Untangling Literacies
My research is influenced by Allen Luke’s conception of critical literacies, as literacies are described as “historical works in progress. There is no correct or universal model. Critical literacy entails 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 connects to Freire's (2018) notion of reading the word and reading the world. This conception of critical literacy rings true for my research since I wonder how TEds use and apply 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).
This research is 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). Grounded on Street’s “utopian conception of literacy as always to come” (Pahl et al., 2020, p. 164) this foundational belief that literacy practices are embodied, bound within contexts, and ideological not solely autonomous, is woven throughout this PhD research. Literacy is both noun and verb, both lived and imagined in the endeavours of TEds 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 is this living literacy practice within the OEPr of TEds that will 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. While Stordy’s (2015) taxonomies of literacies is particularly helpful as a starting point, there is potential for generating a phylogenetic representation of an integrated conception of media AND digital literacies not only to establish origin stories of literacy terminology and integrate information about inherited characteristics, but to also encompass the full range of researchers in the field.
INSERT Figure 9 - Spirals of Skills, Fluencies, Competencies, and Literacies