Materialities, multiliteracies and makerspaces

With increasing digitization and multimodality within society, text production forms a key element of what it means to be literate in today’s literate culture – interactions between children and young people and digital texts, tools and resources are embedded in everyday practices. This shift – along with changes to work practices and the economy - has also resulted in text production becoming a more collaborative practice. When we think about literacies for current times – we usually think about multimodality and digital technologies. Digital tools, resources and technologies have had a radical effect on how we produce texts, how we communicate with each other, the kinds of interactions we can have – the very social organization of the spaces in which we engage. When we acknowledge this, we are acknowledging that everyday life involves an entanglement of social with material; human with non-human; technological and non-technological. These sociomaterial ways of thinking challenge our preoccupation with single individuals using literacy tools (Fenwick, Edwards, & Sawchuk 2011) whether traditional print or digital in order to get things done. From this way of thinking, ‘technology’ in whatever form is valuable, meaningful and worth studying as people actually engage with it to get things done. But we move beyond being interested just in what a young child can ‘do’ with technology toward thinking about how the material as well as the discursive and the virtual works with the human and non-human world. It is this decoupling of knowing and action from a strictly human centred ‘being’ or ontology that is a key contribution of sociomaterial theories (Fenwick, Edwards, & Sawchuk 2011). In this chapter we consider literacies and learning to be literate for current times and thinking, and then present data from one study of how children learn to write and produce texts in their early school years. We highlight data collected as part of one design-based research project from this larger study, where teachers and researchers worked together to plan and implement a series of lessons which began with opportunities for children to engage in makerspace activities, before moving to produce texts in other modes. We are particularly interested in the materiality of these activities and how they shifted the roles of children and adults in the classroom space.