Finding an (Ecological) Niche in the Postdigital Taskscape: The Role of Strong Literacy and Poor Pedagogy in Primary School Pupils’ Online Literacy Practices

Abstract

AbstractThis paper uses a postdigital, postphenomenological lens to examine what happened when an online platform, a wiki, was used to support writing practices in an inner London Key Stage 2 classroom. It understands a postdigital approach to education as one which takes account of the imbrication of technology in our everyday life without valorising it or making hyperbolic claims about what it can do. Avoiding utopian or dystopian accounts, it unpicks what happened when students were allowed to compose multimodal texts beyond the classroom on topics that interested them. Using a postphenomenological approach, it looks at the materiality of the technology in praxis in the different spaces where it was used. It uses as a heuristic Ingold’s concept of the taskscape, recently developed by various scholars as a site not of romantic bucolic human activity but as somewhere where sociomaterial practices are contested as we wrestle for resources within our immediate environment. As students travel between these different taskscapes of home, school and the wiki, it examines how they enact the affordances around them in their transformation from apprentices to more skilled practitioners of literacy. It follows their trajectories-of-becoming when they move between these taskscapes, growing into knowledge as they weave lines of literacy across online and offline spaces. It argues that reviving Gibson’s notion of the ‘ecological niche’ allows us to understand why some find the paths between these spaces easier to tread than others.