Capturing, Representing, and Researching Digital Literacy Events

“Our findings undermine a monolithic and taxonomic conception of digital literacies where they are made up of discrete and measurable skills or even individual practices. The implications for digital literacy research are that literacy events should be treated as assemblages, requiring disentanglement and reassembly using appropriate methodological tools and techniques.”

This really shouldn’t be groundbreaking. And yet, sometimes I find myself –asking different questions–tackling particular problems–engaging with certain people and ideas– at a given point that allow me to shift my perspective and fully see or understand something “anew” (or perhaps for the “first time”).

Bhatt and de Roock (2013) allowed me to make just such a powerful connection this week to frame how I think about capturing and understanding digital literacies in similar ways to how traditional literacies have been recast away from overly-taxonomic cognitive models. As someone who LOVES categories and lists and naturally embraces them as an organizational aids and models, this is an important reminder to help me to socially situate digital literacies as I think about what it means to capture and represent these practices in qualitative research, though perhaps even more importantly in my own classrooms.

A few points worth noting:

• Their discussion describes digital literacy events (drawing from Heath and Lankshear & Knobel) as “observable occasions in which digital text is central and where meanings are ‘mediated by texts that are produced, received, distributed, exchanged, etc. via digital codification.”
• Sociomaterial assemblage is also used “to address the complex entanglement of social and material work that goes into classroom digital literacies.” Here the writers draw from Law and Latour.
• In researching digital literacies in classroom settings, the writers attempted to explore “what participants see, say and do in relation to what they write in the classroom.” By capturing a wider and more multimodal picture of these digital literacy events, they hoped to better unpack the sociomaterial assemblages and to “better understand what occurs when students interact with computers in the classroom.”

Perhaps I am at “a point” in my own studies where the framing of this work finally “clicks” in a resounding way. While I’m sure these writers are likely not the first to make such a claim, it is certainly powerful for me to consider in my own practice. While the focus of this article asks how qualitative research methodologies must adapt in order to capture the more “full-bodied” nature of these events, I wonder how the practices, lessons, and reflections–the experiences–I design for my classes might also represent and capture this picture of digital literacies. How do we prepare teachers to support the development of more critical dispositions for engaging in digital literacy events? What are the added dimensions of these assemblages that might not apply to traditional literacies, and how do we address/prepare teachers to think about them less as discrete skills (even as we attempt to do so ourselves)?
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Bhatt, I., & Roock, R. De. (2013). Capturing the sociomateriality of digital literacy events. Research in Learning Technology, 21.