New Media in the Classroom

Rethinking Primary Literacy

Cathy Burnett, Guy Merchant

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781526451378
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Technology

'This an exciting publication that offers authentic approaches for educators to meet challenges of the literacy that students need in our evolving digital landscape.'

Maureen Walsh, Adjunct Professor, Australian Catholic University and Honorary Professor, The University of Sydney

'In this significant new text, Cathy Burnett and Guy Merchant foreground the affective, embodied and emergent nature of making meaning with new media.'

Teresa Cremin, The Open University

The rise of new media technologies has changed the ways in which children engage with texts and this has implications for literacy provision in schools. Drawing on research exploring new media practices within and outside school, this book explains and encourages classroom activity that makes purposeful and appropriate use of these literacies and is underpinned by a set of guiding principles for teaching literacy in contemporary times. Key topics include:

• Building on children's experiences in and out of school
• Supporting children to draw on multiple modes and media to develop and convey meaning
• Developing a responsiveapproach to literacy provision
• Investigating ways of encouraging collaboration through and around digital media
• Encouraging children to use digital media safely and advantageously

This is essential reading for primary English or elementary language arts modules on initial teacher education courses including university-based and schools-based routes into teaching and also for current teachers wishing to enhance their own literacy teaching.

Cathy Burnett is Professor of Literacy and Education at Sheffield Hallam University.
Guy Merchant is Professor of Literacy in Education at Sheffield Hallam University.

1 The Challenge of 21st Century Literacies

This chapter will:

• provide an introduction to the book
• introduce ideas about how literacy is changing
• introduce the Charter for 21st Century Literacies and the nine principles that it is based upon.

At six you are already part of the world, skilfully working with the tools at hand, interacting with your environment and communicating with those who are closest to you. Your digital history trails behind you, to a time before your birth, held in pre-natal scans, health records and all the rest. As a new-born, still and moving images of you found their way onto Instagram and Facebook. Your first toys are now forgotten though once they sprang to life with flashing lights and tinny rhymes, welcoming you to the gadget world …

New media technologies play an important role in the lives of children and young people. They are an integral part of everyday life in many parts of the world, and have been rapidly taken up in commerce, entertainment and daily communication. In education, their adoption has been rather uneven, varying between countries, regions and institutions. Although much has been written about how technology might or should change schooling, there is little principled and practical guidance for teachers – particularly for those working with children in the earlier stages of schooling. There is, however, a growing literature on how children’s lives and literacy practices are influenced, inflected or transformed by digital media, and it is this body of work that we draw on in this book. Our aim in writing it is to provoke a debate about approaches to incorporating new media in schooling, to provide a catalyst for change based upon what is realistic and achievable, and to argue for classroom work that reflects the changing communicative practices in society at large.

Reviewing developments in policy and practice for an earlier edited volume, we concluded that there was no shortage of aspirational statements about how digital and online practices might radically change classrooms, but there was a distinct gap between these and the more conservative approaches in evidence in many curriculum documents and assessment practices around the world (Burnett, Davies, Merchant & Rowsell, 2014). Nonetheless we explored many examples of innovative teaching and learning in which teachers, sometimes working alongside researchers, were harnessing the potential of new technologies to engage children in activity that reflected the new literacies of everyday life in an authentic way. In that work we identified nine principles or orientations that underpin what, in this book, we ambitiously call a Charter for 21st Century Literacies. Using these principles, we argue, might enable colleagues to develop literacy practices in school – literacy provision that would be empowering to children and help them to have a creative and critical engagement with a range of digital media. This book explores these principles in depth and is to a large extent driven by our own experience of working collaboratively with groups of primary school teachers on aspects of the Charter.

The main focus of this practical work is on situated activity – classroom activity that relates to the particular needs, interests and experiences of children in their immediate context. In this work there is often a sense of spontaneity and unpredictability, as classroom events unfold and children take the lead. Children are encouraged to be creative, improvising and collaborating in an experimental or playful manner which draws freely on their communicative resources and the materials they have access to. They work across these resources to create new meanings. This approach helps to broaden their communication repertoire and develops a creative and critical sensibility which is in step with everyday practices.

Throughout this book we adopt an expanded view of literacies which simultaneously acknowledges the centrality of lettered representation and the importance of other semiotic systems in meaning making. Engagement with new media is seen here as part of a more widespread and proliferating set of communicative practices which are increasingly important to full participation in social life. This set of practices is what we mean by the communication repertoire. We suggest that many everyday practices involve creative, collaborative and experimental meaning making that draws on different elements of one’s communication repertoire.

The Charter for 21st Century Literacies

In some respects, the principles that inform the Charter for 21st Century Literacies restate the commitments of earlier literacy scholars, and in the chapters that follow we have tried to acknowledge and reference these when appropriate. We have argued that these commitments need to be restated because of the persistence of ‘old’ models of literacy education (Burnett & Merchant, 2015). However, we go further than this by building on recent research in literacy, research that has drawn attention to the generative and emergent quality of the kinds of meaning making associated with digital technologies. Planning for 21st century literacies is not simply a case of substituting one set of learning goals for another. It rests on an acknowledgement that resources for communication are now richer, more diverse and more flexible than ever before. New practices, new conventions and new habits of mind are beginning to develop. We explore and exemplify this claim throughout the book.

To begin with we offer a brief summary of the nine principles of the Charter for 21st Century Literacies in order to orientate readers to our key ideas.

• Acknowledge the changing nature of meaning making. If we are to address the divergence between literacies in everyday life and literacy in school, we need to continually revisit our definition of the scope and range of literacy at school to reflect its changing nature.
• Recognise and build on children’s linguistic, social and cultural repertoires. In everyday practice many children move fluidly between devices, using different modes and media, seamlessly combining both digital and non-digital interaction. This fluidity reflects their linguistic, social and cultural repertoire. For some this may involve using two or more languages, as well as the registers associated with different kinds of interaction. Recognising this repertoire and the choices it generates has implications for how we might think of an empowering literacy education. For example, it would not simply involve an incremental expansion of the kinds of texts children produce, but would also involve providing contexts in which learners could draw in open-ended ways across this developing repertoire: to combine and remix varied textual and linguistic practices in contexts that matter to them.
• Acknowledge diverse modes and media. Literacies have always been multimodal, but an explicit recognition of multiple modes can enable children to explore, develop and convey meanings in ways that might otherwise be overlooked. Opportunities to create using multiple modes help learners to explore ideas and possibilities in more nuanced ways, and digital media certainly make this easier. A specific knowledge of alphabetic representation and visual design are an integral part of this. However, these are not separate skills but develop in tandem, and alongside other modes of communication.
• Recognise the affective, embodied and material dimensions of meaning making. The meanings we make are inflected by what we feel, what has just happened and who we are with, as well as how we are positioned by the people and things around us. The immediate environment, resources, personal and shared histories therefore all play a part in what children do with digital media. Literacy provision therefore needs to take account of affective, embodied and material dimensions of communicative practice.
• Encourage improvisation and experimentation. Although intentional design and production are important aspects of multimodal work, creative engagement is often unplanned and emergent in nature. Facilitating this sort of experimentation is based on an understanding of how meaning is made in the moment which may, or may not, result in a finished product.
• Use playful pedagogies. Schools have a role to play in providing risk-free environments in which children may follow passions, experiment, explore, gain feedback and consider alternatives. For teachers, this means adopting playful pedagogies and allowing work to take new or unexpected directions.
• Create opportunities to work with the provisionality of digital media. Although the school curriculum privileges the individual creation of fixed or final products, digital texts are often provisional, allowing them to be easily added to, reworked and remixed. Such practices have the potential to generate rich opportunities for children to reach new audiences, to give and receive feedback and to remix what others have done in ways that are both critical and creative.
• Provide contexts that facilitate criticality. Advocates of critical literacies argue that literacy education must address the power relationships perpetuated through and around texts through critical engagement. Calls for greater criticality have intensified in recent years and are linked to fears about internet safety, commercialism, the stereotypical depictions associated with games and virtual worlds, and the need for discerning use of online resources. Demonising the texts young people use in everyday life is likely to achieve little. Providing contexts in which young people may critically consider the practices in which they engage and how they positon themselves and are positioned by others, with opportunities to rework texts to reflect alternative experiences, is important.
• Promote collaboration around and through texts in negotiating meaning. Learning about new media is not just about doing things with technology, it’s also about doing things with others. Recent studies provide rich insights into the ways in which children and young people collaborate and interact on and around screens. While encouraging such collaborations, we need to be alert to the complex ways in which such interactions are managed and support children to take up such opportunities with confidence.

We believe that these principles can be used to inform classroom practice and to provide children and young people with experiences of literacy that are in step with the world that surrounds them. They also have the potential to support them in being confident and discerning users of new media. In asserting this we are not, however, claiming to have the definitive answer and will regularly refer readers to influential work that is based upon similar principles such as that of the New London Group (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000) and Jenkins et al. (2006).

A charter for a changing world?

Tsering Dolma is not at home. The house and its outbuildings are abandoned, provisions stored away for the coming winter. Although the place has an atmosphere of abandonment, there is no mystery – just a temporary absence. Water comes from a six-inch pipe running all the way up to a cistern fed by a mountain stream below Shadé, but the pipe has long since fractured. There is no water. Tsering Dolma’s possessions remain, despite the locked doors. At first they’re hard to make out among the red dust and mud bricks, but slowly they reveal themselves. This home is well stocked. In fact it’s bristling with technology: farming implements fashioned from wands of willow, a rake, a hoe, a basket-weave cradle for flattening the earth after ploughing – all carefully stowed in the roof space or jutting out from holes in the brick work. This is the technology of subsistence farming, of a low impact bonding with the land. The only absence is Tsering Dolma herself, but she is held in a network of relationships – with locals, the monks from Phuktar, her yaks, the sheep, these basic tools and the land she scrapes her living from. What I call technology, my phone, my camera and my tablet, would be of little use to her. They would play no part. And besides, there is no electricity, no signal, no internet. And if I thought about what might improve her quality of life it would be none of this. It would be more likely to be a pair of thick woollen socks for the winter. That and someone to fix several miles of six-inch pipe. But with no utilities, public or private, that would require an attentive and caring authority – or very generous neighbours with nothing else to attend to. So perhaps now, having more or less abandoned the modernist notion of human progress, of cultural development, of economic growth and the relentless march forwards, our place in the world in all its diversity needs to be rethought. Tsering Dolma has a different relationship with the world. Better? Worse? These evaluations hardly seem appropriate. Zanskar is a very different world and one that is separated from mine by a wide margin, and this gap throws ideas of wealth, of relationship and of technology into confusion. Care has been taken in amassing a good collection of juniper, piled on a makeshift table in a small room near Tsering Dolma’s house – a different sort of plenty.

Put in straightforward terms, the idea that our communication repertoire is changing seems incontestable. But this statement comes with some caveats. First of all, it must be acknowledged that this change, although wide-reaching, is by no means universal, as the vignette above vividly illustrates. Sometimes we talk rather glibly about the global reach of technology. In fact, from a global perspective there is enormous variation in the pattern of everyday communication, as well as in access to devices, services and connectivity. Nationally, and even locally within the UK, there is considerable variation too. Apart from location, age, employment, wealth and lifestyle are among the key influences on our communication repertoire. To a greater or lesser extent, we exercise a degree of choice, but paradoxically, in many walks of life, digital communication is now essential. We know from personal experience that in a university setting it is not exactly compulsory, but it might as well be. Daily transactions between colleagues, students and support services would grind to a halt without it. In these and similar contexts, digital communication has become normalised, mobile devices commonplace – everyone has at least one – and conventions surrounding their use are gradually emerging. For instance, in some formal and informal settings there are agreements about the use of mobile devices – if someone’s mobile rings in a public lecture or presentation it is usually frowned upon, yet, on the other hand, tweeting at such events has become more socially acceptable and is sometimes actively encouraged. These are issues of custom and practice, and as new communicative avenues open up, new social practices and social etiquettes are sure to follow.

The extent to which children are drawn into this changing communication environment is likely to reflect the social and material conditions of their parents or caregivers and the choices they make or the choices they are able to make. Although national surveys chart year-on-year increases in access to new media technology (see Ofcom, 2017; Pew Internet Studies, 2017) there are disparities. As an indicator of this, digital inclusion (and exclusion) has become an important area of concern (Livingstone & Helsper, 2007). But apart from this, some parents and caregivers are concerned about the possible negative effects of digital technologies and choose to regulate children’s screen time. There is a literature that refers to the ‘toxic’ influence of new technologies on childhood (e.g. Palmer, 2006), reports on the rise of a pathological condition referred to as ‘internet addiction’ (Chou, Condron & Belland, 2005), some speculation on the long-term impact on eyesight and the brain (see Swain, 2011) and various commentaries on new forms of economic and cultural inequality (for example, Keen, 2015). At this point in time, however, there is little hard evidence about these negative effects. A more persuasive critique has been levelled at the domination of large global corporations, the consumerism underpinning the spread of new technologies, and the environmental degradation involved in the production and disposal of hardware (see Burnett & Merchant, 2017).

None of these critiques deny that changes are taking place, but they constitute part of an important ongoing debate about the desirability of our increased dependence on digital technology. Here, though, we are not overly concerned about whether or not this is ‘a good thing’; rather we take the changes in communication repertoire as a starting point, and based upon that try to address the question of how educational provision – and particularly that aimed at the under-elevens – might adapt. It could and indeed has been argued that schools are places for face-to-face interaction, sanctuaries from a complex world and places in which the pervasive forces of new media should not be allowed to enter. We do not subscribe to this view for a number of reasons. Firstly, new media technologies are already part of children’s experience: using them in schools builds on their skills and und...