Virtual Sites as Spaces for Learning Language and Literature
Convenor: Ylva Lindberg, Associate Professor, School of Education and Communication, CCD Research Group, Jönköping University, Sweden
Interrogations regarding evolving languaging, including literary practices in digital-analogue-virtual-real continuums are center-staged in this colloquium, in order to problematize established norms in didactics, and further research regarding the digitalization processes in school. The colloquium is anchored in the Communication, Culture, and Diversity (CCD) milieu, and engages with the capacity building among teacher educators to prepare the next generation of teachers for the diversity of contemporary schools. With a multidisciplinary perspective on language and literature as key mechanisms for culturally situated meaning-making, this colloquium engages with languaging and literary skills for learning in a digitalized and globalized era.
Paper 1: The story event “The Beauty and the Beast” in Second Life. Literature studies and the (non)-adoption of virtual worlds.
Ylva Lindberg, Associate Professor, School of Education and Communication, CCD Research Group, Jönköping University, Sweden
This study implies an investigation of digital practices in the virtual world Second Life, which forms the empirical ground for tentatively answering the question how virtual worlds can support literary competences for the 21st century, where the media density transforms ways-of-being-with-words as well as ways of reading and making meaning across languaging modalities. The study is inspired by current ethnographic methodology for digital environments, more specifically the steps between planning, entry, and data collection, as well as the role of the researcher as an individual experiencing and embodying, in a unique way, the surrounding virtual world. In order to orient the study towards data with potential relevance for literature teaching and learning, a thematic selection has been made from the vast and varied environment of Second Life. The chosen theme is “Amor and Eros”, since love is a common theme in literature, and literary themes inscribed in the Swedish curriculum for secondary school. Furthermore, love and eroticism are examples of universal concepts in evolution through digitally mediated communicative practices. The findings are analytically framed by narratological concepts, and the results present affordances of virtual worlds in literature studies, as well as challenges that prevent these to be widely used in the learning of literary competences. The digitalization of the humanities is at the core of the reflection in the current study, contributing to ways of rethinking language and literature learning and instruction in the 21st century.
Paper 2: The impact of language teachers’ topicalizations in two Facebook groups
Sylvi Vigmo, University of Gothenburg, CCD Research Group, Sweden
Social network sites as sites for empirical research have received a lot of attention, for learning and teaching in general but also more specifically for learning and teaching languages. What has been given less attention, however, are the didactic norms underpinning what resources are center-staged by teachers, and the impact on members’ languaging. The overarching question is to investigate teachers’ didactic topicalization of resources and how these play out among the members in two FB groups. This study investigates two Facebook groups as contrasting examples of learning Swedish as an additional language. Both FB groups aim at targeting the specific need by immigrants to learn a new language, Swedish. Both FB groups have no explicit connection to formal schooling as in curricula, and are framed as an extended space for learning and for practicing Swedish. These particular two FB groups were identified as approaching their aims from divergent positionings; one with interests in the national curricula for studying Swedish as a new language, and the other emphasizing the practice of a new language situated in everyday life. After receiving teachers’ consent, data were scraped during a limited time frame of two months. Scraping web data from these FB groups is seen as multilayered, and a methodological approach intertwined with the analysis. Findings are critically discussed regarding how different didactic topicalizations, implicitly underpinned by curricula norms or as departing from emergent issues contextualized in everyday life and their impact on members’ evolving languaging.
Paper 3: Researching the learning of language and literature in the 21st century. Challenges of going beyond 20th century nomenclature
Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta, Professor, School of Education and Communication, CCD Research Group, Jönköping University, Sweden
Contemporary mobilities across and within Northern and Southern places-spaces call for according visibility to the global circulation of discourses with the specific intent of (re)viewing conceptual “webs-of-understandings” that mark and perpetuate the continuing naturalization of North-centric hegemonies and enabling ways of widening dialogical apertures in the Educational Sciences. This paper offers theoretical reflections vis-à-vis recent (re)discoveries of the performative dimensions of “languaging” in North-centric places, highlighting how these conceptualizations appropriate what is “normal diversity” and “normal languaging” in Southern places while continuing to exclude South-centric conceptual framings. It also calls attention to the compartmentalized disciplinary domains in which such discussions take place. Such theorizing can be understood as a Second Wave of Southern Perspectives that center-stages identity-diversity and linguistic-diversity across Northern and Southern places-spaces, highlighting the need to globalize dialogues within the Educational Sciences and Language Studies. Inspired by a more overarching “turn towards turns” (Bagga-Gupta 2019) in general, and linguistic-, boundary- and decolonial-turns more specifically, this paper thus center-stages issues related to the need for destabilizing North-centric knowledge regimes and engaging analytically with global-centric alternative epistemologies where Southern framings and scholarship are brought into conversations. Here challenges of researching children and adults’ “ways-of-being-with-words” across digital-analogue institutional-everyday life settings in the 21st century appear to be imprisoned in 20th century educational conceptual framings. Bagga-Gupta, S. (2019, in press). Learning Languaging matters. Contributions to a turn-on-turn reflexivity. In S. Bagga-Gupta, A. Golden, L. Holm, H. P. Laursen & A. Pitkänen-Huhta (Eds). Reconceptualizing Connections between Language, Literacy and Learning. Rotterdam: Springer.
Paper 4: The disruptive effect of technology on communication a nd meaning-making in the language classroom: a complex systems theory approach
Regine Hampel, Professor, The Open University, UK
This presentation uses a complex systems theory approach alongside sociocultural understandings of learning to explore the potential of new technologies to transform education (Säljö 1999; Wertsch 2002), particularly in the context of language learning and teaching. Although technology is embedded in students’ lives today, there is an assumption by many that its use is inconsequential, an assumption that has been critiqued (e.g. Levy 2000; Hampel 2003; Thorne 2003) but that persists. So how can we ensure that educators understand how these new digital technologies are impacting on communication and meaning-making and align our language learning and teaching practices so they realize the potential that the online media offer and encourage a new learning ecology? To attempt an answer to this question, I will be using complex systems theory (Larsen-Freeman and Cameron 2008) as a useful heuristic for framing my argument, conceptualizing the language classroom (in the widest sense) as an ecosystem consisting of different interacting parts and thus allowing for a focus on the changes that language education has undergone over the past decades as a result of the introduction of new technologies. Focusing on communication modes, interaction patterns, and the positioning of the language learner in relation to the world I provide evidence for the disruptive effect of the new media on traditional language learning approaches and settings and for a resulting phase shift that is reshaping language education today. I highlight the implications of this phase shift for language teachers, for institutions and policy makers, and for research.
Paper 5: On Epistemological Issues in Technologically Infused spaces. Reflections on Virtual Sites for Learning
Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta, Professor, School of Education and Communication, CCD Research Group, Jönköping University, Sweden & Giulia Messina, Dahlberg, Department of Education and Special Education, CCD Research Group, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
This paper builds upon a recently published study in the volume Virtual Sites as Learning Spaces. Critical issues on languaging research in changing eduscapes in the 21st century. (2019, Palgrave Macmillan). It focuses upon the omnipresent nature of (language) learning across arenas that are glossed as virtual/digital and physical/analogue. It analytically argues for the need to go beyond the normative taken-for-granted nature of the affordances of digitalization in education. Highlighting peoples technologically infused contemporary lives – at least as these play out in global-North spaces, we discuss the conceptual challenges involved in studying such an existence. The nature of virtual-physical continua, including their entanglements are explored by discussing how virtual sites for (language) learning emerge in practice, in policy and in research. Augmenting our arguments through a series of illustrative examples, we argue that learning constitutes the constant and ubiquitous ontological dimension of human existence. These examples focus upon - virtual sites (both as they have been explored in research and how they have been (re)presented in policy) as the loci for identifying answers to what is real and what is virtual, including their boundaries, - the myth of technology as educational panacea, and - the challenges that the dematerialization of our everyday wired lives brings to the future of the research endeavor. A “mind as action” theoretical framing with relevance to contemporary learning is discussed, the implications of such conceptual challenges are outlined and policy envisaging’s from the mid-1990s are compared to more recent promises of the “online revolution”. Invited and confirmed discussants: Sune Auken, Associate Professor, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Jack Anderson, Associate Professor, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Regine Hampel, Professor of Open and Distance Language Learning, Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies, The Open University, UK.