The document discusses examining student writing processes to better understand how digital literacy develops. It proposes analyzing the "controversies" that arise as students complete assignments, which involve interactions between students and external actors or forces. Literacy is framed as a social practice embedded in specific contexts. The study would observe students' digital literacy practices while working on assignments to understand how these relate to everyday habits and expectations, looking at both conformities and violations. It advocates using video recordings, transcripts, and interviews to explore local practices and the knowledge students bring, in order to develop more nuanced views of digital literacy as a fluid, socially situated competency.

1. Assignments as Controversies
Getting ‘under the hood’ of
how students write
Image taken from Bhatt (2017a)
@ibrar_bhatt
ibrarspace.net
i.bhatt@qub.ac.uk
EATAW Conference
Mon 19 June 2017
Royal Holloway University
Dr Ibrar Bhatt
Lecturer in Education

2. Why are assignments controversies?
•Important yet ‘black-boxed’ educational moments
•Interactions between ‘actors’ both within and beyond the
immediate scene
•Examining student writing in process allows us to see how digital
literacy actually ‘happens’ vs how it is understood in policy

3. Controversies

4. Literacy as social practice
Literacies are:
• Experienced within specific contexts
• Attached to professions, communities, and places
• Part of particular cultural histories
• Mediated by material objects and technologies
Therefore, to understand Literacies, you need a thorough exploration of contexts wherein writing
occurs.
To engage with Literacy becomes a form of critical social inquiry
See Barton & Hamilton (2000)

5. All writing practices have a constellation of social practices surrounding them.
Photo by ibrar bhatt https://www.flickr.com/photos/87248369@N03/32967559021/in/dateposted-public/

6. • The digital literacy practices of students as they work on their assignments?
• How these practices relate to the students’ everyday digital literacies and habits with
technology?
• Discrepancies between the way students carry out their written work, and the requirements
and expectations of the course and, more broadly, the college?
Points of inquiry

7. A note on methods
Technological developments
Evolution in research methods
New understandings of literacy

8. Methods
1. Observations of the college sites
2. Videography:
1. Multidimensional screen recordings
2. Video logs
3. Dynamic transcript
4. Analytic vignettes (see Bhatt et al. 2015 and Bhatt 2017b for a detailed discussion)
3. Post-assignment interviews with participatory activity (Venn diagrams)

9. [slide with pics and screen shots]

10. Image from Bhatt (2017b)

11. Findings
Structuring agency of policy documents spell out (and limit ) the purpose and scope
for using digital media in the classroom, and in the college generally
Agency of online actors shape the knowledge creation
Capricious violations of these by the students
Assignments are heavily curated, with content from various sources. This curation is
central to the writing process but hinges on certain skills (e.g. discernment)
Links to past writing, e.g. the utilisation of previous work
Links to future writing, e.g. embedding Twitter
Tasks within tasks, like matryushkas
The flow of practices: irruption

12. Final points
What it means to be digitally literate is always in flux.
It should be based on a detailed explication of localised practice.
Researching digital literacy using a ‘social practice’ approach helps us to look at the
funds of knowledge that learners bring to their writing tasks.
Focusing a lens on student practices as the locus of inquiry allows us to see how
both knowledge (and ignorance) are related to a person’s digital literacy practices.

13. References:
BARTON, D. & HAMILTON, M. (2000) Literacy Practices. In: BARTON, D., HAMILTON, M. & IVANIC, R. (eds.) Situated
literacies: reading and writing in context. London: Routledge. 7-15
BHATT, I. (2017a). Assignments as controversies: digital literacy and writing in classroom practice, Routledge Research in
Literacy
BHATT, I. (2017b) ‘Classroom digital literacies as interactional accomplishments’, In Researching New Literacies: Design,
Theory, and Data in Sociocultural Investigation, Knobel, M. and Lankshear, C. (eds.), New York: Peter Lang. pp. 127-149
BHATT, I, DE ROOCK, R & ADAMS, J. (2015). Diving deep into digital literacy: emerging methods for research, Language
and Education, Vol. 29 (6), 477-492

14. Dr Ibrar Bhatt
Lecturer in Education
@ibrar_bhatt
i.bhatt@qub.ac.uk
ibrarspace.net