Literacies, collaboration and context

1. AntarAbdellah Literacies, collaboration and context

2. Introduction • This chapter explores texts and specific interactions and the creativity as well as artfulness inherent in people’s everyday practices of producing and interacting with texts, that is, their literacy practices. • This chapter will deal with the extent to which creativity in written language is dependent on the creative literacy practices through which texts are constructed, and that there is also creativity in the ways texts are read and used.

3. Such practices are shaped by people drawing actively on the possibilities offered by the particular social situations in which they are embedded, in order to achieve their own goals and purposes

4. 1- Creativity in everyday literacy practices

5. A- Literacies in everyday life • Filling in forms and collecting supporting paperwork is normally seen as a fairly routine administrative task. But within relatively constrained circumstances, a person uses her creativity to work out her own ways of going about this unwelcome literacy task. • Later her knowledge becomes a resource in the local community which other people going through similar experiences can draw on and reshape in their own circumstances.

6. Basically, there is a very rare literacy practice that is entirely ‘uncreative’. Indeed, there is an argument that all meaning-making processes have a creative element. • Creativity’ refers to ‘making something which is new, which did not exist before the creative act’, or ‘making something which is unlike things that have been made before’. • Accordingly, all communication is creative in both of the senses above (‘something new’ and ‘something original’), even where the spoken or written text is an exact copy of one that has been used many times before and even where the text itself does not appear particularly artful.

7. So what are the characteristics of creativity in written language? • And how a written text is produced and interpreted in social life? • Instead of examining texts to see if one can ‘find’ creativity in them, we examine the everyday literacy practices through which people produce and interact with texts, and the broader social and political context within which creativity in writing is located is worth being considered .

8. 2 Collaboration in creative literacy practices • Ronald Carter (2004) , highlighted the ubiquity of collaborative verbal creativity in much ordinary everyday spoken interaction. • In fact, this is true not only of spoken interaction, but also of reading and writing. • By focusing on people’s literacy practices rather than just on the texts which they produce, it becomes clear that in many cases, creative texts are often produced as a result of interactive collaboration.

9. Collaboration in everyday literacies • Considering that creative texts are often produced as a result of interactive collaboration and in relation toBreak-in Literacytext , in order for Joanna to be able to fulfill the requirements of the texts, she has to collect information and complete forms related to the break-in. • She is engaging in collaborative activity and drawing on the social resources around her to be able to create what is, for her, a new type of text.

10. (Reading A) ‘Vernacular writing: varieties of literacy among Philadelphia high school students’

11. Miriam Camitta’s research [ 1993] revealed a wide range of literacy practices that the adolescents she worked with engaged in. • While some of them fit the solitary writer’ paradigm, most of the writing practices described involve other people in key roles, whether as readers, as audience, as co-composers or as editors. • Even in the examples of private writing, most of this writing is about explaining and exploring personal relationships, and is therefore situated within what Camitta calls a ‘web’ of social activities and relationships.

12. Where other people are involved, they take an active role in the text-production process at all stages. And this involves not just reading and responding to the texts, but editing, scribing, helping with decisions, circulating, and archiving. • The adolescents in Camitta’s study are not only producing creative texts, but also creating and developing new sorts of collaborative writing practices. • Thus, the performance of their texts is creating a new practice, a hybrid of the practices of rehearsal, performance and editing, which itself feeds back into the writing process.

13. Basically, the writing practices Camitta has identified are not school practices; many of these writing and performance practices are very different from the traditional ‘plan, draft, rewrite, share’ model of writing that the standard language arts curriculum of the time was advocating.

14. 3 The influence of context • The significance of collaboration and interaction in creative literacy practices demonstrated above is just one aspect of the influence of context on the creative literacy practices which emerge. • So how does the context of reading and writing shapes creative practices?

15. Actually, any given context is associated with a specific set of possibilities including the concepts of affordances and constraints of new technologies. • In Reading A the way the teenagers drew on the cultural resources available to them, reshaping and reconstructing existing texts and genres in new ways. • In reading A teenagers drew on the intertextual resources available, appropriating existing phrases from popular songs and re-combining them to create a new product. • They combine the discourse conventions of poetry, journal and letter writing to make a new hybrid product.

16. In Camitta’s study [ 1993], the adolescents are constrained in time and space by the requirements of the school day. They have to be in particular classrooms at particular times. Nevertheless, they manage to make creative use of the possibilities available to them within these constraints: writing between class periods, at lunchtimes, and before and after school. • Though the possibilities associated with a setting do not determine what is created within any given context; they do shape what is possible. • So do the possibilities and constraints of particular contexts (social? And technological?) influence on literacy practices?

17. A-Creative literacies in situations of social constraint (Reading B) A strategy for survival • Anita Wilson describes a range of creative uses of language including oral, written and visual in the prison setting. • Evidently, these prison literacies are the products of inventive minds with a specific ability to make do with what is available, and they are also striking examples of how those who live in specific confined settings develop the ability and talent to imagine using objects and materials in ways that are completely different from their intended function. • What is worth being considered in Wilson’s reading is its theme pertaining to the role of literacy and creativity in relation to maintaining an individual identity in the face of the prison institution and prison life.

18. The prison is one of the classic examples whichMichel Foucault (I980) used to explain the power of discourses and the institutions behind them over the individual. • Foucault distinguished between self as subject and self as agent. • However in his later works, Foucault (I985) elaborates on the ‘productive’ aspects of power and he uses the concept of techniques of the self’ to illustrate the willingness and ability of the individual to maintain a self’ that is self-directed rather than governed by others. • Such techniques can include things such as sticking posters onto walls or writing poems on pieces of paper. • Overall, Anita Wilson explores how the struggles that result from such contexts can be a trigger for creativity. She also underscores that maintaining an identity in prison is also part of a struggle to create and preserve a cultural space in situations where the individual is effectively being isolated from the social world.

19. B-The affordances and constraints of new technologies • The introduction of computer technologies has introduced a broad range of new media to our semiotic landscape. • In view of Gunther Kress (1998), new technologies present specific sets of affordances and constraints which people use creatively in practice, for instance, using text messages, emails and the possibilities offered by hypertext. • Basically, the constraints of particular forms generate creative new literacy practices. For instance, text messagers use a variety of non-standard linguistic forms, such as contractions, abbreviations, phonetic spelling and emoticons, to convey meaning within the very limited possibilities of a 160-character message. While texting has been denounced as ‘poor penmanship’ and ‘bleak, bald, sad shorthand’, it has , on the contrary, been seen as creative practice.

20. ‘transformation’ and ‘transduction • In view of Kress (2003, p. 36) the concepts ‘transformation’ and ‘transduction’ may explain why creativity is an inherent feature of contemporary communication. • Transformation refers to the way the producer of a text can alter and adapt the forms of signs within a mode in relation to their needs and interests, such as in the lexical inventiveness associated with texting. • Transduction refers to the moves of ‘semiotic material’ across modes, where meaning that was originally configured in one or several modes is moved across to a different one. • This happens for example when the young people in Reading A ‘perform’ a story, a poem or a rap song, which they originally produced in the written mode and then shifted to the oral. • Another example is when teenagers use chatrooms to meet up and converse with ‘virtual friends’.

21. In a study of the online literacy practices of a group of secondary school girls in England, Jason Merchant (2001) found that these girls used chatrooms extensively and that they had ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ friends, both of whom they communicated and chatted with in similar ways. However, ‘online’ chatting requires transduction: what is commonly performed through oral means is moved to the written mode when taking place in online chatrooms.

22. The girls explore visual and textual modes in their use of the internet, chatrooms and emails creatively, combining emoticons and specifically created abbreviations with picture files and websites that they exchange as part of their virtual conversations. • Accordingly, their online literacy activities are described as an example of the new communicative practices that are currently developing. • Merchant consider them as the ‘innovators in language use’ who ‘experiment’ with what the new medium has to offer and ‘create’ new forms of writing . Merchant speaks about the girls’ internet practices as ‘a new and fast form of written conversation’.

23. Wikipedia • Another example of the possibilities offered by new technologies is the internet encyclopedia ‘Wikipedia’ (http://en.wikipedia.org), a collaborative encyclopedia which can be updated and changed by anyone accessing the pages. • Wikipedia shows their potential to ‘democratize’ authorship, expanding the possibilities which have historically been restricted to only those forms of creativity privileged by the publishing system; on the internet, everybody can be a published author. Writingn has become ‘part of the whole landscape of the many modes available for representation’.

24. The recent drastic changes in our literacy practices confirm a view of language and of literacy as constantly shifting and changing social and cultural practices. • If we think about language as a system ‘in use’ or ‘in flow’, a system that is constantly created and re-created, changed and adapted, then creativity turns into a normal event, ‘the everyday process of semiotic work as meaning making’ (G.Kress, 2003, p. 40).

25. 4 Creativity in the context of sociocultural change • It has been mentioned that creativity emerges from the constraints and possibilities of the immediate situation, such as prison or the school. • This section emphasizes the need to situate creativity in its broader political and economic contexts. • Creative literacies, in the realm of everyday life, are embedded in socio-cultural practices which are situated in broader structures: institutional, political, economic. These structures and their associated social practices in a state of constant movement and change. • Therefore, adopting a diachronic / historical perspective when studying literacy and creativity is crucial.

26. (Reading C) Local literacy practices in Namibia: creativity and constraint • Colonialism’s impact on local languages and local literacy practices is a good case in point. • In today’s world, the influence of the global economy, the movements of capital and people and the discovery of new consumer markets have profound effects on our linguistic landscape. • Individuals and communities who live through times of rapid social and economic change often find themselves in situations where they need to adapt quickly to new linguistic contexts, learn new languages and engage with new forms of texts.

27. In Reading C the tour guides from Face-to-Face Tours , for instance, relied on ‘literacy mediators’ to help them deal with an unfamiliar text type. • So , people take hold of new communicative practices and create their own strategies to acquire the languages and literacy practices they need. • With regards to literacy and creativity more specifically, Reading C evokes what people do with literacy, or with new literacies, rather than what literacy does to them. • The Mexican immigrants used their own Spanish language and literacy skills and their understanding of phonetics creatively to create for themselves an innovative way of learning English pronunciation.

28. Changing socioeconomic conditions are usually accompanied by changes in the cultural environment and in the networks of social and institutional relationships people are part of. • This may lead to major transformations not only in people’s ways of speaking and writing, but also in their way of seeing the world and themselves. • Such changes are significant for our understanding of creativity in relation to discourse and identity.

29. Creativity, then, lies not only in the ‘taking up’ of new literacy practices, but also in the appropriation of the new discourses these contain. • Literary practices [written texts] may be written in local or national varieties or in other national languages , but their authors use English words and phrases to express ideas, such as the values of individual fulfillment and ‘progress’, that are new within speech communities.

30. It was the availability of literacy that allowed women to start writing letters; it was the learning of English and the exposure to all sorts of new texts including magazines, films, school textbooks that brought young people into contact with rich sources of ideas, identities and personalities, which in their letters they combine to fashion selves and others in ways that stem from their own desires.

31. Anta Wilson and M.Camitta (2000) suggest that vernacular writing is often driven by resistance to dominant formsof literacy, and dominant forms of living and being, as they are sanctioned by schools and society. • However, in view ofUta Papen [2005] , creativity was not driven by resistance to dominant practice, but by the desire and need to take hold of new languages and new writing practices, including the dominant writing practices of powerful elites. • This is never a process of mere repetition, but always entails adaptation and change. This is certainly evident in the way local tourism workers ‘create’ a place for themselves in the Namibian tourism market

32. Creativity is always contextual and that what is found creative in one context may look rather conventional and unimaginative in another. • Creativity does not only take place in exceptional circumstances, the idealized long-prepared moment of creative activity. • Not only is creativity an everyday life process, it often happens in situations which at first glance do not appear to be conducive to creative activity at all.

33. Conclusion • This chapter has approached creativity in writtenlanguage. • It has demonstrated the importance of collaboration and interaction in literacy practices, and of the possibilities and constraints of particular contexts and technologies in shaping the forms of creativity which arise. • Likewise, this chapter has highlighted how creativity in written language can emerge in situations of constraint and confinement and can change in response to sociocultural forces and changing discourses.

34. These goals may relate to play, personal satisfaction, social communication, economic needs or identity work. • There is a very powerful goal motivating the creativity in everyday literacy practices in prisons: ‘keeping one’s mind’. • Creativity in written language is , therefore, neither a decontextualised, individual activity, nor is it entirely shaped by the context within which it is situated. • Creativity in literacy is emergent not from an individual mind, nor from the social context, but from a relationship between the two: an active agent, creatively constructing texts and practices in pursuit o.ftheir own enterprises