Spatializing literacy-as-events. Literacy in new techno-scholastic environments of lower secondary classrooms

Abstract

Drawing on recent re-conceptualisations of the established concept of literacy events into literacy-as-events, this article furthers empirical and theoretical understandings of spatiality in classroom literacy. Using a socio-material approach, it investigates spatial formations of literacy-as-events in lower secondary education in new techno-scholastic environments, where the digital and the scholastic have become indiscernible from each other. The empirical material consists of video recordings from Swedish and Danish classrooms, using two cameras and screen-recordings of students’ screens. From a rich data material, three examples were selected for analysis, thinking with notions of spatial imaginaries and the metaphors of network, region, resonance and fluidity to investigate spatial formations as students work with literacy tasks. The analysis shows how literacy in these digitally rich classrooms becomes distributed over a range of distances in the physical classroom space, where we identify projector-laptop, student-laptop and through the screen formations as examples of spatial formations important for what it means to be a student in contemporary digitalized classrooms. The article highlights the importance of further discussions on how digital technology contributes both to new potentials for meaning-making, and to challenges related to managing a constant state of fluidity without reverting solely to traditional regulatory practices.