Time and Space as a Resource for Meaning-Making by Children and Young People in Home and Community Settings

Abstract

This study provides a close analysis of young people's multimodal texts produced in out-of-school contexts as part of a research project called ‘Writing in the Home and in the Street’, funded through the Arts and Humanities Research Council's Connected Communities programme. The study was carried out with three young people in a library and home setting. All of the young people in the study were girls aged between 12 and 13 years. Two were from white working-class backgrounds and one was from a British Asian background. They shared a heritage of grandparents who worked in the steel industry. The methods were ethnographic and collaborative, with an emphasis on joint analysis of texts. The article shows how spaces of experience and time scales as lived and perceived by young people are glimpsed within their textual productions. Drawing on a multimodal textual analysis together with ethnographic insights from the longitudinal data set, the author considers how time and space shaped these texts and placed them both in relation to past and future trajectories, as well as evoking actual as well as possible locations.