Literacies that Move and Matter

Nexus Analysis for Contemporary Childhoods

Karen Wohlwend

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780429560743
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

Expanding the definition and use of literacies beyond verbal and written communication, this book examines contemporary literacies through action-focused analysis of bodies, places, and media. Nexus analysis examines how people enact and mobilize meanings that are largely unspoken. Wohlwend demonstrates how nexus analysis can be used as a tool to critically analyze and understand action in everyday settings, to provide a deeper understanding of how meanings are produced from a mix of modes in daily social and cultural contexts. Organized in three sections—Engaging Nexus, Navigating Nexus, and Changing Nexus—this book provides a roadmap to applying nexus analysis to literacy research, and offers tools to enable readers to compare methods across contexts.

Designed to help readers understand the theoretical and methodological assumptions and goals of nexus analysis in classroom and literacy research, this book provides a comprehensive understanding of the theory, framework, and foundations of nexus analysis, by using multimodal examples such as films and media, artifacts, live action performances, and more. Each chapter features consistent sections on key ideas and methods, and a description of procedures for replication and application.

Navigating Nexus

4
READING ACTIVITY

Locating Literacy Nexus

Source: Photo by Karen Wohlwend

Chapter Overview

Key Scholars	Brian Street, James Paul Gee, Ron Scollon, Suzanne Wong Scollon
Key Concepts	Literacy as Social Practice
	Shared Meaning–Making and Cultural Participation
	Situated Literacies
Methods Focus	Filtering Ethnographic Data to Locate Nexus Video–prompted discussion groups Movement maps Location–based video recording
Some Methods Mapped to Concepts
	Discourses in Place (DP): photo surveys => material meanings in sensory environment
	Interaction Order (IO): interviews and sociograms => typical groups
	Historical Body (HB): frequency counts => routine practices
Navigating Nexus	Inquiry 6: What Do I Do With All This Data? Using Three Flows as Filters
	Inquiry 7: What’s at Issue? Asking Participants
	Inquiry 8: Which Things Matter Here? Locating Discourses in Place
	Inquiry 9: Who’s Usually With Whom? Finding Interaction Orders
	Inquiry 10: What Are People Expected to Do? Revealing Historical Bodies
	Inquiry 11: What Is Literacy Doing Here? Finding Nexus Within an Activity Model
Examples	Classroom Video and Teachers’ Concerns
	Playing to Read
	Reading to Play

Nexus and Situated Literacies

Ron Scollon and Suzanne Wong Scollon’s (1981) early work on intercultural communication examined the mesh of largely tacit ways of doing culture through language and literacy. They conceptualized the nexus of practice to situate literacies in social practices and cultural contexts in two ways: 1) literacies create cultural meanings to be shared with others during everyday activities, and 2) these literacy practices materialize expectations for ways of behaving as a member within a particular culture. Because situated literacies are a powerful means of enacting, displaying, and invoking cultural norms, literacy learning is crucial in developing expertise in the expected ways of doing and being needed to pull off the identity of a full-fledged member (Gee, 1996; Lave & Wenger, 1991).

Nexus analysis provides a work-around for the critique that ethnography is too local or culturally idiosyncratic by acknowledging and looking beyond the situatedness of the ethnographic data. After gathering in-depth understanding of participants’ concerns and insights within a here-and-now place, the Scollons looked both closely and globally to track an action with a tool or materials over years of use to see how these histories shape normative expectations. Nexus analysis is the name they gave to their micro-/macro-ethnographic methodology that situated cultural practices in global histories. A parallel development in New Literacy Studies (Street, 1995; Gee, 1996) was the shift to literacy practice that unhinged the culturally situated and bounded time and space of a literacy event (Heath, 1983). Brian Street (1995) conceptualized literacy not as abilities or skills but as social practice, a way of getting things done within a cultural sphere. He unmasked the dominant model of literacy that (still) circulates widely in educational discourse. In this autonomous model, literacy appears universal, mechanical, and benign, a single set of skills unproblematically acquired through repeated practice to mastery. However, when analyzed through Street’s ideological model of literacy as social practice, we can see literacies are multiple, steeped in power relations, and in tension with other culturally situated ways of making meaning. In an ideological model, literacy practices are not only ways of making meaning but also ways of “doing and being” as we take up and pull off particular identities that enact recognized ways of belonging in a particular discourse (Gee, 1996).

Nexus analysis recognizes that while the semiotic potential of literacy practices can create new meanings or content, the ways of doing literacies can remain unchanged. In this way, literacy practices that intend to be critical may “sound” critical and express social justice in discourse—on paper or in a classroom discussion—while still reproducing the same inequities by enacting the old established ways of participating (Wohlwend & Lewis, 2011). However, the creativity in literacy practices also enables new actions that veer off or run counter to expected identities and practices. In this way, literacy practices can produce novel combinations of actions for pulling off identities that might not be expected, providing the means for transgressing or remaking the nexus.

Of course, we are always immersed in nexus of practice, and uncovering the nexus and making it visible and ultimately malleable requires extensive ethno-graphic research. The nexus analyst must filter through the meanings and materials in a place to locate the combinations of practices needed to pull off the dominant ways of belonging here. Along the way, analysts are interested in unmasking the meanings and practices that are so familiar they are under the radar—meanings and actions that our participants and we ourselves as researchers may not easily recognize. In other words, we need to filter through ethnographic data to uncover:

• the unspoken meanings of materials and designs that make up discourses in place
• the multimodal production of spaces of belonging that make up interaction orders
• the automatic practices and engrained expectations that make up historical bodies

FIGURE 4.1 Initial Methods of Nexus Analysis Mapped Onto Three Flows in a Mediated Action

A nexus analysis examines these three flows that cycle in and out of any moment of activity in order to get at the mediated actions that materialize and anchor nexus of practice. The end goal is to search to locate a small yet key action that could open possibilities to change the nexus in ways that would make a difference to the people in this place. Figure 4.1 shows one way that methods of nexus analysis could materialize the model of the three flows of a nexus of practice.

INQUIRY 6 WHAT DO I DO WITH ALL THIS DATA? USING THREE FLOWS AS FILTERS

OK, so how does all this work? Where do you look for this tiny, inconspicuous, yet consequential action? How will you know it when you see it? How many moments can you feasibly analyze? Because micro- and macro-analysis of a single mediated action require an intense investment of time, you need a clear process with a compelling rationale for prioritizing your analysis and selecting a few moments to analyze out of a large and messy corpus of ethnographic and video data. In this exploration, I describe a filtering process that can help focus your analysis and inform your emerging analysis.

One strategy is to keep methods and theory tightly linked by thinking with a set of guiding concepts and following these throughout the study. For example, throughout this book, I’m thinking with three flows that make up a mediated action. In this chapter, I’ve incorporated the three flows into an adaptation of the Scollons’ nexus filtering process (2004) to illustrate how thinking with each component could inform early stages of your inquiry as you narrow your search for potential sites of engagement.¹ Figure 4.2 shows how this process organizes and screens initial data during the search for a research site and then focuses inquiry during early visits as you engage the nexus at the selected site.

1. The first filter gives you a sense of what matters here as you learn about core issues from participants (IO) and seek to understand how their issues are reflected in the material environment (DP) and routine practices (HB) (see examples in the next section).
2. The next three filters help you focus systematically on each flow (DP, IO, or HB) as you collect initial data and more of the nexus becomes apparent.
3. The filters funnel data to moments for micro-/macro-analysis of an action in the convergence of these flows so that you can explore its impact and potential for changing nexus.
4. Finally, the last steps are to think practically and imaginatively to improvise and reassemble the typical ways of doing things by altering this small action as a means to help participants reshape the nexus.

FIGURE 4.2 Nexus Analysis Filters, Using Three Constitutive Flows

These filters can organize your research chronologically as well as analytically. For example in the first months as I began to study kindergarten play, in the initial selection to early exploration of a place to study, I worked through four filters: the first filter identified one classroom as a site of engagement, the second located discourses in place to determine where to station the video cameras to capture daily literacy routines, the third followed interaction orders to see how children worked in social groups, and the fourth uncovered historical bodies by tallying the most frequent practices (see Figure 4.2). This filtering led to dense spots in the nexus where close analysis of actions—taping a piece of paper, tapping on a screen—could reveal how shared meanings and social interactions were mediated, negotiated, and produced.

After an action is identified, analysis continues, moving recursively across micro- and macro-analyses, to unpack and situate actions in immediate contexts in their far-reaching histories and trajectories. In this way, the overall filtering process sifts through a large amount of messy data to find a focus, but with a fluid design that cycles over and over, in and out and back again. Paradoxically, it widens the lens while narrowing the search, following histories and expectations in global circulations of literacy practices and artifacts at every step, putting the research in constant motion, moving back and forth across time and space.

Exploring Potential Sites

This chapter provides a sequence of initial emergent steps in a nexus analysis; as you consider potential sites, begin collecting and constructing data, and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• EXPANDED TABLE OF CONTENTS
• List of Excerpts from Previous Publications
• Photo Credits
• Series Editor Introduction
• Preface
• Engaging Nexus
• Navigating Nexus
• Changing Nexus
• Appendix A: Research Studies Mapped to Methods and Publications
• Appendix B: Glossary of Key Terms
• Index