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Formal and informal literacy practices in a Finnish secondary school (a case study)

PhD Reijo Kupiainen

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The study• Kupiainen, R. (2013). Media and

Digital Literacies in Secondary School. New York: Peter Lang

• Ethnography in the Finnish publicly funded secondary school

• Semi-structured interviews with 26 pupils and 8 teachers

• Quantitative survey on media and SNS use of the participants (n=305)

– Kupiainen, 2013

”I am […] interested in young people’s own media practices, what they bring to the school, how these practices change school spaces and teaching and learning, how they are utilized in schooling, and finally how media education with its own goals helps children and young people enhance their media literacy practices. ”

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– Kupiainen, 2013

”I am […] interested in young people’s own media practices, what they bring to the school, how these practices change school spaces and teaching and learning, how they are utilized in schooling, and finally how media education with its own goals helps children and young people enhance their media literacy practices. ”

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”Grammar” of schooling (Tyack & Tobin, 1994)

• Standardized schooling practices: • Divided time

sequences • Separated school

spaces • Separated knowledge

areas as school subjects Creative Commons, Flickr – William Creswell

Informal learning: Lifestyle blogs (personal learning environment)SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

Out-Of-School practices: informal learning

Interest-driven practices

Peer-based learning

Engaging in of participants’ own accord, ”pulled” to learning

Learning goals are open-ended, depended by available resources and personalised

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Challenges for teachers“School has to compete with other media.... If young people play games and hang out on Facebook or something like that, their reality is filled with stimulation. They get new and exciting things every moment. At school this means concretely that we have to work hard in order to keep students tuned in so that the stimulus in school corresponds to their reality. If you think about when a teacher is talking and nearly 30 people are listening, it is, in a way, a really passive situation. How can a student react? They are silent, and write and ask questions one at a time. School reality does not correspond to what happens in their free time when they can be agents all the time and decide what they do. I think that contrast is huge.”(Interview with the history and social science teacher, male)

- Kupiainen, 2014

Strategies

”Michel de Certeau (1984) called strategy the logic of closure and internal administration of institutions (Lankshear & Knobel, 2011). In his theory, de Certeau distinguished between two social forces: production and consumption. Production is controlled through those who have power, who create, maintain, and impose disciplined spaces, make timetables and procedures, and organize the life in spaces. They control through strategies, which are processes directed toward disciplining places and maintaining power (Gomez, Stone, & Hobbel, 2004). ”

- Kupiainen, 2014

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Tactics”In de Certeau’s theory, tactics is an art of the weak. He illustrated this by explaining the practices of North African migrants living in Paris. According to de Certeau, these migrants insinuate into the system imposed on them “the ways of ‘dwelling’ (in house or a language) peculiar to [their] native Kabylia” (p. 30; cf. Lankshear & Knobel, 2011, p. 243). They create their own plural space to be by the “art of being in between.” ”

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- Kupiainen, 2014

Tactics

Strategies

Tactics

”Although, for example, the school space is controlled, it is not absolutely dominated. As Ian Buchanan (1993, para. 21) wrote, controlled space is “reactive rather than active. It is subject to appropriation: its disciplined/dominated spaces... can always be made smooth by their occupants by the act of occupancy itself.” This “occupancy” is tactic. De Certeau (1984) spoke about everyday resistance, in which people undermine imposed power relations.”

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- Kupiainen, 2014

Heterotopos/heterotopia

Michel Foucault 1967, Of the SpacesKevin Hetherington (1997) ”defined heterotopia as spaces of alternate ordering. He emphasized social order more than marginality and pure resistance. At this kind of site, heterotopia brings together heterogeneous and unusual things without letting them build a coherent unity.

”Rather than an actual place, heterotopia is “an idea, or perhaps a practice, that challenges the functional ordering of space while refusing to become part of that order” (Hetherington pp. 46–47). In this way, heterotopia offers an alternative way to do things. It is not a question of marginal places but relations to other sites

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- Kupiainen, 2014

– Kupiainen 2013

”Heterotopia is a space for media education where students bring media practices to

school from outside of the school spaces. Teachers take some relations to this new social

ordering where students show new kinds of agency in learning settings, both formal and

informal.”

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Example: Social Science, grade 9: life careerSCHOOL OF EDUCATION

Informal literacy practices at school

• Teachers do not usually recognise or utilise students’ out-of-school literacy practices

• Schools’ learning environment and organisation of time and space do not support students’ literacy practices

• Students’ out-of-school literacy practices challenges the social order of the classroom

• Students can benefit their competences in learning and could be motivated

”You dig up some peripheral material, share it to the students and soon after you have to gather it back. It is really frustrating sometimes.” (Interview with a mother tongue teacher, female)

”Teachers are worried about a new cellular phenomenon at classrooms”

”Students shoot in secret live Periscope video cast”

Headlines in Finnish news

”This is especially true for students who underachieve in tests or just

do not learn from books or can’t write proper answers. Many students that are not so good at tests are good at

this.” (Interview with the social science teacher 2, male)

Visual and multimodal texts at the classroomSchool spaces will change and became heteropias More collaborative and community based learning

Thank you!