About the book
De/constructing Literacies: Considerations for Engagement reviews and defines the concept of engagement in literacy studies from different epistemologies. Well-suited for literacy researchers and graduate students, it considers the foundations of arts-based research, cognitive psychology, ethnography, phenomenology, posthumanism, with a final chapter on walking methodologies, to better understand how engagement can be framed and looked at in literacy studies.
“De/constructing Literacies: Considerations for Engagement is a fascinating book that challenges educators to rethink the role that aesthetic experiences play with/in student engagement. Lemieux’s conceptualization of reading as a phenomenologically-oriented and posthumanely- driven encounter is both fresh and provocative, as it invites us to imagine not only what a more ethically engaged conception of affective engagement is, but also, what it could be(come).”
—BESSIE DERNIKOS, FLORIDA ATLANTIC UNIVERSITY
“De/constructing Literacies moves us closer to holistic understandings of literacy and learning by presenting literacies as both embodied and distributed, emergent and sedimented, affective and social. Weaving together theoretical strands from phenomenological hermeneutics and posthumanism, Lemieux pushes central conversations in the field forward by making sure the contributions of key deconstructionists, namely Barthes, Ricoeur and Gadamer, are not left behind. The book’s careful empirical groundedness undergirds and lends support to its remarkable theoretical contributions.”
BRICE NORDQUIST, SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY
“De/constructing Literacies: Considerations for Engagement provides us incredibly important additions to the conversations/debates surrounding literacy and
learning. With the world constantly changing, including learners, it is critical we consider the ways in which we interact in diverse contexts but also the affectual nature of these interactions. The book effectively utilises the methodology of phenomenological hermeneutics in exploring material culture and multimodal receptions and productions as they relate to posthumanism. With thoughtprovoking images and prose as well as powerful classroom practices related to reading engagement the book takes the reader on a journey; mapping literate practices through time and space. I am convinced that all interested in literacy, learning and posthumanist thought will read this book with great interest. I highly recommend it.”—G
EORGINA BARTON,
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN QUEENSLAND, AUSTRALIA
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Table of Contents
List of Figures
Introduction
Chapter One: Literacies as Engrenagesor How Phenomenological Hermeneutics Impact Literacy Studies
Chapter Two: De/constructing Reading Engagement
Chapter Three: Illustrating Reading Engagement: Indicators, Meaning-Making, and Beyond
Chapter Four: Mapping Reactions across Students: Engagement Tendencies
Chapter Five: Community-Oriented Literacies and the Place of Materiality
Index
Figures
Figure 1: Figure 2: Figure 3: Figure 4:
Figure 5: Figure 6:
Figure 7:
Figure 8:
Figure 9:
Figure 10:
Figure 11:
Figure 12:
Montreal snow. Amélie Lemieux. Iced footprints. Amélie Lemieux.
Café crème. Amélie Lemieux.
Wet streets, reflecting lights. Amélie Lemieux.
Lights in line. Amélie Lemieux.
Julian’s first aesthetigram, in response to the book excerpt.
Julian’s second aesthetigram, in response to the corresponding film excerpt.
Tom’s aesthetigram in response to Scene 37 in the play Incendies.
Oliver’s aesthetigram in response to scene 37 in the play Incendies.
Simon’s aesthetigram in response to scene 37 in the play Incendies.
Justin’s aesthetigram in response to scene 37 in the play Incendies.
Noah’s aesthetigram in response to scene 37 in the play Incendies.
Figure 13:
Josh’s aesthetigram in response to scene 37 in the play Incendies.
Figure 14:
Max’s aesthetigram in response to scene 37 in the play Incendies.
Figure 15:
Billy’s aesthetigram in response to scene 37 in the play Incendies.
Figure 16:
Figure 17:
Billy’s drawing of the book cover.
First character: Billy’s representation of Nawal in the written play.
Figure 18:
Second character: Billy’s representation of Nihad in the written play.
Figure 19:
Billy’s aesthetigram in response to scene 37 in the film Incendies.
Figure 20:
Figure 21:
Figure 22:
Figure 23:
Reading engagement tendencies in participants.
Total occurrences in reading tendencies.
Community-based LFL in Rosemont, picture taken by Lemieux with an iPhone 5, 2015.
Community-based LFL in Villeray, Montreal, picture taken by Lemieux with an iPhone 5, 2015.
Figure 24:
Figure 25:
LFL Pilot, (c) Lemieux, picture taken with an iPhone 5.
LFLs locations on the McGill campus—Map provided by M. Ramundo.
Figure 26:
Faculty of Arts LFL (location #3), picture provided by M. Ramundo.
Figure 27:
Figure 28:
Cardiff, taken with iPhone 8, 2018.
Cardiff, taken with iPhone 8, 2018.
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Introduction
The title of this book, De/constructing Literacies: Considerations for Engagement, refers to ongoing conversations and debates about the nature of literacies and, more importantly, the relationships between definitions and dimensions of engagement in literacy studies. Under the supervision of Jennifer Rowsell (for postdoctoral training) and Boyd White (for doctoral studies), I studied the epistemological traditions of phenomenological hermeneutics in reception studies, material culture, and more recently multimodal receptions and productions as they relate to such epistemologies as phenomenology, visual culture, new materialism, and posthumanism. This book is a dedication to them as a result of our work together and the provoking conversations that took place over a number of years. In the last few years, the research I have conducted with high school and post-secondary students, as well as with pre- and inservice teachers, speaks to these intricate relationships, and further exemplifies the often-fleeting and oblivious inchoate dimensions embedded in the human, the non-human, and the more-than human. The projects I present in this book are in line with current research focusing on the relationship between youth’s intra-actions and affective states within textualities and materialities, specifically as to how they shape literacies in plural and open forms (Dernikos, 2018; Kuby & Rowsell, 2017; Kuby, Spector & Thiel, 2018; Lemieux
& Rowsell, 2020; Nichols & Campano, 2017; Sherbine, 2018; Wargo, 2018) and in relation to affective entanglements (Ehret & Rowsell, 2020; Leander & Ehret, 2019).
←1 | 2→
Posthuman research on literacy practices focuses on decentering, in part, the sole emphasis on students, and reconsiders students as a whole. That is, focusing on their interactions with the world, the objects, the digital, their environment, and their inner and outer circles. Researching with posthumanism (Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2013; Grosz, 2017) in literacy studies has previously been done with emphasis on: rhizoanalysis and educational studies (Ehret, 2016; Semetsky & Masny, 2013); second-language education and citizenship (Fleming, Waterhouse, Bangou & Bastien, 2017); trauma literatures and sticky, affective entanglements and trauma literacies (Dernikos, 2018); early childhood literacies and methodologies (Kuby, 2017; Kuby & Rowsell, 2017); early childhood play and literacies (Marsh, 2017; Sherbine, 2018); adolescent literacies and affective states (Ehret, 2018; Lewis & Tierney, 2013); sexual cultures and youth digital literacies (Handyside & Ringrose, 2017; Renold & Ringrose, 2017); movement and youth literacies (Hackett & Somerville, 2017; Leander & Rowe, 2006; Nordquist, 2017); classroom makerspaces in preschool settings (Wohlwend, Peppler, Keune & Thompson, 2017); sonic literacies and aural rhetorics (Brownell & Wargo, 2017; Ceraso, 2018); work with exceptional youth (Reddington & Price, 2018); and methodologies in the digital age to look at virtual worlds and big data sets (Savin-Baden & Tombs, 2017).
In their volume on literacy and posthumanism, Kuby, Spector, and Thiel (2018) engage with manuscripts covering four main areas: (1) agency (2) intra-activity and entanglement (3) subjectivity and (4) affect. These four dimensions are pivotal in understanding new directions in literacy studies, especially in looking at more-thanhuman dimensions and epistemologies of being-with (Lemieux &
Rowsell, 2020). The research I present in this book seeks to decentralize traditional literacies insofar as it considers students’ intra-actions in response to narratives and their adapted versions. Looking across interviews, questionnaires, maps, student commentary, and ekphrastic poetry, I adopted a phenomenological hermeneutics approach that resonates with such posthuman elements as subjectivity and moments of affect in high school students. This research has theoretical underpinnings that align with phenomenological hermeneutics (Ricoeur, 1981; Van Manen, 2014). I explain those dynamic open relationships later on in this manuscript. This is followed by a reflection on the material and its impact on communities—which is inchoate by nature—that brings about change and enthusiasm for daily hidden literacies (Rowsell & Kendrick, 2013).
There is no such thing as immaculate literacies. In a recent study, Rowsell and colleagues (2018) have shown how children in primaryschool settings would rather engage, especially in maker education, in sticky literacies (Wargo, 2017), and pedagogies of dissonance between producing and receiving; meaning that both ←2 | 3→happen, sometimes simultaneously and sometimes anachronously. By pedagogies of dissonance I mean that it is not often clear for children that they are engaging in actual “literacies work” when they are making, reading, browsing, tinkering, and composing (digital) texts. The logic of trial-and-error is useful in considering how we might think of literacies differently, as an ontological way of becoming accustomed to new worlds and words, shapes, and sounds, and new ontologies altogether. The vibrant need to transcend im/materials worlds (Burnett, Merchant, Pahl & Rowsell, 2014) is becoming more and more visible across both home and school contexts.
In this volume, I focus mainly on these questions: How are phenomenological hermeneutics reinvested in the twenty-first century? What are the relationships between phenomenological
hermeneutics, affect, and posthumanist thought? To answer these questions, I provide reflections based on studies conducted in secondary and post-secondary educational contexts, and provide further avenues for investigation in literacy studies that look at reading and composition.
←3 | 4→←4 | 5→
CHAPTER ONE
Literacies as Engrenages or How
Phenomenological Hermeneutics Impact Literacy Studies
Phenomenological hermeneutics lay the groundwork for flexible and open investigations into the structured and unstructured layers of the self. As we are thinking about communicative behavior in literacy studies—how a reader may communicate affect for example—one may think about the way through which one can communicate their responses to texts. Phenomenological hermeneutics are always relational; they materialize through communicative modes and moments of human reflection that are forged by elements imperceptible to human nature. These elements are more-thanhuman, im/material, and, more generally, impossible to pinpoint. They defy cause and effect. They repulse correlations and positivists mindsets.
Phenomenological hermeneutics tend to rely on two major strands: lived experience, or Martin Heidegger’s Dasein; and hermeneutics, mostly investigated by Gadamer (1975). Phenomenology has had important repercussions for literacy studies. As such, Roland Barthes’ essay Death of the Author (1984)
(un)intentionally created the collateral Birth of the Reader. One of his most famous texts, Barthes’ DeathoftheAuthorproblematized, in times of post-structuralist French philosophy, the central place of a human subject (the author) and replaced it with that of another human subject (the reader). Analyzing the ways in which Honoré de Balzac’s Sarrasine (1834) could be read (in English or in French), Barthes’ essay showed how Balzac’s writing could be confused with that of the narrator (Sarrasine), and that representations of women as being overly sensitive ←5 | 6→for instance, coincided with sexist generalizations that were infamously common in Balzac’s era. The figure and related representations of the “Author” have historically been used as hegemonies—Barthes suggested the figure of the “Author-God” should be carefully discarded; that is to say hermeneutical work should not be based on a person (as a historical, canonical entity) but rather on language. Reading and composition are like puzzles, and the only ones who hold the keys to solving these puzzles are readers and composers.
Now, language has had its representational problems as well, and has often been “granted too much power” (Barad, 2018, p. 223). The 1970s, 1980s, 1990s have seen, with the birth of the reader, a shift to emphasis on student-led learning after decades of literature education that Barthes and many others have described (Freire, 1972; Rosenblatt, 1969). Numerous researchers (Galda & Beach, 2001; Karolides, 2013; Lewis, 2000; Sipe, 1999, and many others) ad(a)opted Rosenblatt’s transactional theory of reading, and focused on literacy research that contextualized settings for literacy pedagogies.
The mid-1990s saw the advent of the New Literacy Studies and Social Semiotics era, and has been studied mostly through the lens of multimodality (Kress, 2000; Rowsell, 2013; Rowsell, Kress, Pahl & Street, 2018). Rowsell and Collier (2016) provide a thorough review of those changes and shifts in literacies studies over the past 20 years. Most recently, and as stated earlier, the focus on emotions
and affect in literacies research (Ehret, 2018) has redirected matters towards non-representational theory. And so, shifts from the author to the text to the reader, are being reconsidered to focus, relationally, on matter rather than form, persons, or language. The entanglements become more relevant than ever. Text is the relational now, as the subsequent chapters will exemplify. This relational dimension oscillates most often between a combination of typed words on a virtual or printed page, and certainly humans have evolved and adapted to these interplays when they make meaning. And of course, meaning-making depends on other things than schooling, language, reading, and writing (Pahl & Rowsell, 2020).
Ricoeur’s Legacy and the Implications of the Post-representational in Literacy Research
Like many others, I see Paul Ricoeur as one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Drawing on H. S. Gadamer, Ricoeur’s work is worth discovering in literacy studies, as his theory on philosophical hermeneutics brings together matters of alterity, identity construction, philosophy of the subject, and ipseity. For example, Ricoeur’s philosophy of perception allows researchers ←6 | 7→to witness the necessary relationship between research on engagement and the “subjective dimension” of posthumanism. That is, the subject still exists but is decentralized as a repository of “truth”; the material comes to matter, and the more-than-human becomes as important as humans. This way of viewing literacy futures is based on the relational and dynamism between nonhumans, humans, and more-than-humans (Sheridan, Lemieux, Do Nascimento & Arnseth, 2020).
Relationality and Reciprocity in (the) Making: Pathways for Engagement and Beyond
Maker education and conversations on posthumanism have been at the core of literacy research in recent years (Hackett & Somerville, 2017; Kuby & Rowsell, 2017; Leander & Boldt, 2013; Nichols & Campano, 2017; Pahl & Pool, 2018). Most research has pointed to both the reciprocity and the intra-actions that unfold as students develop their thoughts and reflect on them in a non-linear way. Jennifer Rowsell has done significant work in literacy studies and posthumanism (Rowsell & Shillitoe, 2019; Rowsell et al., 2018; Whitty & Rowsell, 2019) and I was fortunate to learn from her work how posthumanist maker mindsets propel researchers, teachers, and students into a world that disrupts production and emphasizes intensities instead. Following that tradition, posthumanism reshapes the ways humanities think about education (Kuby & Rowsell, 2017), and challenges Western concepts such as “reading,” “writing,” and “literacy” as separate entities. Indigenous knowledge and epistemologies (Smith, Tuck & Yang, 2018; Tuck & Wang, 2012), phematerialisms (Ringrose, Warfield & Zarabadi, 2018), studies on affect and digital matters (Chanteris & Gregory, 2018; Ehret & Rowsell, 2020; Wargo, 2018), and posthuman performativities (Barad, 2003; Pomerantz & Raby, 2018; Ringrose & Rawlings, 2015) exemplify how there needs to be a shift to decentralize Westernized hegemonies. This change needs to deconstruct and reverse metaphorical statements that act as a shield to social justice work (see for example, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s (2012) article “Decolonization is not a Metaphor” as well as work towards indigenizing education and literacies through creative multidimensional modes and outlets (Doucet, 2018; Smith, Tuck & Yang, 2018; Whitty, 2017)). As Braidotti (2013) mentions: the “Humanities [need] to clarify their own methods and mechanisms of knowledge production” (p. 155). Braidotti (2013) calls for a
posthuman theory that does not exclude the human, in the sense that it still considers subjectivity, but also includes the more-thanhuman, the non-human, and the superhuman, in the sense that it is “anti-individualistic” (p. 101) or anti-egocentric as it considers the “other” and fosters social imagination.
←7 | 8→
Others have offered more practical definitions of posthumanism, emphasizing different directions. For example, Nayar (2014) described his view on critical posthumanism, in that it favours co-evolution, symbiosis, feedback and responses as determining conditions rather than autonomy, competition and self-contained isolation of the human. It sees human experience, modes of perception and even selfaffective states as essentially derived from, influenced by and formed by the sensoria of numerous other living beings first, and then coming autopoiesis later. (p. 9)
In addition to Nayar, Elizabeth Grosz (2017) describes an ethical dimension and defines “ontoethics” in her book The Incorporeal as “an ethics that addresses not just human life in its interhuman relations, but relations between the human and an entire world, both organic and inorganic” (p. 1). This dimension is crucial in literacy research, alluding to the matter of ethics, morals, and consent by centering and considering the essence of being-with, as well as the nature of human interactions with their environments, and vice versa. The question of ethics is also conveyed by Braidotti (2013), who maintains that “the posthuman knowing subject as a time continuum and a collective assemblage implies a double commitment, on the one hand to processes of change and on the other to a strong ethics of eco-sophical sense of community” (p. 169). Thus, an ethos of cohabitation↔interaction between humans and non-humans takes place, and there is an ethical responsibility inherent to posthuman thought (Braidotti, 2013), which implies a
pedagogy of care for, and consciousness of, ethics and environmental well-being. Art and literacy education are no strangers to those values.
Posthumanism unfolds in ways that are unpredictable and unscripted; I present in the next section a contemporary example of this. In a recent visit to my Alma Mater, I took an afternoon to visit Alexander Calder’s Fall 2018 exhibit at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. I spent some time walking through the showrooms allocated for a recollection of Calder’s training and experiences of working as a sheet metals welder and as maker-designer of a miniature-size circus. His meshing of sculptural and painting practices, while not new, shifted the world of architectural design in the mid-twentieth century. Calder’s work offers a solid rendering of the hybridity between maker mindsets and the arts. The immersive pathways the museum offered speak to current research on posthumanist thought and museum immersion (MacRae, Hackett, Holmes & Jones, 2017). While I briefly recollect my experiences as a museum visitor, those experiences were rooted in the relational, the ‘stickness’ that happens between humans, more-than-humans, and the self/ves, speaking to the very fact that “meaning,” MacRae and colleagues ←8 | 9→(2017) argue, “emerges from diffuse and diverse relationships between non-human and human” (p. 507).
I have been inspired by the propositions put forward by Boyd White (McGill University), Anita Sinner (Concordia University), and Darlene St. Georges (Lethbridge University) in a recent article titled “Interweavings: Threads of Art Education, Poetry, and Phenomenological Grapplings” published in the Canadian Review of ArtEducation. In the article, the authors expand on artful “noematic, or reflexive” (White, Sinner & St. Georges, 2018, p. 32) interweavings and responses to Hari Sawa’s airplane multimodal work, meshing together sounds, destinations, and themes like movement, place, space, and being-with im/material (Burnett, Merchant, Pahl & Rowsell, 2014). The following work is a second
example of those diffuse relationships and comes from a presentation I gave with White, Sinner and St. Georges building on that article and Sawa’s work. In the same fashion as my copresenters, I produced ekphrastic poetry (Heffernan, 2004; Kennedy, 2013; White, 2014; White & Lemieux, 2015, 2017), which corresponds to a produced, verbal, or written materialization of a visual representation. While posthumanism aims at decentering the Anthropocene and human perspectives, this rendition of a Montreal walk speaks rather to phenomenological hermeneutics (Heidegger, 1962; Ricoeur, 1981). The exercise takes us, through still shots of a particularly cold and whimsical night, into my intra-actions (Braidotti, 2013) as I walk from my old Montreal neighborhood to the Old Port. Some research epistemologies will frame these dimensions as multimodal, others as artful; I welcome both perspectives and see them as non-exclusionary, in the tradition of people who have been influential in my thinking (Barton & Baguley, 2014; Chabanne, Lacelle & Richard, 2017; Pahl & Rowsell, 2010; Pool & Pahl, 2015; Rowsell, 2018; Sameshima, White & Sinner, 2018).
Walking, Traces, and Relational Oscillations of the Once Spoken
Silence in motion, advances in time
While its moving essence dances in our minds
Whose light are you keeping in?
Whose soul are you keeping out?
Ruminations of an honest heart with curious bearings
Often still and more often mobile with my thoughts
Whose traces am I reminiscing, following, and unfollowing?
An idea in the making
More truths negotiating
Stillness evokes silence, yet so does movement
Stillness evokes violence, yet so does movement
A straight path with many swerves as one goes along
My old neighborhood, winter lights,
Figure 1: Montreal snow. Amélie Lemieux.
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