Abstract:
This paper sets out to explore the relationship between digital literacies and the student subject as ‘21st century learner’. It emerged from part of a doctoral research project which was aimed at tracing discourses of ‘21st century learning’ into a school. Data for this project was gathered by the ethnographic methods of participant observation, artefact collection and informal interviews, and analysed as evidence of discursive practices. Early on in the analysis, ‘digital literacy’ emerged as a key theme. In order to explore this theme of ‘digital literacy’ in relation to the ‘21st century learner’ as a student subject, a model was required that allowed for the conceptualisation of the material and immaterial elements of ‘new practices’ (Jones & Hafner, 2012) as conditions in which individuals were taking up subject positions. This led to the theoretical framework proposed by Burnett et al (2014) in which the ‘(im)materiality’ of literacy is conceptualised as an assemblage of ‘space, embodiment, stuff and mediation’. This framework allows for an exploration of the way that, in this case, digital literacies are implicated in the formation of student subjects, within the classroom and breakout spaces, and with the objects of digital technology and texts. It allows the paper to go beyond a discussion of students as users of digital technologies to a consideration of individual subjectivities; of how individuals were forming themselves in particular conditions of physical and virtual space, and with the available materials and texts. Thus, it aims at bringing together Foucault’s concept of ‘technologies of the self’ with a consideration of digital literacy as (im)material practices. It is this perspective of the (im)materiality of digital literacy that informs this paper and allows for a framing up of the ‘21st century learner’ as a socio-material subject for whom the digital tools of mediation have become part and parcel of ways of being in the world (Adams & Pente 2011 p248). ReferencesAdams, C & Pente, P (2011) Teachers Teaching in the New Mediascape: digital immigrants or ‘natural born cyborgs’? E-Learning and Digital Media Vol 8 No 3 pp 247-257Burnett, C, Merchant, G, Pahl, K & Rowsell, J (2014) The(im)materiality of literacy: the significance of subjectivity to new literacies research, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, Vol 35 No 1, pp 90-103Foucault , M (1984) Preface to The History of Sexuality Volume II, Random House IncJones, R. Chik, A. & Hafner, C (2015) Discourse and Digital Practices : doing discourse analysis in the digital age, New York, Routledge