Exploring the potential of a sociomaterial perspective for understanding children's experiences of literacies in and out of classrooms

A sociomaterial perspective on literacy focuses on the ways material objects shape literacy practices in significant ways. This viewpoint signifies a shift in thinking from an understanding of material objects as mediating tools of human practice, to something more significant and agentic. In what is emerging as a sociomaterial theory, literacy is seen as a type of body-matter-social interaction in which the composition of material objects implicated in an interaction impacts what is done with them. Research from a sociomaterial perspective examines how the properties of different materials shape the possibility of human experience by considering the ways that people and materials come together to make things happen. In this presentation, I discuss how I used a sociomaterial perspective to explore the conversations that I had with children throughout my doctoral research, Talking to children about literacies in and out of classrooms in the 21st century. Data generation in this research included focus groups, interviews, drawing and photography with fourteen children from two classes in two different public primary schools in regional Australia. Data were analysed through multiple theoretical perspectives including a sociomaterial perspective, a skills-based perspective, a social practice perspective, and an affective perspective. This analysis yielded multiple readings of the same data. In this presentation, I highlight the unique understandings of in and out of school literacies generated through a sociomaterial reading of the children’s conversations, including how it challenged the idea that literacy is primarily a social practice influenced predominantly by the broad social understandings people bring to literacy practices. The sociomaterial perspective used in this research suggests that a social practice perspective is incomplete and may be expanded to include the significant influence of different material objects such as books, computers, drawing implements, touch screen devices, magazines, mobile phones, gaming devices, and so on. I will conclude this presentation by considering some of the implications of a sociomaterial perspective on current thinking about literacies education, particularly how it might advance research regarding the ways that literacies are changing as the material objects involved in the production of literacy, particularly digital devices, change.