Chapter 4. Making Sense of a Person�s Literate Life: Literacy Narratives in a 100-Year-Study on Literacy Development

Abstract

Bazerman notes that a project such as this "may seem quixotic and perhaps impossible in its magnitude, expense, and logistical complexity" (2018, p. 327), but he works through this complexity to trace the broad outlines of such a project. Approaches to Lifespan Writing Research works to flesh out that outline as a next step toward aligned, integrated, multi-site longitudinal studies of writing. In each of these chapters our authors attempt to explicate their epistemological stances, methodological choices, and theoretical reasoning so that resonance across research sites, methods, and findings can begin to be articulated, followed up, and built upon. If Bazerman's initial challenge to the field requires a disregard for what is easy-even, perhaps, for what is possible-the very complexity embraced by the project has also generated an embrace of collaboration and of joint attention to a difficult problem. The complexity of researching writing through the lifespan emerges, in large part, from the fact that writing is itself complex (Bazerman et al., 2017, 2018). Writing is caught up in all facets of our lives, whether explicitly attended to or not. Whether we are writing to our senators or our child's school, making a list of groceries, completing taxes, or writing a report for our employers, we are engaged in various spheres of social and material engagement, working with various audiences, and attending to various demands on our own and others' time. But through it all, we are writing. Attending to writing through the lifespan needs to attend to all of this complexity somehow. The task of this volume is to present potential "hows" and begin to render the impossible slightly more possible for future research on writing through the lifespan. Yet our aims for this volume are not just that it coheres in these ways, but that it actively generates murmurations, or a path forward for those engaged in lifespan writing research. Murmurations describes the coordinated movements of flocks of birds (especially starlings-footage is readily available online) and may involve up to thousands of birds moving together while also easily able to change directions and goals. Murmurations are simultaneously chaotic and deeply ordered-chaotic in that a murmuration changes continuously in shape and direction through time, yet deeply ordered in that the movement is seamless and unified and displays a common goal. Fluidity and unified purpose through chaos seem to us a plausible strategy for tackling such a complex research problem, a claim we unpack more fully in our conclusion.