Untangling Literacies
When untangling these conceptions of literacies, I was influenced by Allen Luke’s conception of critical literacies described as “historical works in progress" as a "process of naming and renaming the world, seeing its patterns, designs, and complexities, and developing the capacity to redesign and reshape it” (Luke, 2012, p. 9). This connected to Freire's (2018/1985) notion of reading the word and reading the world. This conception of critical literacy rang true for my research since I wondered how TEds used and applied their contingent attitudes and technologies since their MDL and OEPr “depends upon students’ and teachers’ everyday relations of power, their lived problems and struggles, and … on educators’ professional ingenuity in navigating the enabling and disenabling local contexts of policy” (Luke, 2012, p. 9).
As part of this untangling of concepts, I was further influenced by the conception of living literacies posited by Pahl et al. (2020) since “literacy flows through people’s rites and practices, and it’s dynamism and vitality rest firmly on thoughts, emotions, movements, materials, spaces and places” (p. 1). My work was influenced by Street’s notion of a “utopian conception of literacy as always to come” (as cited in Pahl et al., 2020, p. 164) and gained understanding that literacy practices are embodied, bounded within contexts, and ideological rather than solely autonomous. Literacy was conceived as both noun and verb, revealed through the TEds actions and endeavours of striving to find the ephemeral, half-glimpsed spaces of the ‘not-yet’ (Pahl et al., 2020). As reflective of a P-IP research design, it was this living literacy practice within the OEPr of TEds that I suspected would be revealed through their lived experiences and intentionalities with MDL. This will be further described in the research methodology section.
For this research, the primary conceptualization for literacy/literacies recognizes that literacies are both an internal, cognitive ability and a social practice, with each requiring action and reflection. Although Stordy’s (2015) taxonomies of literacies was particularly helpful as a starting point, there was potential for generating a combinatorial representation of an integrated conception of media AND digital literacies. Although such a framework may be forthcoming from this research, I admit to a state of ‘not-yetness’ and deferred this work to a later date. My future efforts may continue to make explicit links to established origin stories of literacy terminology or integrate definitional information about inherited characteristics of the range of research foci of literacies that are evident in the field of education.
I acknowledged efforts to bring together understandings of the separated concepts of media literacy and digital literacy, recognized as complex concepts (Martinez-Bravo et al., 2022; Nichols & Stornaiuolo, 2019; Stordy, 2015). The extent to which global efforts attempt to bring media literacy and digital literacy into focus was evident in documents such as the Common Framework for Digital Literacy, Skills and Readiness (DQ Institute, n.d.) and the Media and Information Literacy Country Analysis (UNESCO, 2013). While media literacy and digital literacy are commonly seen as separate and distinct concepts, it is through a process of combination that perhaps clarity can be gained. Bringing transparency to the distinctions between skills, fluencies, competencies, and literacies as outlined in Spirals to Literacies graphic rendering (see Figure 10) may be a starting point. For this research, I remixed MDL frameworks that included the individual cognitive components (what participants know and think), to their actions within social contexts (what they say and do) (Gee, 2015). Although I am not minimizing the complexity of MDL as a concept, something that may be as challenging to understand as the inner workings of the Hubble telescope sent into space, I endeavour to clarify the facets of MDL and OEPr in this research.