Explorando las diversas alfabetizaciones de un adolescente colombiano en su comunidad rural

Participant Background: Chaparro’s Case

This paper’s case study draws on the recounted literacy practices of one Colombian youth, who was fourteen at the time of the study. Chaparro (pseudonym) lives in a small rural village along the Colombian Caribbean coast that is inhabited by approximately 4,000 people. Chaparro lives with his immediate and extended family —his parents, two younger sisters, uncle, grandmother, and great grandparents— in a household composition common to the area. As an eighth grader, Chaparro attends the local public school located a short walk from his home. His school serves around 500 primary and secondary students from the community, and follows the official standardized curricula mandated by the National Ministry of Education.

In the teaching and assessment of required core subjects, including Languages (Spanish and English), Mathematics, Science, and Social Studies, a stringent focus is maintained on traditional literacy skills such as reading, writing, and rote memorization, particularly for success on high-stakes tests. These forms of evaluation require a specific type of written reflection cente red upon school-based, alphabetic-script literacies, while also demanding that students demonstrate their knowledge and competencies by employing inference skills to make sense of the affirmative and supporting statements (“afirmaciones y evidencias”) found in the tests’ written texts (icfes, 2022).

Family-Based Literacies

While maintaining focus on the New London Group’s concept of multi literacies (1996; Kalantzis & Cope, 2020a; Mills & Unsworth, 2017), our analysis of Chaparro’s home literacies will first center on the culture and traditions that largely influence his identity and primary Discourse (Gee, 2015). Born and raised in a rural Colombian community surrounded by close kin, Chaparro’s family-based literacies are mainly situated around a physical structure that has served as a marker of Colombian heritage for centuries: the palm kiosk (Figure 1).

Figure 1. : Picture of palm Kiosk in Chaparro’s home-community

Source: Tatiana Becerra

A remnant of indigenous tradition along the Colombian Caribbean coast (Fals-Borda, 2002), the palm kiosk is the preferred place for gathering and social interaction among family members at Chaparro’s home. On any given evening, a variety of literacy events —or moments of collaboratively composing a text (Pahl & Rowsell, 2012)— occur in this outdoor space. As Chaparro mentions in the interview segment below (Transcript 1), such literacy events include the recounting of anecdotes that often serve as a source of laughter and family connection:

Transcript 1. : Telling Stories at Home

The oral storytelling Chaparro describes in this segment is an important component of his family-based literacy practices. As indicated in line 13, “everyone” in his family partakes —including the family elders such as his granduncle and grandmother— and uses oral storytelling as a literate tool to demonstrate allegiance to family time, histories, the home, and commu nity Discourse (Gee, 2015). Oral traditions are important communicative practices that have been pivotal to recording histories and nurturing rural communities’ identities, thus sustaining and permeating social and cultural interaction in the Colombian Caribbean and Pacific Coasts (Escobar, 2018; Fals-Borda, 2002).

In addition to honouring such long-standing oral traditions, the literacy events occurring in the palm kiosk demonstrate a rich grasp of literacies beyond spoken word alone. Recent developments in literacy studies have turned to affect-based frameworks in order to decenter the text and instead place emphasis on feeling, connection, embodiment, and sensation. Hea vily influenced by Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza’s theory of affect, built upon by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1988), affect-based perspectives make room for considerations of how, through literacy events, bodies (human and non-human, physical and non-physical, singular and collective) perform a continuous, unpredictable, ever-evolving dance that elicits intensities, energies, and disruptions.

Regarding literacy as being permeable in this way opens new worlds of possibility created through “emergent, material, and social relations” (Ehret et al., 2016, p. 3). In the case of the oral storytelling that occurs in Chaparro’s family palm kiosk, the human body works as a ‘text assemblage’, whereby gestural and spatial modalities converse to expand possibilities for communicating and making meaning (Leander & Boldt, 2013). The use of context specific spoken language, gesture, gaze, prosody, and phy sical space converge, providing Chaparro and his family members with powerful affordances in producing literacy events that are understood and felt collectively.

This embodied sense of literacy is nicely reflected through the fami ly-based literacies occurring in the palm kiosk. At a later time in the inter view transcribed above, Chaparro described how his family enjoys playing board games like parcheesi on a regular basis. While the game demands that players read and understand various physical objects —such as the board, card signs and numbers, dice, and chips— the strategic play of those aiming to win also requires the observation and understanding of players’ gestures and gazes to anticipate the next moves. Just as in the palm kiosk, the family-based literacies Chaparro draws upon during his parcheesi gameplay require a complex process of meaning-making across the mind, body, material and non-material, while also centuring the traditions and connections that his family values.

Despite acknowledging his participation in and enjoyment of these family-based practices, Chaparro placed little value on the literacies forged in his home life. He, in fact, described the deficit view of his and his family’s literate abilities during the interview. Chaparro explained that he lacked confidence in his performance of the literacy practices valued in school, and, therefore, believed himself to be non-literate and “bad at Spanish”, his mother tongue. He spoke of ongoing struggles in Spanish class that stemmed from difficulties learning to read when he was youn ger, and continued to manifest as an uneasiness he experienced when asked to read at school. While Chaparro described the importance he attributed to the traditional literacy skills honoured in school and society more broadly - stating “to me, reading is learning” and “literacy is some thing you need to be a person” —he also spoke of his lack of motivation, struggles to concentrate in class, and issues with producing the print-based texts required at school.

The long-standing deficit conceptions Chaparro has developed about his literate ability have put him at a learning standstill in formal educational environments, resulting in poor performance in his language classes. Fur ther, Chaparro expressed similar deficit views of his parents and relatives, whom he considers unable to help him with school tasks as they “know nothing” —an opinion contrasted by the rich description of family-based literacies painted during the interview. Chaparro’s views draw attention to a postmodern concern around ‘acceptable’ and ‘non-acceptable’ forms of a given language (Kalantzis & Cope, 2020): When multiple dialects, registers, and versions of a given language exist, why are students required to master the voice of the nation-state in order to be considered as literate? As researchers and educators, these deficit self/family perceptions are a clear indication of the problematic, narrow conceptualization of literacies and language practices popularized within the school system, particularly as they come from a youth whose life is rich with a myriad of multimodal, digital, and critical literacy practices, as we will continue to describe below.

Multimodal Literacies

While robust and meaningful in nature, Chaparro’s out-of-school literacies go far beyond his family-based practices. Each evening while watching the news on TV, Chaparro draws upon his ability to navigate and critically analyze multimodal texts. Experiencing the interplay of diverse modes —semiotic resources including text, image, sound, gesture, and music (Jewitt, 2008; Mills & Unsworth, 2017)— while consuming the news has motivated Chaparro to search for other texts with multiple modalities in order to gain new perspectives and information, as he describes in the interview segment included below:

Transcript 2: Finding the Affordances of Other Modes

The scene discussed in this interview segment is of the explosion of a truck transporting gasoline in a small town in Santa Marta, Colombia. After initially learning about the tragic event and its proximity to his own home, Chaparro was motivated to search for additional information in the form of YouTube videos. The videos he found were recorded by witnesses during the explosion, featuring uncensored visuals, live sounds, and a first-person perspective that Chaparro could not obtain by solely watching the news. His desire to access a vivid, realistic representation of the tragic event demonstrates an awareness of varied multimodal affordances, as well as an understanding of content restrictions across media platforms.

Chaparro’s experiences watching the news and doing supplemen tary research have also influenced some of the texts produced for his school assignments. During the interview, he described a project assigned in his Technology class that required students to reflect on machines and their impact on the environment. Chaparro chose to reinterpret a segment he had seen while watching the news by creating a cartoon and including written comments on his representation of a petrol machine, as he describes in the interview segment below:

Transcript 3. : Shifting Meaning from the TV News to a Cartoon.

The multimodal composition Chaparro completed for his school assig nment demonstrates his ability to transfer meaning across varied contexts and modes in order to express a specific message to a specific audience. This process of creation requires a “critical eye towards different genres of texts and a meta-awareness of these texts” (Pahl & Rowsell, 2012, p. 47). Rather than simply describing what he had watched in the news segment —a petrol machine contaminating the aquatic home of depicted floating dead fish— Chaparro chose to create what he believed to be a more power ful representation by visibly showing how the oil leaking from the petrol machine was affecting the fish, and describing the process in his own words.

This is an example of a textual ‘remix’ and ‘transmediation’, as Cha parro drew from the meaning of a source text (the news segment), while altering (or ‘remixing’) its modes and shifting (or ‘transmediating’) semiotic content from one mode to another (Mills & Unsworth, 2017). By removing the sound, speech, and print, and including his own created visual of the ideas he was aiming to represent, Chaparro was able to bring new meaning to the news segment. Although the different ‘semiotic modes’ of sound, images, written text, and drawings might appear to contain the same content —a petrol spill contaminating water— they are nevertheless “conveyors of qualitatively different kinds of messages” that “impart certain kinds of meanings more easily and naturally than others” (Hull & Nelson, 2005, p. 229). Chaparro’s multimodal remixing required both critical and creative engagement with various source texts, and a “semiotic awareness” of the affordances of resources working together to produce new meanings (van Leeuwen, 2017; Lim, 2021a).

In selecting the information and method of representation he found most powerful and fitting for his audience —in this case, his teacher— Cha parro was also able to infuse his literate production with his own agency and identity (Thomas & Seely Brown, 2011; Pahl & Rowsell, 2012). Through his literate abilities, Chaparro transformed the TV segment into something new and meaningful: an original text fitting the characteristics he knew were valued in the classroom domain and commonplace Discourses of his Technology course. Although this example of multimodal textual remixing was completed for a school assignment, Chaparro did not consider it to be as rigorous a literate production as a formal written essay due to the value placed on didactic literacy practices. While this shortcoming of the education system was indeed felt by the researchers, Chaparro’s textual remix still provided him with a strong sense of pride and accomplishment, and he was excited to share what he had produced during the interview, as demonstrated by his bright smile (Figure 2).

Figure 2. : Stencilphoto of Chaparro smiling while describing his textual remix.

Source: Tatiana Becerra

Critical Digital Literacies

Chaparro’s ability to understand, analyze, and remix multimodal texts like YouTube videos and TV news segments exemplifies his honing of digital literacies (Lankshear & Knobel, 2008; Mills, 2016; Pahl & Rowsell, 2012). As Chaparro found himself looking to the digital domain to expand his understanding of the world through multimodal texts that resonated with him, he developed his critical analytic skills and began forging his identity as a young activist. In addition to the explosion in Santa Marta, Chaparro described how he chose to look further into the case of police brutality that occurred in Bogotá in September 2020 which was widely covered in the news. While the national media portrayed the case as an accident rather than a murder committed by the police, Chaparro questioned its bias and chose to do his own investigating. He explained: “It didn’t seem right to me because I watched the video recorded by the man’s partner… a video I found on YouTube. The man asked (the police) to be left alone when he was being beaten, but they put that thing that electroshocks you.”

In their article, “Critical Literacy as a Way of Being and Doing,” Vasquez and colleagues (2019) conceptualize “dynamic digital doings” as a critical way of living and being that transcends contexts. When Chaparro decided to explore the murder through a different lens, he called attention to the idea that texts and literacy practices are never neutral, and naturalized understandings must be explored and analyzed through different lenses in order to suggest possibilities for change (Vas quez et al., 2019). Rather than blindly consuming what he watched on the news, Chaparro’s critical digital literacies informed his understanding and later judgement of the man’s death: “That’s the police’s fault.” This powerful comment evinces Chaparro’s ability to evaluate and compare sources —in this case, the YouTube video as well as the news segment he watched reported on national TV. By making his own judgement, Chaparro’s critical literacies helped him to identify the use of extreme and unnecessary force by the police officers involved, which unveiled the corrupt power relations in the area.

While certainly meaningful in helping Chaparro develop his activist identity, his digital literacy practices are also influenced by one of his ‘ruling passions’ (Barton & Hamilton, 1998): video games. As an avid player of games downloaded to his cellphone —like Counter Terrorist and Dream League— Chaparro taps into his digital literacy skills to improve his gameplay, as described in the transcribed excerpt below:

Transcript 4. : Finding Weapons

Using Google as a search platform, Chaparro is able to find instruc tion-based walkthrough videos that help him improve various components of his gameplay, such as how and where to locate new weapons in Counter Terrorist (Figure 3). According to Toh and Lim (2022), a player’s ability to gain information on a game’s design features —”including knowing how to work across different semiotic modes, such as language, visuals, audio, music, and action to perform critical and creative actions in the game” (p. 11)— demonstrates deep engagement with multimodal literacy practices

Figure 3. : Screenshot of a play scene in Counter Terrorist

In addition to reading, analyzing, and transferring the content he navigates in these videos, Chaparro described how he reads the game itself as a text in order to learn the best strategies: “The game is telling you how to shoot, whom to kill, and how to move or walk.” In this description, the video game Counter Terrorist is presented as a text featuring various modes —such as image, movement, and written words— working in harmony to help players understand game dynamics and Discourses (Figure 3). In this sense, reading the game and interpreting its meaning is a literacy event that Chaparro engages in within the digital domain: a ‘figured world’ (Pahl & Rowsell, 2012) whose affordances allow him to author new selves and inhabit new spaces.

The development of these forms of complex literacies and identities through gameplay and game-related searches have been delineated across studies exploring a range of genres, formats, and game-based communities (e.g., Bailey et al., 2017; Gee, 2007, 2014; Scolari et al., 2022). Skult and Smed (2022), for instance, delineate the complex multimodal narrative designs in the commercial pc game c.l.a.y: The Last Redemption that require players to critically navigate various modes (e.g., spatial, aural, visual) and interactive elements (e.g., branching narrative pathways, navigable designs). While these potentials have become increasingly acknowledged across research spanning the fields of literacy, education, and game-based studies (Garcia et al., 2020) —with recent surges even leading to collabo rations between governments and gaming companies over the course of the pandemic (e.g., the #crushcovid initiative by the Canadian Government (Public Health Agency of Canada, 2020))— deficit conceptions still per vade contemporary discourse, resulting in a continued refusal to honour and integrate videogames and game-based literacies into formal learning contexts (Nash & Brady, 2021).