Premium
Matter, Literacy, and English Language Teaching in an Underprivileged School in Spain
Author(s) -
Villacañas de Castro Luis S.,
Cano Bodi Violeta,
Hortelano Montejano Ana,
Giner Real Clàudia,
Gómez Pons Icíar,
Mesas Tomás Belén,
Sanz Martínez Claudia,
Tortosa Gozálvez Clara
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
tesol quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.737
H-Index - 91
eISSN - 1545-7249
pISSN - 0039-8322
DOI - 10.1002/tesq.572
Subject(s) - materiality (auditing) , literacy , pedagogy , sociology , english language , sociocultural evolution , variety (cybernetics) , qualitative research , psychology , mathematics education , social science , anthropology , art , artificial intelligence , computer science , aesthetics
This article analyzes the processes and findings of a collaborative action research (CAR) project that aimed to analyze the potential of materiality to radically transform the way English was taught and learned in an underprivileged public school in Spain. The CAR drew on new materialisms and new literacy studies to explore the relationship between matter and English language teaching from socioeconomic, sociocultural, and technological perspectives. The main pedagogical strategy consisted of widening the quantity and quality of the material resources in the English classroom, precisely to draw a material link between the English classroom and the students’ homes, communities, and the informal literacies they enacted in them. Through two cycles of inquiry, the CAR team put into practice two multimodal and artifactual workshops with a group of nine children from underprivileged, minority backgrounds. A variety of qualitative strategies were used (including classroom recordings, student interviews, and photographs) to confirm that the insights from new materialisms and new literacy studies had generated opportunities for meaningful English learning within a culturally sustaining pedagogy.