The Meaning Makers

I never met Gordon Wells in person, but as a long-standing admirer of his scholarship I was deeply moved to read about his tragic death. It was one of those unfortunate coincidences - I heard the sad news just as I was agreeing changes on the draft of a piece I’d written. Mine was a piece that underscored the enduring influence of his work. As is often the case with writing, I needed to go through the process to clarify my own thinking, and that led to a fuller appreciation of his influence. Wells had a lasting effect on me as a teacher and researcher. Writing about The Meaning Makers, first published in 1986, it was necessary to return to the work, and I was pleasantly surprised to find it as fresh, engaging and relevant today as it was thirty-four years ago when I first encountered it. Subtitled ‘children learning language and using language to learn’, The Meaning Makers is nothing short of a landmark text. It is based on fifteen years of longitudinal research, all rather diminutively referred to as the Bristol Study. Fifteen years is almost unthinkable under current funding regimes, but it certainly helps in getting some depth. And the work of Wells and his team certainly had depth. The research was rigorous and carefully theorized, providing detailed evidence of how children’s language and early literacy developed at home and at school. It also strongly suggested how such development might be effectively supported. In his work Wells referred to a wide range of child language research, building on the insights of Britton, Rosen and Barnes in seeing language and learning from a Vygotskian perspective. Alongside this he repeatedly turned to the work of Bruner, developing a social constructivist view of meaning which was vividly illustrated through carefully selected extracts from his extensive fieldwork. Transcripts are chosen with care and subjected to close analysis in Wells’ writing and this provides an important model for all who follow in his footsteps. For me the simple message that children are active meaning makers remains a powerful guiding principle. That principle, and the convincing evidence used to illustrate it underscores Wells’ significant contribution to language and literacy studies.

Doing data differently

Reading that 8 million horses died in the First World War or that 200,000 were slaughtered with the collapse of the equine market after the Second is extremely disturbing. More so than if it had been a 'large number' or a 'great many' - and so, in such matters, numbers count. Being a literacy scholar with a background in the humanities and qualitative research often puts me in a particular position with respect to numbers. When paradigm wars break out, as they do from time to time, I repeatedly find myself in opposition to the bean counters. But as Jackie once pointed out to me, quantitative studies can be really useful in offering a broad view of trends and patterns. I just didn't listen. But now, working on the British Academy funded project Doing Data Differently I'm beginning to learn the error of my ways. In fact I'm learning a great deal, most of which I'm still mulling over. But here's a random collection of thoughts. First - and central to the Doing Data Differently project, is the significance of what you measure and what you don't (the shadow side if you like). Second, and related to this, is the sheer power of numbers, the 8 million horses effect as I shall now call it. Third is about how you visualise data. Visualisation is representation, and as a result it can highlight, it can exaggerate or it can distort information And finally, in this whole quantitative field it's all about relations, what can be mapped on to what, who or where. This can be a highly creative act (highlighting new relationships), or a selective act (implicitly suggesting that some relationships are more important than others) and probably much more, too. I'm guessing that this sort of critical perspective is all very familiar to those working in this tradition and it's probably part of the basic mathematics that I've conveniently forgotten - but it's a useful antidote to the intoxications of post-qualitative theory and is certainly helping me to think about educational data differently and equally importantly, we're sharing this journey with a wonderful group of teachers.

Here come the non-humans

It's not just the fact that we're sailing in the wake of Latour's Re-assembling the Social - the growing appetite for all things socio-material or post-human represents an impulse to think differently about our place in the world. Suddenly, or so it seems, the non-humans have risen up to challenge the endeavours of social science. Is it strictly social anymore, you might well ask? That challenge, if taken seriously, is a challenge to what we focus on in research, how we go about studying it, analysing and even reporting it. Conceding to material agency must surely be an all or nothing affair. I've just been reading Adams and Thompson (2011) on 'interviewing objects' - yes, that's right, interviewing objects. Well, the sort of objects they are concerned with are technological, and if we allow them the temporary grace to separate (human) subjects so cleanly from (technological) objects, they make a compelling argument. I resonated with this observation, for instance, 'The technological milieu is shaping substantially - insinuating itself, habituating us and simultaneously informing and interpreting - how we act in and perceive the world (2011:13), and I enjoyed reading about the 'invitational quality of things'. I remembered a conversation with Julia a while back when she wondered out loud if the idea of affordance still worked in a socio-material universe. I suppose in a way an affordance is rather weaker than an invitation. Perhaps it suggests less agency? I can't help thinking that Twitter's 'What's happening?' prompt is a bit more like an invitation, and similarly that the little red dot that says 158 next to the envelope icon on my phone is an invitation - an invitation to worry or to read and delete. So, here come the non-humans, and really when you think about it they're all over us; they have us surrounded.

Discourse/methodology

Discourse and Digital Practices - the outcome of a lively symposium in Hong Kong, organised by Rodney Jones and his colleagues, is out now in the UK. In my chapter, I took some of the iPad data (also published here), and tried to relate my analytical methods to the more familiar practices of discourse analysis. Whether or not I succeed in doing this is, of course, for readers to decide, but to me it felt a little like retracing my own footsteps. I was trying to think through how discursive practices, media narratives, digital technologies, adult-child relationships, notions of literacies... and so on, all mesh together in the story-sharing episodes captured on video. In doing this, I probably focused too intently on the micro-analysis, applying a rather simplistic multi-modal framework to make sense of the interactions between adults, children and iPads. So although this generated interesting thoughts about pointing and touching, it bypassed embodiment and feeling altogether. But more importantly it excluded the intervention of researchers, ignored the representational nature of video and foregrounded human interaction. I was drawn into a comfortable world - one in which we can watch and describe 'fluctuating modal hierarchies' (Norris, 2004) from outside. But recently, and particularly in my collaborative work with Cathy, that idea that there are distinct actions, interactions and even episodes 'out there', waiting to be described, labelled, and interpreted becomes rather problematic. It's not that I've come to embrace a rather extreme form of social constructivism in which everything dissolves into being a sort of collective hallucination (although it must be said that the time spent looking at virtual worlds often made me question the distinction between the virtual and the actual, and sometimes to the extent that there seemed very little difference), but more that the work on multiplicities, socio-materialism and post-humanism that we've been reading prompts some rather challenging thoughts about what we do as literacy researchers - well, let's say social science researchers in general - with our dominant structuralist accounts of meaning-making and our almost doctrinal acceptance of social constructivism.

Data driven?

At this year's LRA conference I found myself repeatedly asking whether presenters felt that their video data was producing them, rather than the other way around. It probably sounded like someone trying to make a clever point, so I thought it might be worth trying to unpick what I was driving at. The thought first occurred to me a while back when it seemed as if researchers had 'discovered' mobility, as if it was something akin to a previously overlooked landmass - already there, but as yet unchartered. At that point I wondered whether that new interest in movement was simply a by-product of moving image technology. Were we simply seeing what our technology enabled us to see? Looking back then, was that earlier fascination with spoken interaction, turn-taking, transcripts and all the paraphernalia of oracy simply the result of affordable recording devices and magnetic tape? Thinking in this way might just exemplify how data produces us - and also at the same time how technologies of data capture enact exclusions. In our rush to study mobility do we ignore turn-taking, or indeed anything that falls outside the frame? You could take the argument to another level, as Barad does in Meeting the Universe Halfway, when she argues that 'technoscientific practices play a role in producing the very phenomena they set out to describe.' (207:2007). Or on an everyday level you could see how the way the iPhone camera gets used creates a new way of seeing the world. That wide angle lens, the heightened colour values, and also the simple ubiquity of the phone itself melds with our experience in new ways, creating radical departures from photography as it was. Put that into a slideshow (as above) and the way we participate in the world is changed.

Affect

Massumi makes a useful contribution to the problem with affect when he says:' There seems to be a growing feeling within media, literary and art theory that affect is central to an understanding of our information- and image-based late capitalist culture, in which so-called master narratives are perceived to have foundered....belief has waned for many but not affect. If anything,our condition is characterized by a surfeit of it. The problem is that there is no cultural-theoretical vocabulary specific to affect. Our entire vocabulary has derived from theories of signification...' (Parables for the Virtual, 2002:27). Good point, well made. Still confusing affect with emotion? I found that this helped to unscramble the two (and 'feeling' at the same time).

Commodification

As a sort of postscript to yesterday's piece on the commodification of early learning and literacy, I wanted to underline that this isn't a new phenomenon at all. From Dinky toys and Meccano to Helix geometry sets, Chambers pencils and Beacon Readers, my own childhood learning was strongly patterned by commercially-produced artefacts that often enjoyed global circulation. What has changed, I think, is the extent to which the tools of edutainment are scripted, mediated and marketed to consumers - both parents and their children. In a sense some of the products are more specialised and they tap into curriculum discourses about what early learning should look like, and an increasingly high-profile set of messages about the home as a site for influential early learning. Most of us in the field would agree about the significance of early learning, but the backwash effect from narrow models of curriculum could end up with narrow models of early learning - a toddler's home curriculum which is characterised by endless and unimaginative routines based on the alpahabet, the cardinal numbers, and shape - all driven by digital toys. If I'm right then it's important that we champion those toys, media products and apps that are informed by a more diverse, expansive and flexible view of literacy and learning.

Multiple things

Research Story from Chris Thomson on Vimeo.
We all  have to juggle with competing demands and priorities, and it seems to get even worse when we start to research things! I was moved by this digital story produced by one of my Masters students - it illustrates the cost, the struggle and the emotional underlife in an elegant way, but also it highlights some of the benefits that accrue from doing this sort of work. It's well worth keeping all this in mind as we go on. In my own work, I've been wrestling with ideas about pleasure, everyday life and the commodification of early learning and literacy. In the light of this I returned to Helen Nixon's piece  'From bricks to clicks.' and the more recent piece, with Erica Hateley in Children's Literacy, Learning and Culture which ends with this: 'As children are inducted younger and younger into particular modes of literacy, and particular dispositions as 'consuming citizens', researchers committed to learning from and contributing to young people's agency and social opportunities need to pay attention to what is happening culturally when reading and playing and literacy and learning means tapping, touching, swiping, and scroling and combining online and offline activities.' (2013:39)

A story?

Oh hell, I'm stuck in The Room - or to be more precise I'm stuck on a puzzle in an impressive iPad app. It's enough to while away hours of one's life. Anyway, I had to break into that this evening to talk to some students online about research, or to be more precise about stories. I took the tack that good (social science) research is a good story well told. And, of course I didn't mean that it's fiction, but that it's a well-crafted account that has a 'story-like' arc or development. I also leaked the fact that I've been working with a colleague on the idea of storying as a research method. I'm quite excited by that. The idea is that producing multiple stories from different points of views helps to uncover new insights. Rather than trying to triangulate, or what Haraway (1988:581) called 'the god trick of seeing everything from nowhere', these stories stack up - interconnecting in unpredictable ways. I'm looking forward to seeing how that all shakes down. There will be a paper - soon.

Creativity and mobile technology

Sir Ken Robinson opened the day's business at NCTE 2012. His mixture of simple truths, stand-up comedy and tweet-able soundbites is quick to win over an audience, as he rolls out contemporary educational aphorisms. Waving the flag for diversity and creativity is so important in the face of widespread curriculum 'reforms'. Reforms that push students and teachers into a conveyor-belt mentality. Throughout the rest of the day, I followed sessions on using tablets in classrooms - well iPads to be specific - and there's certainly no shortage of these to choose from. Two things struck me. First of all, the sheer enthusiasm of academics and teachers for iPad apps. Indeed it's an enormous app-etite! Most presenters seemed happy to stick with describing 'really great' and, of course 'awesome' apps. I only heard one lone voice that tilted at the idea that these presenters might be inadvertently advertising Apple products to their colleagues, their students and their students' parents. Secondly, there seems to be quite a lot of confusion about the use of the idea of affordances. Partly this stems from slippages between thinking about the affordances of the tablet and the affordances of an app itself. Rick Beach even took it one step further by suggesting that affordances were really what educators could 'extract' from apps. I'm not really convinced by that idea. But all told there were plenty of examples of innovative practices - although few people were asking really searching questions about students, portable technologies and new literacies. Consequently my notes (in the NCTE app!) ended up looking like a shopping list of apps. Perhaps this shows that this is new territory. The massive take-up of i-Pads and the proliferation of apps has taken classrooms by storm. But I do think there is a pressing need for more considered and more research-based, reflective accounts to sit alongside the emerging how-to publications...and all those enthusiastic presentations. Advances in literacy, Ken Robinson suggested, are the product of an interaction between technology and human creativity. Perhaps we need to pay more attention to the human bit.

Qualitatively funny

Academic re-mix, or what - I laughed at this! It's not of course that we want to draw hard and fast lines between quantitative and qualitative paradigms, but some of the lines rehearse very familiar conversations - conversations that I've found myself with colleagues and friends. It seems like 'scientism' can be very emotive topic, and that's where the mash-up hits home. The emotive tone combines with excellently timed sub-titles. Just a diversion from real work, of course, just like fooling around for hours on Gif Control or plotting your moves on Path.

Looking forwards, looking backwards

For most of the work I've been involved in over the last ten years, the words 'technology' or 'internet' have seemed far too general. That's what prompted me to settle on the digital, particularly as it seemed to combine as a useful descriptor in such ideas as 'digital practice', 'digital communication', 'digital writing', 'digital media' and yes, of course 'digital literacy', in which familiar ideas - practice, communication and so on - were changed or re-interpreted with digital and connective technologies. Some terminology has a limited shelf-life for me; I notice I have pretty much dispensed with CMC and online communication because they don't seem to me to tell the whole story. Then of course there are terms like 'new media' (which I still like), 'Web 2.0' (which now seems rather old school) and 'social media' (which I use, but don't like - after all media is always social, isn't it?). Along with all this shifting is my own engagement or experimentation with digital spaces - chatrooms, blogs, virtual worlds and, yes, social media! I've written about all of them, and most recently with Julia Gillen on Twitter (here). What drives all this activity? Well I suppose I'm genuinely interested on how we shape and are shaped by our communicative environment - how we mean, and how we might negotiate new meanings about our lives, in the world, in the current context - which after all is a context that is infused with what Latour would call the non-human agents of digital technology. Since this is turning confessional I'd have to concede that this is my overarching interest. And since I happen to have spent most of my working life in educational institutions, I've always had a keen eye for what this might mean for children and young people. Drilling down further into curriculum stuff and the whole tangle of learning, well that regularly slips through my fingers. I feel there is so much in that whole arena that I either don't know or simply can't believe. At each turn, though, I've had an implicit tactic. First I try to understand what's going on in popular practices, and that always seems to work best by immersing myself in them, and then I start asking what that means/or might mean for education. Is that a method? I don't know, but it's what I do. Working on blogging with Julia Davies, the only way we could explain this reflexive insider approach was to call it a 'dual autoethnography', and that rather awkward term crops up again in the Twitter paper. But that's only half the journey; the second half is asking the questions. I suppose that's the buzz in the DefT project: asking those questions with a varied group of colleagues. In a way (and this might sound to them like heresy) I hope there isn't an answer, because that always seems to force premature closure. For me it's the question: what's going on and what does this mean for children and young people that propels us forward.

Literacies and complexity

On my idiosyncratic pathway through informal meetings and programmed events at AERA 2012 I became interested in how becoming literate with technology is now being conceptualised and investigated. Researchers I have a close affinity with see digital practices as hard to pin down, difficult to describe and often associated with disrupting assumptions about literacy, pedagogy and curriculum. As the simple attractions of the iPad capture the attention of early years researchers, they raise similar issues to those of their colleagues working with older children and youth - both in school, and out-of-school contexts. Issues of varied experience, questions of what is age appropriate, and re-considerations of the processes and products of meaning-making recur. I seem to have come down firmly on the side of embracing complexity, and resisting simple frameworks and accounts, and search for this in the work of colleagues. At the moment I can see three reasons for upholding this acknowledgement of complexity. Firstly, it seems to me to be the stongest theme in my own empirical work. Secondly, it is in sympathy with post-modernism's rejection of grand narratives. And thirdly, from the educational perpective, it defies the sort of reductions that make learning seem measurable and something to assess and therefore a subject for numerous attempts to monitor and control - to render it as a mechanism that holds those institutions and individuals responsible through the vice-like grip of accountability.

On evidence

Research, like photography, is a selective record of things that have already happened. The writing of research is inevitably retrospective, and in this sense is always a partial history - a flawed recollection of the past, albeit one that is consumed in the present. And this is what makes research design such an interesting process. It is the point at which we are planning the future selection of evidence from which we will attempt to construct the story of something that hasn't happened yet. It details how we will select, collect and analyse the materials that we haven't yet collected. No wonder, then, that when we read research - even good quality research - it so often feels as if some realities have been hollowed out, or that there is an airbrushed image of truth. As with history with a capital 'h' it is usually the lived experience of the human subjects that is hidden, perhaps simply because this is always so complex and fluid. It is only really the most patient of ethnographers who can capture the fleeting shadows of human intentions, emotions and their various attempts to forge meanings. In the Julian Barnes novel: 'The Sense of an Ending', there's a great quote about history which is attributed to a Patrick Lagrange. It goes like this: 'History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation' (p17). Since the source isn't formally acknowledged, are we to assume that it is a work of fiction? Whatever the conclusion, could it be re-worded as : research is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of interpretation meet the inadequacies of data?