Literacies for Learning in Further Education: promoting inclusive learning across boundaries through students’ literacy practices. Greg Mannion Kate Miller Institute of Education, University of Stirling, Scotland in association with the LfLFE Team
Paper presented at the ECER Conference, Dublin, September, 2005. Contact details:
[email protected]
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Introduction The Literacies for Learning in Further Education (hereafter, LfLFE) research project has been funded for three years from January 2004 as part of the United Kingdom’s Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP), administered by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). The project involves collaboration between two universities and four further education colleges in England and Scotland and has been funded for three years from January 2004 as part of the United Kingdom’s Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP). A key aim of the TLRP is to improve the outcomes – however specified – for learners in teaching and learning contexts. The LfLFE project involves collaboration between two universities – University of Stirling and Lancaster University - and four further education colleges in Scotland and England – Anniesland College in Glasgow, Lancaster and Morecambe College, Perth College and Preston College. The project is in three Phases.Phase 1 was an Induction period, also allowed us to explore the literacy practices required by students in becoming a student in further education. Phase 2, ended in July 2005, examined in detail the literacy practices of students in eleven curriculum areas across the domains of college, work, home and community. The final phase of the project will involve developing and evaluating pedagogic interventions based upon our initial data collection and analysis. The premise for the project is that the literacy demands and practices of F.E. colleges are not always fashioned around the resources people bring to student life. This paper reports on a methodology, some data analysis and a theoretical position that together support a permeable and relational view of literacy practices and their associated domains. The data suggests that many students experience literacy in a polycontextual way and that it is possible to recognize the role of literacy as a set of boundary practices. The paper suggests it is a central pedagogical challenge to create opportunities for new boundary objects and boundary literacy practices to emerge in the interface between home, work and college contexts if learning is to be rendered more inclusive.
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Theoretical Framing: Literacy Practices in Context New Literacy Studies (NLS) provides the main theoretical home for this work providing a social view of literacy. What is ‘new’ in New Literacy Studies (NLS) after Street (1984) is a shift in perspective and the development of new concepts particularly the related ideas of literacy events events that involve reading and writing and literacy practices which seeks to understand literacy events in their social context. Recent work on literacy (Barton & Hamilton 1998, Barton, et al. 2000) focuses on literacy as situated in particular social ‘domains’ (such as home, school or workplace) which are structured, patterned contexts within which literacy is used and learned (Barton & Hamilton, 2000). Students may join various ‘discourse communities’ in these domains or be excluded from them. Seeing literacy as socially situated in domains foregrounds how literacies can change over time, be valued differently in different contexts and may be associated with new technologies in informal as well as formal settings. In a given domain, practices give rise to distinctive literacies and associated discourse communities. There is a danger here that because a domain supposedly provides a boundary, learning in one domain (say the home) is potentially separated from that which goes on in classrooms and colleges. This view fuels the idea that educational institutions value and somehow ‘deliver’ decontextualised and generalised knowledge. However, as Barton and Hamilton (1998) assert, domains are not permanently bounded and nonpermeable. There can be overlaps between them. There is the potential for practices to be exported between domains and for domains to infiltrate each other. For us, a domain is not seen as a sort of container within which literacy practices takes place. Following activity theory’s insight that systems realize and reproduce themselves by generating actions and operations (Engestrom et al., 1995), we offer a similarly dynamic view of literacy domain focusing on the manner in which they coevolve with and through the generation of practices. Practices are not just embedded in contexts. Rather, contexts are produced through practices which themselves emerge over time (Chaiklin and Lave, 1996). In terms of reading and writing, literacy practices are both
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dependent upon and productive of domains (Leander 2002).
In this paper we privilege the literacy practices that occur between domains. As we will show, these inbetween contexts are common in students’ accounts of their literacy practices. To theorise the ways reading and writing gets deployed across domains, we draw on Van Oers’ (1998) term, recontextualisation to explain how people carry out known activities in new contexts or develop new patterns of activity to solve problems in new contexts.
The NLS view of literacy is further expanded by treating literacy as a multimodal form of communication (Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996) where many modes (speech, writing, reading, gesture, and even taste and so on) may come together in any communication activity. Kress and van Leeuwen (2001) unify the socially situated, embodied and interested use of semiotic resources under the umbrella term 'communicative practice'. For Kress, learning is about inner sign making and the shaping of the subjectivity of the signmaker while outward sign making can create new forms of syntax or text which can recursively impact on one's subjectivity. Here learners are always reinterpreting texts anew; learning is more akin to design work. Kress’ view informs our view of learning and further challenges the notion of context as container for action. DeCorte (1999) reminds us that earlier versions of the situated cognition perspective asserted that knowledge and skills cannot transfer across contexts because they are so strongly embedded in and tied to the context in which they are acquired. But a view is emerging that is more sensitive to multiple contexts in learning (TuomiGrohn and Engestrom, 2003). This view, argues for the use of the term ‘generality’ of knowing (Greeno, 1997) or polycontextual knowing across the different activities that learners participate in. Following Kress, literacy practices are not just socially ‘located’ but are directly engaged in the design of social contexts (Leander, 2002).
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The link between learning and context, explored above, omits any discussion of identity formation processes. Hall (1996) offers a polycontextual theory of identification as the continual process of transformation that is not unified but fragmented and distributed across contexts, intersecting practices and discourses Because we continually identify across contexts in any one moment, recontextualization is seen as the process of participating in any number of contexts while concurrently changing that context through making sense of it out of experience of other situations, past and present.
For us in LfLFE, because students are always on a journey of participation and identity formation across more than one context, learning is always polycontextual to some degree. Within this relational sociocultural view, learning is taken to be evidenced by participation in a new activity in response to constraints and affordances of the new situation with a mobilization of resources drawn from the contexts of experience in other situations. This view of learning takes for granted a transformation or a recontextualisation of an earlier or parallel situation and the interaction of the learner in the new context. The research focus on literacy practices is best understood as a lens for understanding the relationships among the related processes of learning, recontextualisation and identification (Figure 1, below):
Identification
Recontextualisation
Figure 1: Literacy practices mediating learning, identification and contextualization.
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In Figure 1, the representation of literacy practices in the centre of the diagram is intended to stand for the way in which literacy practices are implicated in the coemergence of learning, identification and context. The central perspective on literacy here is that our contexts are mediated through our practices (tools): we learn, live and become through the reading and writing of texts of various kinds everything from diaries, timetables, and the web to phone text messages. This is a freeze-frame representation of processes that are complex and dynamic, in order to make them amenable to understanding and investigation.1 This two-dimensional image does not capture the ways in which diverse identities, contexts and learning relate to each other across as well as within domains. We continue to address the challenge ofconstructing diagrams that adequately represent our ideas here. Russell (2005: 8), drawing on Engestrom’s idea of expansive learning (1997), sets out the challenge of theorizing the multiple contexts that can be in play when a person is learning: But to theorize expansion through different contexts, one must theorize the relations of all these elements in multiple activity systems, what Engestrom et al. call polycontextuality, the "third stage" of activity theory (Engestrom, Engestrom & Kärkkäinen, 1997). Participants within one activity system, one context, come from various contexts, and will enter various contexts. To understand the various ways participants interpret and use the tools, object, motive, rules/norms, etc. of an activity system, it is often necessary to analyze the relations among various contexts. Here the notion of a boundary object is useful to help us spot how learning gets enacted in a relational and polycontextual manner. The notion of boundary objects was developed in actor-network theory (ANT) (Star, 1989), but has also been taken up by Wenger (1998) in his conceptualisation of communities of practice. In ANT, ‘like the blackboard, a boundary object “sits in the middle” of a group of actors with divergent viewpoints’ (Star, 1989: 46). Boundary objects are unique because they may play different roles in different domains or contexts. They are always embodied in a specific artefact (physical or conceptual) that is recognizable by members of more than one 1
It is also possible that learning may not be the purpose of the literacy practice, which points to the mobilising literacy resources may not simply be across contexts but also from one purpose to another and involve different aspects of identification.
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domain. By implication, boundary objects are themselves dynamic because the same artefact can have more than one meaning for an individual who inhabits more than one domain. Boundary objects act as translation devices affording communication between domains but also function as resources for boundary practices (Gal et al, 2005). For our purposes, we explore how some literacy practices may be acting as boundary practices occurring in the interfaces of literacy domains wherein identification, recontextualisation and learning is negotiated. For Wenger (1998: 107) boundary objects work at the edges of communities of practice mediating their external relationships; ‘they enable co-ordination, but they can do so without actually creating a bridge between the perspectives and the meanings of various communities’. To date, a form of expansive learning resulting from border crossing between contexts has been seen as higher order form of expansive learning (Engestrom, 1995), though there is a sense that it is becoming the norm for those who inhabit multiple activity systems. Yet, a more relational view of place and space suggests that students at any level may ordinarily interact across multiple activity systems associated with college, home and work, leisure and other spaces. This suggests that boundary objects and their associated practices are not happening at the margins of communities of practice but are ubiquitous. The degree to which learning for regular students in formal educational settings is commonly polycontextual is not well understood. What if all learning, contextualization and identification involve degrees of expansion across and between contexts? This project sought to add to this picture by encouraging students to consider via the lens of literacy to what extent and in what ways their learning, identification and contextualization processes appeared polycontextual to them. Methodology The methodology informing this project is broadly ethnographic, hermeneutic and reflexive. We are trying to obtain ‘thick description’ from the inside rather than merely act as observers from the outside. For this reason, a participatory approach imbued the methods and design though not all are ‘members’ of the research team in the same way and there is a continuum between those who are more like ‘respondents’ and those who are more like ‘researchers’. Here our aim is to support participants in becoming ethnographers of their own experience. The project is hermeneutic insofar as we
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recognise the recursive role of interpretation in the understanding of social practices, that is, the ways in which understanding is mobilised through the interrelationships between persons and artifacts and that these understandings help to shape future practices.
This has resulted in a mixed method approach to the project as a whole. In phase 2 one method of a number devised to capture data on student’s sense of their own literacy practices was the ‘Icon Mapping Exercise’. The rationale here is to explore students’ own understanding of the interrelated process of learning, recontextualization and identification. The method described was devised so that it allowed respondents to explore how these processes relate through the lens of literacy. In the first phase of this activity, students were reminded that they have already done work on noticing and exploring the literacy practices in their lives through other methods. Next, a range of ‘icons’ were presented to students that could be interpreted differently by each respondent to signify or function as a label for the sorts of literacy practices and events they had now become sensitised to as project respondents. Some examples of the full set of 40 icons are provided below. These were generated after piloting the activity and devising icons that represented the sorts of activities we knew were of some relevance from phase 1.
The icons represented a semiotic landscape which can refer to texts, literacy events or literacy practices in their lives. Working with these semiotic resources, students are invited to design a new text that in some way represents the interrelated process of learning, identification and contextualization. The method also took cognizance of the
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idea that students work in a multimodal manner and can be viewed as ‘designers’ (Kress, 2001) of the maps they produce as signs through the research process. Individually, they were invited to pick a range of icons (maximum of 10) that reminded them of the sorts of reading and writing that they engaged in their daily lives inclusive of those encountered A. at home and as part of students’ leisure and pass times time outside home B. in workplaces / placement / parttime work, or C. in college (in class, outside class).
In order to generate salient data, the interviewer would qualify the icon selection process by asking respondents to bear in mind / remember times and places where reading and writing felt really important to them or resulted in significant learning of some kind. The sorts of reading and writing we asked students to think about were ones that … (a) they would miss if they couldn’t do them any more (b) reading and writing that was very meaningful for you / others (c) have lead respondents to understand and learn things that are important to them.
These selected ‘important’ icons, now acting as signs or referents to particular literacy events and practices, were explored for their relevance one by one. Thereafter, respondents were invited to place or ‘map’ these icons onto a piece of flip chart paper. On the page there were three overlapping circles annotated with the titles: home, college and work. Students would then, place the icons in the circles according to any of the following guide criteria: (a) where they take place (b) for whom or for what ‘place’ they had most relevance. The use of a three circle Venn diagram mean that icons that related to literacy practices that were relevant across more than one domain could be placed in any of the four possible overlaps between any 2 or 3 of the circles. Locating icons in ‘the inbetween’ areas of the Venn diagram proved fruitful in exploring how literacy
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practices and events can have a multiple contextualizations or were polycontextual. The researcher then explored this mapping exercise in more detail probing for ideas about how some literacy practices are relevant to various aspects of the lifeworld.
Lastly, since mostly icon maps were constructed in parallel, paired interviews or focus groups were conducted with these respondents. Usually in pairs or groups up to 4, they were asked to review and explore each other’s maps. This was achieved by discussing what students and researchers noticed and what was common across the maps.
This paper reports on some of the findings from 11 maps devised by students in six subject areas. 6 were female, 5 were male. Their ages ranged from 15 to 25 with the mean age being about 19. Tape recordings were made of the conversation, a record was kept of the icon map and a digital photograph was taken of the map itself. Most interviews were transcribed in full and/or summary notes were written up.
Findings First we offer a descriptive macro view of all 11 maps. Taken together, we can simply represent here the numerical dominance or otherwise of how the students placed of the icons on the maps: 19
42
13 12 2
0
3
10
Figure 2: Venn Diagram showing the numbers of icons chosen and mapped onto the domains of ‘Home’, ‘College’ and ‘Work’ for 11 students. Total number of icons n=91.
Map Data Analysis Separating the data out, we should note a greater number of icons were ‘home-related’ literacy practices (42+19+12+2=75) than college-related (19+12+3+13=47).This is hardly surprising given the identification of ‘student’ is not an all-encompassing one and that coursework may not take up that much of a respondent’s life, time or energy. That said, there are a number of literacy practices that students deem important that are allowing them to relate home and college domains in some way. Just under half (44%) of the Home domain is in shared overlap areas, while nearly three quarters (75%) of the College domain is shared. This indicates a high degree of polycontextuality of a very large percentage of the types of reading and writing deemed important by students. In fact, more of the icons in the ‘college’ domain are also placed in the overlap (home/college or home/work/college) areas (34) than those that are not in overlapping areas (13). But perhaps more concerning is the relative absenceof icons that relate to college coursework, assignments, or study in any of the Venn diagram’s subsets. From this, we can say, that there is potential for college-based reading and writing to be more resonant or connected up with the sorts of reading and writing students’ value most in their own lives. A closer look at some particular cases is needed to understand what this data might signify. Two Student Case Studies Two case studies of students’ icon maps are offered for the insight they offer us in terms of the ways in which literacy practices, learning, identities, and contexts interrelate. 11
First, we take Stephen who is an Intermediate 1 catering student.
Figure 3: Stephen’s Icon Map. Home: Surfing net for information / 'personal research'; downloading tunes; burning CDs; playing X Box; using website to 'share' tunes etc via the ‘Kazaa’ website; reading fiction. College/Home Overlap: Using IT; reading newspaper; reading handouts; using mobile phone for texting.
Stephen’s Icon Map revealed the dominance of his own leisure and homerelated literacy practices over formal courserelated literacy practices. More important is the manner in which the home / leisure related literacy practices are valued above those related to college coursework particularly in his discussion of the map. He feels that many students his age share the same interests which he summarises as: “Having fun, playing games, texting, computers”.
Handouts aside, the literacy practices he deems important that are positioned in the home/college overlap are mostly not obviously related to the course he is on. They include mobile phone message texting, reading the newspaper and internet use. They appear to be located here because they can happen at home or college and/or because the college provides good internet access.
Stephen is an avid user of new and old technology of certain kinds. Many of the literacy practices he deems important relate to communication of various kinds: (a) MSN instant messenger; (b) Telephone texting;
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(c)
‘Peertopeer’ file sharing via a webbased service called Kazaa is a central activity for him. Here he can download audio/music, games, software and video files. Here he gets and shares ideas for how to ‘cheat’ on computer games. He also burns tunes onto CDs and onto his Xbox so he can play music while playing games.
Stephen reads The Sun newspaper and shares his thoughts about the news with others in college. Interestingly, he does not like TV. S: I don’t really like the TV eh, because most of it’s pish ken so I dinnae watch TV at all really
GM: And what’s better about the newspapers then for you?
S: I don’t know, you can do it whenever you want, the news is always on at a certain time an that eh, so you’ve got to be in for it and that eh? And then I mean you can watch BBC News 24 or that but that’s just a load of pish.
For leisure, he plays a lot of computer games. He also reads a lot of fiction, getting through about a book a week (David Gemmell, Catherine Cookson are examples of the authors he reads). He mostly borrows these books from his grandmother. Stephen’s almost apologetic or embarrassed when he notices that he reads more fiction than the interviewer: GM: You read a lot more fiction than I do by a long shot. S: Yo, that’s well bad. You’re making me feel like a geek now.
He sees handouts as a central way of keeping abreast of college work. He feels reading handouts at home when he can find time enables him to pass the course. Other coursework that interested him lately was about chocolate. It seems there were some web sites that were of use here.
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He also engages in what he calls ‘personal research’ via internet searches on topics that interest him. He found out that cannabis burns at a higher temperature than cigarette tobacco so there is an increased risk of throat cancer.
He notes that communication might be improved on campus if there were a MSNtype system in place. He feels the current email system is not instant enough and it is solely for use in the college. He notices how his filesharing habits through Kazaa might be replicated in the manner in which recipes are made available. He suggests that there could be music playing while they work in the kitchens. While he finds essay writing very tedious, he would find it a lot easier to burn a CD with various sorts of multi media for an assignment. When offered the choice of constructing a multimedia CD or writing an essay he replies: S: […] Write an essay or burn a CD? There you go [he gesticulates the sort of work he would do on the computer with a series of quick hand movements and then offers me his finished product in mime]: CD! Oh … but writing an essay! I cannae be arsed writing this f****** essay. Oh my God, [that would be] such a load of sh***!
Reviewing his map he comments: “young people are more interested in what they do at home than what they do at college eh, like it’s more important to them cos they really want to do it” whereas at college he feels students get involved in reading and writing because they “need to”.
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The second case is Laura, a Music student. Laura claims music is the love of her life. She is a member of bands some of which are part of the participation in the course.
Figure 4: Laura’s Icon Map. Home: Texting, playing and reading music, playing CDs. Home / College Overlap: Using computer, reading books. Home / College / Work Overlap: Writing Lyrics College: Taking notes (and writing assessments)
A key text is her ‘song book’. This is a focus for her own creative writing is a centre piece for her literacy (placed in the centre of the map). Laura: I love writing lyrics and stuff it’s my way of, [I] suppose, of getting my emotions out.
She sees the activity of writing and doodling in here as being related to her college course and her future career in the music industry: she eventually wants to be a singer / songwriter. The literacy practice of writing songs and lyrics sometimes starts with a melody or some lyrics. She often gets these down on the notebook and this can happen almost any time of the day like when she is doing the ironing for example. She draws pictures in it too. Once there are some lyrics in place, she will get the guitar out and try to work out some chords for these pieces. The lyrics are the important part of the product for her but these records in her notebook are reminders of the melodies that she creates for them too. She tends not to get into writing a full score (inclusive of rhythms and stave notation) for these songs but is prepared to consider the usefulness of being able to do this.
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Lisa downloads music from her CDs and catalogues them on her computer according to genre or ‘type’. Then she can search for and find music categorised under various terms some of which are her own terms rather than the generic ones found in music stores such as soul, classical etc. She also pulls lyrics for songs she likes off the web and then reads the lyrics and sings along to them.
Laura loves reading books; she reads books every night as a way of relaxing. She reads books that are related to the music industry in some way. She reads musician’s biographies for example but also fictional novels that often relate to music in terms of the plot or character’s interests in music. Some of these books get suggested to her by her parents, while others are sourced through reading about them in magazines. Book reading is an important literacy practice for her because: I’m learning and I enjoy learning, even when it’s fiction or nonfiction. […] I like reading books like the Marley book [‘No Woman, No Cry’] because it’s showing how people got into the music business but also I’ve got another book, well it’s called popular music it’s a fiction but I haven’t actually read it yet, just started reading it but it’s about the person’s love for music or something.
She prefers book reading to internet sources and looks at web sites only a couple of times a week when in college as she has no internet connection at home. She says she would miss internet access however if she didn’t have it.
There is an overlap between reading for coursework and for college work in that they are helping her with learning on the same topic. The difference appears to be in how systematic and managed the reading and learning are. Also, books she reads for leisure are usually purchased while more researchled reading for the coursework is borrowed from the library. Recommended books seem ‘hard’ and she’s not read many of them or if she starts, she does not get through them. She thinks reading fiction could be a good
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component of alternative forms of coursework.
Note taking on what lecturers say is a practice that is distinctive in that it is usually full sentences and is not some sort of individualised short hand. Unlike handouts, that tell her what she is ‘supposed to know [Laura], the note taking practice is about the creation of personal meaning rather than an exact record of what the lecturer said. GM: Yeah, ok and the reason why the note taking is important to you is because? Laura: I’m learning. […] GM: […] do the notes feel different to, let’s say if the lecturer gave you a transcript of what they said or gave you hand outs are they different? IEE:
Emm yeah, because when I’m writing it I know exactly what I mean by it.
Laura’s notes are carefully filed in plastic sleeves and then placed into bigger folders. They are very meaningful for her because she knows exactly what she means by them and they are the sources of longer pieces of writing that emerge in her essay writing which she does on a computer. The handouts are different because they tell you what you are ‘supposed to know’. This literacy practice is also important in terms of her sense of her own learning. She feels that if students could see the relevance of what the essay does in terms of helping them go somewhere with the subject area that it would be less onerous and something they would want to do. This area of her literacy seems somewhat unconnected to the book reading or the lyric writing.
She notes that the computer is a central player in her literacy but she tends to think of it as something she resists by keeping with handwriting and working in her song scrap book in a nondigital way. The icon map exercise did help her see the place of technology in her literacy practices however.
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Laura texts people a lot and her phone is ‘always on’. She uses a lot of short cuts when constructing texts. Texts tend to be about arrangements to meet folk. She thinks that if the college started sending texts to students, that they would get read and they would not be experienced by users as an intrusion. She feels chances are it would get read ‘straight away’ and be replied to as appropriate. This new use might be a simple as letting people know if a lecture is cancelled. In contrast, she has never sent an email to a tutor or teacher at school. When she was abroad for 6 months, the Internet provided her with a very important ‘lifeline’. She feels emails are for family and friends at a distance and takes the place of letter writing as a practice. Texts are ‘for friends’ she meets every day and they don’t usually discuss college work while live chat via MSN is not something she does much of (perhaps because of not having access to internet at home).
College ‘work’ is sometimes done in a notepad, sometimes on computers and this happens at times in college and at time at home. College provides a focus for her work when working at home is more difficult. Revision may happen in the library or she sometimes seeks out a place to study in the college. This aspect of her writing seems separate enough from her home and other contexts except that it may happen spatially at home at times. The content seems unconnected to the other sorts of reading and writing she comments on as being ‘important’ to her. In general she values her own writing and reading: “people just need to [write and read] instead of having it as something that you have to do, I think people need to realise that it is something that will help them.” [Laura]
Discussion When asked about his map, Stephen takes it for granted students are more likely to be interested in ‘home’related literacy practices than purely collegebased ones. He considers that college is likely to ‘overlap’ with home because students usually choose to do a course that interests them. Conversely, many of his homebased literacy
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practices do not connect with college activities at all and appear not to be valued by college. For Stephen, listening to music, playing computer games and doing ‘personal’ research on the internet are not placed in the college domain because they are “not important at college” [Stephen]. For Stephen, we notice the irregularity of affordances offered by college coursework for mobilizing the literacies he is more at home with. Reading and writing he feels more at home with is not valued at college though he maintains a handle on coursework by valuing reading handouts himself. The times when he feels coursework is of more relevance is when it involves topics of interest (how to make chocolate biscuits with cannabis ingredients) or is mediated in a manner he is familiar (he finds websites more accessible). The use of websites to find information for both personal interest (soft drugs) and to research his portfolio topics (chocolate) for his course provides an example of how ICT on occasion acted as a boundary object across domains.
In general, however, this hospitality student experiences well-defined differences between the identification processes within his youth group and his identification as a student chef. There are few opportunities for some form of leakage between the different contextualization processes (being on the internet, being in college, being a video gamer, being in the college kitchens) and his learning in different contexts. For the moment, the literacy practices that are important to Stephen - texting, having fun, playing games and computers - are not generally being drawn upon in the catering course in any systematic way. Nor is the course providing him with many ways of utilizing his awareness with ICT. In terms of his literacy practices, we can say there is a lack of coherence across the home, college and work domains. College-based and home-related literacy practices seem to meet different needs rather than a common purpose. This lack of co-ordination or alignment indicates the absence of border literacy practices and of boundary objects. Laura, like Stephen, talks about literacy practices that reveal a high degree of personal ownership and commitment. But her ‘important’ literacy practices are intimately connected to who she thinks she is and wants to become - a songwriter/musician. The literacy practices related to college coursework are clearly also ‘owned’by her in the
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sense that they are distinctively personal. Unlike Stephen, however, a range of her literacy practices appear to act as boundary practices between her personal world (home domain), the course-related literacy practices (college domain) and the literacy practices she imagines may become useful in the music industry (work domain). This polycontextualising is afforded by the resonance between her identification with the music industry within which she is playing a peripheral yet legitimate role (to use Lave and Wenger’s (1991) term). Being a music student, a musician in a band and a lyricist are clearly connected: these are the more abstract boundary objects in play in her approach to literacy. One obvious literacy practice – lyric writing – appears to supporting and is supported by these boundary objects. Writing lyrics serves an overlapping purpose allowing her to relate learning, identification, and multiple contexts. For Laura, lyric writing functions as a boundary practice supporting the boundary object of being ‘Laura’ (as perceived within the home domain) and being a student musician (within the work domain) and being a ‘real’ musician (work domain). These identifications are allowed to interpenetrate through the boundary practice of lyric writing. Understanding the practice contexts of the music industry, learning how to write songs and develop one’s creative abilities and ‘passing the course’ all interrelate. Unlike Stephen, the links are strong between identifications process (becoming a musician among friends), generating and participating in useful literacy practices (learning to write songs) in a meaningful context (college, band events, home-based activities). Through the lens of literacy we can see how these areas of her life leak into each other and interconnect or border off each other. For Laura, there are identifiable boundary identifications (being a musician/student of music), boundary contextualisations (where college meets home and work: participating in college band ‘work’), and boundary literacy practices (lyric writing, reading fiction about music). The boundary objects related to these practices are material goods: her lyric book, music scripts, fiction books and non-material or idealized objects: being or becoming a ‘musician’. It would appear that both of these students are engaging in literacy practices that are locally relevant for them. These practices have emerged in their contexts to meet their own needs which in many cases overlap with college demands. The students themselves report how literacy practices are affected by processes of identification, contextualization and learning within and across domains. Boundary literacy practices (such as Laura’s reading of books related to the music industry) appear to ‘border off’
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or infiltrate other literacy demands and college-based practices that arecreated as part of college learning: they are polycontextual across domains. For Laura, we could say, the literacy in some cases is enacted in a less bounded network of contextualization, identification and learning (though she clearly has issues with the utility of handouts). For Stephen, there is a sense of a stronger boundary between the contexts, identities and learning emerging in his private world and those emerging via college coursework. The bounded nature of his domains is noticeable because of the rarity of the opportunities for cross-fertilization or ‘leakage’. Across the data we are finding that college learning involves literacy practices that connect with or resonate with the students’ literacy practices in different ways in different subjects with different motivations and affordances and constraints. Conclusion Boundary objects circulate through networks playing different roles in different situations. They are not merely material; they can be ‘stuff and things, tools, artefacts and techniques, and ideas, stories and memories’ (Bowker and Star, 2000: 298). We have found it possible to identify both boundary objects and their related boundary literacy practices through this and some of our other methods. The data supports the view that literacy practices can function as boundary practices and these are critical in noticing how learning across contexts occurs. This thinking leads us to moves away from the traditional ideas of transfer and neatly bounded views of context towards a more emergent and relational understanding (see Fowler and Edwards, 2005). As a result, polycontextualisation is potentially a key construct for describing the data but also the pedagogy we are envisaging. Following Star and Griesemer (1989), we may make some suggestions for how to create and engage in polycontextual pedagogy via literacy. Because boundary objects serve as translation devices they inhabit several intersecting social worlds and satisfy the informational requirements of each – pedagogical strategies need to be sensitive to noticing what physical objects and abstract ideas might work in this manner. Because learning is inherently polycontextual, teaching and learning needs to satisfy different concerns at the same time. Polycontextual pedagogy needs to further explore how to build on carefully surfaced boundary objects which function as common points of reference for students’ different
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identifications and contexts. As we have seen, students’ own literacy practices and others encouraged by lecturers can provide a means of coordination and alignment across multiple contexts and identifications. Bowker and Star (1999) note that the creation and management of boundary objects is important in developing and maintaining coherence across intersecting communities. For our projects’ purposes, we expect some degree of joint ownership of boundary literacy practices by students and teachers to be necessary though the meanings they attach to these will be different. But boundary objects and their associated practices should be working arrangements that are not imposed on a group or appeal to outside standards. One of the problems this throws up is what sort of curriculum are we envisaging. One view is that for a curriculum to be relevant and engender the production of knowledge it is likely not to be easily pre-planned or be pre-determined. Because it relies on relevance for students, it needs the possibility of the emergence of a task around which students can gain commitment while still allow for the alignment of college with other contexts in their lives. Since the practice of teaching, learning and assessment in FE are often circumscribed by outside control mechanisms, this raises a concern.
The LfLFE project is now entering an intervention phase. One view of this phase is that we are looking to generate more effective boundary objects and practices for different students in different subject areas. As such, this analysis suggests we may be seeking to create locally relevant interfaces or boundary zones between contexts for students. As the project enters the next phase involving college-based researchers in changing practice, it is to this task we next turn our attention.
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