Two - In versus out of school
There’s always been interest in how school learning transfers to out of school life. Does school learning actually get applied in the real world of our learners, and does it make a difference to them? There’s no clearer case for the need for school learning today to make its way into the real world than with critical reading/viewing.
We know that critical reading/viewing is an essential 21stC skill. Lucy Pangrazio’s excellent book Young People’s Literacies in the Digital Age (2019) points out very clearly that mastering critical digital literacy is one of the most pressing contemporary issues. She says “Digital technologies have changed the arrangements and patterns of contemporary life. Much of this is to do with the explosive growth of the internet and its capacity to connect people, open markets, redefine boundaries and carve out new spaces for cultural engagement.” This creates a wealth of opportunities for young people. But like the genie let out of the bottle, it can never be reversed, and requires certain skills, dispositions, frames of thinking to navigate it effectively.
All of our lives are awash with textual overload - mostly on devices - from which we don’t seem to be able to switch “off” and so our lives are also full of moment by moment decision-making about what we read (this blog or the latest Covid update?), how we read it (with highlighter at the ready or on the couch while surfing the Olympics coverage?), why we read it (to find out stuff or for the Lols?).
Even for young people who are physically active, say in sporting activities, devices can dominate the way young people interact out of school. I live with a terrific 17 yr old (you met her in blog One) who moves seamlessly on her phone through researching general information via a web browser (the off-side rules in Soccer), to scrolling through Now This News on Instagram, to watching influencer videos on TikTok. What has she learned in school about navigating these different online spaces critically? Is it the school’s responsibility to be helping young people do this? Will she get RSI from thumb scrolling?!
Navigating multiple forms of digital communication in one language (e.g., English) is one thing, but doing it in multiple languages, in some of which you are still becoming fluent, is another. This is the case for many EAL learners, especially those who use so-called “minority languages” that are not well represented on the internet. How do they make critical sense of material in their home languages when they have only learned to read critically in English, and in school?
If students have learned to read critically in a language, it is likely this approach can be applied to subsequent languages, given the right conditions. “Although the application of some skills such as decoding and vocabulary building may be language specific, and vary from language to language, the nature of the skills themselves are common across languages. Students who are accustomed to look for details and contextual clues, to identify cause-effect relationships, to infer meaning and to evaluate and react to what is written in their native language will certainly be able to transfer all of these skills to reading a second language.” (Ada & Campoy, 2017, p. 125).
However, there is often an unfortunate assumption that English learners have not learned to be critical readers in their home languages; that home language learning was purely functional. This belies the varied ways in which cultures mobilise critical thinking and critical literacy and perpetuates deficit models of these readers. I have challenged the deficit notion elsewhere (Alford, 2014) as have others, but it remains a resilient feature of teachers’ experience that English learners struggle with critical concepts in Australian classrooms. It is true that for some learners a critical lens was not prominent in their formal education where rote learning and deference to text may have featured more strongly, but there are other factors at play here…..
Is it the abstract nature of the critical literacy concepts in the curriculum that do not allow EAL learners to demonstrate a critical approach they may be more familiar with in home cultures/languages? Have we ever asked our EAL learners how they approach texts critically in their own languages? Perhaps it is done very differently; at later stages of life-long education; within different contexts altogether, not formal education; relative to first culture conceptions of what it means to study a language and become fully literate. Their funds of knowledge (Moll, 1992) about being critical readers remain largely unknown to many teachers. And how does acculturation and enculturation processes influence EAL learners’ motivation to take up critical approaches to reading (see Jia, 2014).
Back to the transfer idea…..it’s clearly not that simple.
The concept of “transfer” suggests a uni-directional and mono-dimensional reassignment of reading knowledge and skills from one context to another. Bulfin and North (2007) prefer to see the transfer process as a “dialogic negotiation of a complex range of texts and practices that flow across and between school, home and other spaces” (p. 247). I find this useful when thinking through the ways migrant and refugee-background youth move between school and home and other spaces where productive differences might be quite marked.
A more constructive term to use than “transfer”, or even “apply”, is recontextualise which I take to mean: to reappropriate something, relative to another context and other variables.
Recontextualisation, from the work of Bernstein (1990), is the representation of other practices produced in the course of activity within one’s own social practice. A relevant example is the deployment of reading knowledge and skills, acquired through schooling, into the out of school/home contexts for purposes other than schoolwork. The concept of recontextualisation can show how a discourse in one social practice can rematerialise, usually in a distinct way, in a different social practice. “The point about recontextualisation is that the new context changes the meaning of the original” (Janks, 2014 p. 37). It is inevitable, then, that the critical reading migrant youth learn in school will transmute in various and varying ways in the out of school context by virtue of the contextual features there, for example, the language being used by the individual learner; the regular reading practices in the home environment; access to certain material, e.g., Apps; and their personal purposes/goals for reading outside the demands of schooling. So, it is not a matter of a neat transfer, but the rematerialisation of critical literacy skills shaped by the context and also the learner’s personal history of learning to be a reader.
The study I’m currently leading is investigating exactly this. How do migrant youth rematerialise any of the critical literacy dispositions/skills/approaches/practices they have gleaned along the way- in their countries of origin, countries of transit, in classrooms in Australia- to what they read and view, especially online. A future post will reveal the findings!
Some references for you to keep learning:
Ada, A., & Campoy, F. (2017). Critical Creative Literacy for Bilingual Teachers in the 21st Century 2 Issues in Teacher Education 6, 2, 115-128.
Alford, J. H. (2014). “Well, hang on, they’re actually much better than that!”: disrupting dominant discourses of deficit about English language learners in senior high school English. English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 13(3), 71-88
Janks, H. (2014). The importance of critical literacy. In J. Z. Pandya & J. Avila (Eds.), Moving critical literacies forward – A new look at praxis across contexts. (pp. 32-44). Routledge.
Jia, F., et al (2014). The Role of Acculturation in Reading a Second Language: Its Relation to English Literacy Skills in Immigrant Chinese Adolescents. Reading Research Quarterly, 49(2), 251–261 https://doi: 10.1002/rrq.69