Due to the Covid-19 global crisis, educational institutions have been moving online at an unprecedented scale. However, there is little research which documents these recent impacts on classroom practices. By the same token, the increasing influence of global digital platform providers in education also remains largely unquestioned. In line with recent postdigital scholarship, the platformization of education warrants scrutiny (Jandrić et al., 2018). Digital media can no longer be considered as new and separate from the practices of everyday life; instead, hardware, software and algorithmic processes are essential parts of our socio-material realities (e.g. Jones, 2020; 2021). As part of a broader project on Platform Pedagogies, I explore how the widespread integration of globally-owned platforms into local settings belies the ways in which situated educational practices are increasingly being shaped/facilitated across borders, by human as well as non-human actors (e.g. Williamson et al., 2019).
Against this backdrop, this paper discusses the analysis of on-the-ground literacy practices and focuses on the classroom as a "site of engagement" (Wohlwend, 2021, p. 10) that is constituted by discourses, local practices, materials, technologies, bodies, actions. Recent scholarship in literacy education has highlighted the urge for developing theories and methods that examine these human-machine entanglements, pay attention to multimodality and scrutinize digital platforms (e.g. Wohlwend, 2021). In discussing video-recorded data from a pilot study in a secondary school, I argue that nexus analysis constitutes a useful methodological approach to examine these human-machine entanglements – it is embodied and spatialized literacies that converge in hybrid classroom settings.
The micro-analysis of learners' actions on screens thus requires not only different transcription and coding methods, but also enables to unpack deep-seated discourses that are engrained in human-machine interactions (cf. Scollon, 2001). In examining learners' mediated actions and learning about their understandings of digital education platforms, nexus analysis helps to make visible what is usually left invisible (cf. Bezemer & Kress, 2016). Nexus analysis provides tools to better understand the ways in which young people engage in meaning-making practices and to deconstruct how educational technology providers shape key literacies in education.
References
Bezemer, J. & Kress, G. (2016). Multimodality, learning and communication: A social semiotic frame. Routledge.
Jandrić, P., Knox, J., Besley, T., Ryberg, T., Suoranta, J., & Hayes, S. (2018). Postdigital science and education. Educational Philosophy & Theory, 50(10), 893–899. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2018.1454000
Jones, R. H. (2020). The rise of the pragmatic web: Implications for rethinking meaning and interaction. In C. Tagg, & M. Evans (Eds.), Message and medium: English language practices across old and new media (pp. 17-37). De Gruyter.
Jones, R. H. (2021). The text is reading you: teaching language in the age of the algorithm. Linguistics and Education, 62 (2021), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2019.100750
Scollon, R. (2001). Mediated discourse analysis: The nexus of practice. Routledge.
Williamson, B., Bergviken Rensfeldt, A., Player-Koro, C., & Selwyn, N. (2019). Education recoded: policy mobilities in the international 'learning to code' agenda. Journal of Education Policy, 34(5), 705-7. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2018.1476735
Wohlewend, K. (2021). Literacies that move and matter. Nexus analysis for contemporary childhoods. Routledge.
