Literacy and Mobility

Complexity, Uncertainty, and Agency at the Nexus of High School and College

Brice Nordquist

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317279907
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Lese- und Schreibfähigkeit

Pushing forward research on emerging literacies and theoretical orientations, this book follows students from different tracks of high school English in a "failing" U.S. public school through their first two years in universities, colleges, and jobs. Analytical and methodological tools from new literacy and mobility studies are employed to investigate relations among patterns of movement and literacy practices across educational institutions, neighborhoods, cultures, and national borders. By following research participants' trajectories in and across scenes of literacy in school, college, home, online, in transit, and elsewhere, the work illustrates how students help constitute and connect one scene of literacy with others in their daily lives; how their mobile literacies produce, maintain, and disrupt social relations and identities with respect to race, gender, class, language, and nationality; and how they draw upon multiple literacies and linguistic resources to accommodate, resist, and transform dominant discourses.

1
LITERACY IN PLACE AND MOTION

Value increasingly arises not from what is but from what is not yet but can potentially become, that is from the pull of the future.

(Thrift 2008)

Even on the hoof, we remain in place. We are never anywhere, anywhen, but in place.

(Casey 1996)

An investment in education is an investment in the future. So goes the rallying cry of corporations, private foundations, government agencies, and other stakeholders within the U.S. education system. This conglomerate is currently investing unprecedented amounts of capital and labor in efforts to smooth out transitions between systems of education and a forever-future global economy. From Every Student Succeeds to the Gates Foundation’s Pathways for Student Success and the Common Core State Standards, effectively managing the movement of students within and across institutions is presented as the key to education reform in the United States and around the world.

These reforms are premised on a familiar formula: educational-occupational mobility leads to economic progress and a more equitable society. As former U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (2014) exhorts:

Education is the civil rights issue of our time….We must recommit, as a nation, to programs and policies that close opportunity gaps and help all students reach their potential. Only then will we be able to accelerate our nation’s economic progress, increase upward mobility, and reduce social inequality for all Americans.

Duncan’s programs and policies seek to push and direct flows of students through an increasingly streamlined school–work complex of institutions, investments, tradeoffs, standards, and alignments. As Jan Nespor (2004) asserts, “Schools are not just territories regulating kids’ movements within their borders, but vehicles which physically and symbolically transport young people through and across social and material landscapes” (p. 311). In this way, we can think of schools as consisting of and contributing to intersecting and adaptive mobility systems that enable and manage predictable repetitions of movements of people, objects, texts, ideas, and information (Urry 2007). As assemblages of immobile structures and circulating entities, these systems create, distribute, and concentrate labor and capital (always unequally) and materialize place and scale. They enhance the potential mobility of some and diminish or halt the mobility of others (Sheller 2014). In this way, mobility systems are also always immobility systems with elements of viscosity, coagulation, and friction (Cresswell 2014).

In pursuit of educational, economic, and social progress, educational mobility systems bus students across cities and counties; usher them through hallways; admit and reject them from colleges; promote, suspend, and relocate teachers; manufacture and ship textbooks; circulate and collate assessments; (re)distribute and cut funds; divide up neighborhoods and cities; structure days, seasons, and years; and so on. The primary goal of these interconnected systems, as Duncan makes clear above, is the creation, distribution, and concentration of capital and labor. Students are sorted and transported along tracks of study designed to help them reach their productive and consumptive potentials so that the fruits of their labor can effectively feed back into national and global economies (Bowles and Gintis 1976, Bourdieu and Passeron 1977, Apple 1988).

To streamline this economic payoff, education is represented and enacted as series of stair-stepped, developmental trajectories. Within these closed mobility systems, there is no room for movements that intersect with, diverge from, or descend the staircase—mobilities that transport students to and from school, supply their worksheets and tests, vibrate in their pockets, interrupt their thoughts, shape their beliefs and perceptions. As if all the complexities of education could be plotted on a single line.

Attempts to chart journeys from one stage of development, grade level, institution, discourse community, and social class to another contribute to a preoccupation with destinations, their boundaries, and their attendant demands and a general neglect of the web of mobilities that constitute and connect these. To successfully move from one step to another, students must cultivate habits and accumulate the knowledge and skills demanded by self-evident future geographies—places, landscapes, natures, and bodies that motivate and govern action in the present.

Educational and political discourses render the future knowable and actionable by figuring space-time as a static grid used to individuate and measure students’ movements among fixed and discrete locations. The demands of the job market must be met in college courses, which must meet the demands of more advanced courses, while the demands of college determine the objectives of high school, and so on down the line. Standards, outcomes, corresponding curricula and assessments, and discourses surrounding these disclose futures and condition and limit how they can be acted upon. They operate through a circularity that establishes relations between past, present, and future and self-authenticate these relations (Anderson 2010). But as geographer Andrew Baldwin (2012) asserts, such discourses “disregard the ways in which the future is very often already present in the present not as a discrete ontological time-space, but as an absent or virtual presence that constitutes the very meaning of the present” (p. 36). Or as feminist philosopher Karen Barad (2007) describes, “The past matters and so does the future, but the past is never left behind, never finished once and for all, and the future is not what will come to be in an unfolding of the present moment; rather the past and the future are enfolded participants in matter’s iterative becoming” (p. 181).

FIGURE 1.1 Screen Shot of Common Core State Standards Promotional Video

Source: D.C. Public Schools (2012). “Three Minute Video Explaining the Common Core State Standards.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5s0rRk9sER0.

And so by focusing on how to best prepare students for self-evident futures— the next grade level, the first year of college, an academic discipline, a job— policies, pedagogies, and assessments often disregard the ways in which imagined futures and embodied histories shape needs, desires, perceptions, practices, and places in the present. By confining conceptualizations of movement to places left behind and places of arrival, we often fail to consider the ways in which these places are connected and constituted by intertwined spatial and temporal mobilities. Fixations on progress toward, transition into, and transfer for the future often prevent us from recognizing education as a process of placemaking—of “matter’s iterative becoming”—in the present (Barad 2007, p. 181).

In this way, the futurity of modern education obscures the material labor and achievements of teachers, students, and objects in the creation and transformation of places. By allowing preoccupations with geographies of the future to overshadow placemaking in the present, we run the risk of missing or devaluing the knowledge (re)produced in the interactions, struggles, and exchanges that make up our daily work together in and beyond the classroom. That is, we risk approaching knowledge as a corpus of representations and information that can be laterally and vertically integrated across contexts, systems of education, and courses of life (Ingold 2009, p. 354). But as Etienne Wenger (1998) asserts, “knowing is defined only in the context of specific practices” (p. 142). We come to know and demonstrate knowledge through effective participation in particular situations. And we learn how to participate through processes of apprenticeship, by sharing embodied and emplaced experiences with other people and things and thereby developing shared understandings of these experiences. In this way, “meaning or knowledge is discovered in the very process of imitating […] movements” (Gieser 2008, p. 300).

While there are a number of factors contributing to the relentless future orientation of formal education and its models of vertically integrated knowledge, two modern conceits are central to the arguments of this book. The first proposes to isolate singular mobilities through depoliticized contexts, and the second assumes that such contexts preexist the movements that make them. In other words, the first conceit imagines a student’s academic literacy development can be separated from their daily travel to and from school, their part-time job, their educational history and desires for the future. And the second figures locations of education— classrooms, school buildings, districts, grade levels, and so on—as predetermined and bounded containers of educational activity.

Kevin Leander, Nathan Phillips, and Katherine Taylor (2010) identify the “classroom-as-container” as a dominant discourse and “ ‘imagined geography’ of education, constituting when and where researchers and teachers should expect learning to ‘take place’ ” (p. 329): “One might almost see the classroom as the epitome of immobility …representing not only conventions of material structure but also conventions of teaching practice, of schedule, of seating charts, and seatwork routines” (p. 332). According to anthropologist Tim Ingold’s (2008, 2009) “logic of inversion,” the intersecting pathways of people, materials, resources, ideas, and energies that constitute a classroom or any other place are converted into boundaries within which activity is contained. Following this logic, we tend to approach classrooms, schools, and colleges as places that exist rather than places that occur or become.

Alternatively, if we approach our courses as movements along overlapping and diverging paths, we might understand ourselves, students, and materials as co-creators of emergent rather than predetermined places. Formed through movement, places are events rather than things, topics rather than objects (Casey 1996, Massey 1994, Pennycook 2010). And courses are places-in-progress, continually produced out of their connections to other places over time— other classes, programs, institutions, neighborhoods, communities, techno- and mediascapes (Nespor 1997, Tusting 2000, Leander et al. 2010). In contrast to conceiving of classes and schools as closed mobility systems, approaching teaching and learning as placemaking involves attending to the “coming together of the previously unrelated,” the constellation of processes constituting a place or course (Massey 2005, p. 141). By tracing associations and reflecting on temporal and spatial relations embedded in our interanimating practices, we might build knowledges of how places/courses are constituted. And these knowledges might help us recognize and mobilize our own agencies and the agencies of the people and things around us in the (re)creation and transformation of educational and civic systems.

This vision of collective creation and transformation shapes and is shaped by the research represented in this book. At the heart of this research are questions about the ways in which scenes of literacy (including those in classrooms) are constituted and connected by mobilities of people, objects, ideas, and information. What kinds of practices, relationships, and knowledges are possible when we approach our classrooms as “complexes of mobility”? (Lefebvre 1991). When our pedagogies account not just for circulations of texts, but also of people, practices, materials, ideas, and resources across classes and schools to other places-in-the-making? What does this process of mobilization do to the boundaries we construct or accept between courses, disciplines, institutions, and communities? As literacy researchers, what happens when a research site’s appearance of solidity is destroyed—from individual texts to events, archives, programs, and institutions? How might foregrounding patterns, representations, and practices of movement reorient our attention to and alter our perceptions of literacy and language practice? What theories and methods can we adopt to more effectively attend to fleeting, distributed, multiple, complex, sensory, emotional, and kinesthetic dimensions of literacy and language?

To ground these questions and frame the practices represented throughout this book, this chapter provides theoretical touchpoints for considering relational and, thus, political dimensions of space-time and mutually constitutive relations among literacy practices, mobilities, and places.¹ The partial and subjective representations of practice I offer in these pages come from a three-year multi-sited, mobile ethnography investigating the complexity of students’ movements within, between, and around high school and college. Like the vision of teaching and learning as placemaking presented above, this ethnographic project is a reflexive and experiential process through which my research participants and I coproduce knowledges about our literacies and mobilities, and about ourselves and systems.

Because knowledge is always situated in practice, to better understand how students and teachers know literacies and mobilities, I engage in and, inevitably, (re)shape their practices. These practices, which are wrapped up in processes of connecting and making places, are the products of the ethnographic project (Pink 2009). “The whole process of gathering and molding knowledge is part of that knowledge; knowledge construction is knowledge, the process is the product” (Blommaert 2009, p. 266). Accordingly, fieldwork, analysis, reflection, and representation are recursive rather than discrete stages in a linear process. This means that despite the book’s order of presentation—a fairly conventional chapter arrangement from theory to practice and pedagogical application—the theoretical assemblage I trace out here is not foundational; it did not precede the research in my mind or on ...