Glimpses from the kaleidoscope:Research Mobilities in Primary Literacy Education in England

Gillen, Julia and Burnett, Cathy and Adams, Gill and Thompson, Terrie Lynn and Lindroos Cermakova, Anna and Shetty, Parinita and Shannon, David Ben (2023) Glimpses from the kaleidoscope:Research Mobilities in Primary Literacy Education in England. In: Sheffield Literacies and Language Conference, 2023-06-162023-06-17, University of Sheffield.

Abstract

Primary literacy education in England is a controlled domain of activity, with a strong measure of coherence around Department of Education documents around policy, curriculum, training and professional development. Research, often termed evidence, is drawn upon in particular ways. Our project is examining how research related to primary literacy education, (RPLE), in all its forms, is mobilised and reshaped as it moves. In today’s environment, communications are recontextualised and remediated in various sociomaterial assemblages. Our aim is to investigate which topics, approaches, methodologies and social actors are of particular significance in the RPLE landscape in England today, and which are relatively marginalised and how. In this presentation we will give glimpses from some of the findings of our project. As our kaleidoscope moves, variegated findings come into view, while the perspective of the researcher is always implicated. We will share some visualisations drawn from the following entanglements with data: • Teachers’ viewpoints on how they themselves understand and engage with RPLE gained through interviews, focus groups and lifelogging, gained in 2021 & 2022. • A Corpus Linguistics investigation of newspaper discourse, displaying what themes of RPLE are publicly available and how these have shifted, or not, from 2017-2022. • Sociomaterial explorations of a relatively dynamic discourse on Twitter, 2019-2022, examining how topics ebb, fall, move and disappear. We will be open to discussing with the audience how our methodology might be illuminating what they perceive as contributing to forging hopeful literacies.