EXPLORING THE INTERSECTION BETWEEN LITERARY AND DIGITAL LITERACY IN SCHOOL

In our paper we discuss how literary literacy may be enhanced in heterogeneous groups by engaging the pupils in digital literacy actvities, more concretely the activity of literary blogging. One aim of the paper is to discuss certain challenges in the relation between the literary blog and literary literacy. Another aim is to bring out the theoretical implications of such a digital-literary project within literacy studies.

The project we report from is a study of pupils’ reading and their production on an internet literary weblog (blog) in Norway in the period 2008-2009. The pupils, some with Norwegian as their first language and some with Norwegian as second language, post a book review on the blog after finishing reading a book. The pupils’ teachers, their classmates and the librarians read the reviews and post comments. In the paper, we compare similar – digital and non-digital – projects on literacy with our own literary blog project with regard to goals, design and challenges. Relevant works are literature projects like those discussed in Axelsson (2000), Elley (1991), Morrow et al. (1997) and (Langer 2001) and digital projects like Skaar (2009). They show that schools that succeed in their work on literacy, tend to have teachers that initiate discussions about the texts and motivate the pupils to read by presenting a great amount of books of different kinds. In addition, connected to the reading, they engage the pupils in a vast amount of activities like writing and dramatizing.

We view digital literacy both as part of literacy in a general sense and as a tool for enhancing the pupils’ general literacy level. General literacy is here understood as the sum of literacies like functional, cultural and literary literacy, as described in e.g. Barton 2007. In our paper we discuss how this way of viewing literacy has specific implications for what is often referred to as inclusive education. In this particular setting, it concerns the school’s responsibility to neutralize the differences in digital literacy that exists in the pupil population. As part of this discussion, we emphasize that regular and supervised instruction and training for all children is necessary, in order for them to become competent users of digital tools. We also debate whether publishing on the net in fact may constrain some shy, emergent writers in a heterogeneous group. We discuss what may be done to overcome such potential obstacles. Finally we sketch how the digital form of the blog activity may add an extra, positive feature of communication.

The overarching approach to our digital-literary project, reflects and expands on the discussions in e.g. Ziehe (2006) and Skaar (2009). They hold that the school should not blindly import all of the youngsters’ own culture. Therefore, without depreciating the pupils' own digital world, the teacher must provide a good situation for learning, with adequate structure and content, showing that there are other sources of knowledge than those that they know from their everyday digital life. Our contribution in this respect is in particular that we try out in practice a scheme that seeks to find a balance between the role of the school as a provider of a safe digital environment on the one hand, and as a facilitator for individual and collective exploration of exiting digital resources on the other.