The scrumpled geography of literacies for learning

Abstract

This paper draws upon the experience of the Literacies for Learning in Further Education research project in the UK. The project explored the literacy demands of a number of curriculum areas and the literacy practices of students in their everyday lives, in order to identify those ‘border literacies’ which may act as resources for learning and attainment within their college courses. Drawing on Literacy Studies and aspects of actor-network theory, this article outlines the conceptual innovations that we found necessary arising from our data analysis, extending existing work on situating practice and boundary crossing to posit a conceptual landscape that we term the scrumpled geography of literacies for learning. This landscape is one in which purification, naturalization and translation are key concepts, where literacy practices are enacted as network effects of a folding of a range of micro-practices into conglomerations.

Keywords:

• literacies
• learning
• literacy practices
• actor-network theory
• translation
• purification
• folding
• border crossing

Acknowledgements

This article arises from work done within the Literacies for Learning in Further Education research project, funded by the ESRC's Teaching and Learning Research Programme (grant number RES-139-25-0117). Our thanks to all the members of the research and those who have participated in this work. It is also based upon work funded by the ESRC's Teaching and Learning Research Programme in a thematic seminar series, Contexts, Communities, Networks: Mobilizing Learners Resources and Identities Across Domains (grant number RES-139-25-0174). Our thanks to all who contributed to the seminar series. Our thanks also to the two anonymous reviewers of this article who gave engaged and constructive feedback, which we have attempted to fold into the final text.