Mapping literacy spaces in motion: A rhizomatic analysis of a classroom literacy performance

Abstract

tudent presentations are a routine practice in many literacy classrooms and are often motivated by larger pedagogical approaches (e.g., writing or reading workshop). In these literacy events, students share their interpretations of texts, read original writings, display posters and artifacts, act out skits, make evident their completion of course work, and perform a broad range of identities (Lensmire, 1994; Wilhelm & Edmiston, 1998;Wagner, 1998). The audiences of these student presentations also engage in a number of social practices, including making backchannel remarks, asking questions, filling out evaluations, laughing, shifting in their seats, yawning, napping, and clapping. For audience members and presenters alike, student presentations do not consist of simply talk, or print texts, but are rather multimediated and constituted through relations of talk, structured and rearranged room spaces, movements and organizations of bodies, and often print text, images, and video clips.Moreover, when students present or perform their work, they offer audience members diverse literate practices and identities. Performances position audience members with unique modes of address (Ellsworth, 1997); performances offer particular genres of interaction, particular forms of embodied engagement, and particular kinds of access to texts and textual interpretation. Audience members anticipate different performer identities and practices, they respond to the modes of address used by performers, and they also engage in strikingly different literacy practices as they shift orientations from one performance to another. Thus, even a cursory review of some of the complexities of student presentations reveals that they are composed of diverse types of texts, objects, and bodies and that power and meaning within them are stretched across diverse media, performers, and audience members. Whereas student presentations in literacy classrooms have been an ongoing focus of interest since some of the earliest systematic work on classroom 428 429 In many literacy classrooms, students engage in public performances in which they use various texts, movements of their bodies, and verbal interactions. How do we interpret such events? In this article, we critique a representational mode of interpretation and describe an alternate mode. We argue that literacy performances are often about creating differences, including differences in the moving, shifting relations of semiotic resources and differences in the performed identities of participants. Such differences-effects and affective intensities-are lost or overly stabilized within conventional interpretations, which focus on asking how meanings are represented, organized, and produced in performances. Conventionally, the texts of performances (e.g., print, images, speech) are imagined to signify (or re-present) a world that lies behind them. The task of interpretation is approached as reading for meaning. In this mode, we conceive of performances as primarily communicational or informational. Altern...

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