Abstract:
This paper discusses an event of making stories within an initial teacher education program in English and literacy curriculum. It considers how a group of pre service teachers undertook a task of making a narrative text that was produced in both print and digital form. In particular, the connections across signs, objects and bodies are examined as ways of reckoning and playing out the language and material workings of making a story.
Following Massumi (2015), there is a focus on the activity of the body within an ever changing assemblage of time, place and objects. An analysis of the task attends to the ways imagination, creation, knowing and making are enacted though the body as affective events. As such there is a shift from limiting attention to an end point, the completed text, to an understanding of literacy as being in the present, relational, embodied, material and semiotic This matters in times of advanced capitalism where the policy environment is dominated by an austere view of ‘literacy as skills’ that privileges the calculation of metrics of children and teachers performing within predefined and normative pedagogical approaches.
Creative and embodied literacies formulate new subjectivities for pre service teachers and educators and demand pedagogies within a relational ontology that is concerned with furthering literacy as affirmative ethics. Here, literacy is an affective and embodied encounter that seeks to maintain the constant demand to question how we story the stories that tell about humans and non-humans being in the world.
References
Braidotti, R 2013, The Posthuman, Polity, Cambridge and Malden.
Burnett, 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. 90-103.
Burnett, Cathy & Merchant, Guy (2018): Literacy-as-event: accounting for relationality in literacy research, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, DOI:10.1080/01596306.2018.1460318
Leander, K & Boldt, G 2012, 'Rereading "A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies": Bodies, Texts and Emergence', Journal of Literacy Research, vol. 45, no. 1, pp. 22-46.
Massumi, B 2015 Politics of Affect, Polity, Cambridge and Malden
Following Massumi (2015), there is a focus on the activity of the body within an ever changing assemblage of time, place and objects. An analysis of the task attends to the ways imagination, creation, knowing and making are enacted though the body as affective events. As such there is a shift from limiting attention to an end point, the completed text, to an understanding of literacy as being in the present, relational, embodied, material and semiotic This matters in times of advanced capitalism where the policy environment is dominated by an austere view of ‘literacy as skills’ that privileges the calculation of metrics of children and teachers performing within predefined and normative pedagogical approaches.
Creative and embodied literacies formulate new subjectivities for pre service teachers and educators and demand pedagogies within a relational ontology that is concerned with furthering literacy as affirmative ethics. Here, literacy is an affective and embodied encounter that seeks to maintain the constant demand to question how we story the stories that tell about humans and non-humans being in the world.
References
Braidotti, R 2013, The Posthuman, Polity, Cambridge and Malden.
Burnett, 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. 90-103.
Burnett, Cathy & Merchant, Guy (2018): Literacy-as-event: accounting for relationality in literacy research, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, DOI:10.1080/01596306.2018.1460318
Leander, K & Boldt, G 2012, 'Rereading "A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies": Bodies, Texts and Emergence', Journal of Literacy Research, vol. 45, no. 1, pp. 22-46.
Massumi, B 2015 Politics of Affect, Polity, Cambridge and Malden