Language and Literacy: A Canadian Educational e-journal (Oct 2024)

Boxed In and-and Busting Out

  • Ronna Mosher,
  • Kimberly Lenters

DOI
https://doi.org/10.20360/langandlit29697
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 26, no. 3

Abstract

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Working with a group of Alberta Grade 1 and 2 teachers we have observed and heard described several of the complexities they face in practicing well amidst multiple and competing dimensions of contemporary literacy instruction. The outcomes-driven machinery of their provincial context, their school district’s system for communicating classroom assessments, and the increasing dominance of synthetic phonics are factors the teachers note as constraining their knowledge, skills, and ways of being/doing, and that of their students. When these material expectations are positioned against other commitments to literacy education and diverse ways of being/becoming literate they both intend a certain future and serve as reminders of literacy education’s philosophical and practical “trouble without end” (Tsing, 2015, p. 2). Conceptualizing instructional contexts and practices as research assemblages, the study in which this paper is based investigates how early elementary teachers work at, with, and within the current conditionings of school-based literacy practices. Drawing on teacher interviews, photographs from within literacy teaching and learning situations (Snaza, 2019), and extended observations with a Grade 1 French Immersion teacher and class, the purpose of this paper is to explore liveable possibilities in reading, writing, and language instruction for the “right now” of literacy education (Kuby et al., 2019). Focusing on examples in which teachers seek “and…and…and…” pedagogies (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 25) our purpose is not to settle the troubled waters of literacy education but to trace contours of possibility as teachers encounter literacy education’s boxes and boundaries and exceed their confines. We follow teachers’ material and social participation in curricular attentions to affect and cultivations of newness as a practice of care for and curiosity about a shared world in early elementary literacy instruction.

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