assignments as controversies: getting 'under the hood' of how students write

Assignments as Controversies

Getting ‘under the hood’ of how students write

Image taken from Bhatt (2017a)

@ibrar_bhatt

ibrarspace.net

i.bhatt@qub.ac.uk

EATAW ConferenceMon 19 June 2017

Royal Holloway University

Dr Ibrar BhattLecturer in Education

Why are assignments controversies?

• Important yet ‘black-boxed’ educational moments

• Interactions between ‘actors’ both within and beyond the immediate scene

•Examining student writing in process allows us to see how digital literacy actually ‘happens’ vs how it is understood in policy

Controversies

Literacy as social practice

Literacies are:

• Experienced within specific contexts

• Attached to professions, communities, and places

• Part of particular cultural histories

• Mediated by material objects and technologies

Therefore, to understand Literacies, you need a thorough exploration of contexts wherein writing occurs.

To engage with Literacy becomes a form of critical social inquiry

See Barton & Hamilton (2000)

All writing practices have a constellation of social practices surrounding them.

Photo by ibrar bhatt https://www.flickr.com/photos/87248369@N03/32967559021/in/dateposted-public/

• The digital literacy practices of students as they work on their assignments?

• How these practices relate to the students’ everyday digital literacies and habits with technology?

• Discrepancies between the way students carry out their written work, and the requirements and expectations of the course and, more broadly, the college?

Points of inquiry

A note on methods

Technological developments

Evolution in research methods

New understandings of literacy

Methods

1. Observations of the college sites

2. Videography:

1. Multidimensional screen recordings

2. Video logs

3. Dynamic transcript

4. Analytic vignettes (see Bhatt et al. 2015 and Bhatt 2017b for a detailed discussion)

3. Post-assignment interviews with participatory activity (Venn diagrams)

[slide with pics and screen shots]

Image from Bhatt (2017b)

Findings

Structuring agency of policy documents spell out (and limit ) the purpose and scope for using digital media in the classroom, and in the college generally

Agency of online actors shape the knowledge creation

Capricious violations of these by the students

Assignments are heavily curated, with content from various sources. This curation is central to the writing process but hinges on certain skills (e.g. discernment)

Links to past writing, e.g. the utilisation of previous work

Links to future writing, e.g. embedding Twitter

Tasks within tasks, like matryushkas

The flow of practices: irruption

Final points

What it means to be digitally literate is always in flux.

It should be based on a detailed explication of localised practice.

Researching digital literacy using a ‘social practice’ approach helps us to look at the funds of knowledge that learners bring to their writing tasks.

Focusing a lens on student practices as the locus of inquiry allows us to see how both knowledge (and ignorance) are related to a person’s digital literacy practices.

References:

BARTON, D. & HAMILTON, M. (2000) Literacy Practices. In: BARTON, D., HAMILTON, M. & IVANIC, R. (eds.) Situated literacies: reading and writing in context. London: Routledge. 7-15

BHATT, I. (2017a). Assignments as controversies: digital literacy and writing in classroom practice, Routledge Research in Literacy

BHATT, I. (2017b) ‘Classroom digital literacies as interactional accomplishments’, In Researching New Literacies: Design, Theory, and Data in Sociocultural Investigation, Knobel, M. and Lankshear, C. (eds.), New York: Peter Lang. pp. 127-149

BHATT, I, DE ROOCK, R & ADAMS, J. (2015). Diving deep into digital literacy: emerging methods for research, Language and Education, Vol. 29 (6), 477-492

Dr Ibrar Bhatt

Lecturer in Education

@ibrar_bhatt

i.bhatt@qub.ac.uk

ibrarspace.net