when people asked me about my dissertation as i was collecting...
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Draft of Chapter 3
The Space of With
“It may be the recovery of imagination that lessens the social paralysis we see around us and restores the sense that something can be done in the name of what is decent and humane.”
Maxine Greene, 2000, p. 35
Introduction
At the beginning of this study I did not know, but might have guessed, the great
importance that space – our space, in between so many other lived realities – would come
to have for the story of our group and this dissertation. I conceptualize our space as one
layer of our multilayered counterstory to the schooled discourses on literacies in the lives
of African American boys. In this chapter I look at how the five boys and I became a
group and co-constructed our space in which to story the world around us, a focus that
reflects the shift in this study from being an inquiry about resistance to project of
possibilities. I initially describe the methodological implications of this shift in the
previous chapter in order to illuminate the ways in which my hybrid researcher and
practitioner identities found a place in this work; here I respond to Greene’s (2000) hope,
noted above, that our work as educators and researchers not fall prey to prevalent “social
paralysis” by articulating a stance of with that moves toward the “recovery of
imagination” and possibilities in collaboration with adolescents through the construction
of a hybrid third space.
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Our space as a “third space”
Spatial hybridity, what Bhabha refers to as “neither One nor the Other, but
something else besides, in-between” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 224), is a particularly appropriate
lens to bring to bear in making sense of how our group came to life, once we initially
came to be. We were in-between the more identifiable contexts of home, school, or
community; we were in-between discernable roles of participants and researcher. I use
Bhabha’s concept of hybridity – of in-betweenness, and implied decentering of power
through explicit diversity – to frame our group as a “thirdspace,” that is, a space of
hybridity.
In addition to salience of space in my analysis of fieldnotes and a variety of visual
documentation, I was also aware of the ways in which we enacted our group across space
and time. Within the particular context of this study, I conceptualized our space as a way
of being that was negotiated by an adult and adolescents boys, and that was enacted
across the three dimensions: multiple locations, multiple modalities, and multiple selves.
Thus, as I looked for how and why our space was generative of multiple literate identities
and engagements with literacies, I was also aware of where, how, and by whom our space
was being “lived,” as Soja (1997) discusses. Thus, when I talk in this chapter about our
group, made up of the boys and me, as a third space, I am suggesting that our group was
more than a site for research, or an example of pedagogy to be studied; I argue that we
co-constructed a space that afforded us a range of possibilities for where, in what ways,
and about what and whom we constructed multimodal texts in the form of stories and
counterstories.
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I engaged the theoretical lenses of spatial hybridity – of geographic, discursive,
and identity hybridity – to frame my analysis of the dimensions of our third space –
locations, modalities, and selves – and to illuminate the ways we lived our space across
the dimensions; therefore I explore the locations we traversed, modalities we engaged,
and selves we authored. I also found that our enactment across these dimensions were
enmeshed, and ultimately took on new forms and purposes that characterized the hybrid
nature of our space. I map the three dimensions of our space map onto and, in so doing,
extend these theoretical lenses of hybridity. I understood this process – the co-
construction of our group space – to be recursive (illustrated by Figure 3.1) and
multimodal.
Figure 3.1
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storytelling
storytelling
Traversing multiple locations
Engaging multiple modalities
Authoring multiple selves
(our) Third Space
Discursive hybridity Identity hybridity
Geographic hybridity
As I explicated in the previous chapter, the context in which a study of literacy
takes place significantly impacts what is learned in that space; embedded in an inquiry
such as this is the ever-present and ever-shifting conclusions drawn about the
relationships between literacy and race in the lives of urban adolescent African American
boys. For that reason, before I describe the layers of knowing (in Chapter 4) and play (in
Chapter 5) in our space, I first extend the description of our research context though an
illustrative analysis of the ways in which the context for this study – our space – was
made/lived/enacted. I include excerpts from fieldnotes and group conversations and
selected photographs to render the dimensions of our space, and to make explicit our
spatial hybridity. I initially highlight each of the three dimensions separately using
examples from the data. When I talk about the multiple locations we traversed, I will
present examples that illustrate the range and variation of our geography and indicate the
moments of spatial hybridity across location and stories; I consider the question of where
literate engagements can be enacted, and how locations can be traversed in a hybrid
literate space. Similarly, I include instances that demonstrate the ways in which we
engaged multiple modalities to enact discursive hybridity in our space; I consider the
question of what literate engagement looks like, and how modalities can be engaged for
literate purposes. And I present an analysis of the multiple selves we authored by
presenting two examples that exemplify identity hybridity of our space; I take up the
question of who enacts literate identities, and how selves can be authored in a hybrid
literate space. These examples represent larger patterns in the data that collectively
represent the interconnectedness of our spatial hybridity with our ongoing storytelling.
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I acknowledge that in the data presented in these sections we were never engaged
in only one way of being, but that we were always enacting our space in hybrid ways;
these ways of being – as individuals, as a group, as individuals within and constitutive of
a group – include the three dimensions I focus on, but also undoubtedly reflect a range of
other ways of being and interacting that I do not explicitly focus on here. Therefore, as I
foreground one dimension, the other dimensions of our space are also at play. I conclude
this chapter by connecting the possibilities that were opened up by our space with the
arguments made by current literacy research for supporting adolescents’ literacy learning
using a multimodal vignette that brings together the multiple dimensions of our group
space. Finally, I argue that a hybrid space affords what Soja (1997) identifies as “new
social possibilities” that, in this study, complicated the expectations for a context of
literate engagements. Enmeshed in this analysis is active disruption of traditional power
relations of a literacy research space, that I will address further in the conclusion of this
chapter.
Recovery of imagination
The following vignette is based on my fieldnotes from the first summer that the
boys and I met, and illustrates the moment at which the aforementioned shift from a
primary focus on resistance to an understanding of possibilities occurred for me in this
study. Prior to this moment we had spent nearly three hours in park filming scenes for
our horror movie STAB!, and after stopping into the library to get a drink from the water
fountain, were proceeding north to complete our filming for the day (8/26/02).
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We are on our way to shoot the last scene of the day in McDonald’s. Timothy and Cedric, who are sitting on the steps, are squinting as they look up. As I approach them, Cedric tilts his head to one side and looking up at me asks, in a serious tone, “Ms. Lalitha, have you ever thought of being a teacher?” Intrigued, I respond that I used to teach a few years ago. As if to clarify Cedric’s point, Timothy follows up by saying, “No, our teacher.” Antwine and James don’t say anything but appear engaged in the interaction and look on as Timothy and Cedric continue. “You’re nice to us,” they tell me and with a smile Cedric taps me on my elbow as if to reinforce this point. Timothy suggests that we could set up a home school situation where we would continue to shoot the movie, and we would have access to the library. As he talks, his uses his hands to gesture to the library and in the direction of the park from where we have just walked. I agree that it would be a wonderful idea and before I can say more Timothy takes up the thread that Cedric started with his comment that I am nice to them. He begins talking about his teachers in general within the conversational frame of how they are “not nice”. Timothy then goes on to describe an incident – representative of others, I gather – where a teacher of his left a message for his mother on the answering machine. He then wishes aloud that he could play the tapes back to his teachers and point out the differences in how they talk to him (in class, I presume?) and how they talk “on the tape.” As Timothy finishes his account Cedric stands up and we begin moving toward McDonald’s to begin shooting the next scene. I make a mental note to ask the boys more about some of the opinions they offered today, especially about schooling and their relationships with teachers.
I was struck that day by the conflicting thoughts going on inside me. On the one
hand, I wondered how all this “in-school” talk found its way into our intentionally out-of-
school space; and on the other, I began to recognize the group that the boys and I had
been co-constructing as space to not only talk back and resist institutional “stories”, but
in which to explore discursive possibilities as well. As my analysis of the data was
ongoing, I turned my gaze inward and began to think critically about how we were living
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and enacting our space; I wondered what the dimensions of our space were, and how we
engaged our context and modalities in the process. These are the questions I address in
this chapter in order to explicate the ways in which this group of urban, African
American adolescent boys and I traversed multiple locations, engaged with multiple
modalities, and authored multiple selves as we made our group space.
Geographic hybridity in a co-constructed third space:
Traversing multiple locations
With the city as our canvas, the boys and I made our way through parks, streets,
buildings, parking lots, and came into contact with a range of people, rules, expectations,
and surveillance. As we walked, rode the train or the bus, or (rarely) drove around West
Philadelphia, we often shared stories that turned otherwise forgettable structures into
landmarks for our memories and experiences. Our stories breathed life into the city’s
sometimes fatigued demeanor and verbally recognized the meanings that different places,
ways of living and being had for our lives and for literacies in our space. Without being
tied to any particular location, the boys and I had the luxury to not only locate ourselves
in different places, but to bring into our space the geographies that held meaning for us.
We did this through the sharing, imagining, and construction of stories and counterstories
that at once shaped and were shaped by our group. Once again, I use the concept of
counterstory/ies as both a text and a discourse, such that as we “talked back” to the
dominant ideologies of schooling we produced multimodal texts as well as disrupted
traditional adult-youth power dynamics (e.g. Gutierrez, et. al., 1995) by the practices we
enacted; our “lived space” was co-constructed in part through these counterstories. In
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this section, I will use the theoretical lens of geographic hybridity to discuss how we
enacted our group as a space across multiple locations.
Although we were not bound by physical space, there were a few sites that
continued to be present throughout the time we spent together as a group. The local
branch of the library, the McDonald’s, and Malcolm X Park, were all located along the
corridor that we traversed most regularly; in this section, I call these “old locations.”
Over the fifteen months these three sites were consistently suggested as places to meet,
have conversations, film, make recordings, play. Equally important was our movement
across these and other locations. New locations that we ventured into were outside of our
usual repertoire, that I call “new locations,” and that we frequented less than five times.
On these walks the boys would point to people on the street, shout out to schoolmates,
comment about the myriad shops and wares being sold, and mess around with each other.
Our movement was, to an extent, driven by our stories, and reflexively our stories moved
us, literally. In this sections I will look at how we made new meanings for literate
engagements in old locations as well as in new locations. The hybridity of our shifting
geography is reflected in the resulting relationships, between meanings and locations, and
contributes to the making of our group as a third space.
Making new meaning in old locations
About a month following the vignette that opens this chapter, the boys and I had a
conversation that built on the evolving counterstory of school. Here, I explore a
conversation that took place at McDonald’s during which the boys imagine this out-of-
school site as a site for literate engagement. This is an “old” location that the boys and I
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had become quite familiar with, that gains new meaning through the enactment of our
space. It is this relationship – old location, new meaning – that offers one way of
thinking about geographic hybridity.
In between sips of orange soda and bites of a hamburger Timothy states, “This is
what school should be like.” It was a warm day in September and Timothy, Cedric,
James, Antwine and I were having lunch at McDonald’s, a few steps from the library
where we’d met an hour earlier. It was a fairly typical meeting during which we moved
across different locations – the 52nd Street library, McDonald’s, the YMCA – used
different technologies – the digital voice recorder and the video camera – and covered a
range of topics in our conversation. Timothy’s remark brought up a thread of
conversation that had been present since our earliest meetings: a critique of their school
as a learning space. Anecdotes about school rules and feelings of discontent with the
curriculum often followed an opening like Timothy’s statement. Antwine, usually
reticent during conversations about school, even stated once that his dislike of school and
disinterest in doing homework was tied to, what he understood as, “teachers just giving
us something to do” (AT, 4/26/03). Beneath the commonly recognized adolescent
resistance to homework and school-mandated work lay social commentary and action in
response to school practices that wasn’t to be taken lightly. And in this space, Antwine’s
comments about school had a place just as much as his questions about “making a
movie” (FN, 4/16/03) or thoughts about his “corny” neighborhood basketball team.
However, on that day the talk focused on us. Cedric pointed to the street behind
us and commented that “we could be learning from all around us” (FN, 9/20/02). This
was not the first time he had expressed disdain with school being a primarily indoor
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enterprise, with the exception of “two minutes of recess that they take away from you if
you’re bad” (FN, 10/26/02). Picking up the voice recorder, Cedric stood up and offered a
suggestion for “an assignment…that could be for us to take tape recorders and interview
people, like if a funeral’s going by and see how they’re feeling.” I agreed
enthusiastically, thinking that he was suggesting an idea for us to pursue as a group. We
were nearly done with our horror movie and would be ready to work on another project
soon. But Cedric sat down, put the voice recorder back down on the table and resumed
drinking his soda. After a few seconds, Antwine, who, along with James, has been eating
and listening quietly, kicks off his shoes, pokes Cedric, and disappears like lightning into
the colorful playland structure. Cedric takes another big gulp of his soda and looks at me
eagerly and asks, “Ms. Lalitha, can I—can I have the camera?” I hand him the video
camera and, cradling it in his right arm, Cedric climbs through the structure until he
reaches the top. Antwine has already slid down one of the slides, screaming as he arrives
and looking behind him to make sure Cedric isn’t following him. He isn’t. Cedric is at
the top of the structure taping a “threat”1 to Antwine that he plays for him when he
emerges from another slide a minute later. Timothy and James gather around Cedric who
is holding the camera and shielding the sun so that they all can see. I take a few a notes,
but mostly respond to their questions about zooming and panning with the video camera
and laugh with them at Cedric’s audacious remarks in response to Antwine’s earlier
threats.
1 “Threat” messages came about as a way to become fluent with using the video camera. An example of this multimodal text genre is included below; I also further discuss these messages within the frame of multimodal discourses in Chapter 5.
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I read the juxtaposition of Cedric’s observation about our location – as a site for
the literate engagement that funeral interviews would afford – and the following threat
messages as an instantiation of the geographic hybridity of our space. The five of us were
situated in a public place with stories teeming all around us, a point that Cedric makes
explicit. We were eating lunch, sitting together in a moment of reflection, defined by
Timothy’s remark that reconnects our out-of-school, group space with School. His
comment sparks conversation about this ongoing topic of debate which, fed by the day’s
activities and Cedric’s observations, further counterstories School; a multimodal
counterstorying discursive moment when Cedric’s oral literacy practices are followed up
by his and Antwine’s antics that not only embody play, but that instantiate a use of the
video camera that reoccurs several more times during the year.
Furthermore, following the moment of Cedric’s exasperated utterance about the
nature of schooling, I began to further focus my attention as a researcher inward and onto
our group. My earlier intent to understand how the boys would resist “majoritarian
stories” (Delgado, 1995) using multimodal literacy practices evolved into an inquiry
about the space we were co-constructing and its affordances for a range of storytelling
and counterstorytelling possibilities. As I did so, the questions about place became
subsumed by questions about space; and more specifically I became increasingly aware
of the relationships across the boys’ discursive constructions and the terrain we traversed.
For example, whereas McDonald’s was initially a place to meet, eat, and counterstory
school, it was also a filming site for our horror movie. Thus, stories and counterstories
shared a dialogic relationship with a place – in this case, a fast food restaurant – such that
they not only shaped the other but, in effect, remade each other. For our group, the
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function and purpose of McDonald’s changed from a branch of a multinational fast food
chain that was a place to eat and meet into a site for social commentary, for challenging
school discourses, and for staging several scenes from STAB! In particular, the ways in
which we engaged technologies and remained aware of ourselves as group that learned
and played together (discussed in more detail below) contributed to how we enacted
ourselves as a third space within a place.
This evolution happened for several reasons: first, there were no limits placed on
McDonald’s by any of us as far as what could happen there; second, our relationships and
the availability of multiple modalities (discussed below) were engaged in different ways
and were generative of multiple spaces for storying and representation. That is, the
geographic hybridity of our space was reflected in not only the multiple locations we
traversed but also the ways that our enactment in these locations suggested new meanings
for literate engagements.
Additionally, Through comments like Cedric’s and Timothy’s, and in the ways
that they actively engaged with and in our space like Antwine, each of the boys
contributed to identifying where we made a space for our multimodal storytelling, and
making meaning about our space with, against, and beyond broader dominant discourses,
e.g. School. Through their ongoing practice of storying – with, against, and beyond – the
boys moved me to consider the discursive possibilities that emerge when a group of boys
are engaged in co-constructing a space within which knowledge the role that literacy and
race play in their lives is centralized in their discursive practices. Shaping the decision
about where to we went as a group is a part of that story.
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Making new meaning in new locations
Weis and Fine (2000) remind us that youth are already engaged with the world
around them in different ways and for a variety of purposes, in out-of-school spaces that
are often unsanctioned havens crafted by youth in response to an often hostile public
Spaces (e.g. Aitken, 1994). The cases in their volume, Construction Sites, broach the
question of what spaces are for and of youth, and, perhaps more importantly, what
happens in the borderlands of youth spaces? As I moved across a range of locations with
the boys, I was saddened to see the point about hostility ring true; as a group we were
regularly reprimanded or asked to leave for being too loud, disruptive, or behaving
inappropriately in locations where the rules of engagement were heavily regulated,
among them was the Art Museum. In the context of geographic hybridity of our third
space of literate engagement and discursive possibilities, we also confronted the question
of how these “hostile public spaces” affected our space; in the midst of these
confrontations were also questions of literate appropriateness. These rules of engagement
further complicated this study that was centered on the literacies of adolescents by
bringing to light the conflicts between an adolescent directed space and adult directed
locations. I take up this conflict in this sub-section about geographic hybridity in order to
ask what it looks like for a location to be traversed from within a space that recognizes
that discourse is multiple, hybrid, and shifting.
In a journal entry written alongside fieldnotes from a summer (2002) meeting, I
wonder the following about appropriateness:
“The are too old for the children’s section, too young for the adult section.
When/where are the boys appropriate?” (Journal, 8/29/02)
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On the day I wrote this entry, we had been reprimanded by the librarian at the local
branch of the Free Library for being “disruptive,” and during which Antwine was
individually chastised when he hesitated to write in his birthday on the computer sign-in
sheet; he hesitated because he was unsure of the rules. As a group we had been
reviewing some film from a previous meeting. We were clustered around the video
camera that James held and operated as we all struggled to see. Within minutes the
librarian, an older white woman, walked over to us and told us that we were disturbing
the other library patrons. I apologized to her, and as she walked away Timothy gritted his
teeth and asked me why I was apologizing to her. He didn’t think we had done anything
wrong, and neither did I. I shared that opinion with him and wondered about my own
power, and responsibility in this space and the ways that our literacies – our personal and
collective ways making meaning in our space – did and did not fit with the expectations
of the locations we traversed.
Such a rule-based social reality raised a significant conflict about our group space:
to what extent could we engage in a counterdiscourse when we continued to make use of
places with established institutional rules that often adhered to more traditional notions of
behavior, interaction, and literate engagement. On a trip to the Art Museum this moment
of discord was made public, as reflected in my journal entry from later that day:
As we headed out of the museum an African-American man dressed in a guard’s uniform addressed the group and asked them to “stop running” down the steps. He then turned to me and said, “Ma’am, could you please maintain your group!” My response in that encounter was to nod in acknowledgement in the direction of the guard and to escort the group outside. In my mind, however, I was overwhelmed with the (re)realization that I was once again seen as the adult who is responsible for the group of kids I was with. Conflict arises for me in such a circumstance when I wonder about the extent to which I do not fully assume my role as an adult in their lives and perhaps engage with them the elements of the
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existing “culture of power”; how do I do so without breaching the integrity of a relationship that is growing based in part on my hesitation to “reprimand?” How does this role of “adult”, in the context of research with adolescent boys, intersect with the other roles that I am more willing to inhabit – i.e. co-researcher, questioner, ally, mentor (perhaps unwittingly).
(Journal, 10/5/02)
As we entered and exited multiple locations as a group of three, four, or seven people –
depending on who was present, and whether any of the boys had siblings, cousins, or
friends with them – institutional expectations of who we were (adult and children, or
teacher and students) preceded our entry and made it challenging to co-construct a new
kind of space within these constraints; these expectations often diverged with how we
had come to traverse old locations as a group. In new locations we had a heightened
awareness of where we – our discursive practices – did not fit; and, by extension, where
our literacies were unwelcome. However, it was often against these expectations and
following these experiences that we made our space in-between these places, and through
storytelling.
For example, our journey to the Art Museum is also telling of how the boys used
this excursion to further make our space through story, in particular to story against
school through school language. Of the six hour outing, we spent under an hour inside
the in the museum itself. We spent most of our time trying to get to the museum (two
buses and short walk), in the café (where Timothy noted that based on the food, replete
with chilled vegetables and salads and devoid of extensive meat options, “this [the café]
is for white people!”), and outside climbing the art museum steps and the statue across
the street in Eakins Oval. The shifting geography is central to the boys’ collective
recollection of the excursion. My questions about appropriateness are redirected in the
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retelling and replaced the more tactile nature of the group’s memory, as evidenced in the
conversation that followed this visit, about two and half weeks after our trip (GC,
10/26/02). When this conversation took place, the six of us were seated around a table in
the library of the boys’ school. We met during the recess time allotted after lunch for
approximately 25 minutes, extending 10 minutes into their post-lunch class time. Ms.
Klein, the librarian, welcomed us into the library, as she would several more times during
the year; and the boys would just as often comment on my niceness towards Ms. Klein at
what I felt was her generosity, and what Timothy read as her obligation (to let us meet
there).
The excerpt below begins after Antwine asking me if we can go back to the Art
Museum. I reply by asking him to tell me what he liked about our visit, and the others
contribute to shaping this oral text as not only having a reflective function but also a
planning purpose; the boys connect our visit to the horror movie that we had been
filming, and imagine multiple modalities for continue this conversation. Following the
conversation, I discuss the connections between this conversation that focuses on our
visit to a new location and the discursive making of our space:
1 Lalitha what do you guys like about it, though?
2 James the big phone (?)3 ? the pictures n |stuff|4 Lalitha the big |phones^|5 ? |yeah|6 Timothy the rock climbing7 Several yeah!
8 Lalitha oh the rock climbing – that was so much fun
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9 James it not |rock climbing|10 ? [unintel]
11 James it just a rock
12 Lalitha statue climbing? <laughs>
13 Timothy
I know, you said we were gon’ go rock climbing and then the killer could come, knock somebody off—|they be like|
14 Cedric |that woulda been decent| to have |
the camera|15 Lalitha |I’ve actually been looking| for a
place to go rock climbing
16 Cedric
that—that woulda been decent to have the camera in the rock climbing
17 Antwine uh yup
18 Timothy
we could go rock climbing and then the killer come try to stab him in the leg and cut his—
19 Syrome fall down the steps
20 Timothy
<laughing>no, cut—cut—cut the um wire off and the person [1.5] but they don’t die
21 Lalitha oh that’s another way he kills
22 James for Christmas when we got our
23 Syrome for Christmas?
24 James I meant <laughing>
2 Timothy yeah for Christmas he can get us a 17
5 bomb (?)26 James for Christmas I [intel]
Several seconds later
I had an idea but [1] we too far in the movie
27 Timothy what’s |your| idea^?
28 Lalitha |your ideas| dangerous
29 James
cuz his cousin not here. <pointing to James>. We gotta find somebody little
30 Timothy
um… oh he gonna |(hurt?) you!| <thinking of what the idea might be>
31 James
|like dontchoo| know the fire escapes on the um…<tch> on the um, apartments? You could hang somebody right there and just have some blood dripping
32 Timothy oooh…creepy
33 Lalitha [intel] <laughing>
34 Syrome where would we do that?
Particularly salient to the boys’ recollection of the visit was what they identified as “rock
climbing” (line 6), and what I recast as “statue climbing” (line 12), or, as I noted earlier,
the tactile nature of engaging with this new location. Although someone (line 3) makes a
note of the “pictures n’ stuff” that we viewed2, it is the tactile experiences that are most
resounding in their descriptions of the visit. Similar to other visits to new locations – e.g.
2 Our initial intention in visiting the Art Museum was motivated by the exhibit, Indivisible (www.indivisible.org), which was on display during the fall of 2002. I described this exhibit to the boys as examples of “telling stories through pictures” (FN, 9/20/02)
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Penn’s campus, the El (for a couple of the boys), the University Assisted School – tactile
interaction with a place was intimately tied to the process of meaning making about that
location, and, as lines 13-19 indicate, yield insights into the ongoing scripts of our space.
At that moment it was the horror movie STAB!, and as these connections are made by the
group, they illustrate how place (Art Museum) is connected to our space (and identities as
moviemakers). Tactile and ownership. But our visit was also one instance of several in
which our collected practice or traversing locations using our hybrid literate lenses came
into conflict with a location’s expectation of appropriate behavior. As a group, we
constructed new meaning around these questions of appropriateness that served to
strengthen our collectivity, and gave us institutional fodder to story against and beyond.
On other occasions we have made explicit connections to our continued
counterstory of the schooled expectations of a literate space – i.e. “do well here”
comment at penn
The multiple locations we moved across prompted us to question and comment on
a range of topics, among them a critique of the indoor nature of schools and limitations
that rules create for interaction in public places. The dialogism between the multiplicity
of locations and out storytelling is made evident in the multi-layered nature of our
movement across the city. Through collective engagement we enacted our space across
multiple locations, some new and some old. In doing so, we were enacting our spatial
hybridity precipitated by our shifting geography. These moments not only call up
questions of where literacy practices occur (in what locations) but what it means to make
a space for literate engagement in different locations; and in a related breath, our
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moments of negotiating both familiar and unfamiliar terrain made visible the problem of
place for youth (e.g. Heath and McLaughlin, 1998; Weis & Fine, 2000). In the next
section I discuss the ways in which multiple modalities engendered the discursive
hybridity of our space, acknowledging the overlapping simultaneous interplay across the
dimensions of geographic and identity hybridity, as well.
Discursive hybridity in a co-constructed third space:
Engaging multiple modalities
The literacies in the lives of adolescents are increasingly multimodal and are
being explored with growing frequency (e.g. Alvermann, 2002; Gee, 2003; Moje, 2000;
O’Brien, 2000). In this space I actively sought to make a range of meaning making
modalities available for the boys’ construction of stories and counterstories.
Consequently, engaging multiple modalities pushed the discursive hybridity of our space,
which in turn afforded a shared ownership of meaning making in our space. This
collective ownership is also reflective of the ways that modalities were taken up in the
broader context of multiplicity of the locations we traversed and the selves we authored.
When I talk about engagement with multiple modalities, I am talking about the ways that
we used the video camera, notebooks, speech, disposable cameras, and other
representational modes to make meaning – or story – within our space. In this section I
explore how we engaged modalities to help construct our third space, our context for the
development of our literacies.
20
The social context of our multimodality
From the beginning of our coming together, the boys and I imagined the practice
of storytelling through multimodal lenses. The genesis of our group was driven by texts
that engaged a range of visual and oral modes, and the social context of our space
significantly shaped and was shaped by the range of discursive modes that were
available. By that I mean the availability of meaning making modes – writing, speaking,
video, audio – interacts with the social norms of our context to create the engagement of
modalities. Given that premise, it is important to understand the origin of our group as
multimodal from the beginning.
Our first meeting took place atop the jungle gym at their school (6/21/02). As I
pitched the idea of meeting together as a group, we took turns climbing across the
monkey bars, and sliding down the fireman’s pole. Timothy suggested the West
Philadelphia branch of the library as an initial meeting place, and it stuck as the primary
meeting spot for the remainder of our time together. Timothy asked me when I wanted
to “start the group” and I left the decision up to them, thinking that they might want time
to enjoy their summer vacation. Almost in unison they asked if we could meet on
Monday, just three days later. I wondered aloud about getting their parents’ permission,
but they assured me that their parents wouldn’t mind and that they would definitely
approve. “Anything educational,” I heard Cedric say, “is fine with my mom.” “Yeah,
anything educational,” Timothy echoed. It was a phrase that I’d hear several times
throughout the study – “anything educational” – in reference to our group activities and
outings. I described my idea vaguely, saying that I was interested in bringing together
photography – the medium they’d come to associate with me as a documenter in their
21
classroom – and creating stories – an idea that I had broached with two of them
throughout the months preceding this meeting. Of the five boys that ended up
comprising “the group,” I had only had these preliminary conversations with two of
them, Timothy and Cedric. As we hung out on the jungle gym, I told them that I needed
their input to help shape the idea further. All four of the boys seemed interested, and they
were especially taken with the possibilities of using cameras. Immediately they began
sharing with me stories of trips they had taken with their respective families during which
they had taken pictures. A couple of them had used “throw aways” – disposable cameras
– and a couple had used “the kind you keep putting film in.” (FN, 6/21/02). Thus, from
the beginning of the study, visual modalities were central in our space, and their
importance in creating our space became cemented during our second meeting when we
began brainstorming project ideas.
At our first summer meeting (6/24/02), the Monday following the boys’ last day
of school on the Friday before, there were only five of us present – we were missing
Syrome – and, seated at two adjacent tables in the 52nd Street McDonald’s, we began to
imagine what we would do as a group. We pulled two adjacent tables together and began
talking about the role that photographs and the practice of taking pictures played in the
boys’ lives, a thought that followed from our jungle gym conversation. Battling the
steady buzz of the restaurant, the boys talked over each other and called out what they
already have and would want to, in the future, capture on film: people (family, girls), a
daycare center (people taking care of people), decent cars, “decent” houses, homeless
people. Timothy specifically suggests that we could go to Ishkabibble’s, an eatery on
South Street, and take pictures of the famous people that frequent the establishment;
22
multiple modes of inquiry and representations were embedded in the genesis of our
group, similar to how the notion of traversing multiple locations became an unwritten
expectation about what it meant to be our group.
When it was lunch time we paused our conversation to order some food. I had
promised to treat the boys to lunch so I gave Timothy a twenty-dollar bill and my order
and, after Cedric and Antwine told Timothy what they wanted, the three of us continued
talking. James went up to the register to help Timothy with the order. Several minutes
later, Timothy returned to the table with a fistful of bills, some loose change, and a smile
followed by a “Thanks, Ms. Lalitha.” James followed him with a tray full of burgers,
fries and cups for drinks, that the boys help themselves to at the nearby soda dispenser.
We continued our conversation as we ate and I posed to them my question about what
stories we wanted to tell. During the conversation Timothy’s voice and ideas cover the
page in my notebook as I wrote quickly to keep up with the ideas. Cedric adds his ideas
and he and Timothy banter back and forth by challenging each other’s claims and
engaging in impromptu one-upmanship. Cedric suggests that we can make a chart, “like
a Cedric chart,” he says. His multimodal description – oral and gestural – of what a
chart-based representation of Cedric would look like, including categories of information,
is cut off mid-sentence by Timothy, who suggests that we can watch something change
over time – he gives the example of a homeless person transitioning into housing, or a
woman’s pregnancy. Cedric hits him when he hears the word pregnancy. Timothy
pushes Cedric back and goes on to say that “you could also see how people keep the
streets clean.” For example, first there would be trash, then no trash, then more trash
again.
23
Stepping out of this vignette, I want to explicitly point out the social context in
which multimodal meaning making was being enacted, and recursively how the
multimodality helped to create our third space. We developed a shared understanding of
how we made meaning and as individuals and as a group. Especially challenging for me,
at times, was the recognition that because I did not share some of the similarities that the
boys shared among each other – i.e. I was not an African American adolescent boy, who
attended the same K-8 school as the five boys, who had the same teachers – I had to learn
to read the boys interactions with each other as part of that differentiated meaning
making. I do not mean to imply an essentialized identity for the boys in the group based
on outwardly identifiable characteristics, but am rather referring to something that
Cedric, himself, refers to when he suggests that there are some things that are common
among groups – in this case the boys in our group – because of their identities as boys;
being aware of this, Cedric notes, is necessary to better understand who boys – the boys
in our group – are as makers of meaning, and constructors of knowledge that is worth
hearing (VT, 12/30/02).
Textual multimodality was also evident in our space from the outset as we
engaged, constructed and discussed a range of multimodal texts. Here, I return the our
conversation from our first summer meeting to illustrate how these texts were both
introduced into our space, and helped to enact our space. Central to this hybrid
enactment is the mode of speaking. I present this next section excerpted directly from my
fieldnotes to retain the immediacy of the moment.
The conversation took a turn when something that Antwine says sparks several comments about movies, namely a flurry of Adam Sandler movies fly around our tables. Then the boys start talking about Harry Potter, the
24
movie. Cedric wonders aloud when they are going to release the second one. After a few seconds of discussion, Antwine states that they (he and James) have the (video)tape but that he didn’t like it. Cedric looks at him with disbelief and restates how much he liked it. He goes on to say to me, pointedly, that J.K. Rowling (author of the Harry Potter book series ) likes him; he then brings up the character Cedric Diggory, placing his right hand proudly on his chest and utters the name a few more times with a special emphasis on the last name, “Cedric Diggory! Cedric Diggory! Cedric Diggory!” Cedric then points out the James is in there, too – James Potter, Harry’s father. More discussion ensues about the beginning of the story and the lack of information that the author gives about Harry’s origins and history. After a bit more discussion, they start talking about other movies that they have seen that were also decent. As we talk I encourage the boys to think about the possibilities for storytelling across audio and visual (e.g. photo and video) modalities. This prompt engenders audible excitement from the boys as they offer more ideas of what to photograph and, presumably because of the recent talk about movies, as they begin imagining out loud ideas for a movie.
(FN, 6/24/02)
There are direct and recursive connections that persist throughout our time together
between the multimodal possibilities we imagined for representing stories, and the
multimodal texts that fed our collective imagination. Other multimodal texts in our space
included movies (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, X2: X-Men United, Scary
Movie3) and other videos (ArtShow) that we watched together; magazines (Vibe, Philly
Weekly) and books (Our America, Monster) that we discussed; websites
(www.newgrounds.com, http://www.ncrtec.org/picture.htm) that we explored; and texts
(Timothy’s digital stories, e.g. The Mens Day Out; group photo essays) that we
constructed.3
3 The space of a dissertation only allows for the inclusion of a few examples that are representative of larger patterns in the analysis of data. In the category of co-constructed multimodal text, in addition to the ones listed above, is the impromptu Sprite “commercial,” that James recorded and that features Cedric, which was taped on a walk back to the park from Syrome’s house. This commercial is titled “Sprite.mov” on the CD.
25
Another aspect of the recursive relationship between our space and multiple
modalities is reflected in the production of new text genres that reflect the hybridization
of outdoor play with our multimodal engagement. In particular, I am talking about
“threat messages” that were a spontaneous outgrowth of the ways we engaged with the
video camera in our space. These threat messages proved to be a strong foundation on
which the boys, James in particular, built their fluency with maneuvering the video
camera. By the time the first video threat was taped (7/31/02), utilizing the playland at
McDonald’s was a common activity following lunch. In this first example4, James is
lying down inside the play structure and lackadaisically talks into the camera that
Antwine is holding. This particular move, of engaging the kind mock-fighting play that
the other boys regularly engaged in, was outside of James’s usual interactive repertoire,
which is what makes this exchange particularly interesting.
James’s threat to Cedric:
[James, lying down inside the McDonald’s Playland structure]
I’m chillin this hot little thing [?] Cedric but he is very uglyAnd I’m gonna beat him upCedric [mock punches himself in the face]4 I’ve included stills from two of the threat messages – the ones exchanged between James and Cedric – below, with the corresponding oral text. The set of four threats, including the exchange between Cedric and Antwine taped on another visit to McDonald’s, can be viewed as a video clip found on the accompanying CD. This clip is titled “Threats.mov”
26
You’re gonna get thatI’m gonna rip you in little pieces
Right after James and Antwine slide down and show Cedric this message, Cedric grabs
his soda and asks Antwine to follow him into the playland where he begins to record his
own message back to James. He situates himself in the same spot from where James
recorded his message. His audience is both James, to whom the threat is directed, and to
Antwine as he asks “It’s on? It’s on?” Cedric is interrupted when he sees James hot on
his tail, causing him to yelp and slide down.
Cedric’s response to James
It’s on, it’s on? <To Antwine>Ok, look here, James! [pointing]You ugly bum!You talkin’ to m—[scrambles to get out when James appears]
Antwine’s voice as the cameraman during these sequences can be heard in the
background, and together these messages illustrate the social context of our space
through the multimodality, and recursively illustrate the engagement of the multimodality
of our space to enact our social context. Common across these assertions is the
recognition of the discursive hybridity that our space affords.
27
These clips are also representative of more than the “goofing around” they appear
to show on the surface; embedded in the construction of these “threats” are what I am
calling the social affordances of technologies, and multiple modalities more broadly. In
the next sub-section on the discursive hybridity of our space, I look at the social
affordances of multiple modalities that are brought up in an email; I explore both the
story of email in our space and contextualize Timothy’s email (below) to render how
email was invoked in the enactment of our space.
Multimodal engagement makes with visible
Email was not a common feature of our space, and in fact after an initial flurry of
obscene language laden emails between the boys on the day I showed them how to set up
and use their Yahoo! email accounts, only Timothy utilized email to communicate
outside of our face-to-face meeting times. I use Timothy’s email to illustrate how the
nature of with is both rendered and enacted in our space.
Return-Path: <timothybaker1026@yahoo.com>Delivered-To: lmv@dolphin.upenn.eduDate: Mon, 6 Jan 2003 12:45:51 -0800 (PST)From: timothy baker <timothybaker1026@yahoo.com>Subject: rep lingTo: Lalitha M Vasudevan <lmv@dolphin.upenn.edu>X-Status: X-Keywords: X-UID: 11698
DEAR MS. LALITHA,HI THIS IS TIMOTHY I GOT YOUR MESSAGE JUST NOW IMSORRY THAT I COULDNT COME TO THAT MEETING IN 2002 BUTI WAS KINDA CONFUSED BECAUSE I THOUGHT YOU WANTED THEGROUP TO TRAVEL BACK IN TIMEHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!! OK WHAT IREALLY WANTED TO KNOW WAS WHEN WE WERE MEETING AGAIN? MS LALITHA I JUST WANTED TO SAY THANK YOU FOR ALLYOU DONE I KNOW THAT ITS NOT EASY TAKING CARE OF USLIKE THAT BUT I JUST WANTED TO SAY THANK YOU FOR ALLYOU DONE. OK SO AS SOON AS YOU GET THIS MESSAGE LET
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YOUR FINGERS DO THE TYPING AND E-MAIL ME BACK. OH YEAHIN THE E-MAIL ME THE ADRESS TO THE PEOPLE THAT WILLGIVE US A LOAN? OK GOTTA GO SO I"LL SEE YOU WHENEVER!
-TIMOTHY BAKER
__________________________________________________Do you Yahoo!?Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.http://mailplus.yahoo.com
Timothy first responds to the fact that I had sent him an email at the end of the calendar
year 2002, when I had set up an email account for all the boys (12/30/02). His familiar
humor comes through in this mode, which could be seen as a hybrid between speech and
written communication (CITES – re: the conversational nature of emails). The second
paragraph, that begins with “MS LALITHA,” is characteristic of the discursive
performance that accompanied many of Timothy’s engagement with digital modalities.
His “THANK YOU” echoes a pattern of response when we, as a group, have engaged in
prolonged interaction with different technologies. In addition to this email, at our
meeting in December and earlier (October) Timothy explicitly thanked me for “letting”
them use the technology and noted the difference between the access to technologies in
our space and the controlled and lack of access to technologies in school. Along with
other commentaries on their access to technologies in school – notably absent access is
the story that kept recurring in our conversations – Timothy’s discursive construction of
our space as one in which he read my actions as caring for them (the boys) further
contextualizes the meaning of with as he engages this mode to convey his message.
When I received Timothy’s email, I was overjoyed and wrote an email to myself,
that I consider to be a part of my own multimodal reflective space (my research journal).
29
In it I explicate the questions that I had about the extent to which the boys, and Timothy
in this case, were given the space to utilize the digital modalities in their school.
Return-Path: <lmv@pobox.upenn.edu>Delivered-To: lmv@pobox.upenn.eduSubject: timothy's emailTo: lmv@pobox.upenn.edu (Lalitha M Vasudevan)Date: Tue, 7 Jan 2003 12:53:23 -0500 (EST)From: lmv@dolphin.upenn.edu (Lalitha M Vasudevan)X-Status: X-Keywords: X-UID: 11704
i am elated to get timothy's email. it is in all caps and was written yesterday, monday 1/6 at 12:45. i'm guessing that he wrote it at school, so that hopefuly means that he has access to the internet somewhere in school. i shoudl ask him about this.
timothy also asked me to send him the email addresses for people who might give us a loan - this is great! it potentially means that he is thinkign about this work outside of our time together as a group and may be an indication that he wants to participate in the process of acquiring money for this work.
i wrote back to him and responded to his question about our next meeting - today - and remionded him of our next project idea. i'm curious to see how he responds to this email and also to see how email will grow in our work.
These questions, in concert with Timothy’s words and actions, serve to further construct
our space against schooled discourses of literate engagements and a literacy context.
Although we did not carry through with our plan to seek external funding for our project,
we did develop a budget and an equipment and supply list. Multimodal engagement in
our space also echoed the multimodality in the boys’ lives, that was not only constructed
within our space but that was present in the boys’ stories, the texts they brought into our
space, and the discursive possibilities they imagined. The ways in which our meaning
making was regularly hybrid and multimodal further noted the importance of our space as
one of discursive possibilities, in constant contrast to their experiences with technologies
30
in school. In these ways, technologies in our space – the digital modalities – had social
affordances for constructing the with-ness of our space.
Literate engagement in our space was multimodal, and carried a quality of hybrid
discursivity that afforded a shared ownership of the meaning making in our space. I was
struck during the study at the complex ways that engagement with digital modalities –
technologies, broadly – within a stance of with played a role in making ours a space
against school, but also in the ways that we made our way beyond the discourses of
school. While Kress & Jewitt (2003) describe the affordances of a mode as “what it is
possible to express and represent readily, easily” within the context of designing
meaning, I found it more useful in this inquiry of meaning making to release my
expectations for digital modes of representation. In fact, I believe that suspending my
expectations about what a particular mode is for opened up the possibilities for how the
boys used technologies, which then significantly shaped our group space as one in which
play with technologies was allowed (discussed in more detail in Chapter 5). These
moments of play also contributed to shaping the relationships that I had with the boys,
and that we had as a group. In the next section, I build on this idea of relationships
through the lens of identity hybridity and by engaging the idea of self-authoring. The
multiple selves we authored in our space were intimately connected to the locations we
traversed and modalities we engaged, which will evident in the examples that follow. In
the discussion for this chapter, I will return to the notion of hybridity seen across the
31
dimensions of our space in order to return to a holistic – trilogic5 – portrayal of our third
space.
Identity hybridity in a co-constructed third space:
Authoring multiple selves
According to Soja (1996), a “thirdspace” is generative of “new social
possibilities” of representation; he argues for an understanding of space as constitutive of
knowledge. The boys and I enacted multiple selves within our space (Soja, 1997), and in
so doing enacted the necessary spaces within which to engaged in that identity work.
This recursive work, of making space and enacting selves, also resonates with Holland,
Skinner, Lachiotte, and Cain (1998), who build on Bakhtin’s (1986) construct of self-
authoring to challenge the notion of fixed identities. In our space, I found several
instances of the literate selves that we authored across contexts, and by engaging our
shifting landscape and different modalities. In this section I want to pay particular
attention to those selves that fell primarily into two categories: authoring group identity
through discourses of membership, and authoring discrepant selves in reflexive moments.
I argue that, similar to the other dimensions of our space, these authored selves were both
constituted by and were constitutive of our third space. I understand authoring to be an
intentional act of meta-discourse about our space.
5 I am using the idea of a trilogic, or trilogism, in the vein of Bakhtin’s dialogism, wherein if, according to Holland, et. al. (1998) who build on Bakhtin’s (1981), “The figured world of dialogism is one in which sentient beings always exist in a state of being ‘addressed’ and in the process of ‘answering’,” then I add to that dialogic – of being addressed and answering – the enactment of representing. I see representation to be separable from and at the same time intertwined with addressing and answering; but extended to recognize the possibilities afforded by multiple modalities for representation across space and time.
32
Authoring group identity through discourses of membership
While movement and multiple modalities shaped our space, so, too, did the shared
meaning making around our group identity. Since we weren’t quite “One or the Other”
(Bhabha, 1994) and had no outwardly discernable rules of belonging, how we existed as a
group was a regular topic of discussion; these discussions are peppered across the data,
from the first meeting in which we mused about what we might do together as a group
through to the last official meeting when our group identity was discussed in reaction to
Syrome’s absence. After our first jungle gym meeting, the boys assumed the role of
establishing the membership parameters of our group, and by extension the “who” of the
research space.
The discursive norms of our space were consistently hybrid, and any group
activity we engaged in regularly spanned a range of locations, modalities, topics, and
literacies. We effectively began each meeting with the question of what we were going
to do that day, and very often the impromptu agenda drew on the previous meeting to
pick up on loose ends, an invoking of the project we were currently working on as a
group, and a plan to travel to a few different places. Among the decisions that were
factored into this process was whether and in what ways other kids could hang out with
us. While all five of the boys did not necessarily socialize outside of school before we
came together for this study, they were insistent that we “close the group” to anyone
outside the six of us (FN, 5/8/03); they wanted me to enforce their rule that no one could
leave or join the group after that date, albeit nearly a year into our initial group meeting.
This particular comment was precipitated by Syrome missing yet another group meeting.
Of the six of us, he met with us the fewest number of times. In fact, as Cedric pointed
33
out on several occasions, it was primarily when “we were going somewhere, like Penn or
the movies or something” that “the whole group” was together (11/7/02). Syrome was
also the only one of the five boys whose weekly schedule included a “diet” of several
school-related after-school programs. Thus, it was often in the context of Syrome’s
absence that one of the boys – usually Timothy or Cedric – would make a note about
membership and what it meant to be a part of the group; they consistently named
attendance as key to membership.
The notion of attendance was complicated on the numerous occasions when
friends or relatives would join us for a meeting, which then “wasn’t really a meeting.”
(Antwine, FN, 4/30/03). By nature of others’ presence, our audience for our discursive
performances was altered. Even when Jasmine, James and Antwine’s younger sister who
regularly joined us during meetings that were scheduled after-school – because the
Antwine and James were allowed to meet as long as they brought their sister along – was
around, the social dynamics of the group necessarily included her as an audience as well
as an actor. In this way, the expected hybridity of our space was disrupted, however the
hybrid nature of our space also accommodated “others’” participation. One exception to
this relative fluidity of membership was the interactions with Ebonnie, who was in the
same fifth grade class as Cedric, Timothy, James and Syrome, and whom I had gotten to
know through my fieldwork in the same classroom. Ebonnie met with us eight times
during the late summer and early Fall of 2002, primarily because she was cast as a
character in STAB! Timothy begrudgingly assigned her the role because we had run into
Ebonnie and her younger siblings and cousin at the park while filming, and she expressed
great interest in what we were doing (making a movie); and because the script called for
34
Timothy’s character to have girlfriend. Once her last scene was filmed, and her character
was “killed off,” the boys – mainly Antwine, Timothy, and Cedric – were adamant that
she stop meeting with us. They stated this to her clearly, and then asked me to reinforce
their decision. My hesitance to relay such a harsh message gave Ebonnie an opening to
vie for an extension in her participation in the group. She did so by volunteering to stand
in line for Cedric at McDonald’s during a late September meeting. It was during that
meeting that the boys and I decided to visit the museum; not only did Ebonnie come with
us, but she figured prominently in one of humorous moments from our journey to the
museum. In the excerpt below, which follows from the earlier transcript excerpt above,
the boys reference this moment as they recount the visit during a group conversation. As
they do so, they are explicating their understandings of our group identity by situating
Ebonnie’s actions outside of acceptable group norms (lines 4-8) and my actions within
the group (9-13):
1 Cedric |that was decent how we|—2 Syrom
e[unintel] gon’ dry up
3 Cedric how we um…<tch> when we was waiting for the bus an’ everything
4 Syrome
she was out, yo <referring to Ebonnie>
5 Cedric yo, oh, she was like “which one is the 33?” <imitating Ebonnie>
6 Lalitha <laughs>7 Syrom
ethe one with the |33|
8 Cedric the one—|3-3!| <repeating the response that E had gotten when she posed the question to a passer-by>
35
9 James member--remember when the bus |[unintel?] was tryin’ to leav n’?|
10
Timothy
it’s turnin’, Ms. Lalitha, she’s like |“aaah!”| <and motions like he’s running, like I did toward the bus during our art museum trip>
11
? |I’s about to|| [unintel]
12
Lalitha <laughing>
13
Cedric yeah, we was all runnin’ in the streets an’ e’rything
14
Timothy
I was about to throw my water bottle at it
15
James <laughing>
16
Cedric I was—I was just cursing, yo! <laughing>
17
Timothy
[unintel]
18
Cedric I ‘as like “wait, you mother--|<fist to table>|
19
James <laughs>
20
Cedric I’s just cursing, yo
I include this excerpt to illustrate the positionality that is evident in this space of
collective authoring of our group identity, as demonstrated in the ways that my and
Ebonnie’s actions are discursively invoked and categorized as outside and within the
group, respectively. In these lines of our conversation in the library, the talk focuses on
the journey to the museum, and in particular two events: Ebonnie’s interaction with the
man who responded to her question with intentional sarcasm, and my running to get on
the 33 bus after having waited for it for over an hour. On the basis of the boys’ disdain 36
for Ebonnie’s appearances during group meetings that is evident throughout my
fieldnotes from the late summer and early fall of 2002, I read the difference in
characterization of these two “funny” moments by the ways that the boys do and don’t
show alignment. In their description of Ebonnie, they situate themselves outside of the
event, as spectators even. When they describe my running toward the bus, their inclusion
in this event is ratified by Cedric (line 13) who says, “yeah, we was all runnin’ in the
streets an’ e’rything.”
The instances of laughter are significant in how they render the quality of “fun”
and “funniness” about this event and in what they reveal about the relationships we had
with each other in our group. By itself, the laughter might not mean much, but it is
layered within the later connections that the group makes between this visit and their
critiques of the kind of places schools are. In subsequent retellings of the visit, the points
that are made about fun – e.g. the rock and statue climbing – and funniness – e.g. the
absurd image of me, the adult, violating adult behavior in the presence of adolescents –
are the facts that reoccur. This is consistent with the boys’ earlier musings about how
school, a formalized and indoor learning place, might and should be different as
discussed through the lens of who teachers and present themselves to be (further
discussed in the next chapter). In many ways, our group identity was shaped with, by and
against the different ways that each of the boys experienced school. Other examples of
the use of membership discourses to author group identity included the discussion about
our group name that was simultaneously generative of collective reflection on “what we
do.”6
6 The engagement of location – the boardroom in an office building on Penn’s campus – and modalities – flip charts, and the video camera – converge during the conversation referenced here and yield insights into
37
Authoring discrepant selves in reflexive moments
While I did not specifically look for how identities were made and lived, it is clear
that in the multimodal co-construction of this group across space and time Cedric,
Timothy, Antwine, James and Syrome each found different modes of engagement and
spaces for making meaning about a range of topics. The ongoing enactment of our “lived
space” – traversing multiple locations, engaging multiple modalities, and authoring
multiple selves – necessitated and welcomed my hybrid teacher and researcher identities;
similarly, our space afforded moments of reflexivity in which they engaged discursive
practices that veered from their predominant ways of participating in our space. I did not
identify these moments as discrepant because of their reflexive nature – so as to imply
that reflexivity was discrepant – but rather to identify the uncharacteristically singular (or
dual, given my presence) nature of these self-authoring spaces. In the following example,
I return to the context of Timothy and his email account, a reflexive moment that was
borne of sheer happenstance; miscommunication coupled with the weather – rain – that
was noted as the reason that only Timothy and I showed up on this day (12/14/02). Prior
to this moment, I had been waiting for the boys outside of the library. Having talked with
all of the boys the night before, I am confident that we will meet as planned; however I
rethink my assuredness when I see the drizzle. We were supposed to convene at noon,
but I knew from past experience to not start worrying until at least 12:20.
These conversations run through my head as 12:00 becomes 12:10 and I look down Sansom St. to see if James, Antwine or Cedric is on his way. I continue checking the clock inside the library and remember that sometimes the boys don’t leave their houses until 12, which means that they will get to the library several minutes later. Around 12:15 I am
how the boys conceived of our space. I’ve included a brief clip from this meeting that presents the hybrid context for this authoring moment, titled “Whatwedo.mov” on the CD.
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greeted by the father of one of Antwine’s friends (Stanley) who asks me how I am and asks if I’m leaving. I say that I am waiting for “the boys” to which he clarifies by asking “Antwine and them?” I nod and smile. This prompts him to shake my hand, wish me a good day and then say “They should bottle up that smile of yours!”
…12:30 I conclude that no one is going to show up, but before leaving the library I decide to go inside and look Syrome’s address up online. A flyer for a poetry slam catches my eye on the wall next to the short flight of stairs that lead to the computers. I make a mental note of the slam and head up the stairs and find Timothy sitting at a computer. He is dressed in his tan/light beige velour sweatsuit and is wearing a light beige doorag on his head. I walk up to him and sit down at the next computer and ask him how long he’s been here. He says that he has been here for a while, and I tell him that I’ve been outside since 12:00 – we share a chuckle over this silly situation. Timothy tells me that James and Antwine can’t come today and then asks if Cedric is coming. I tell him that I spoke with Cedric last night and that it sounded like he was coming. Timothy suspects that Cedric might have thought that we weren’t meeting because of the rain.
(FN, 12/14/02)
Timothy confirmed my suspicion that the rain may have hindered our group
attendance for the day. He showed up because he had breakfast with his dad earlier that
morning. I took a seat next to him and told him that I had set up email accounts for him
and the other boys and asked if he wanted to check it out. I had used the boys’ full names
and their birthdays to construct their usernames and I was going to take that afternoon to
help them customize their accounts. Timothy pointed out to me that I had used the wrong
date for his birthdate. I used that mistake to set up another email account with Timothy at
the controls, so to speak. We talked our way through the process of setting up an email
account, of deciding on a username, of choosing a password, and the basic rules about
Inboxes and sending and receiving email. Throughout this process, Timothy talked in
quiet tones and remained seated in our chairs. I point this out to make clear the
discrepant nature of this moment, when our primary audience in that moment was each
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other; we were wholly focused on working through an activity (setting up an email
account) and in the process Timothy exhibited an uncharacteristic “stillness” in his
interactions with me.
After we spent the rest of his hour-long slot allotted for computer use in the
library, we moved to a round table in the main area of the library’s first floor. I show him
a copy of Our America that I had brought with me and intended to share with the group
that day. In this moment, informed by Timothy’s interactive cues, I authored myself – as
someone familiar with this text – in a way that was perhaps less active than I had
originally planned. The convergence of group members (Timothy and me), context of
the location (the library on a rainy Saturday), and use of multiple modalities (email,
book) resulted in this self-authored reflexive moment; I engaged in my own brand of
stillness to mirror Timothy’s actions. By stillness, I mean taking the time to look at
something with the luxury to really look; there is a quality of “stepping outside” to reflect
inward. Similar moments also took place with Cedric and Antwine, both of which are
invoked in this dissertation. In both of these cases, like with Timothy, my relationship
with the boys was shifted due to the convergence described above during which time
Cedric authored a more readily assumed the role of informant that I often implicitly
ascribed to him; Antwine authored a noticeably more thematic self, by which I mean he
engaged modalities to construct moments for his still reflective selves to emerge.
The multiple selves we authored, in the enactment of identity hybridity, gained
meaning through active engagement with the other dimensions of our space. Not
explicated here are the ways that the boys made use of the video camera and digital voice
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recorder to further create an authoring space for themselves. I invoke these moments in
the discussion of the multimodal quality of literacies in our space, which were
contextualized in play (Chapter 5). As my own identity was in constant negotiation, so,
too, were the selves that the boys authored in our space. These selves were informed and
shaped by the broader context of our space, but as well by the meanings and purposes for
literate engagement in a given moment. For example, the threat messages could also be
read for the space for self-authoring they provide as Cedric, Antwine and James used the
video camera to construct and represent a focused message to each other. Our third
space, that affords these reflexive moments for the reasons of hybridity outlined above
and that are characterized by their discrepancy against the rest of the data, further pushes
the counterstory of schooled expectations for literate engagements and contexts for
literacy by being a space in which multiple selves can concurrently exist; where the
expectation of hybridity is welcomed, and sought after. In the vignette and transcript
below, I aimed to bring the dimensions of our space back together, so to speak, after
having looked at the interconnected dimensions of our third space.
Co-constructing a multimodal space of discursive possibilities
In representing our space, distilling something so dynamic into distinct and
describable pieces presents a new set of challenges. Among them, a challenge to the
reader to keep the other dimensions in mind and at play while delving deeper into one
aspect of a group space. To conclude this chapter I use a vignette excerpted from
fieldnotes taken during a meeting that occurred two-thirds into my data collection to
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attempt a more holistic representation of the ways we lived our space. I follow this
vignette with an audio excerpt from that same day that presents a look at our space from
my interactions with Antwine, who figures only peripherally in the vignette but whose
authored self is central in the description of the discrepant reflexive moment that is
afforded by the multiple modes for meaning making.
Making movies in the park
There were six of us who met during the boys’ spring break, on a beautiful clear
Wednesday afternoon. After gathering at the library, we attempt to meet at McDonald’s
to regroup after having not met for three weeks. There were a lot of people inside and
after a few minutes to trying to have a conversation, Timothy says, “Y’all wanna go
somewhere quiet?” (AT, 4/16/03). I agree and follow his suggestion that we head to the
park, that, oddly enough, was quieter and better suited for the movie-making followed
This scene represents, in writing, one aspect of our meeting that day: making movies in
the park.
I am sitting on the bench partially shielded from the sun by the pavilion overhead. Timothy is sitting to my right and waits in anticipation as I unearth my laptop form my backpack. I had just finished mentioning that I made a mini-movie about (Malcolm X Park) from some of our pictures from the summer. Timothy nods when I ask him if he’d like to see it. As I bring out the laptop I quickly survey the park and see Antwine and Cedric taking turns riding Timothy’s bike. James first stands in front of me to my left and then takes a seat on the other side of me on the bench. He seems somewhat interested in my conversation with Timothy and when I notice this I try to include him by looking at both of them as I talk. Once the laptop “wakes up” I click through the appropriate folders and locate the movie and open it up inside Windows Movie Maker (WMM). As I go through this process I tell them again that they can use this program to do a movie of their own; we might also use this to edit our horror movie, I suggest. Timothy and James nod. When the movie finally begins both boys get a knowing smile on their faces as they recognize the opening
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chords of Jill Scott’s “A Long Walk.” “Ok, Ms. Lalitha,” Timothy says approvingly as he bops his head in rhythm with the song. As the movie progresses I comment on the different clips. For example, I point out the aerial photograph of the park that I found on the internet and the text I overlaid onto it. I laugh along with James at a picture of Cedric making a funny face. At this point Cedric and Antwine are standing behind us and I hear Cedric make fun of Antwine’s “hang time” (the length of his braids) and then comment on how long we’ve been meeting. “We known each other that long?” Cedric remarks. I remind him that I first met them even earlier while they were still in 5th grade. “Oh yeah,” he responds. I resume my commentary on the movie and point out some of the video transitions and video effects that I played around with in making the movie. I also note that this is a movie made up entirely of stills and we could also import some of the video we’ve taken to string clips together. By now, James has also moved and is standing behind the bench to be able to see better. There is a slight glare from the sun and Timothy, who is holding the laptop on his lap, fiddles with the angle of the screen to help the cause.
When the nearly 2 minute-long movie ends I try to judge the boys’ reactions. Antwine moves his gaze from the screen to Cedric and attempts to provoke him; Cedric staves him off nods in my direction and offers a pat on my back by way of encouragement. I ask the 4 of them if they’d want to try one of their own and Cedric nods and then excuses himself to catch up with Antwine who has just taken the bike out from under him. Timothy begins to ask me questions about how he can put a movie together and I respond by asking him if he’d like to one now. He nods and say “Ok.” With the laptop secured in his grip, I direct Timothy though the process of opening up a new project – i.e. click on “File”, select “New Project”, etc. Using the prompts made available in WMM we engage in a back and forth discussion and walk through of how to import files – pictures and audio – and an impromptu overview (on my part) of how my filing system is organized on my computer. During one quiet moment as we waited for the pictures to be imported, Timothy remarks, “Man! I need to get a laptop!” For several minutes more we work together to become familiar with previewing images, importing them, and finally dragging the images and audio onto the sequencing strip at the bottom of the screen. I apologize to Timothy for my lack of current music tracks and vow to download more before our next meeting on Saturday. For this new project Timothy selects Missy Elliot’s “The Rain” and imports then drags it onto the audio section of the sequencer. The song begins playing when he hits the play button causing Cedric, who is riding by, to peer over and see what Timothy is doing. He starts singing the song and then interjects, “Go Tim,” as he sees Timothy building his movie.
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At this point in our time together, we had already filmed a horror movie, taken several
series of photographs on a range of topics, and had begun gathering and creating texts
under the theme of “How friends act toward each other” (described further in Chapter 4).
We had established a practice of moving across multiple locations and repurposing
locations and texts to meet our needs. On this occasion the park became a movie making
and editing studio for Timothy, our photographs marked both future stories and
memories, and our space became a site for learning a new software program.
Authoring a reflexive self multimodally
Later the same afternoon I handed out another set of disposable cameras to the
four boys who were present, and immediately Antwine snapped pictures of what was
going at that moment. He was “starting [his] story now” (FN, 4/16/03), but didn’t yet
know what the story would be about. What he did know, and later wrote about, was that
he enjoyed the chance to document our group’s activities. Among the photographs he
took was one of Cedric, Timothy, James and me hanging upside down at the park (Figure
3.2). This particular photograph came to have a long life in the multimodal enactment of
our group, and was regularly referred to when describing our space, our relationships
with each other, and a description of “what we do” (FN, 4/19/03). I will talk more about
this photograph as it functions as a description of our relationships and our group
activities in the upcoming chapters. I include the photograph here to talk about the
context in which it came to be. That is, conceived in the discrepant moment of singular
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reflexivity, Antwine’s authors a photographic self and begins to distribute cameras as
well as take photographs using one of the disposable cameras.
Figure 3.2
Antwine’s presence in this photograph is imagined, is evident in the fact that the
photograph even exists. This intangible quality of these discrepant moments gained more
significance in the communication modes that were opened up between me and Antwine
as he authored this self multimodally. As a researcher in this space I sometimes worried
that all the voices and perspectives of the boys were not always reflected in sense making
about our space as one in which literacies flourished. However, in these moments and
enactments of authoring, I gained insight into the ways that the different boys were
engaging with our space, in relationship to the stories they wanted to tell. These
discrepant moments elucidated the predominantly collective nature of our space by
reminding me to look for, and in some instances create, contexts that would engender the
authoring of these singularly reflexive selves.
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The next two excerpts further illustrate space of self authoring evident in a
conversation that Antwine and I had, in this case on the walk to the park and then sitting
on the bench in the park; and shows the ways that he imagines multimodal possibilities
for storytelling as well as for his role(s) in the group.
1 Antwine
we can have a movie of … some… a little boy, some little boy cant make it to the … to the .. NBA and stuff. <hear momentum in his voice>
2 Lalitha mm-hmm3 Antwin
eA’right, a’right… he cant go into the NBA until he an adult but then
4 Lalitha uh-huh5 Antwin
ebut then as a little kid… he go straight into the NBA
6 Lalitha Kobe—7 Antwin
eno, he could go straight – like 13 or 14
<later, in the park>8 Antwin
elike… we can all be like playing a game and stuff
9 Lalitha mm-hmm10
Antwine
[you] taking pictures of us
11
Lalitha mm-hmm
12
Antwine
playing little bit – that’s how im thinking…
Basketball was important in Antwine’s life. He was a guard on a local
community team and for most of the time that we met as a group, he talked about his
basketball games and skills with confidence. Although by late spring he was no longer
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associating himself with the community basketball team, his interest in basketball as a
sport remained. What is particularly interesting to me about these exchanges, and several
others like it, is the way that Antwine engages in the space; these moments are different
from the regularly busy nature of our group meetings, and why I have been thinking of
them as discrepant. I am conscious of the tendency to understand this concept as
situations where everyone was quiet or not moving. In fact, the opposite was often true
and Antwine, in particular, engaged in these self authoring moments multimodally. For
instance, Antwine’s next move was to take one of the disposable cameras and take
pictures around the theme of basketball. Everyone left that meeting intent on
photographing around a theme. I collected the cameras two days later and developed
them in preparation for a meeting three days we initially made movies in the park. We
met at an office building, where I had shared office space for the consulting that I did.
Antwine ordered these pictures – that is, he suggested that we pool all the photographs
we all had taken and label them by theme. These pictures were also later used to signify
family, relationships, and a few found their way into the ongoing theme of “How friends
treat each other.” (I explore the multimodal storytelling and literacy practices involved in
this sorting in Chapter 5).
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Timothy and Antwine, in separate ways, were helping to construct the space as
multimodal in the ways that they engaged multiple modalities to not only imagine
possible stories, but also to assume different literate identities. Timothy used
photographs, video editing software, music, and the park pavilion to engage a range of
multimodal literacy practices as he became a movie maker and storyteller. Additionally,
Timothy’s impromptu movie debut is both a reflection on his adeptness at quickly
developing a level of fluency with Windows Movie Maker, and a demonstration of how
he used of our space to play with the available technologies and texts to construct his
movie.
Antwine as a manager and producer as he organized the distribution of the
cameras, and imagined a basketball story to construct. The language of movies was a
constant in our group, as we not only made a movie but also watched several movies
together; our discursive identities were similarly shaped. Antwine shaped who and how
he was in this space. Following the tradition of the movie language we often used to
name our group activities, I read his discursive acts He also assumed the identities of
documenter, photographer, and storyteller as he engaged different discursive practices to
produce a unique and hybridized member of the group, which still resonated with the
collective identity and purpose of the group.
Discussion
Third spaces are regularly spoken of as emerging out of need, sites that are born
of resistance and necessarily hybrid in response to an imposed and often dualism; the
hybridization, therefore, is located and studied within the self (Bhabha, 1994) . These
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assertions are also primarily located in postcolonial discourses, as initiated by Bhabha’s
(1994) theorizing of the cultural identities produced in struggle. On the surface,
therefore, the connection between the space that the boys and I created and a theorized
third space may not be obvious. However, it is the marking of hybridity that supports this
analysis of collective instantiation across the dimensions of locations, modalities, and
selves. Our collective expectation of hybridity afforded this space of with in which new
literate possibilities, and through this literate hybridity we co-constructed a space of/for
hybridity.
A hybrid third space, co-constructed with youth, affords new possibilities for how
to explore the ways that they engage literacies in their lives outside of school. In so
doing – collaboratively creating this space of with – my inquiry about how the boys
might engage literacy practices to “talk against” evolved to consider how the very context
of this research impacts these engagements and engenders possibilities for new and
unscripted sites of inquiry about literacies and related discursive practices. My initial
goal in this study was to create a space for stories and counterstories – which I
understand to be discursive sites themselves within which to explore how race is
positioned/constructed/situated in the meaning making practices of this group of boys;
and to engage technologies in order to open up new representational and reflective spaces
in which to engage in this meaning making. By collaboratively creating a context in
which to explore and complicate the relationships of literacies and race,
The boys theorized for me what kind of group space this was, a practice that
spotlighted some of my frustrations as both a practitioner and researcher in this space. I
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wondered about what kind of research this was; what my role was in this space; what it
meant to engage with the world around us across modalities.
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