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This article was downloaded by: [Eindhoven Technical University]On: 14 November 2014, At: 23:07Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
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New literacies as multiply placedpractices: expanding perspectives onyoung people's literacies across homeand schoolScott Bulfin a & Dimitris Koutsogiannis ba Faculty of Education , Monash University , Clayton , Australiab Department of Linguistics , Aristotle University of Thessaloniki ,Thessaloniki , GreecePublished online: 25 Jun 2012.
To cite this article: Scott Bulfin & Dimitris Koutsogiannis (2012) New literacies as multiply placedpractices: expanding perspectives on young people's literacies across home and school, Languageand Education, 26:4, 331-346, DOI: 10.1080/09500782.2012.691515
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2012.691515
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Language and EducationVol. 26, No. 4, July 2012, 331–346
New literacies as multiply placed practices: expanding perspectiveson young people’s literacies across home and school
Scott Bulfina∗ and Dimitris Koutsogiannisb
aFaculty of Education, Monash University, Clayton, Australia; bDepartment of Linguistics, AristotleUniversity of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece
(Received 3 May 2012; final version received 3 May 2012)
The home–school mismatch hypothesis has played an important part in socioculturalstudies of literacy and schooling since the 1970s. In this paper, we explore how thisnow classic literacy thesis has developed a new life in studies of digital media andelectronic communications with regards to young people and schools, what we call thenew home–school mismatch hypothesis or new literacy thesis. We report on two studies,one conducted in Australia and the other in Greece, that worked with 14–16-year-oldyoung people to explore the relationships between their use of digital media in- andout-of-school. Our analysis suggests that the relationship between literacy and digitalmedia use in and outside of school is more complex than is often presented in mediacommentary and in research and points to the need for more careful consideration ofthe relationship between school and out-of-school practice and knowledge.
Keywords: new literacies; digital literacies; adolescents; school; home
Introduction
Research policy and typical media reporting on children’s digital communication practicesare presented mainly through two discourses1: the instrumentalist and the ‘eco-social’.The latter discourse, which is somewhat more scientifically oriented (see below), arguesthat the ‘children’s machine’ (Papert 1993) has dramatically altered young people’s out-of-school literacy practices. A key assumption underpinning this discourse is a clearlydemarcated boundary between the digital literacy practices of children in- and out-of-school.According to this discourse, out-of-school practices are presumed creative, innovative andnon-traditional, embodying new ‘ethos stuff’ (e.g. Lankshear and Knobel 2007), whilein-school practices are a dreary part of traditional school life and ignore the pervasivenessand informal educational potential of children’s everyday digital literacies. In this paper, wequestion this new ‘home–school mismatch hypothesis’ and emphasise schools as complexsocial institutions: places where concrete, but not uniform, literacy experiences with newmedia are practiced and where special initiatives and tactics are employed by students tomake their school experience more hospitable. These in-school practices are an importantinfluence on out-of-school practices, and indeed, as we argue in this paper, might be seennot simply as ‘situated’ but as multiply situated, or, to take Prinsloo’s notion of ‘placedresources’ (Prinsloo 2005), as multiply placed. In our analysis, we draw on data fromtwo large mixed-method studies conducted in Australia (Bulfin 2009; Bulfin and North
∗Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
ISSN 0950-0782 print / ISSN 1747-7581 onlineC© 2012 Taylor & Francishttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2012.691515http://www.tandfonline.com
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2007) and Greece (Koutsogiannis 2007, 2011) with secondary school-aged young people,14–16 years old.
In this paper, we aim to present a critique of media policy and research discourses relatedto young people’s digital literacies, and to emphasise the important connections betweenhome and school worlds and the variation and complexity within each of these domains forliteracy practice and research. The paper is divided into three main parts. First, we sketchout what we have come to call the ‘new home–school mismatch hypothesis’, showinghow the ‘old’ mismatch hypothesis (cf. Luke 2004) has been transformed and modified byinstrumentalist and eco-social discourses into a new literacy thesis or new literacy myth,which bears striking resemblance to claims made on behalf of the ‘power of literacy’ andof technologies like writing and reading (cf. Graff 1979). Following this, we outline tworecent research studies that challenge this new home–school mismatch hypothesis. Finally,we provide some analysis of data from these two studies pointing to a renewed emphasis oncomplexity in the analysis of digital literacy practices in and around classrooms and schools.
A ‘new’ home–school mismatch hypothesis
In recent years, and particularly in the last decade, media policy and research activity aroundyoung people’s use of digital media have been particularly intense. Much of this activityis expressed in two discourses: one which is instrumentalist, popular and influential ineveryday life and also to some extent, in policy environments (Bulfin 2009; Koutsogiannis2009, 2011); and the other, a loose collection of research that takes what we will callan ‘eco-social’ approach to literacy, learning and digital media. This research has beendescribed by some as the ‘new literacies studies’ (Gee 2010). Given space constraints, inthis section we discuss only the research that takes an eco-social approach.
Current research and eco-social discourses
The ‘new literacies studies’, while still an emerging field drawing on a range of interdisci-plinary areas of study, examines ‘new types of literacy beyond print literacy – especiallynew digital literacies and literacy practices embedded in contemporary popular culture’(Gee 2010, 9). This research tends to approach literacy and new technologies with twomain premises. The first is that literacy has changed and continues to change from what itmight have been 20 years ago or even 5 years ago. These changes to the meaning of literacyare a function of many other broader changes, be they social, cultural or technological. Infact, rather than being something static and general, literacy is always situated, its multiplemeanings contextual and fluid. The second premise in the new literacies studies is thatunderstanding how people use literacies beyond schools and in their everyday lives canprovide valuable insights for improving ‘formal’ literacy learning within schools and otherinstitutional settings. From these two important and widely influential premises, the newliteracies studies have generally developed along two main strands: a skills-based strand,and a popular digital culture strand.
Skills-based approaches to literacy and new technologies seek to understand what newskills might be required of readers and writers in new media environments (e.g. Coiro 2003;Coiro and Dobler 2007; Leu et al. 2004). While skill-based approaches usefully emphasisethe continuities between old and new literacies, they have been critiqued for focusing onindividual and cognitive skills and ignoring the situated nature of new and digital literacies(cf. Prinsloo 2005; Snyder and Prinsloo 2007).
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Research exploring popular digital cultures sees new and digital literacies more broadlyand has examined a wide variety of practices and texts, with, and sometimes without, newtechnologies: fanfiction, Internet chat, games and social networking to list but a few (see forexample, Carrington 2005; Hammer 2007; Mavers 2007; Livingstone 2008; Black 2009;Burn 2009). In general, this research has sought to show how popular digital practicesmight be reframed as complex meaning making activities. The research argues that newtechnologies must be seen as a part of a ‘new media ecology’ (cf. Sefton-Green 2004).Because it emphasises the closely connected nature of new technologies and young people’sliteracy practices in many out-of-school domains, the ecology metaphor aptly characterisesthe nature of this discourse. Research examining this ‘new ecological reality’ in literacydraws on work from across cultural and media studies (cf. Sefton-Green 2004; Buckingham2007), social psychology (cf. Livingstone 2009) and the ethnographic literacy tradition (cf.Pahl and Rowsell 2006).
A key claim is that while studies demonstrate the significance of popular digital culturesand practices in the lives of young people, the new literacies are largely being ignored inschools. In this research, new literacies are portrayed as rich, authentic, engaging, creative,embodying ‘new ethos stuff’ (Lankshear and Knobel 2007), while school literacies are theopposite – dull, dry, inauthentic, rigidly formal and lifeless (cf. Facer et al. 2003; Carrington2004; Gee 2004; Lankshear and Knobel 2006). In this analysis, schools are locked intoan industrial-era model of schooling and portrayed either as consciously ignoring newliteracies (by prohibiting mobile phones for example) or as simply ignorant of them (seefor example Prensky 2006; Shaffer 2006; Collins and Halverson 2009). Following thisargument, a main outcome of this research is to urge the introduction of these popularforms of digital informal learning into schools, or at least elements of this type of learning,with the hope that this will lead to positive change within school environments (cf. Gee2003; Lankshear and Knobel 2006). This includes a wider recognition of the significanceof an increasing range of diverse literacies and a sense that schools as presently constitutedare falling behind the demands of a technologising society.
Both of these research strands can tend toward determinism and to overstatement aboutthe power and impact of new technologies on communication and social life, and certainlyon current forms of schooling (cf. Feenberg 2002; Muffoletto 2001; Friesen and Lowe2011). In addition to this, there are strong parallels between contemporary claims aboutthe new literacies and much older claims made for ‘old’ literacies (cf. Graff 1979). Forexample, in addition to being required by new communication practices, assumptionsembedded in some of the research, and in the broader discourse as research is taken up andrecontextualised by school systems, educational policy makers and the media, suggest thatthe new digital literacies lead to ‘significant individual and national progress, to economicgrowth and affluence’ (Koutsogiannis 2007, 220). It seems that while there may indeed be‘new’ literacies, claims about the power of literacy are anything but new. In these claims,the new literacies take on the familiar autonomous glow of wide-scale and decontextualisedliteracy programs which seek to inoculate against illiteracy in order to secure individual andnational economic and social progress and stability (cf. Street 1984, 1995). Koutsogiannishas called these claims the ‘new autonomous model of literacy’ and observes that it,‘leads to a downgrading of complex sociocultural realities and an emphasis instead on theimportance of infrastructures, serving as fuel for the engine of the digital economy’ (2007,220).
In this way, claims about the always connected and rich digital lives of young peopleoutside of school and the barren, lifeless and dreary opportunities for students inside schoolsare reminiscent of the ‘home–school mismatch hypothesis’ developed through classic new
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literacy studies research (cf. Luke 2004). Indeed, we argue that this binary – between therich and meaningful play with new media outside of school and the deadening dustinessof work on computers inside school – represents a new variety of home–school mismatchhypothesis. While we value this ‘eco-social’ literacy research for the important work it does,for example, in attempting to address the longstanding ‘schooling of literacy’ (cf. Streetand Street 1991), we also want to highlight several problems we see with this research,which appear to us as challenges for the future. We outline three of these below.
Challenges for the research
More than four decades of socio-cultural research in literacy has done much to highlight anincreasing diversity of literate practices and has undermined the claims of ‘school literacy’to be ‘the single authoritative norm against which other ways of doing literacy should bejudged’ (Moss 2001, 147). Indeed in our own modest research and teaching work we havebeen participants and contributors in this effort. Despite this, recent research exploring newand digital literacies, whether described as ‘new literacies research’ or by some other term,faces three challenges. In this paper, we focus only on the first of these and only brieflyoutline the second and third.
First, an under-theorised relationship between home and school. As we have suggestedabove, in much of the research, home and school are seen mainly as separate and distinctdomains of practice, certainly in terms of the way that young people either might chooseto engage, or are compelled to engage, with the new media. Contrary to this tendencyto see these domains as a binary, in our recent work we have explored the connectionsand continuities across these domains (Bulfin and North 2007; Bulfin 2009; Koutsogiannis2009, 2011). While socio-cultural studies of literacy have placed considerable emphasis onthe home–school mismatch, this has meant that connections and continuities between homeand school have not always been pursued with as much vigour (for important exceptions, seework by Hull and Schultz 2002; Gonzalez, Moll, and Amanti 2006; Pahl 2007). Certainlythis is the case in the new literacies studies research briefly reviewed above.
Secondly, overgeneralisation. A large part of the research and debate in this area doesnot often adequately account for the concrete realities of situated contexts, particularlyoutside of developed countries and economies (e.g. Prinsloo 2005; Koutsogiannis 2007;Mutonyi and Norton 2007; Walton 2007). This can result in some over-generalisation inthe literature. For example, viewing the use of digital media by the younger generation asa decisive differentiating factor in their identity.
Thirdly, limited context and focus. Much of the research does not adequately accountfor the complexity of schools as institutions and focus on the reaction of social protagonistsin a period of fast change. Within a limited context and focus, schools are construedas something homogenous and without major consequence for children’s out-of-schooldigital literacy practices, while children’s out-of-school digital literacy practices are seenas something more or less natural and inevitable, as part of a given and new communicativeglobal order (Koutsogiannis 2009).
Each of these challenges has at its core, a series of well-worn and increasingly tenuousbinaries, which, we argue, are well-suited to careful critique and closer investigation. Ofcourse, these problems or challenges do not exist as discrete issues or in some isolatedway and there is overlap and connection between each. In this paper, we focus on the firstchallenge: that of developing more nuanced accounts of the relationship between digitalliteracies across home and school domains. Using data from different socio-cultural andeducational backgrounds, one of our aims is to underline the fact that digital literacies are
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best understood as multiply situated across home and school domains, or in other words,they are multiply placed practices. In the remainder of the paper, we discuss two researchstudies to explore some of the implications arising from our reading of the research andwider social discourses presented above.
The two studies: digital literacies in Greece and Australia
The two studies discussed in this paper were conducted during 2006–2007 and initiallyfocused on the out-of-school digital literacies of secondary school-aged young people,14–16 years old. In this paper, we focus on selected data from semi-structured interviewsconducted in Greece and on focus group data from Australia.
The Greek study ran over five months and developed 23 ethnographic case studies drawnfrom 4174 questionnaires and 77 semi-structured interviews (43 girls and 34 boys). In thispaper, we use data from two interviews with two different young people. The completeGreek study, including the large-scale questionnaire, is reported elsewhere (Koutsogiannis2011). In terms of the qualitative data, interviewees were recruited from within schools thathad also participated in the questionnaire. The content of the semi-structured interviewswas parallel to the content of the questionnaire. Each interview lasted for 45–60 minutesand was conducted in the school, something that can influence children’s responses. Ineither case, we approach interviews not as neutral methodological tools (cf. Mishler 1986;Gee 2005; Abell and Myers 2008), but as co-constructed accounts where both researchersand participants engage in complex meaning making and identity work.
Our analysis of this Greek data brings to the fore two diverse but interconnected variablesthat have proved to be essential in grasping more thoroughly the relationship betweenchildren and new media. The first variable addresses the role of two crucial socializationinstitutions: home and school. A broader analysis of the Greek data (Koutsogiannis 2011)has demonstrated a contradiction related to how different social groups understand andreact to the ‘new communicative order’ (Street 1998). On one hand, for some, mainly lessprivileged social groups, schooled ‘ways with words’ and ‘ways with technology’ (cf. Heath1983) played a key role in constructing participants’ own Discourse models on the contentand the context of new literacies, and therefore participants’ ‘yet to be thought’ (Bernstein1996) initiatives and practices. On the other hand, certain other social groups have a moreprofound understanding of the protean nature of literacy, which is nowadays changed inits content and context. These social groups have the financial resources, the knowledgeand the willingness to effectively ignore, or bypass, the way the Greek public schools tendto frame and recontextualise new literacies (digital media and English) and to developinitiatives which will facilitate their children’s initiation into the new literacies in waysthat are quite different from less resourced students. The main constituents of this carefuland conscious planning for their children’s early familiarization with and best exploitationof new technologies are, inter alia, the provision of appropriate hardware and software athome, the different ‘ways with technology’ and the selection of a school that will fulfillthis vision for their children’s future. These choices can be traced in the range of in- andout-of-school digital literacy practices performed by children from these well-prepared andwell-resourced homes. The two cases are indicative examples of this contradiction. Thesecond crucial variable is connected with the personality and agency of the children, whoin their unique ways filter their social experience as well as the new literacy reality.
The Australian study closely followed 25 young people in five Victorian secondaryschools over a year and developed detailed ethnographic case studies of their use of dig-ital media in- and out-of-school. Participants attended schools representing a range of
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social, cultural and economic environments from each Australian education sector (public,private/independent and Catholic). Importantly, not all participants had an interest in newtechnologies. A range of data were generated: interview recordings and transcripts, studentICT-media use diaries, field and observation notes, other documents and artefacts includingonline chat conversations and emails, photos and digital video. Focus groups were held reg-ularly during school time throughout the year and ran from 45 to 60 minutes. Participantswere often friends and enrolled in at least some of the same classes. The Australian datadiscussed below are from two different schools. A detailed account of the study is availableelsewhere (Bulfin 2009).
Data from the Australian study indicate how the participants’ experience of literacyand new technologies at school was shaped – both constrained and enabled – by the officialschool curriculum and also by participants’ unofficial digital literacy practices, characteris-tic of both in- and out-of-school practices. A common set of ‘school-authorised technologypractices’ was evident across the schools: activities requiring students to use new tech-nologies to locate, retrieve and repackage information, and also activities where studentsused new technologies to create school-like products and artefacts. Participants were oftencritical of these school-authorised practices, finding these functional and unimaginativeand sometimes ‘fun’ but ‘pointless’. Many of the participants accepted that these activitiesmade sense only within the logic of the school and classroom. Despite participants’ frus-trations with the way new technologies were ‘schooled’, there was evidence of productiveengagement, where some participants created opportunities within school tasks for the useof new technologies which were characteristic of their out-of-school uses. There was littleevidence of wholesale disaffection; ambivalence was more common. Many of the studentsin the study combined elements of school literacies and non-school literacies, indicating thattheir practices were ‘multisourced’ (Prinsloo 2004) from across home and school domains.
While the Greek and Australian studies were conducted in quite different cultural con-texts, they had similar motivations, theoretical underpinnings and methodological stances,not least in terms of their approach to developing a more nuanced understanding of therelationship between home and school digital literacies. For the analysis in this paper, wehave exploited theories belonging to critical discourse analysis, mainly Gee (2005).
Data and analysis
Greek cases
The two examples we give below share certain common features, while also presentingcertain differences. Both young people are in the same class (9th grade), are 14 yearsold, are excellent students and wish to study medicine after finishing secondary school.Both are learning foreign languages, the main emphasis being on English. Both make useof ICT outside school, mainly for writing. The two children come from different socialbackgrounds. Matina’s father is a car body repairer, her mother is a housewife, and theylive in one of the less affluent western suburbs of Athens. Constantinos’ father is a civilengineer, his mother a former teacher now working in her father’s commercial business. Thefamily is very comfortably off and live in one of the most expensive areas of the northernsuburbs of Athens. The ways in which they seek to help their children are quite different.
Matina’s parents’ Discourse model (Gee 2005), as has been shown to be the casefor many working class parents, is influenced by the Greek public schools’ ‘ways withtechnology’: ICT in school means mainly a separate ICT course in every class that givesattention to ICT skills. In this context, Matina’s parents encourage her to buy a computerso that she will perform well in her IT lessons at school; they also pay for her to take extraEnglish and German lessons outside of school. Constantinos’ parents have made sure to
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employ an English girl as a babysitter since he was very young, so that he would learnexcellent English from an early age. His father began to teach him how to use a computerwhen he was in third grade. The two children had different pre-school experiences, and theycontinued along different paths when it came to the choice of school. Matina’s family couldnot afford private education and so she attends the neighborhood state school, whereasConstantinos’ parents chose an expensive private school offering functional use of Englishand ICT. Constantinos’ parents follow a more functional-oriented Discourse model, as iscommonly the case with parents from privileged socio-cultural backgrounds (Koutsogiannis2011), understanding literacy as multiliteracies (e.g. the functional use of English anddigital media). We shall attempt to demonstrate below the connection and continuity thatexist between in- and out-of-school digital literary practices.
Matina
Matina was one of the few children in the Greek study who did not own a computer andwere resistant to the idea of acquiring one, despite the fact that her parents have urged herto buy one so that she will do well in her IT class at school. She does not visit Internet cafesand uses a computer outside school only on visits to her cousin, when she either plays PacMan (rarely) or does word processing. In the extract below we see what use she makes ofword processing in her free time (‘R’ is researcher and ‘M’ is Matina. The Greek interviewswere conducted in Greek and translated into English. Material in double parentheses ‘(())’is researcher-inserted comments for clarification):
1. R What do you write in Word ((word processing))? Because you told me that you do yourhomework by hand.
2. M Yes, basically with Word I try to write different unimportant things to get used to it, so Iwill know how to write with it.
3. R Typing, you mean?4. M Yes.5. R And why do you do that? To learn, how?6. M For practice.7. R To practice?8. M To practice using it, yes.9. R So you’d like to be able to use it? Why? Since you said you didn’t like computers . . .
now, why do you do that? Why do you use Word?10. M To practice, and so I can do well in the IT lesson at school.11. R So that’s it, that’s what you want?12. M Yes.13. R So you don’t really want to use Word?14. M Right.15. R You don’t like it?16. M Not at all.17. R Here at school, do they want you to be fast, to write fast?18. M No. They just want me to be able to write. To be ready to write.19. R Hmm.20. M So I don’t have to ask for help. So . . . I will know how to do it.
What is of particular interest in this extract is the situated meaning (Gee 2005) ofcertain common words such as ‘write’ (line 2) and ‘typing’ (line 3). Matina says shewrites ‘unimportant things’ solely to practice her typing (line 6). This is an activity almostunintelligible in the broader realm of social life. Also unintelligible in broader social termsis the expression ‘to be ready to write’ (line 18). Matina sees writing on the computer assomething to be practiced continually so that she will be ready to respond when asked,seeing it as a skill quite divorced from her social reality.
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However, this unintelligible action is very easily understood if we place it within thecontext of how digital writing is seen at Matina’s school. There, writing is a technical skilllinked closely to the IT class, which is of value to the children because they will need it inthe future (see line 10 and line 5 in the second extract below). Thus the words write andtyping, although related to the child’s out-of-school literacy practices, assume their sociallysituated meaning and become intelligible in the context of the child’s experience of writingon the computers available to her at school.
What is interesting is that at an earlier stage in the interview Matina states that she doesnot want a computer of her own, which seems to be at odds with her desire to practice wordprocessing outside school. The relevant extract is presented below:
1. M I don’t have a computer at home, and I don’t like seeing it in front of me.2. R You don’t like it. You . . . don’t have any idea how to use it?3. M Yes I do. I learnt in the IT lesson at school.4. R What have you learnt? What do you learn in these lessons?5. M We learn how to write texts, er. . . the basic things about the keyboard, basic icons. This
year we’re doing programming. We’re learning how to write, how to makeprogrammes. That’s it.
6. R Can I ask you, why don’t you like computers?7. M I don’t like it because it’s a tool that I can’t use to talk with. I can’t communicate. It
isolates people. Er. . . because . . .8. R Why does it isolate people?9. M Because they sit at home in front of their computers, they go online and they stop going
out with friends and enjoying themselves.
Matina views the computer as a tool which ‘isolates’ people (line 7). It seems reasonableto ask how a child who does not own a computer can be so sure that its use will have theeffects she identifies (line 9). Clearly evident in this extract is a common school versionof the technology-as-catastrophe discourse. Such topics are frequently found in Greek andAustralian students’ argumentative essays about the negative impacts of ICT on society. Itis common in discussions of the contemporary world of communication for teachers andstudents to air the technophobic arguments of instrumentalist discourse, namely that ICT‘isolate people’ and have an adverse impact on communication (line 7).
We have already noted that the first extract above appears to run counter to this secondextract: on the one hand Matina appears hostile to ICT, and on the other she wishes to‘be good at it’, as she says in another part of the same interview. But in fact there is noreal contradiction here. We have already noted that Matina is a very good student and itis clear from her words that she has acquired two of the socially situated identities (Gee2005) the school requires of her with respect to ICT: (1) to prepare herself, through theexercises in question, to be ‘ready to write’ in the future; and (2) to engage in technophobicdiscourse about the adverse impact of ICT on communication. Her in-school practices showthat these apparently contradictory realisations of identity have clear consequences for herout-of-school practices: on the one hand she is hostile to the idea of owning a computer,and on the other she prepares herself, when she has the chance, to perform better at school.We might say that her experience with school literacies and their embedded identities playsan important shaping role on her out-of-school ways with new technology.
Matina, as we have already said, comes from a family that invests very much in the powerof literacy. The interest in this case is that both her practices and the views of her familyare influenced by the way the public schools in Greece typically use new technologies. Herfamily wants to buy a computer to help her do well in her ICT classes at school, whileMatina’s use of the computer is understood through her school experiences. This finding
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does not underestimate her literacy practices and her family discourses about literacy. Whatwe would like to accentuate is the way this data suggests that public schools’ Discoursemodels regarding the use and purpose of new technologies affect a greater number ofchildren and families from disadvantaged backgrounds, in contrast to what Heath’s (1983)research has shown. In addition, as we will see with the next case, more prosperous socialgroups have the potential to put distance between themselves and the ‘here and now’ ofpublic school practices and to develop their strategies (Fairclough 2003) drawing frommany and varied resources.
Constantinos
Constantinos has had his own computer since he was very young, learning computer skillsfirst from his father and then at school. He uses it to play games, to go online to findinformation on football and politics – his two main interests – and to do his homework. Hisschool makes extensive use of ICT. He is one of the few cases of children who make extensiveout-of-school use of word processing, on which we shall focus below. Significantly, this useof word processing began at school, where he needs it to do his homework, and was thenextended on his own initiative into his out-of-school practices in order to pursue his ownpersonal interests in out-of-school contexts (‘R’ is researcher and ‘C’ is Constantinos):
1. R [. . .] So you type very fast. Do you know a lot about word processing?2. C Yes. I use it a lot; I do a lot of written work on it . . . For lots of school work, and also I
write articles on it for the school magazine. I’ve got hundreds of files.3. R Files with schoolwork?4. C Schoolwork and also things about football.5. R Football?6. C I’m very keen on football, I write features about teams. I do them for school. And I’m
preparing a big book.7. R You mean, without being asked to, you sit down on your own and write these things?8. C Yes.9. R So, tell me, what do these features contain?10. C I told you, I’ve made a book. I wrote it in Word with a friend, a whole book, with
photographs and everything about all the teams.11. R Greek teams? Foreign teams?12. C Greek. It’s written in English. I didn’t just give it to people at school; I sold it at a very
low price. It’s impossible to get copies now.
Constantinos goes on to say that he made quite a lot of copies of his book: some he soldat school, some he sent to his uncle in the United States to sell there, and some he sent tofriends in England. Below, he explains why he wrote the book in English:
1. R Why in English?2. C I told you. To sell it, to promote the Greek championship abroad, where it isn’t
appreciated nearly enough in my view.3. R Greek football?4. C Yes.5. R You don’t think people do it justice?6. C Right.7. R Why?8. C People think our football is played at a very low level, but that’s not true.9. R Not true?10. C Right. And the book has details of every player, the good ones. It’s very good.
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Here Constantinos has combined in a creative way both the literacies he has beentaught at school: functional use of ICT (in this case, word processing) and functional use ofEnglish. It is also important to remember that his family took steps to ensure he acquiredthese literacies from a very early age.
We have already noted that Constantinos is a very good student. From his own wordsand the practices he has described, we see that he has acquired the situated identities that hisschool requires in respect of ICT: functional use of ICT in combination with functional useof English. Significantly, the out-of-school activities we have described are a combinationof schoolwork (and in many cases his own preschool literate experience) and his personalinterests.
Matina and Constantinos are obviously two extreme examples, selected to highlightsomething which is revealed by the overall analysis of the Greek data (Koutsogiannis2011): the role of socialising institutions continues to be very important, and can beseen in the nature of the children’s out-of-school digital literacies. The social protagonists(mainly parents and students) realise that something has changed in the field of literacy,but they do not all have the same resources to respond to the new challenges. We seethat some parents prepare their children to have better chances to become global citizens,while others are not able to do more than prepare their children to have better chancesto be local citizens (Koutsogiannis 2009). There is nothing new in this and it has al-ways been the case (e.g. Gee 2005). The downplaying of the role of the family and theschool, and the exclusive focus on a ‘romantic perception’ of children’s relations withICT, something we encounter very frequently in eco-social discourse, is likely contribut-ing to the perpetuation of these inequalities, or at the least, their continuing normali-sation.
We might observe at this point that school is not merely the institution which incorpo-rates effectively or otherwise the new technologies. It is not a uniform institution whichengages in practices that differ spectacularly from children’s own informal literacy prac-tices. It is the institution which supplies children with literacy experiences of a specifictype, and thus defines to a significant extent the limits of the ‘thinkable’ (Bernstein 1996)within which children can act. It is not so much the fact that one school makes moreextensive use of ICT than another, as the fact that it favours different types of practice (cf.Lewis and Fabos 2005), which means that it presupposes, and also constructs, differenttypes of children’s socially situated identities. From the analysis of all our data, and fromthe two examples we have discussed, it appears that children’s out-of-school digital literacypractices can be read much more clearly if we also take into account their primary andsecondary Discourses (Gee 1996), something often missed in eco-social discourse.
Australian cases
In this section, we present cases from the Australian study which continue our line ofinquiry. We attempt to show how students in the examples below negotiate the literacy andtechnology experiences on offer to them in school and construct alternative socially situatedidentities for themselves. When engaged in these negotiations students bring together schooland out-of-school practices, combining and recontextualising these within the examples (cf.Dyson 2003). Below, Tania, Jim and Mary, students from a middle-class state school inMelbourne, talk about playing Tetris and creating computer animations using programssuch as Adobe Flash (‘R’ is researcher):
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1. R What’s the most interesting thing you’ve had to do at school with computers?2. Tania Play Tetris! It’s definitely high up there. ((laughing))3. Jim It would probably be IT for me; we did quite a few new things.4. Tania Flash was fun.5. R Yeah, learning how to use Flash and programming it?6. Tania Yeah I made like this gymnast girl who did like backflips, I’m like; yeah, it was like
pretty fun when I actually learned how to do it.7. Mary Yeah, it’s hard to work with Flash, so, I don’t really understand it.8. Tania Someone made a really good soundtrack on ((Sony)) Acid, which was just bangings of
drums and you’d hear it like ((high pitched laughing)) in the background like catsand weird sound effects, all mooshed together.
9. Mary Ah, yeah that’s cool.10. Tania There is a copy of it, if you want to hear it.
Tania’s tongue-in-cheek claim that Tetris is the most exciting thing she has done inschool with technology suggests that her experience with technology in school is likeTetris: rather dull and repetitive. In addition to her playful critique, she provides examplesof school-authorised practices that she views as more interesting: learning to programAdobe Flash and creating a soundtrack. The students did experience some enjoyment(‘pretty fun’ line 6) and engagement with these school activities, but this is when theyare inflected with elements of their outside-of-school practices. Tania’s enthusiasm for herFlash animation seems partially rooted in her personal interest in gymnastics, while herhumour about the mundaneness of school technologies is linked to her revelling in the anti-cool qualities of Tetris. To create a soundtrack, her friend uses school resources remixedwith non-school elements of ‘cool’ contemporary techno beats and ‘weird sound effects allmooshed together’ (line 8). Tania’s comments suggest that, at least in this instance, studentsare able to negotiate space for forms of creative engagement while still poking fun at thenature of school-authorised practices. This is more complex than what is often scripted astypical student disengagement with school ICT uses and is closer to ambivalence, because,as Tania and other students often noted and accepted, ‘school is school’. So while Taniaand her friends didn’t necessarily enjoy school-authorised practices, learning to programFlash gave Tania another point of connection and engagement with her own interests.
In another example, a group of students from an exclusive, high-fee paying privateschool engage in a similar practice of negotiation. The school’s email system had recentlybeen changed and students had found unexpected uses for it, not all of which were inkeeping with the original intentions of the software designers or the school. In fact, inthis instance students’ actions challenge and subvert school-authorised ways of working(= indicates a latched turn):
1. R So, do you email teachers?2. David Yep, we email teachers about work, yeah.3. Rob I’ve been using my email a lot this year, actually, because I’ve been missing days.4. R So you’re asking teachers for work, or . . . ?5. David We can use the school email.6. Rob They’ve changed it=7. Sarah =updated it.8. Rob Since last year, they have a different program.9. R Yeah, I noticed when you guys were in the library you each had an Outlook account.10. Rob Yep, we have an Outlook account.11. David You can also access it from home.12. Rob People take advantage of it by sending group emails to everyone.
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13. Sarah Oh, yeah, like everyone in the whole entire school, says like ‘Hi’, and then peoplesend one back saying like ‘hi what’s up’.
14. David Yeah, I got like fifteen. Fifteen different ones going hi, hi=15. Sarah =And they all say HI HI HI HI HI HI HI=16. David =Hi, Hi,=17. Sarah =That’s not funny . . .18. Rob =because you can very easily send them to everyone.19. Sarah Yeah, then it’s like ‘stop this’.20. David Yeah ‘stop this’.21. Sarah Then ‘make me!’ . . . That’s realistic.
The school had reasons for updating the email software, one of which, according toinformal conversations with school staff, was to encourage exchange between students andteachers about schoolwork outside of classtime. According to the students here, discussionwas encouraged, at least for students absent from school (line 2–3). But the technology alsoallows for other unintended uses. The students mention ‘people’ who ‘take advantage ofit by sending group emails to everyone’ (lines 12–13). What began as a school decisionto change the email software in the hope that teachers and students would communicatemore often about school-related concerns, became an opportunity for students to interactplayfully in ways not officially sanctioned by the school but in ways that were characteristicof students’ outside-school practices (cf. Finders 1997). These actions represent a playfulsubversion of school purposes: a kind of IM/chat-use of school email (lines 12–16). Literacypractices more often found outside of schools are seen here blending and negotiating forspace with more formal school intentions and practices. In the process, the schooledemail space, designated for school-like patterns of discourse and activity, is reconfiguredas a ‘permeable’ play space (cf. Dyson 1997), a chat room where every student in theschool is a potential participant. There is, of course, also the sense that such chat-likecommunication in this particular space can be a nuisance (lines 16–20). What emergesis a multi-voiced ‘conversation’ where the playful and the annoyingly unhelpful workalongside the original intentions of the school (cf. Bakhtin 1981). In this example, becausechat programs are restricted at school, participants ‘bend’ and modify the original intent ofthe school-authorised email software so that it can be used to perform tasks similar to IMprograms: they create a tactical hybrid.
A final example of this practice is the use of games on graphics calculators. This activitywas observed or reported in interviews and informal conversations across all schools in thestudy. The games were usually shared between students by downloading them from anothercalculator. The games are very basic in function and display, similar to those available onearly generation mobile phones (// indicates an interrupted speaking turn. Empty parenthe-ses represent untranscribable words or phrases. Numbers in parentheses are timed pauses):
1. Tania I have to say the best invention though in classes to waste class is Ghetto.2. All Yeah, Ghetto.3. Tania Ghetto ( ) on graphics calculators, and we have like a drug dealing game and so it’s
like the best game, you just go around shooting people.//4. Liz You make money by dealing drugs.//5. Tania You make money by dealing drugs and robbing people.6. SB So this is a . . . //7. Tania Calculator game.8. SB You download it onto your calculator?9. Jim Yeah, via another calculator.10. Tania You get it, like you can ( )//
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11. May Where did Ash get it from?12. Ash I got it off my sister and she got it from=13. Jim =She got it from someone else.14. Liz ((to Ash)) Do you have a pimp? Does your sister have Pimp? My sister has Pimp and
that’s where you’re a pimp and you make money for like (1.0).15. All ((laughter))16. SB For doing ‘pimpy’ things?17. All Yeah. ((laughing))18. Liz There’s like ho’es ( ).19. Tania You can get every type of calculator game to waste your time, you can get Bowling,
Tetris, Frogger, Mario.
These students (and others across the schools in the Australian study) reappropriate thegraphics calculator, a sanctioned technology, for game playing and time wasting – differentkinds of ‘work’. Humour and irony derive from the fact that devices designed to save timeand perform mathematical calculations are instead put to work as time-wasting devicesrunning software about a gritty urban underground. Tania revels in the game’s subjectmatter: ‘You make money by dealing drugs and robbing people’ (lines 3–5). Again, thiscomment is ironic, given the sanitised school environment in which the focus group andgameplay take place and the nature of the device and the functions it usually performs –serious mathematics. In this instance students bring together a device and its usual functionwith a set of practices commonly associated with activities outside the school: playfulsubversion and irreverence.
Discussion
It is clear that participating in school practices such as those presented in the exam-ples above has consequences for out-of-school activity. But neither school practices northeir effects are homogenous and not all children of course behave in the same way. Thedifferent schooled experience in combination with the different children’s personalities,contribute to the constructing of different (children’s) school-situated identities, or differ-ent schooled ‘Discourses’ (Gee 1996, 2005). One of our aims here has been to explorehow school ‘ways with technology’, their school-authorised technology practices, mediateout-of-school digital literacy practices, or how out-of-school digital literacy practices couldbe better understood in light of schooled situated identities.
A key assumption underpinning the ecosocial discourse sketched at the beginning ofthis paper is a clearly demarcated boundary between the digital literacy practices of childrenin- and out-of-school. Out-of-school practices are largely seen as creative, innovative andnon-traditional, unable to be captured and appropriated by schools and teachers who arealways one step behind. In-school practices are dreary, dusty, traditional school activitieswhich ignore the pervasiveness and informal educational potential of children’s everydaydigital literacies. Despite the persuasiveness and tenacity of these discourses, the examplesfrom both Greek and Australian studies presented here suggest that the relationship betweendigital literacies in the home and school is not a simple mismatch.
While we acknowledge the real and potential discontinuities, the examples given herehave allowed us to explore different sorts of continuities. For example, the Greek examplesshow a clear continuity between family, school and children’s out-of-school digital literacypractices and this sort of continuity is not neutral and not uniform. We have seen thatparents’ Discourse models in relation to the new literacies, in combination with their
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economic capital, play an important role in the literate life trajectory of their children: theseDiscourse models identify and shape family ‘ways with technology’, and criteria for schoolchoice. What is interesting and perhaps most deeply challenging is that the reflexivity ofthe children and families in building their Discourse models seems to depend largely ontheir economic and cultural capital. Schooled understandings of more and less appropriate‘ways with technology’ – what we have called here, school-authorised technology practices– also play an important mediating role in children using digital media outside of school.This does not mean that the children’s agency is unimportant. We have seen that both Greekchildren are agentive and design their initiatives in unique ways, but in a way where theirlife experience is omnipresent.
The examples above are also a reminder that schools are complex social institutions,places where concrete, but not uniform, literacy experiences with digital media take place.The Australian examples show how students were able to negotiate school ‘ways withtechnology’, making spaces for creative engagement and also for playful critique. Thesetactical initiatives, which were often ephemeral, seemed to have been employed by youngpeople to make their school experience more hospitable. This involved a bringing togetherof school practices and out-of-school practices in a process of recontextualisation, wheremeaning making might be thought of as multi-sourced. Students, then, did not simplydisengage from what is on offer at school, rather, they used school literacies, indeed digitalliteracies, as a basis from which to re-explore their own interests. So rather than beingeither/or, that is, located in home or school domains, young people’s digital literacies mightbe more productively seen as stretched across school and home domains and multiplysituated. Thinking about new literacies as ‘placed resources’ is a productive beginning; butwe wonder if we might now also need to see the new literacies as multiply placed.
AcknowledgementsThe authors are grateful to Jennifer Rowsell, Mastin Prinsloo and two anonymous reviewers for theirhelpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
Note1. We understand discourses (with a lower case ‘d’) as ‘different ways of representing aspects of
the world’, following Fairclough (2003, 215). We understand Discourse/s (with an upper case‘D’) as ways of being, following Gee (1996, 2005).
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