The Everyday of NML

In reading again today I found Leander (2003)* discussing everyday literacies. This resonates well with what I am looking at in regards to the concept that students are not completely different in school from out of school. Nor do they do identity work in isolation, as Wortham shows. Rather the development of literacies, practices and identities are across various spaces and settings in our lives. The use of the internet and the practices, meaning-making spans the spaces. By understanding new media literacies as everyday practices which cross spaces, it problematizes the binary often set between in and out of school practices. It situates the interactions in the broader social context of what is happening in the internet, which is a part of the broader society. The recognition that students bring more to school than just what school gives them (and more than school often values), can be seen in the ideas of Moll who discuss funds of knowledge. This movement to seeing the student participant as part of the larger social interaction of society rather than merely an actor in the school setting in isolation gives power to the need to look at the ways that students interact out of school (others are doing that) and inside school as part of that broader context (few are doing this). I see that the latter is my focus. What are the students doing inside the school setting, but at the same time enacting identities and practices to create social spaces which are part of trajectories which have school as a part of them. This view does not examine the students trajectory as that of a kindergartener (or preschooler) to that of a graduate (or non-graduate). Rather, this view sees the student as having a life trajectory that intersects with school and school practices, but does not limit the resources for action, participation, identity work and interaction to those which have been supposedly provided by school or assessed by school. It is for this reason, that I do not wish to focus on 'academic achievement' as the means of seeing what the impact of technology is on the students. This concept is problematic, not only in the problem of academic achievement but also in that of examining the impact of the technology. Again, the focus on everyday practices allows us to understand the technology, not as a tool put rather examining the social ecosystem for which the technology provides a vital part which changes the way the whole system is enacted and identities which in that are produced..not just a single impact. The embeddedness of the practices in everyday helps us to see that it is the practices which continually create, recreate the large system of interactions. Thus, to examine the 'impact of the technology' is to assume a static system on which it is impacting. This does not recognize the constant enactment of the ecosystem which is continually emerging.
This embededness of the everyday allows us then to return to a situatedness of the practices and interactions in both the local setting as well as the larger global setting through the internet and societal context (Gidden; Gergen).
*Reading Research Quarterly 38 no3, p. 392-7