The phonics bit of digital literacy

Learning phonics helps children decode texts, plausibly passing as readers due to their ability to read aloud and and score well on phonics tests, but it does not necessarily open the way for them to understand or enjoy what they are reading, or enter into that immersive and imaginative world of ideas that form one of the main reasons we value reading so highly in the first place.

I wonder whether some approaches to digital literacy, that focus on defining a set of competences with tools, are in danger of following the same path. Children may be able to plausibly appear to be digitally literate; they can write a class blog post, share a photo on a social networking site, google countless images of the latest games console. But to be (digitally) literate is not just about being able to write a blog post; it's about having something to say and someone to say it to. It's about voice – whatever medium we choose to express that voice in.

It's a common place to talk about digital literacy as digitally-mediated communication as if what we communicate is somehow secondary and just 'happens'. This is what writers and poets can teach us: what we read and what we have to say matters.

Working in schools with young people to help them express their voice sounds like something everyone can agree on as A Good Thing. But taking this seriously is actually a pretty radical thing to do. The recent 'neverseconds' blog storm-in-a-teacup attests to that.

Being literate, digitally or otherwise, is not a neutral, value-free set of technical competences, but is deeply embedded in our lives and cultures. This relates to a 'critical' view of literacy where we need to ask: “what kinds of literate practices, for whom, fitted for what kinds of social and economic formations should be constructed and sanctioned through teaching” (Luke & Freebody, 1997, p. 2).

This takes us far beyond just learning to 'do your sounds'.

How do we know what a text really means?

In my research, I am interested in how teachers construct particular stories, or meanings, about digital technologies, the relationships between these stories and other stories of education, and the relationships between these stories and teachers' technological practices in the classroom. A core question for me will be how to understand, interpret, analyse and make meaning from the texts that are produced as part of this research. This seemingly basic question - how do we understand what a text means - is one which is not so easily answered. It is a methodological question: How do I, as a researcher, make claims that my analysis of a text's meaning is a valid one? It also gives rise to many conceptual questions: Where does the meaning of a text lie anyway - is it located in the text itself, in the author's intentions for the text, or in the reader's interpretation? When people disagree about what a text means, how do we decide who is right? What are the processes by which we derive meaning from a text - are some more legitimate than others and if so, who decides? I'm certainly not about to come up with final answers to all these questions here, but I am starting to think about some of the ways that have been taken to some of these questions. (And by 'text', I am not only referring to artefacts created using written language, but a set of meaningful signs that hang together to create a relatively coherent whole - a conversation, a film, a dance, etc.)


Critical discourse analysis seems to promise a theoretical and methodological approach that begins to answer these questions and provide a way for researchers to go beyond a naive and inevitably partial 'face reading' of a text. But reading some examples of CDA, I've been very uncomfortable about what some of them seem to be claiming. Often these approaches claim to deconstruct a text to reveal the hidden unpalatable political ideologies and power relationships upon which they are based.

Perhaps its my background in literary theory but analyses that claim to be able to reveal the 'hidden' meaning of a text set off great big alarm bells for me.

If such a technical and theoretical analysis is required to reveal the 'true' or 'hidden' political ideologies of the text, then how does the text have any effect on its reader? If it is only through a process of rigorous CDA that this underlying meaning can be grasped, then the readers or audience of the text are surely safe from any dangerous political connotations. What this seems to tell us is that what a text means is not just a theoretical question, but a practical, empirical question - we need to ask what a text actually means to particular people in particular situations. And it may not mean the same thing for all of them, because context is essential to the meaning of a text, and everyone brings different experiences to contextualise their understandings.

The 'true' meaning of a text as revealed through some CDA approaches is often taken to reveal what the author really meant, or thought. Authors (speakers, designers) could always make different choices about the words, images and other signs they use, but it does not necessarily follow that they have complete freedom and agency to choose any combination of words at all. There are social, cultural and organisational limits on what someone feels able to say and how they feel able to say it in any particular situation. We are not social 'dupes', mindlessly repeating whatever society tells us to, but neither do we always have the freedom, skills, time or other resources to say exactly what we want to. And authors often approach these compromises very explicitly and consciously in a sometimes complex process of negotiation that seems to be overlooked by an approach that equates the results of CDA as revealing the author's 'hidden' meaning.

As an example, I once sat in a seminar where researchers described how they had analysed the number of words, pictures and pages in books from a schoolchildren’s graded reading scheme and discovered that there was a consistent word-picture-page ratio, and then analysed this to reveal how authors’ conceptualised children’s reading development. At the time I was a publisher of children's literacy resources including reading schemes and the word-picture-page ratio was the result of a process of explicit decision-making and negotiation that resulted from a process of conducting market research with teachers, consulting with academic reading experts, taking into account organisational requirements to make a certain percentage profit and the costs of producing the books and making marketing decisions about the price we should sell the books for and the number of books we could sell. There were tensions in balancing all these considerations and compromises were made. The researchers' 'textual' analysis approach that placed all analysis on the text itself missed these conditions of production, and so simply equated the way that children's reading development was constructed in the text with authorial intention. This is all to say that the creators of a text may consciously be aware that their 'text' does not perfectly represent their own views, but is what they are able to do given the available circumstances and resources.

These problems are caused by separating the 'text' as an artefact from the context in which it was created, and the context in which it is interpreted by an audience. In doing so, it fails to distinguish between what texts tell us about its authors' meanings, the effects of texts on readers, and the meaning of a text 'in itself' (a question I'll leave for another day). Critical discourse analysis is usually described as a process of going back and fore between the text and its context, and when this is done well, I think these problems could be avoided.

How is 'narrative' used in research?

Since the 'turn to discourse' in research, narrative has taken a prominent role in many different kinds of research. Narrative is conceptualised and employed in many different ways in different kinds of research, and I have been thinking about what a focus on 'narrative' means for my research. After all, perhaps I could replace 'narrative' with 'beliefs,' 'understandings,' 'perceptions,' or 'thoughts'. What is the role that narrative plays? Some of my recent reading has been helpful to distinguish the various ways in which narrative is understood and employed in research.

Narrative as constructing experience

This is where I started off in my thinking about narrative; thinking about the importance of the stories that we tell ourselves. Stories are powerful ways in which we make sense of our experience in the world and construct our own identities. We create patterns and coherence in what would otherwise be disparate and incoherent events and experiences. The structures and forms of familiar cultural tales, such as virtue being rewarded, can find their way into our personal narratives, and might provide ways by which we link events together in meaningful ways. These stories can become stories we live by, not just retrospectively explaining our lives and experiences, but get used as a touchstone in our decision making. This is the kind of narrative discussed by Jerome Bruner.

Narrative learning

Ivor Goodson and his colleagues in the Learning Lives project worked with the idea that narrative constructs experience, to look at how people learn from their narratives and through the act of constructing narratives. They described how different kinds of narrative had different levels of learning potential, and also different levels of action potential, the extent to which people were able to act on learning achieved from and through their narratives.

Narrative as access to social worlds and inner workings

In some research, narrative is recorded or elicited as a conduit to understanding the inner reality of an individual – it is emphasised that it is important that 'their voice' is heard on its own terms, rather than being abstracted through statistical or other methods. Their narratives are analysed to understand the social worlds they inhabit and how they construct their own experiences. Narratives here is 'data' that is collected to tell the researcher about aspects of their participants' world they would otherwise be unable to study.

Narrative in society

Research analysing narrative does not only look at what narrative tells us about people and their social world, it can also look at how the production of narrative is itself a social act. Narratives do not 'exist' out there on their own, but they are produced by particular people, in particular situations, drawing on the particular local and cultural resources available to them, for particular purposes and with particular consequences. This kind of research focuses on narrative as a social act and looks at what narratives do in social contexts, rather than what narratives tell us about individuals' experiences and social worlds. This kind of research therefore take narrative as an object of study in its own right and breaks down distinctions between 'discourse' and 'practice'.

This kind of research is described as focusing on narrative practices in everyday life by Gubrium and Holstein. It aims to deal with both the external and internal content of texts. In this way it has some similarities with Fairclough's approach to discourse analysis that sees discourse as the mediating between and part of the internal and external relations of text.

Narrative as a method of research

Often described as 'narrative inquiry', this is a way of using narrative as a way of doing research. It sees the process of research itself as a one of constructing a narrative and is particularly interested in the researcher's involvement in this process. The output from this kind of research may itself be in narrative – and fictional – form. Rather than making any kind of verifiable claims about the experiences of participants encountered in the research, research becomes an opportunity for extended reflection on the part of the researcher and successful research texts are ones that resonate with readers and prompt them to reflect on their own experiences. Examples here are Peter Clough and Clandinin and Connelly.

If the aim is to produce fictional narratives that allow us to reflect on the nature of human experience, then it would seem that good literature already does this – and in many cases does it better – than this kind of research. If the research texts produced are drawn from researchers' reflections, are to be judged in terms of the imaginative or emphathetic response they inspire in the reader and cannot be held to account in terms of how 'truthfully' they represent their participants, then it is not clear to me what the 'research' is adding that wouldn't be had better by reading Chekhov.

References:

• Bruner, J. (2004) Life as Narrative. Social Research 71 (3), 691-710.

• Clandinin, J. and Connelly, M. (2000) Narrative Inquiry: Experience and Story in Qualitative Research. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

• Clough, P. (2002) Narratives and Fictions in Educational Research. Buckingham, Open University Press

• Fairclough, N (2003) Analysing discourse: textual analysis for social research. London: Routledge.

• Goodson, I., Biesta, G. J. J., Tedder, M. and Adair, N. (2010) Narrative Learning. London: Routledge.

• Gubrium, J. F. and Holstein, J. A. (2009) Analyzing Narrative Reality. Los Angeles: Sage.

Image credit: ~ Phil Moore @ flickr

Why are teachers' tales of technology interesting?

Part of the process of research is of course reading lots of theoretical and substantive material to inform the approach to the topic of research. But it's also important to reflect on where your personal interests and motivations are coming from - some of these are grounded in referenceable literature and theory, some from more nebulous experience. So here I am explicitly, transparently noting some of my current assumptions and motivations, in the full expectation that these will change as I read more, think more and engage more with the field.

I am researching the stories teachers tell about digital technologies in education for a PhD. Why should this be interesting or worthwhile at all?

1. I think that it is important to better understand why teachers use technology in the ways they do rather than only  focusing on why don't they use them at all or use them 'better'. (Partly this is important in itself, also I think it is a necessary first step if we do want to think about how things could be different). I realise for some people, the answer to this question will seem obvious. I'm not so sure it is.
2. I think that the way teachers think about technology and education will help us understand why they use technologies in their classrooms, or not, in the way they do. (I do not think teacher's thoughts are the sole determinant of their classroom practice or that their beliefs are completely independent from other individual, social, institutional discourses).
3. I think that narratives are a powerful way in which we construct our experience and justify our action and so understanding what stories teachers tell about technology and education will help us understand their practices with technology in education.
4. I think that teachers' narratives about technology in education will necessarily interrelate with their narratives about education more broadly, e.g. the purpose of education, their role as a teacher, issues facing young people today, etc.
5. I think that the necessary change in schools is in the domain of these broader narratives - reconfiguring how we see the purpose of education in relation to society, the economy, what it is we want to offer young people to take into their future, etc, and for change to happen, teachers need to have the opportunity to think differently about these big questions.
6. I have a hunch that telling stories about technologies might provide an opportunity for rethinking some of these broader narratives about education, society, etc, and therefore might be a route to more transformatory educational change.