related issues. The onset of over half of all lifetime mental health problems occurs by age 14. Moreover, numerous young individuals state that their mental well-being worsens due to school factors, coinciding with the increasing digitisation of education.
This presentation discusses the co-creation of personal, social, health, and economic (PSHE) educational materials aimed at enhancing critical thinking, digital literacy, school engagement, and digital empowerment among secondary school students. Initially, the research aimed to gather insights into young people's visions for future education in a technologically integrated school system. Through collaborative storytelling workshops involving 48 students from years 7 to 9, the study captured their utopian and dystopian perspectives on a digitally enhanced school environment.
Students expressed desires for technology to track progress continuously, streamline lunchtime activities, and improve access to learning resources. They also emphasised the importance of privacy, distrust towards AI programming, and the need for autonomy in learning. Using storytelling as a method provided a safe space for discussing current concerns, with outputs relevant to young people, educators, technology professionals, and policymakers in the education sector.
Option 4 (Workshop) - Seminar Room 1
The pedagogical potential of craft: An invitation to explore how we encounter and form meaningful dialogues between; self, world and others - Matthew Briggs, Ruskin Mill Centre for Practice.
Through engagement with story and material we will explore the literacies and sensory modalities that enable us to make meaning, and become more at home in our bodies, the world and communities.
Breakout Session 3 (Saturday 15th 11 - 12.30)
Option 1 - G05 (Workroom 2)
1) Undoing Normativity: Narratives of Neurodivergence from the Global South - Dr Vishnu KK Nair, University of Reading.
This paper will discuss the intersection of neurodivergence and communication from a global southern perspective. Current models of language and communication utilised in fields such as applied linguistics and speech and language therapy view disabled ways of communication as lacking competence. Global Northern notions of communicative norms are deeply tied to ability which is linked to standardisation of vocabulary, grammar, and discourse. Whilst recent research on neurodiversity have critiqued abled notions of communication, they are still rooted in power imbalances where knowledge production from global north is privileged over global south. There is a universalising tendency of imposing global northern ideologies to global south similar to what Meekosha (2011) has argued as “one-way transfer of knowledge from North to the South” in the context of disability studies.
Through an ethnographic study with an autistic child and his family from the Southern Indian state of Kerala, this talk critiques the universalising notions of neurodivergence and communication. This paper argues that the embodied meaning making of the child is deeply entangled with global southern notions of community, care work and relational ethics. It will further extend the scope by comparing southern epistemologies and more than human treatment of neurodivergence and communication and discuss their convergence and divergence from different geographical ecologies. Thus, this paper supports recent calls to decolonise applied linguistics and communication disability as well as celebrate plurality of knowledge as crucial for expansive views of communication.
2) Spinning and Stimming: Exploring Intergenerational Neurodivergent Literacies Using Arts Based Methodologies - Dr Chris Bailey, Sheffield Hallam University.
This presentation addresses the topic of intergenerational literacies and the development of creative methods to explore communication dynamics within this context. Embracing a neurodiversity paradigm lens, the presentation draws upon the concept of neurodivergent literacies to highlight the multifaceted nature of communication beyond traditional linguistic frameworks. With a focus on non-linguistic communication, multimodality, materiality, and affect, this study showcases how arts-based methods can enrich our understanding of neurodivergent communication and meaning-making processes.
A central feature of the work is a researcher-created zoetrope, initially conceived as a creative tool to further explore an aspect of my own autistic experience. I will explain how this soon evolved into a catalyst for examining the intricate interactions between me and my youngest daughter. By highlighting the (extra)ordinary moments present in everyday life, this presentation sheds light on the complexities inherent in intergenerational neurodivergent communication, challenging the prevailing emphasis on language within educational settings.
Moreover, I reflect on the ethical considerations involved in researching personal and familial experiences, emphasising the need for nuance and sensitivity, whilst highlighting the invaluable insights gleaned from such endeavours. This presentation not only unveils the intricacies of intergenerational neurodivergent literacies but also underscores the transformative potential of creative methodologies in elucidating these dynamics and sets the stage for future avenues in literacies research.
3) Speaking in Scraps: Using Collage and Creative Methods to Disseminate Educational Research - Meg Wellington-Barratt, University of Sheffield.
This paper draws on an ethnographic research study that employs assemblage theory and thematic analysis in order to explore the impact of teacher identity, pedagogy and curriculum in British secondary and post 16 photography education. My role within the study is multi-faceted as a teacher, researcher and collage artist. Using an a/r/tography approach, I am able to utilise the collective skills from these roles in order to explore the assemblage that exists within the photography classroom and wider institutional environment. This paper will demonstrate the relationships between conventional research methods such as interviews, observations and photographs, and how these methods can be presented and interrogated through the use of collage, a method that De Rijke argues, ‘can accommodate that flux [of qualitative research], [and be] resistant to the passive cultural politics of neoliberalism’ . The presentation itself will also be in the form of collage to represent the ability of arts methods when presenting or communicating research.
Option 2 - A08 (Lecture Theatre 5)
1) Sociotechnical Imaginaries, Generative AIs and More Than Human Authorship - Professor Lesley Gourlay, University College London.
In recent years, developments in Artificial Intelligence have produced Large Language Models (LLMs) leading to a form of generative AIs (GAIs). This development has profound implications for human entanglements with technologies in terms of how these AIs might constitute new forms of subjectivities, texts, and literacy practices. This development has particular significance for higher education in terms of academic writing, assessment, and research. In terms of higher education, specific concerns have been raised about the implications for assessment, study practices, and the status of knowledge and learning in the context of these ‘writing machines’.
This paper reviews the current state of the art in related bodies of research literature and proposes the field could benefit from a wider variety of critical and theoretical perspectives. Drawing on the concept of the sociotechnical imaginary from science and technology studies, it considers how discourses and practices surrounding GAIs are evolving in society and education. It then considers the effects of authorship and the writing subject, with reference to the concept of more-than-human authorship. It then draws on recent work in the philosophy of technology, proposing Husserl’s outer and inner ‘horizons’ as a potential framework with which to consider the complex entanglements of human and nonhuman agency, as enrolled in more-than-human authorship and entangled with the presence of GAIs in the ‘lifeworld’ of contemporary higher education. It concludes by proposing future directions for work in this area, in order to gain better theoretical purchase on the phenomenon at the various levels set out above.
2) Evaluating the Influence of Generative AI Misuse on the Shaping of Student Academic Writing - Mary Cheng, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
The popularity of employing Generative AI (GenAI) has provided new writing assistance tools but also risk of misapplication. On the one hand, integrating the use of GenAI in the writing process is considered to enhance students’ language use, alleviate their research process and assist in clarifying their ideas. On the other hand, this new tool could create plagiarised or outsourced assignments. Current research on AI policy, safety issues, fairness and ethnicity have received more attention than how AI might shape students’ writing. This study seeks to analyse potential effects of GenAI misuse on students’ academic essays.
Samples of student academic essays flagged for GenAI integration were collected from a university in Hong Kong. Based on the linguistic, structural and referencing criteria, with reference to Hyland’s (2018) notions, this study analyses atypical writing patterns indicative of heavy GenAI influence. Preliminary analysis of these AI generated scripts showed repetitive sentence structures, intensive use of transitional markers, formulaic colloquial referencing structures, and lacking authorial voice and critical reasoning.
This presentation seeks to open discussion on identifying potential skills or understanding gaps, and explore appropriate GenAI pedagogical integration. With growing GenAI accessibility, how this new media could shape students' writing is important to be investigated in higher education.
3) Enhancing ESL Writing Skills Through Generative AI Tools: A Study on Students' Perceptions and Performance - Visanna Pui-ling LEE, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
This presentation will share whether the use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools can enhance the English writing performance of three groups of third-year Engineering students who are learning English as a Second Language (ESL). Utilizing a questionnaire survey, the research explored the students' perceptions of their English writing skills before and after adopting generative AI tools. The majority initially reported their writing skills as average to poor, with grammar being the primary challenge. After implementing AI tools, a significant portion of the students observed improvements in their writing qualities, with notable improvements in grammar confidence and vocabulary use. However, some students expressed concerns about an over-reliance on the technology and its potential impact on the editing process. Despite these concerns, more than half of the participants believed that AI tools had a positive effect on their grades and writing processes, while just under half reported that their grades either remained the same or deteriorated. This indicates a need for further investigation into the relationship between the use of AI tools and traditional ESL learning methods.
Option 3 - 205 (Workroom 3)
1) The Emergence of Emirati Pidgin Arabic: Investigating Social Interactions and Needs in Gulf Countries - Drs Mohamed Abelsalam Osman Mohamed Ahmed & Asma Alotaiby, Sudan University of Science and Technology.
In the diverse linguistic landscape of Gulf countries, Emirati Pidgin Arabic (EPA) has emerged as a unique blend, drawing from Arabic dialects, English, and diverse linguistic elements. Investigating EPA offers insight into the dynamic adaptability of language and its pivotal role in facilitating cohesion within the diverse cultural makeup of the Gulf region. This study aims to investigate the power of social interactions between immigrant minorities and hosting communities in generating pidgin in Gulf countries, specifically in the United Arab Emirates. And how both the survival needs of expatriates and the communication needs of the hosting community played a fundamental role in pidgin’s emergence. The study uses the descriptive-analytical method and a questionnaire with 67 participants. Results show that Emiratis are not inclined to speak EPA at home and rarely use EPA-related sentences. Asian expatriates' interaction needs to play a crucial role in Pidgin's development.
2) Anglicisms in Omani Arabic: A study on the causes, uses and perceptions of English loan words - Professor Ali Algryani & Dr Syerina Syahrin, Dhofar University.
The prestige and power of English in education, business, entertainment, culture and politics across the globe today has contributed to the existence and spread of anglicisms in world languages. The use of anglicisms (English loanwords) is a global phenomenon that has an impact not only on international communication exchanges but also on people’s native languages. Modern varieties of Arabic including Omani Arabic are not an exception to this growing trend.
The current study is an attempt to investigate the use of anglicisms in Omani Arabic. The prime aim is to find out the reasons why young Omanis use anglicisms in their day-to-day interactions and what attitude they have towards these loan lexical items. The data used in this research was obtained via focus group discussions. Seventy undergraduate students at Dhofar University participated in the study.
The findings show an increasing use of anglicisms by the young generation in both face-to-face and virtual everyday communication. The study also reveals that this rising trend can be attributed to various factors including a) the overwhelming prestige of English and Anglo-American culture, b) influence of technology, e.g. social media platforms, c) internationalization of education, d) lexical voids in the native language, and e) preciseness and conciseness of loanwords. Finally, the fact that anglicisms are associated with a variety of connotations such as education, modernity, wealth and power seems to motivate the younger generation to accept and continue to use anglicisms in day-to-day interactions.
3) A Discourse-Ethnography of the Cost of Living Crisis: Mediating Care and Austerity in Post-Industrial Semi-Rural England - Dr Tony Capstick, University of Reading.
This paper is a study of the caring practices that working class families engage in when they act as language brokers and literacy mediators for family members who are negotiating social care systems in the UK. It draws on data collected in the course of the multi-sited interdisciplinary project Transnational Families in Europe: Care, Inequalities and Wellbeing, but has a focus on a predominantly ‘settled’ working class family in the north of England. The paper draws from an (auto)ethnography of the author’s engagement with family members, health and social care providers and government institutions as well as charities and agencies tasked with helping low-income families navigate cost of living crises.
The study illuminates the ways that families negotiate their caring commitments and how these negotiations are textually mediated when institutional discursive control prevents those who are outside the institution from accessing “powerful” languages, registers, genres, discourses and literacies. Data were collected in Darwen, Lancashire, where life expectancy is well below the average for England and health inequalities are targeted by government. The post-humanist and new materialist philosophies drawn on in the paper reveal how spatialised feelings of belonging and alienation are part of mediating caring relations. Findings reveal how studying the affects generated by space and the non-human environment as part of these caring relations enables us to see how caring includes the mediation of a politics of home in addition to the politics of austerity.
Option 4 (Workshop) - G04 (Workroom 1)
Exploring Language and Literacies in our Identities: A Visual Mapping Approach - Laurel Smith, Sheffield Hallam University.
Language is about communicating with others and the world around us. It is the way in which we are able to articulate and share our thoughts and meanings, and the way in which we understand others. Through our lives, we learn to be skilled manipulators of language, using and adapting language in different contexts, times, and places, and for different purposes. But it is more than just simply communicating. As an inherently social practice, our language learning is also entwined with our connections and relationships with others and our identities, our sense of self. Language is imbued with feelings, emotions, beliefs, values; it both reflects and shapes who we are as an individual living and interacting within our communities and wider societies.
In this workshop you are invited to reflect on your own language histories and experiences, home languages and dialects, and the ways in which these change over time and in different contexts. During the workshop you will engage in creating a visual map, inspired by Swaaij and Klare’s ‘The Atlas of Experience’, to explore how language and literacies have shaped and influenced your identity. A short reflective autobiographical writing activity is the stimulus for the map-making and to begin to consider our sense of self as framed by both the past and the present, and entwined with our relationships with others. The workshop concludes with an opportunity to share your map within the group, and to explore the connections and complexities inherent within these landscapes.
Breakout Session 4 (Saturday 15th 13.30 - 15.00)
Option 1 - G05 (Workroom 2)
1) Environmental Literacies for Regenerative and Sustainable Futures - Sundas Mahar, University of Glasgow.
As a doctoral student interested in pluriversal literacies, my research project focuses on indigenous and traditional environmental literacies and their implication for regeneration and sustainability in contemporary contexts. The environmental crisis makes it clear that we cannot hope to regenerate and sustain the environment, non-human species, and ourselves without first reviving and developing deep relationships with the earth. In my study, I explore how indigenous and traditional environmental literacies from traditions and geographical locations around our shared planet can help us reflect on developing these deep relationships.
With the intention of decolonising the way we perceive ourselves and the natural world, I do this by using research workshops as my primary tool for data generation, where participants engage with these literacies and are facilitated to respond through multiple modalities that aim to revive, apply and celebrate said literacies. The study was designed using a pluriversal theoretical framework intertwining Arne Naess’ deep ecology, ecopedagogy as it has developed from Paulo Freire’s work, and Islamic environmentalisms bridging Eastern and Western thought. The research workshops for my study took place with students at the University of Glasgow, with community members at the Woodlands Community Development Trust in Glasgow, and with academics and colleagues from the Sustainable Futures Global network during a symposium in Malawi. A range of participatory methods were used including but not limited to sharing circles, embodied expressions, reflective discussions, art-based inquiry.
The presentation will focus on a brief overview of the project and the fieldwork, and the initial findings from the study.
2) Cultivating Extra-Ordinary Literacies: Towards Collaborative Utopian Dialogues for Cultural Innovation - Matthew Briggs, Ruskin Mill Centre for Practice.
This talk will present the process and outcomes of an intercultural ERASMUS+ project in ecological entrepreneurship, spanning more than three years of collaborative workshops, excursions and research, between six transdisciplinary institutions in and from; Norway, Iceland, England and Wales (spanning Universities, Colleges, Schools, Regional parks and Environmental consultants). Responding to social, educational and ecological crisis, the project aimed to attend to the ‘…need to develop a more relational language-with concepts, words that recognises individual values and connect us to other people, to nature and to the ethical core of oneself.’
The talk will focus on the process of how the project endeavoured to seek and employ extra-ordinary literacies and modalities to form and inform dialogues, collaborations and synergies between; place, people, education, cultures, economy and ecology, in order to promote and stimulate ‘Cultural Innovation through Ecopreneurship’. ‘Ecopreneurship’ is to foster the capacity of people to imagine positive change in society, and to act on behalf of the future we want to see’.
It will present on the multiple modalities and literacies that were explored and engaged (for example; story, craft, song, music, text, artefacts, maps and digital tools and media), within the projects and endeavour to encounter, research and make meaning, within the liminal space between place and people. Thereby, attending to critically question the centrality of language in ‘communicating, knowing and being’.
3) Our World, Our Futures: Exploring Justice-Oriented Environmental Education through Multimodal Intercultural Communication - Dr Claire Lee, Oxford Brookes University and Dr Aminath Shiyama, The Maldives National University.
It is argued that the central question for education today is how humans can live in a way that respects our shared existence with the more-than-human world.
In this talk, the presenters will share insights from the ‘Our World, Our Futures’ project, a recent small-scale, intercultural project that explored what transformative environmental and global citizenship education might look like in primary schools across two contexts, England and the Maldives. Teachers and researchers in the two countries co-developed dialogic classroom projects in which, through multimodal literacies, children shared their knowledges and feelings about their local environments, present and future. By enabling children to connect with peers living in very different environments and cultures, and by valuing their diverse knowledges and ways of making meaning with and beyond language, we hoped to offer an alternative to decontextualised, outcomes-driven, language-centred pedagogies.
In this talk we discuss the playful ways in which the children used model-making, digital and non-digital design and talk to explore and articulate their knowledges, highlight injustices, and imagine futures. The children learned about one another’s environments and lives, and global interconnectedness, and gained fresh insights into the uniqueness of their own local ecosystems. Teachers described the project as deeply engaging, transforming both their own praxis and the children’s sense of self as global citizens. The project offers an alternative approach to environmental education for an uncertain future, one that is hopeful and that promotes both environmental and epistemic justice.
Option 2 - 205 (Workroom 3)
1) Play as a Third Space in Superdiverse ECEC Contexts - Dr Christina Tatham, University of Sheffield.
Contemporary migration flows have led to an increase in superdiverse communities that are characterised by the dynamic interplay of multiple variables leading to intense social complexity. Superdiversity is predicted to become ever more prevalent in the future, yet paradoxically, educational institutions are moving in the opposite direction, employing a raft of standardisation mechanisms that are aimed at reducing complexity. Standardisation seeks to suppress individuality in favour of uniformity, privileging dominant discourses while marginalising knowledge and practices that fall beyond these narrow, artificially constructed boundaries. An increasingly superdiverse world calls for an alternative view of education that supports children to make sense of disparate, sometimes competing, discourses, and to value their own and others’ multidimensional repertoires of practice.
Situated against this backdrop, this paper offers Third Space Theory as an alternative module of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) that embraces the complexity of multiple, divergent discourses and repertoires. Third Space theory has been applied to educational contexts for over two decades, attracting support and critiques. This paper argues that the combination of play and Third Space Theory offers a weighty counterpoint to the discourses of standardisation.
This paper adopts Rogoff’s three planes of analysis to extend common conceptualisations of third space, exploring how third space creation is shaped by children; by interactions between children; and by cultural-institutional contexts. The paper will use vignettes from a yearlong study with children (aged 4-6) in a superdiverse setting to demonstrate how play catalyses the creation of a transformative third space.
2) Third Space Revisited: Exploring the Affordances of Artist and Researcher Representations of Children's Games - Professor John Potter, University College London.
This presentation explores media arts-based practices and researchers’ participatory ‘focused ethnographies’ to consider how they can, in different ways, pay attention to the ‘laminates of experience’ evident in children’s play practices. Such a focused ‘education of attention’ can, in turn, challenge traditional literacy hierarchies and enable readings of children’s creative play practices distributed across global cultures and through time.
It draws on the work of the artist Francis Alÿs, who has filmed children’s games around the world as part of his practice, and on research projects at UCL and Sheffield which have adopted an ‘Opie positionality’ in relation to children’s play and games, locating children’s own accounts of their play at the heart of the project. This has enabled different readings to emerge, centred on children’s creative adaptations of established playground rituals, and their play in the spaces of school, home and more.
This presentation focuses on the use of space and location in the artist’s films and in-gallery installations, illustrating how lenses offered by both researchers and artist-practitioners may or may not enable different forms of ‘third space’ to emerge and be identified in the children’s play practices. Post digital, socio-material, and new literacy readings are invoked alongside concepts drawn from social anthropology such as ‘lines of flight’ and ‘wayfaring’ to demonstrate how children play with the material and spatial resources to hand in ways which, far from being simply ephemeral, are freighted with cultural value.
3) Reading Spaces In Between: Conceptualizing a Model of Post-Spatial Literacies - Dr Stacey Bliss, University of Regina and Mount Royal University.
Exploring beyond the centrality of language, I present possibilities for a post-spatial model of literacies. This model highlights what is often indescribable and invisible – our human interdependence and interconnection and the reading of spaces in between. The rationale for conceptualizing a new model of literacies is twofold: a) to work beyond models of literacies that Street (1984) conceptualized as autonomous and ideological and add ‘integral’ literacies, contributing to the scholarship of what it entails to be multiliterate, and b) to enhance discourse around the necessity for literacies that serve as tools or skills of interconnectivity in (hyper) liquid modern times.
The paper begins by recasting newer literacies - such as emotional literacy, mindfulness as literacy, Earth literacy, racial literacy, and what I term ‘resonant literacy’ - as part of the post-spatial model. Next, I share vignettes from an ethnographic study of meditators who invoke Gurmukhi mantra and foundational and social themes from two SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada) studies. The themes gesture to somatic and subtle literacies that increase our awareness of self, others, and the Earth.
The paper concludes with hopeful (or extraordinary) possibility of expanding the boundaries of what literacies entails – in particular, a post-spatial model of literacies as a framework to work beyond social futures toward designing newly interconnected futures together. After the paper presentation, I am hoping the group has a robust and candid discussion about the viability (or not) of this model.
Option 3 (Colloquium) - A08 (Lecture Theatre 5)
Children’s and Families’ language as ‘more-than’: Insights and implications for literacy learning drawn from multiple theoretical framings of early childhood language
Speakers: Professor Abi Hackett, Drs Ester Ehiyazaryan-White, Hugh Escott, Karen Grainger & Karen Daniels, Sheffield Hallam University and Dr David Ben Shannon, Manchester Metropolitan University Discussant: Dr Vishnu Nair, University of Reading.
The nature of language and its centrality as a human phenomenon have been the subject of debate in different cultural traditions over millenia. The ways in which language is conceptualised and understood is implicated within literate conceptions and associated pedagogical methods to support language and literacy learning and may serve as an effacement of the experiences and qualities of live linguistic interaction. In this colloquium, we draw on our own empirical studies conducted in early childhood spaces to examine alternative ways of understanding language and language development from multiple theoretical and disciplinary perspectives.
In particular, our work offers imaginaries of young children’s and families’ languaging as extraordinary, starting with what might be considered ordinary – everyday life in communities and classrooms, the mundane, taken for granted, fine-grained and illegible of life with young children. With this as a starting point, we bring different disciplinary perspectives and methodological training to make sense of this everyday unfolding of language, place and body. Our interest in this colloquium is in what shifting the disciplinary and theoretical lens enables for our shared imagining.
This work challenges a deficit view of early childhood language by insisting there is always something more, something wild, creative, dynamic and embodied, which exceeds the narrow views of what language is, and is for, within dominant accounts. Thus, these perspectives afford new understandings of what a literacy education, embedded within this broader study of language and learning, could be and how inequality in both literacy education and oracy traditions might be actively challenged.
What counts as communication?: Adult interpretations of interactions in an early years educational setting - Drs Hugh Escott & Karen Grainger.
Developmental, institutional, and research frameworks that are mapped onto the emergent interaction of early years children create ideas about what is valuable, significant, and expected from their use of language. Children’s developmental progress and practitioners' professional reputations are made legible through these frameworks. Current discourse on improving literacy outcomes places emphasis on children demonstrating their vocabulary, and being socialised into conversational norms through learning to be ‘ratified’, turn-taking participants in dialogue with others. However, expectations of these normative conversational framings may mean that researchers and practitioners consign moments of interactional ‘sophistication’ to ‘triviality’. This is despite the fact that they are communicatively rich and filled with shared enjoyment, enchantment and complexity.
During the 2021-2 academic year, we participated in an early-years nursery setting as additional play-workers equipped with chest mounted cameras. In this paper we explore video recordings of adult-child play and interaction to increase the legibility of the complex means in which children’s participation is invoked through emergent, multi-channel, multi-party, multi-modal, and materially situated means We consider how we as adults shaped or gave ourselves over to forms of ‘participation’. We also reflect on the means that we have as researchers, linguists, and professionals to attend and make legible the realities of participation in context. In particular, we consider the ways in which transcription and traditional notions of conversation may be limiting our view of children’s interactional skills. We also highlight other non-trivial aspects of the children’s communicational moves that may otherwise be overlooked.
How can we value the translanguaging practices of multilingual parents with their children and what is the ethical/anti-deficit relevance of these practices? - Dr Ester Ehiyazaryan-White.
Multilingual and migrant parents’ literacy practices with their children are often devalued and othered in policy, research and practice. Recent research has shown that translanguaging is a natural communicative practice for multilingual users, which happens through engaging multiple modes of communication beyond language. Drawing on artifactual literacies and funds of knowledge, this research aimed to establish a translanguaging affirmative space for multilingual parents within which their experiences of introducing early literacies to their children were valued. Such translanguaging space has the potential to address the power imbalance between researcher knowledge and parents’ everyday embedded knowledge. Through an artifactual literacies approach and recognising that ‘objects speak with many voices’, the parents engaged in an open discussion about their literacy practices with their children. Some of these artifacts related to structural literacies and others to funds of knowledge. Analysis using multimodal concepts indicates that two mothers’ access to translanguaging in their semiotic repertoire was dependent on the presence of and opportunity to show and gesture with the literacy artifacts. The translanguaging space was shared by me as a multilingual researcher who did not, however, share a home language with the participants. This opens up opportunities to reflect on the ways in which migrant and multilingual parents’ knowledge can be valued and shared in ways that go not only between but also beyond languages.
“Deeply reciprocal yet deeply opaque”: place, the body and movement entangled with language - Professor Abi Hackett, Drs David Ben Shannon & Karen Daniels.
As literacy research expands conceptualisations of what literacies and language are, simultaneously policy makers are narrowing frameworks for what ‘counts’ as proper or acceptable literacy and language. Perspectives from developmental psychology currently hold the mainstay in policy discourse on young children’s language and literacy, and we argue that purely viewing literacy through this lens may reduce what language can be and how it can best be supported. Importantly, dominant perspectives on literacy are shaping educators, children’s and families’ understandings of what literacy is, who it is for, and what it can do in ways that can perpetuate inequalities in education settings. In response, we offer some examples of our encounters with young children which we have described as “deeply reciprocal yet deeply opaque”. We argue for what Édouard Glissant terms the ‘right to opacity’ in teaching and assessing communication and language skills in early childhood. We contest the international emphasis on efficiency, clarity, and rationality in ECE communication and language provision as one informed by colonial and ableist logics of ‘transparency’. Instead, we argue for an attention to moments of what we call ‘opaque reciprocity’: of (1) non-dyadic, non-developmentalist, more-than-human exchange, within which (2) authorship becomes distributed inter-subjectively, thereby (3) de-emphasising efficient, clear, and rational notions of meaning-making. We argue that foregrounding children’s ongoing bodily movements in classroom settings, unsettles notions of literacy as a sedentary, individual activity and instead draws attention to the contingent nature of its continual construction and change within classroom assemblages.
Option 4 (Workshop) - G04 (Workroom 1)
When Words are Not Enough: Learning Literacies of the Pluriverse - Professor Mia Perry, Dr Lisa Bradley, Amanda Ptolomey & Dr Marcela Ramos, University of Glasgow and Professor Carmen Medina, University of Indiana.
“Everything in the world is speaking to us, it is a literacy in itself” (Musqua, in George, 2010). From gestures to root patterns, from senses to temperatures, from sound to pattern formations – people and ecosystems function amongst, and depend upon, many complex sign systems. The literacies that we have enable us to interpret the sign-systems (including language) that we all use to understand, make meaning, and engage.
Imagine all island communities still “reading” the signs of their coastline, and agrarian communities still understanding the signs of their soils and leaves. Imagine if we could make meaning from the trees in our landscape. All relationships and therefore actions would be affected.
But the only literacy that counts in education today is print: reading and writing words. So, all other literacies are disappearing. Print literacy has been woven into the global economy and overshadows all other ways of meaning making and being with the world. Non-print forms of literacy have become marginalized, if not subjugated, ways of knowing, maintaining artificial hierarchies of knowledge and action that benefit those already in power. A “universal literacy” of print text assumes a singular ontology across the globe. The pluriversal is a decolonial alternative to Western notions of “universal”, calling for the acknowledgment of different ways of being and knowing, and prompting the repair and recovery of the systems and relations to honour and support that.
This workshop will conjure some of the many ways of meaning making and relating to different aspects of the world. These include literacies of land, water, faith, and body. We will engage participants particularly in literacies of matter (materials), especially stone, wood, and plastic. Examples from various parts of the world (Colombia, Scotland, Malawi) will be interwoven with activities inviting participants to engage in non-linguistic literacy learning. We will facilitate participants to begin to de-code or “read” the materials, and then explore what sort of relations and actions it prompts.