Analyzing literacy education: the Scandinavian scene

The Scandinavian countries are historically and culturally closely connected, and share an international image as democratic welfare states in which everyone has equal access to education and participation in society. Compulsory schooling was introduced quite early in the Scandinavian countries: in Denmark in 1814, in Sweden in 1842¹ and in Norway in 1889, and since then literacy has been highly valued in these societies and has been considered important for providing access to education, the labor market and citizenship. The similarities between the countries also relate to an intensive and widespread use of modern information technology throughout their societies, that seems to produce a situation in which ‘the world on paper’ (Olson 1994) is supplemented and partly replaced by ‘a world on screen’ (Snyder 2001), and to a growing influx of migrants and refugees which has transformed the countries into more complex multicultural and multilingual societies. Against this background, the purpose of this special issue is to examine the ways in which various analytic perspectives on literacy practices create a potential for insights that may advance our understanding of literacy in contemporary educational settings in which diversity and multiplicity have become key features.

There is no simplistic, homogeneous conceptualization of literacy that may describe the diversity of literacy practices existing in educational settings of the twenty-first century. These practices are embedded in an increasing variety of modalities and processes and, thus, are blurred and complex. A media-filled world folds and unfolds experiences, tools and discourses around, for instance, moving pictures, screen-based and print-based texts, computer games, and adventure or popular media genres. Also, diversities regarding social, political, economic and religious circumstances are embedded in contemporary literacy practices. As such, literacy practices in educational settings are continuously transforming, variable and fluid.

On the other hand, these literacy practices are under increasing pressure from transnational edu-political discourses calling for accountability, best practice, efficiency and quantitative comparisons between nation states. Within this discourse, an image of homogeneity and stability is produced that tends to over-determine literacy practices based on a small set of idealized objects, perceived as mutually exclusive and binary. When these contradicting movements are localized in educational settings, tensions are created between conflicting conceptualizations of literacy. This has an unforeseen impact on the development of literacy on societal, individual and conceptual levels.

Taking up these concurrent trends, this special issue takes as its point of departure the position that analyzing the messiness, diversity and multiplicity of literacy practices creates a potential for insights that advance our understanding of literacy in contemporary educational settings. The researches presented in the volume, which all have a strong empirical base, aim to contribute to the ongoing discussion of how to describe and understand contemporary literacy practices by both offering examples of different analytic tools and taking a meta-perspective on the analysis of literacy in educational settings. The contributions are united by a theoretical point of departure in researching literacy as a social practice, in which ethnographically oriented analysis of empirical data from everyday life is central, following among others Heath (1983), Street (1984) and Baynham (1995).

With regard to educational contexts, Heller (2008) argues, drawing on Bourdieu's key concepts, that literacy education can be seen as the formation of a field or market, ‘as a discursive space in which certain resources are produced, attributed value, and circulated in a regulated way, which allows for competition over access’ (50). This understanding of literacy education, which might be seen as a broad and general framing of the chapters in this volume, opens not only for a research interest in how specific types of literacy and literacy practices become privileged and are considered essential in education, but also for an interest in how children and teachers negotiate and navigate in a literacy landscape that has become more and more complex due to global flows, mobility and an increasing technologization of societies.

Within the social theory that unites all the chapters in this volume, it is customary – or perhaps habitual – to draw explicitly or implicitly on Street's (1984) distinction between an ideological and an autonomous understanding of literacy. We acknowledge this distinction and its great importance during decades of literacy research, but at the same time we find this binary framing, which also might be considered part and parcel of much Bourdieu-inspired research, somewhat problematic, considering how binary framings have framed much literacy theorizing and research as being dominant/oppositional or critical regarding practices, discourses and conventions (Gee 1996; Janks 2010; Luke 1997) in a way that tends to overlook the point that literacy education is always a local and situated inter-textual practice created through individual actors’ actions, interpretations and use of available linguistic and semiotic resources (Pennycook 2001).

Looking historically at the methodological challenges of examining literacy practices from a social perspective, there seem to be different approaches to investigating whether individual actors’ interpretative processes should be a central part of research or not. Barton and Hamilton (1998) argue that it is important to change the perspective on literacy from literacy as something that is localized in the individual, to the uses of literacy by different groups, in order to understand literacy as a social practice and as more than an individual skill. Other literacy researchers, such as, for example, Lillis (2001) and Dyson (1997) have in their research demonstrated that literacy in and around education can be researched as a social practice with a close analytical focus on individual actors and without reducing the complexity surrounding literacy to a question of skills. An increasing explicit interest in research foregrounding the relationality between social, discursive and material environments has contributed to the discussion of methodological challenges of how contemporary literacy practices may be conceptualized (Masny 2016). A relational rhizomatic approach produces ‘a movement that dissolves dualisms in favor of multiplicity, uncertainty, and the untimely’ (2016, 1). We believe that the cultural, linguistic and material diversity and complexity of post-modern societies make it relevant to conduct literacy education research with a focus on the local and situated character of individual actors’ practices, which perhaps represent ‘the cracks in the wall, where the light comes in’, to quote Leonard Cohen.

Currently, a number of different social and cultural paradigms are challenging narrow conceptions of literacy in educational research. The authors in this volume share an interest in how to research literacy and actors’ interpretive processes surrounding literacy education, and this interest draws theoretically on sociocultural, critical, multimodal, socio-semiotic and socio-material approaches to literacy, thus reflecting the rich and rhizomatic theoretical development within the research field. What we intend to show and discuss are first of all the analytical potentials of the different theoretical orientations rather than similarities, differences, weaknesses and strengths in each theoretical orientation.

The sociocultural literacy theory known as New Literacy Studies (Street, 1997) emphasizes the ideological nature of literacy practices and is characterized by an ethnographically oriented approach to literacy studies that methodologically draws on Hymes’ ‘ethnography of communication.’ This heritage is not least visible in the use of ‘literacy event’ as the unit of analysis in much literacy research (Maybin and Tusting 2011). In the first contribution to this volume, Tanner discusses analytical practices with regard to the relation between literacy events and literacy practices from an interactional perspective. Based on a multimodal perspective on social interaction, she argues for and demonstrates the relevance of a conversation analysis approach to investigating literacy practices in the classroom. The findings are based on empirical data from a video-ethnographic classroom study on learning and literacy practices during the middle years.

The emphasis of the ideological nature of literacy has brought power-relations and different kinds of societal inequality into research focus and gave rise to a critical literacy strand that began researching and analyzing institutionalized schooling in order to identify patterns of oppression and marginalization (Maybin and Tusting 2011). A part of this critical research tradition has been the development of pedagogical models of critical literacy (Freire 1970; Lankshear, McLaren, and Greene 1993; Janks 2010; Luke 2014). Olin-Scheller and Tengberg focus in their study on aspects of teaching and developing critical literacy among students as it is defined and understood by the Swedish National Agency for Education. The empirical material analyzed in this contribution was collected in two Grade 9 classes.

Multimodal approaches to literacy aim to analyze and systematize a broad repertoire of semiotic resources in human communication with an explicit focus on meaning-making. A large part of multimodality research is positioned within the theoretical framework of social semiotics (Kress and van Leeuven 1996–2006), in which multimodality is defined as ‘the use of several semiotic modes in the design of a semiotic product or event’ (Kress et al. 2001, 20), thus acknowledging the role of non-linguistic modes in meaning-making. In her contribution, Sofkova-Hashemi focuses on the text and media landscape in the classroom in particular with regard to the multimodal meaning-making mediated by the use of laptop and tablet computers. She explores the patterns of communication which the digital meaning-making of 7–8 year old students display when composing a narrative story.

Taking into account social, discursive and material elements entering into a relationality, both Holm's and Hermansson's analyses explore how literacy practices function, and what may become. For Holm, teachers’ perceptions and practices are central in understanding standardized literacy testing as social practices. Drawing on Latour's theoretical framework and Actor-network theory inspired research in testing, Holm examines teachers’ constructions of the literacy competence levels of multilingual students in three primary school classes in Denmark.

In emphasizing aspects of relation and situatedness, Hermansson explores young children's ways of becoming writers. For the 6–7 year olds in the study, writing in school is about being at the center of a myriad of different human and non-human elements, such as talk, laughter, bodily movement, experiences of adventure, and popular media and educational discourses. In applying a situated, relational and nomadic analysis, Hermansson's study offers a shift in the unit of analysis from the competent writer as an autonomous text maker, to the event and its intertwined relationships of different elements as the nodal point of becoming writers.

By foregrounding moments and movements that precede processes of literacy of all kind, the socio-material approach turns its attention to the continuous production of becoming. Thus, processes of literacy can be understood as networks of socio-material relations between humans, technologies and elements that interact in mutual interdependence. Accordingly, Holm and Hermansson's two articles offer an analysis of how various issues/problems are constituted in contemporary literacy practices.

This volume grew out of the annual meeting of the Literacy Research Network of the Nordic Educational Research Association in 2015 (NERA). From a joint symposium, the different authors have explored different analytical perspectives on literacy as sociocultural practices in relation to education, to advance the ways we understand the messiness of literacy practices in contemporary society in relation to educational settings. It is our hope that this will advance our understanding of the potential that this diversity and multiplicity may have for education.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Since the late sixteenth century, commoners in Sweden had been taught basic reading skills through the catechism, and it is generally perceived that the majority of commoners had already developed basic skills in the middle of the seventeenth century. In 1842, it became compulsory for the parishes to construct schools and hire teachers, and for the families to send their children there. However, the schooling was poor and no early literacy education was provided until some decades later. It is thus believed that literacy rates actually decreased in Sweden from 1842 and a few decades afterwards, and that it was only later that literacy became highly valued throughout society.