Seminar Two March 1 st 2010 Glasgow Caledonian University
Mary Hamilton, David Barton and Candice Satchwell. Literacy Research Centre, Lancaster
University
This paper is concerned with the literacy practices of staff and students in Further and Higher
Education. We situate these practices in the broader demands of the institutions experienced by staff and students in different institutions. We explore the boundaries which people identify, maintain and cross in relation to the informal contexts of home and personal life, as well as work places. In line with the broad focus of this seminar series, we view the practices of both groups as part of a bigger institutional shaping in the rapidly changing post-school sector.
The paper draws on data from two different projects to examine practices associated with different domains.
The first is the Literacies for Learning in Further Education (LfLFE) project (Ivanic et al 2009) which focussed on FE students in England and Scotland, their everyday practices and the literacy demands they face in college. This project ran between 2004-2007 and captured one historical moment in a changing landscape.
The second is an ongoing study of academics writing practices and how these are changing, including the crucial aspect of their acquisition and use of digital technologies. We are exploring the under-researched topic of how the literacy practices of academic staff are adapting to major change in the culture and infrastructure of the university sector. Rather than focus on the texts academic writers produce in different disciplines we are researching academics actual writing practices, the range of writing activities which academics now engage in and their shifting use of new technologies. We aim to make links with research on contemporary changes in Higher
Education more generally.
Both projects start from a Literacy Studies approach which views academic writing as practices embedded in social contexts, rather than sets of disembodied skills possessed by individuals
(Barton, 2007; Barton, Hamilton & Ivanic, 2000). These practices can be analysed according to elements of participants’ everyday experience, including: social networks and identities, values and motivations, physical settings and activities, sponsors, mediators and resources. The ways in which people mix the old and new technologies are one significant dimension of the practices we have documented in our empirical research studies. These include the ways in which technologies are re-arranging the way people work in educational institutions, both students and academic staff. This “re-arrangement” is not happening evenly across all groups and activities. It may result in disjunctures, misperceptions, new learning needs and communicative challenges.
Furthermore, whether or not the literacy practices involve new technologies may be less significant than individual or group identification with other aspects of literacy practices.
Identities can also change according to imagined futures and experienced presents; hence students can adopt institutional literacies as (or if) they identify themselves as members of that institution.
In this paper, we use the interpretative framework from literacy studies theory, outlined above, together with examples from our data to explore notions of boundaries and identity in the context of literacies and technologies. In so doing, we hope to offer insights into how boundaries are perceived, breached, reinforced and negotiated in the two very different educational contexts of Further and Higher Education. We believe that comparing these two contexts can be productive and extends the range of our understanding. Significant differences include the characteristics and motivations of the students, organizational features of the institution and the expectations placed on staff members in relation to research, administration and teaching. FE
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Seminar Two March 1 st 2010 Glasgow Caledonian University students, for example, have to negotiate simultaneously not only their college studies but their working lives in a range of vocational settings.
The notion of ‘boundaries’ and ‘borders’ was a crucial one to the Literacies for Learning in FE project (Ivanic & Satchwell, 2007). Our aim in the project was to look at ways of permeating the borders between students’ literacies at home, at work and in college, with the intended outcome of improving students’ experience of education. It became clear while researching students’ literacy practices in and out of college that their practices outside of college had characteristics which were often different from those required for their courses. One of the most obvious differences was the prevalence of students’ digital literacy practices in their everyday lives, and the prevalence of paper-based practices on their courses. In attempting to soften the borders, therefore, the project aimed to incorporate some characteristics of the students’ technologybased literacy practices within the curriculum.
In attempting to understand the characteristics of various literacy practices which students engaged in, we analysed them according to a set of ‘aspects of literacy practices’, as outlined above. An important overarching aspect in the configuration of literacy practices in the different domains of people’s lives was individuals’ sense of identity. This notion of identity was of concern both in relation to a particular kind of reading or writing, and their sense of inhabiting the domain of education and/or the domain of work related to their futures (Satchwell & Ivanic, 2009).
A student who both lived and worked as a chef in a pub had difficulty in delineating the boundaries of his work, his everyday life, and his existence as a college student. For this student, the blurring of the boundaries could be seen as educationally beneficial, in that his college work benefited from him practising recipes at work, and vice versa. This was not the case for all students, however, and issues of institutional and individual power came into play.
In the research into academics writing and their uses of technology, ‘boundaries’ has also emerged as a crucial factor. Metaphors such as ‘walled garden’, ‘barriers’, etc. are commonly used to describe the different environments of home and work. For many academics it is important to keep the borders in place to differentiate home life from work; whereas for others their identity as ‘an academic’ requires that the borders are always permeable, ‘like a priest’, as one informant suggested. Changes in technology play an important part in the maintenance or dismantling of boundaries: for example, whether or not access to the internet and email is available plays a crucial part in how securely boundaries between home and work are in place.
Internet connection also affects both the conditions for writing (being interrupted or distracted), and the potential content of the writing (whether online articles etc are accessible). In a literal sense, technology can enable the crossing of boundaries – by physically carrying a memory stick between home and work, or by using a laptop on a train between two domains.
We conclude from our research that:
 “boundaries” are construed very differently by different people;
 technologies are acting to dissolve boundaries of time and space in ways that are sometimes welcomed, sometimes resisted by users;
 practices situated in informal contexts do not migrate in any simple way into educational settings even when technology is in place to facilitate this;
 a literacy studies approach can help untangle the elements of social practice that are in alignment or conflict and so aid understanding of outcomes in specific settings.
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Seminar Two March 1 st 2010 Glasgow Caledonian University
References
Barton, D.
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Barton, D., M. Hamilton and R. Ivanič (eds.) 2000.
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Miller, K., Satchwell, C., Smith, J. (2009)
Ivanic, R., Edwards, R., Barton, D., Martin-Jones, M., Fowler, Z., Hughes, B., Mannion, G.,
. London: Routledge.
Ivanic, R. and Satchwell, C. (2007) 'Boundary crossings: Networking and transforming literacies in research processes and college courses',
, Vol. 4, No. 7.
ambivalence across contexts', in K. Ecclestone, G. Biesta and M. Hughes (eds.)
Satchwell, C. and Ivanic, R. (2009) 'Reading and writing the self as a college student: Fluidity and
, London: Routledge Falmer.
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