Negotiating and appropriating new literacies in English language classrooms in Hong Kong primary schools : economies of knowledge, attention and enjoyment

Abstract

In the context of social and economic globalisation, the nature and uses of literacy have been profoundly impacted by information technologies, giving rise to an increasing variety of multimodal, digitally mediated texts, practices and relationships called new literacies. This study explores how new literacies were taken up by teachers and students in English Language (English as a Second/Foreign Language) classrooms in Hong Kong primary schools. Set within a government funded project aimed at promoting new literacies in Hong Kong schools, the study specifically explores the discursive tensions amongst the English Language curriculum and new literacies practices and pedagogies, and how students and teachers negotiated these tensions and appropriated new literacies practices as they planned and enacted a new literacies task within a curriculum unit.

The research design involved a critical policy text analysis and a multi-case study within a poststructuralist discourse analytic approach illuminated by Lacanian psychoanalytic theories of fantasy and enjoyment. Extracts of key policy texts and New Literacies Project texts were selected for critical discourse analysis. The multi-case study of three new literacies curriculum units, enacted by three classes of students and their teachers in two local Hong Kong primary schools, focussed on various new literacies practices. Data collected for the multi-case study included recordings of lessons and planning meetings, participant observation with field notes, observations of material and virtual contexts such as computer labs and online sites, students’ classroom work and digital products, and teacher and student interviews.

In the process of mapping the discursive constructions, tensions and contradictions of new literacies across policy texts and classroom enactments, three ‘economies’ emerged in the findings. Tensions between the knowledge economy of globalised educational and curriculum policies emphasising language forms and linguistic skills, and the attention economy of new literacies involving students’ creative multimodal production and consumption and the accumulation of attention in online interactions, were negotiated by students, teachers and the Project researcher (myself) in the three school cases. A key, if unanticipated finding, however, was the emergence of an economy of enjoyment, involving the transgression of classroom social norms and the subversion of symbolic authority in students’ digital products and online interactions. Enjoyment was also found in the ways some students were captivated by online interactions and the pursuit of celebrity identities, and in teachers’ intense commitments to and anxieties around particular discourses and subjectivities. The study concludes with a discussion of the significance of psychoanalytic notions of enjoyment in new literacies in curriculum policy and practice, and suggests implications for research and practice of new literacies in the context of globalised educational policies.