We should draw our metaphors … not from the language of the construction kit but from that of polyphonic music … As each player, in turn, picks up the melody and takes it forward, it introduces another line of counterpoint to those already running. Each line answers or coresponds to every other. The result is not an assemblage but a roundel: not a collage of juxtaposed blobs but a wreath of entwined lines. (Ingold 2015: 7)

Introduction

A few years ago, the UK National Gallery’s Take One Picture programme asked primary school pupils to create responses to George Bellows’s (1912) painting Men of the Docks (Fig. 1) which depicts a group of labourers waiting to be picked for a day’s casual work. Unlike Bruegel the Elder’s (1559) painting, The Battle Between Carnival and Lent which Ingold (2011) used to illustrate his concept of a taskscape, with people involved in ‘an array of mutually responsive tasks’ (2017:17), Men of the Docks is a picture of inactivity and stillness. While some men are waiting to find work, one can be seen in the shadows walking away on his own. In this article, I, like some of the children in their response to Men of the Docks, am interested in characters like the man in the shadows, whose paths diverge from those of others and perhaps peter out.

Fig. 1
figure 1

© The National Gallery, London

Men of the Docks (1912) by George Bellows

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Ingold has recently critiqued his own taskscape metaphor of human activity as too anthopocentric, preferring a more ecological perspective which sees us enmeshed in the physical world around us, following the flow of materials in a process not of interaction but of ‘correspondence’, creating ‘entangled lines of bodily movement and material flow’ (2012: 435), what he calls a ‘meshwork’. This meshwork is not the same as Latour’s network which Ingold (2012: 436) sees as ‘an ecology bereft of energy’. Rather than seeing agency ‘as distributed around the network’, for Ingold (2011: 113), it ‘rather emerges from the interplay of forces that are conducted along the lines of the meshwork’. Gourlay (2023: 60) critiques the meshwork metaphor for failing to account for ‘the spaces between the lines, the interstices which are not composed of or concerned with connections or entanglements’. In this article, I ask further questions about the implicit ideas of harmony in the meshwork, asking what happens when the trails go cold, when there are points of rupture or non-respondence, when the music is dissonant or stops altogether, when the invitation to follow the flow of materials is declined as people wander off. Following Gruppuso and Whitehouse (2020: 592), I reprieve Ingold’s notion of taskscape ‘as an entanglement of different activities performed by humans and non‐humans, in a process of resonance that is not always peaceful and harmonious’. For me, the word embroilment helps describe the relationship between humans and non-humans. From the French verb embrouiller, it suggests ideas of muddle or confusion, something more messy, provisional, or contingent than a meshwork or network.

This article is a study of sociomaterial literacy practices in an inner London primary class of which I was the teacher. It analyses the embroilment of pupils and things when an online platform, a wiki, was introduced, looking at lines of literacy as children crossed between virtual and physical taskscapes beyond the bounded spaces and temporality of the school day. For some pupils, whose paths were trailing off in the conventional literacy class, it analyses what knotted them back into the virtual taskscape. Conversely, for some pupils, the trail went cold in the virtual space. What is it about the relationship between things and humans that caused this to happen?

Postdigital and Postphenomenological Approaches to Literacy

The term postdigital has been used to account for the increasingly embedded nature of technology in our daily life (Jandrić 2019) with the prefix ‘post-’ implying ‘not a chronological term but rather a critical attitude (or philosophy) that inquires into the digital world, examining and critiquing its constitution, its theoretical orientation and its consequences’ (Peters and Besley 2018: 30). Jandrić (2019: 35) notes the postdigital challenge of exploring ‘grand philosophical questions such as equality and/or symmetry between human and non-human actors’ as we grapple with the ‘messy relationships between ... humanism and posthumanism’ (Jandrić et al. 2018: 896). These questions are of particular relevance to the educational project, long framed by modernist anthropocentric ideals of producing citizens ‘civilised’ by their understanding of abstract concepts (Campbell and Olteanu 2023; Goody 1977).

Apperley et al. (2016: 204) apply the term ‘postdigital’ to literacies. For them too, ‘the term refers to the blurring of the digital and non-digital through widely distributed computational technologies and connectivity in our contemporary moment. However, the postdigital is also a critical interrogation of the disjunctures in the hegemony of the digital.’ As Bhatt (2023a: 5–6) argues, ‘the postdigital should not be misconstrued as a resignation that “the machinification of everything is complete”, and neither is it about a nostalgic attachment to analogue modes’. For Campbell and Olteanu (2023: 3), overcoming the ‘dichotomization—between embodied experiences in real environments and interactions in digital media environments—is the central contribution the postdigital makes to research in literacy studies’. Bhatt (2023b) revives Barton’s (1994) ecological model of literacy to draw attention to the complexity of the relationship between humans, texts, and technology which a postdigital framing demands. For him, the ecology metaphor allows us to delve deep into the intertwining of ‘literacy practices with the past and the present, the analog and digital, and human and non-human’ (2023a: 5).

Research in postdigital literacies draws on seminal work on literacy events (Heath 1983) and practices (Street 2001) which focused attention on the embeddedness of literacy in social contexts (New Literacy Studies). Reconfigurations such as the ‘digital literacy event’ (Bhatt and de Rook 2014), ‘literacy-as-event’ (Burnett and Merchant 2020), and ‘platform practices’ (Robinson 2022) take into account our imbrication with technology in our text-composing practices. In these new iterations, the materiality of literacy comes into focus (Sørensen 2009; Lenters 2014; Burnett and Merchant 2020; Hawley 2021; Gourlay 2015) alongside questions about the agency of the artefacts or things we interact with. Robinson (2022: 363) articulates this in the notion of ‘platform practices’ which encompasses both ‘(a) how platforms do things to and with people and (b) how platforms nudge people to do things both to and with each other and to and with the platform’. These re-workings of social models of literacy emphasise notions of becoming, mutual constitution and sociomaterial practices in which we and the technology ‘produce each other while producing culture together, the one becoming alongside the other in an ongoing process of computational and cultural emergence’ (Robinson 2022: 363).

These social and sociomaterial theories of literacy have evolved alongside textual theories of literacy as multimodal (Kress 2003) with the advocacy by some of ‘a pedagogy of multiliteracies..[which] focuses on modes of representation much broader than language alone’ (Cope and Kalantzis 2000: 5). However, despite Kress’s (2010: 77) attention to ‘the materiality of modes’ and their interaction ‘with the physiology of bodies’, multimodal theories of literacy have been critiqued (Campbell and Olteanu 2023) for their text-centric focus and lack of attention to context. Studied in isolation, texts become ‘cultural freeze frames’ (Leander and Boldt 2013: 36) with no spatial or temporal dynamic.

Ways of bridging the ‘ideological lacunae’ (Pahl et al. 2006: 1) between social theories of literacy which develop from New Literacy Studies and those in the multimodal camp are evident in concepts of ‘posthuman linguistics’ and ‘semiotic assemblages’ (Pennycook 2018a; Gourlay et al. 2021; Bhatt 2023c), which propose a distributed and relational view of language and attention to ‘materialist, vitalist, embodied, and embedded subjects and repertoires’ (Pennycook 2018b: 451) in social spaces. A revival of the contested notion of affordances (Gibson 1979; Oliver 2005) ‘as potential semiotic resources that an organism enacts (detects, reads, uses, engages) to channel learning-as-choice in its environment’ (Campbell et al. 2019: 367) is another useful step in coaxing together sociomaterial and semiotic models of literacy.

This article takes up Bhatt’s (2023b) re-working of Barton’s (1994) ecological metaphor of literacy as ‘postdigital literacy ecologies’ as a way of understanding ‘the embeddedness of literacy in social life, thought, history, language, materiality, and learning’ (Bhatt 2023b: 4). This approach gives us what Campbell et al. (2021: 4) call ‘strong literacy’, an account which ‘recognizes that literacy itself must be broad enough to encompass all a student’s meaningful engagements with the world; how they are affected by the more-than-human, and their capacity to act agentively’ in their environment. Such a conception of literacy is of course multimodal in that it encourages us to notice the myriad ways in which young people communicate as ‘sensitive crafters of mood, mode and meaning’ in embodied ways, across time and space, in and out of school (Cannon et al. 2023: 9), offering the potential for them both to be viewed and to view themselves as ‘capable meaning makers’ (McKee et al. 2019: 60). Bhatt (2023b: 4) points to several challenges for postdigital literacy researchers: first, the incorporation of ‘offline data to support and make sense of online literacy practices’, and second a focus on the way in which platforms and their interfaces produce new formations of literacy and what the implications of these formations are ‘in terms of ethics and social justice’. This article will attempt to respond to these challenges.

In particular, it will draw on phenomenological and postphenomenological (Ihde 1990; Verbeek 2005) methods to analyse the development of pupils’ literacy practices across physical and virtual spaces. Unlike a Heideggerian view of technology as alienating, postphenomenology asks us to analyse the role of technology in society and culture as neither neutral nor determining but mediating and potentially transformative. In Ihde’s (2009: 23), ‘interrelational ontology, … the human experiencer is to be found ontologically related to an environment or a world, but the interrelation is such that both are transformed within this relationality’. Ihde (1990) and Verbeek (2005: 115) develop the idea of an artefact or technology having ‘intentionality, a trajectory that promotes a specific kind of use’. This perspective is particularly helpful in educational research as it allows us to examine the materiality of technology in praxis and question assumptions ‘that technology either enhances learning in and of itself or that it is neutral without teacher intervention’ (Adams and Turville 2018: 3). As Farman (2012) notes, a phenomenological perspective also allows us to examine our sensory experience with technology. The work of Tim Ingold in phenomenological anthropology, with its focus on learning through the senses in our environment, gives us a theoretical framework that links the ecological perspective of postdigital literacies with a focus on our embodied, lived experience and perception within lifeworlds.

The Taskscape as Heuristic

This paper will use Ingold’s (2000: 195) concept of the taskscape understood as ‘a mutual interlocking’ of ‘technical and social activity’. Ingold’s taskscape is contingent on his ‘dwelling perspective’, existing only in so far ‘as people are actually engaged in the activities of dwelling’ (2000: 197). He has recently downplayed his original distinction (1993) between taskscape (as a metaphor for society) and landscape (1993) (as a metaphor for nature). ‘I have begun to think that every task describes a linear movement of some kind … woven into the land … In my thinking, then, the array of tasks has largely come to be replaced by this medley of lines; taskscape by meshwork.’ (Ingold 2017: 25) The concept of the taskscape has, despite Ingold’s reservations, been taken up in other disciplines, particularly archaeology and anthropology. Ingold (2017: 26) himself noted its use as a ‘handy moniker for a descriptive account of the spatiotemporal layout of activity at a site’. For Gruppuso and Whitehouse (2020: 592), it is a ‘powerful heuristic tool to understand the world and its own doing, contestations and politics included’. They draw attention to critiques of the taskscape and its associated Heideggerian notion of dwelling as too local, romantic (Massey 2006; Cloke and Jones 2001) and insufficiently concerned with representation (Bender 1998). Instead, they describe ‘the taskscape as an entanglement of different activities performed by humans and non‐humans, in a process of resonance that is not always peaceful and harmonious’ (Gruppuso and Whitehouse 2020: 592). While in Ingold’s (2017: 17) taskscape, people are ‘locked in attitudes of mutual attention, such that their activities, as they are carried on, continually answer to those of others’, Cloke and Jones (2001: 662) point to the ‘anti-idyll’, the less harmonious way in which ‘the sad, the lonely, the happy, the poor, the wealthy, will have walked those paths doing differing tasks in differing ways and constructing the landscape differently’. They call for a reconceptualisation of the dwelling perspective

adapted to a world where views of authenticity as some form of idealised past original stable state are clearly unhelpful; to the complex interpenetration of places with other places, and to the flows of ideas, people, and materials which co-constitute and co-construct those places; and to the need for dynamic rather than fixed ways of understanding embodied engagements with landscapes (Cloke and Jones 2001: 664).

If the dwelling perspective connotes rustic rootedness, Ingold’s (2011: 216) wayfarers are more nomadic: artists or artisans who ‘make their way through the taskscape ... as do walkers through the landscape, bringing forth their work as they press on with their own lives’.

In educational research, the taskscape concept has been deployed to analyse the interaction of materials, spaces and bodies in art education (Nolte-Yupari 2017), outdoor education (Prins and Wattchow 2020) or therapeutic landscapes (Dunkley 2009). Prins and Wattchow (2020) foreground the importance of place or taskscape in the pedagogic moment or tactful encounter between teacher and pupil (van Manen 1990). In a study of multimodal composition practices in schools in Chile, Norway and Canada, Rowsell et al. (2023) develop the idea of ‘mutually responsive tasks’ in Ingold’s taskscape ‘to describe how young people orchestrate and interweave lines when they craft entangled stories’ (2023: 634). For them, the idea of the taskscape offers ‘ways to capture multiple story lines woven together into one common space–time’ (2023: 636). For Smale and Regalado (2017), in their study of the different ways in which US college students use technology in their academic work, the taskscape is a broader ‘field of practice’ (Ingold 2011: 59). For them,

the academic taskscape encompasses the totality of the student experience, including students’ perceptions of their schoolwork, the locations where their academic work takes place, the tools or support that are available to them, and the people they interact with along the way. In a typical day, a student’s academic taskscape might include time at home reviewing study notes, traveling to campus to attend class at the college, or going to the library to work on am assignment. The devices that students use are critical components of the academic taskscape as well (Smale and Regalado 2017: 15).

In this study, I use taskscape more as a heuristic snapshot, as Ingold does in Bruegel’s painting The Battle Between Carnival and Lent, seeing taskscapes as ‘repertoires of practice’ while noting that they are not always in ‘harmony all of the time, in fact they are sometimes at odds with each other’ (Rowsell et al. 2023: 635). Thus, the taskscape has purchase methodologically as snapshot for analysis and heuristic for asking what was being performed in the embroilment between humans and devices? What were the processes and becomings that emerged over time? In this article, I will take the spaces of home, school and the wiki to be three different taskscapes. Like Rowsell et al. (2023), I use Ingold’s (2015) idea of lines as another useful way to conceive of the movement of pupils and their sociomaterial practices across these spaces which are rendered more porous and less bounded by the digital. However, in addition to noticing when the lines are entangled harmoniously, when the meshwork metaphor works, I am also interested in broken lines, rupture and what leads to the end of a line.

Methodology

Although I carried out this research with the ideas of Merleau Ponty framing it, as I gathered data, I had not crystallised my approach as phenomenological or postphenomenological. Nevertheless with hindsight, I can see that many of my methodological approaches align with the ones suggested by Adams and Thompson (2017) such as ‘gathering anecdotes’ (both my own in a research diary and those of other participants through interviews, ‘following the actors’ (as I saw different imbrications and assemblages emerging), ‘listening for the invitational quality of things’ (as I watched what the technology was enabling or constraining), and ‘studying breakdowns, accidents and anomalies’ as I pondered the way things were not always going according to plan. Adams and Turville (2018: 4) note how postphenomenological research can be divided ‘into two categories, roughly equivalent to data collection and data analysis in qualitative research: (1) collecting or generating prereflective materials or anecdotes, and (2) reflecting phenomenologically on the gathered prereflective materials’.

I gathered this data as a teacher researcher in a Year 4 (ages 8–9 years old) class of an inner London primary school with high proportions of children eligible for Free School Meals and classified as having English as an Additional Language. I received ethics approval from the Institute of Education and gained the consent of pupils and parents. All names are anonymised. The class consisted of 12 boys and 15 girls. I chose wikispaces as the software for the intervention, as it was a simple wiki-building software provided without charge to teachers by wikispaces.com, a San Francisco–based web-hosting service. The interface resembled word processing software such as Microsoft Word that we knew children were familiar with. Digital technology has brought about the possibility of materially different spaces, a realisation, as Marsh (2005) notes, of the importance of material artefacts, including digital devices, in the development of children’s literacy practices. This then is what interested me: the possibility of linking with children’s out-of-school practices using technology with enhanced authoring, collaboration and publishing possibilities and the option of incorporating multimodal elements, thereby tapping into students’ ‘repertoire of practices’ (Gutiérrez 2008: 149).

I collected data from the 27 pupil participants and 5 of their parents during the 12-month wiki intervention and over the following year when I continued to teach the same children. My data collection methods included participant observation (including online observation), interviews with pupils, parents and teachers (semi-structured individual interviews and focus groups), and analysis of documents and texts (online and offline texts created as well as scrutiny of conventional assessment data). The main data collection was preceded by a pilot study with a class of 9- and 10-year-olds.

The launch of the wiki intervention involved me modelling the software in class, demonstrating its potential for the generation of multimodal texts and allowing children to practice and support each other. I also encouraged the children to generate their own writing in their own time about subjects of their own choosing within the taskspace of the wiki as well as using it to complete classwork and homework. Fieldwork in the classroom took place on a daily basis as children often came up to me first thing in the morning to talk about something they had posted on the wiki the previous evening. There were also the lessons in class where we used the wiki for scaffolded writing.

The classroom is noisy, and what the teacher can see is subjective and selective: ‘a vision that is free from everywhere and nowhere, equally and fully’ is, as Haraway (1988: 584) observes, an illusional ‘God trick’. For me, snatched fieldnotes had to be frantically scribbled down while I was teaching or just after I finished, during break and lunchtime. These handwritten notes (what Lofland and Lofland 1995, call ‘jotted notes’) I typed up and fleshed out that evening as full field notes in an observation journal. I tried to keep the notes as descriptive as possible (Frank 1999), leaving interpretation for later analytical stages.

At home, in the evening and on the weekends, I would also check the children’s contributions to the wiki and document them as part of the research journal. The children who were participating most enthusiastically in the wiki were the ones chosen for the initial rounds of focus group interviews, and these actors were then followed and the work of nine of them analysed in detail. Examining and analysing the texts on the wiki involved looking not just at meaning but making the most of the invitational quality of the software to look at the frequency and timing of posts as well as the edit history of each wiki page. As an insider researcher, I also had access to offline texts: ongoing assessment and contextual demographic data that might not have been available to an outsider, as well as the writing they did in their exercise books.

As the project progressed, I was struck by something concerning which I had also noticed in the pilot study. Although the participation of some children in the wiki taskscape was enthusiastic and ultimately transformative, fewer than half of them were engaged with online text creation. My mission during the reflective period (of data analysis) was to study this ‘breakdown’ (Adams and Turville 2018; Röhl 2012), to understand why not all children were taking part. What were the social and material constraints that kept some of them out of the loop? What were the contextual factors which affected their use of technology? As Adams and Turville (2018: 19) note, developing the advantages of Heidegger’s ‘broken hammer’ analysis, ‘in the context of postphenomenology, a breakdown provides a reliable way of surfacing our otherwise taken-for-granted, co-constitutive relations with technologies and thus make them available for inquiry’. As I analysed the data, I developed an ‘eye for materiality’ (Aargaard and Matthiesen 2016: 41) analysing what objects ‘do’ (Verbeek 2005; Röhl 2012) in different contexts, examining the function or multistability (Ihde 1990) of the wiki technology across the taskscapes of different homes.

To support this analysis, all children were asked to reflect on their engagement with the wiki and their use of technology in the taskscape of the home by drawing an annotated picture, the ‘situational map’ which Aagaard and Matthiesen (2016: 43) advocate using in postphenomenological research on materiality. These drawings helped me to analyse.

material presence with an eye for the age-old schism of structure and agency which in this regard may be conceptualized as the distinction between body one and body two (Ihde 2002) … Body one is the Merleau-Pontyian body that corresponds to our agentive, motile, perceptual being in the world ... Body two is the Foucauldian social and cultural body … the materially and semiotically positioned body. (Aagaard and Matthiesen 2016: 42)

In this way, I was able to reflect on wider power relations at play as children made traversals between the different taskscapes.

When the Meshwork Works: Gestures of Writing in the Wiki Taskscape

I am gathering anecdotes, listening to a group of children in a focus group talk about why they’re enjoying writing on the wiki. They speak enthusiastically about the ‘handiness’ (Verbeek 2005) of the devices they are interacting with to produce texts and the sensory nature of this interaction.

AMIR: When you’re handwriting, it does take more energy out of you. When you are on a computer, you just have to press a button. When writing, it takes longer and more energy.

VLADIMIR: I prefer to type more than anyone else in the whole world. When you type, it’s quite easier. All you have to do is press a button.

MOHAMED: When you write on paper and you’ve lost your rubber, you have to cross it out and it will be quite messy and with technology you can delete things without losing it

VLADIMIR: with just a few clicks.

The gestures of typing the boys describe sound more playful, less taxing to the musculature of the hand and arm, ‘keystroke dances or jigs’ (Adams 2016: 483) rather than the disciplined ritual of handwriting they are used to in class.

It’s not just the hardware that’s making them feel better about the gestures of writing. The ‘algorithmic paratexts’ (Adams 2016: 492) which ‘work in the background of most text-based software applications’ are also important in increasing children’s feelings of mastery, allowing them to take action on mistakes without the intervention of an adult.

SARA: It does a squiggly line, so you know it’s wrong, then you perfect it. If you do it on a piece of paper on your homework, you don’t even know what to do next.

Ihde (1990) and Verbeek (2005: 114) talk about the ‘inclination’ of technologies ‘that shapes the way they are used’ to ‘promote or evoke a distinct way of writing’. Vladimir, a very reluctant writer in class, tells me how the invitational qualities of the software allow him to build up a long text over time.

VLADIMIR: About revising your work, for example, you’re doing your work, your mother or father says it’s time to finish. You can just finish the paragraph and once you’ve finished the paragraph you can click save and then can sign out close and the next day you can continue it. You can do it day by day by day if you are making a really long wiki like I am.

The online element of the software plays a further role in allowing children to see each other’s work and improve their own.

AISHA: I think it does make writing better. Every time you look at someone else’s work, you might get ideas for your work. You might not want to copy it but write it in your own words.

In the taskscape of the wiki, they told me, they felt like were playing or socialising online.

It doesn’t feel like work – it feels like I’m just talking to my friends online.

There were also material cues, semiotic traces from other spaces which reminded them of online game play or chat, such as the need to log in with their own username and the opportunity to change the icons which represented them.

The physical taskscape of the classroom has material, temporal, and spatial constraints that limit performative accomplishment, in particular the tools and the tyranny of the timetable. The unbounded space for text creation allowed them to ‘be themselves’ as two girls put it, to write texts of their own choice and put across their points of view rather than relying on the teacher to choose them in class. As Andrew Barry notes, digital technology disrupts Foucauldian notions of disciplinary control in educational and other spaces. Barry (2001: 148) points to ‘a degree of play and flexibility between the interactive device and the user’s body. Above all, the use of interactives is not intended to regiment the body, but to turn it into a source of pleasure and experiment.’ By contrast, the bounded space of the classroom deploys disciplinary technologies with a more ‘rigid articulation of bodies and objects’ (Barry 2001: 148), a correct way to sit and use tools such as handwriting pens and pencils and a strict timetable controlled by the teacher as expert authority. In grammatical terms, the offer of the digital invites a different modal verb: ‘You may’ instead of ‘You must’, an invitation rather than a command. In sociomaterial terms, the sensorium of the wiki learning environment, with its imbrication of the digital into writing practices, felt very different for some pupils from their embroilment in institutional physical spaces. The ‘affective vectors’ (Merleau Ponty 2013) they put forth as they played with the keyboard to produce texts on the wiki reminded them of gestures, skills and practices they were already familiar with from home. What Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 7) call a ‘semiotic chain’ is clear, linking practices in different sites, ‘like a tuber agglomerating very diverse acts, not only linguistic, but also perceptive, mimetic, gestural, and cognitive’. In what I’ve talked about so far, the meshwork is working as a metaphor, particularly for some pupils whose paths were meandering off in the classroom, what teachers call ‘off-task’. People and things are in correspondence: lines, pathways and trajectories of the children as wayfarers between home and the wiki are evident in abundance and, crucially, their interaction with the digital is transforming how these pupils experience literacy learning.

When Paths Entwine and Lines Mesh—the Role of Strong Literacy and Poor Pedagogy

If the taskscape of the wiki involved altering the physical spaces in which literacy practices took place, it also involved a revisionary pedagogical approach, potentially altering the relationship between teacher and pupils. Masschelein (2010: 49–50) invites us in critical educational research to consider the benefits of what he calls a ‘poor pedagogy’, one which eschews profits, surveillance, and monitoring in favour of inviting us ‘to go and walk the roads following tracks leading nowhere and which therefore can lead everywhere’. As part of this poor but ‘generous’ pedagogy, we are asked to pay attention, making the most of the time and space we have for experience, as we walk, ‘without a programme’.

This notion of pedagogy which, far from poor, could be conceived of as rich and capacious, chimes with an advocacy of education as leading out (from the Latin educere) rather than training or moulding (educare) (Craft 1984). The pedagogy used in the wiki project was, like the signature pedagogies described by Thompson et al. (2012), about foregrounding the doing and becoming implicit in building up knowledge, (the connaitre rather than the savoir of knowledge) and capturing and fostering ‘tacit knowledge’ (Polanyi 1958) alongside the building up of explicit knowledge in a more linear, hierarchical way in the classroom. The idea was not to replace but to complement the schooled standardised literacy curriculum, adding a more rhizomatic (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) dimension to the vertical model framed by ladders and levels, taking a more holistic approach. Getting away from standardisation did not (and could not) mean ditching standards. What it did mean allowing a negotiated space to emerge that was driven by children’s interests, teasing out the multimodal literacy practices they may already have developed in conjunction with material artefacts they play with at home. This ‘strong’ view of literacy ‘does not come down to text-based decoding/encoding but rather semiotic- engagement in all its evolving complexity’ (Campbell and Olteanu 2023: 17) across time and space. The aim was to create a kind of multimodal translanguaging space (Wei 2018: 22) where pupils draw on a ‘wider repertoire of modal resources’ and codes than is usually allowed in the classroom, a Third Space (Moje 2013; Gutiérrez 2008) where it might be possible to negotiate what counts as knowledge by merging ‘the teacher’s monologic script, one that potentially stifles dialogue and interaction and that reflects dominant cultural values and the students’ counterscripts, formed by those who do not comply with the teacher’s view of appropriate participation’ (Gutierrez et al. 1995: 445).

One of the key motives for creating a Third Space is as a space for reconciliation between oppositional elements (Moje 2013). As Gutiérrez et al. (1995) note, it also enables the safe emergence of the counterscript, the potentially subversive behaviours which demonstrate resistance to the institution. One of the first things that happened on the wiki was that the digital made the counterscript materialise. Here in the Third Space of an online taskscape, pupils could exchange views and ideas away from the direct physical presence and authority of the teacher, as well as being able to interact with the teacher ‘at eye-level so to speak’ (Sørensen 2009: 164). The student counterscript and local knowledge include ‘cultural references to popular music, film, and television’ (Gutiérrez et al. 1995: 451). Following a discussion in class during the pilot study about the press and privacy, Elizabeth, one of the girls often loudly whispering the counterscript in class, started posting in our online taskscape as the popstar Rihanna (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2
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Online post by child (Elizabeth) in role as the singer, Rihanna

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Offline, I was able to acknowledge and discuss this with her. Some time later, when scrolling through posts, I saw that she had started to see the technology as an opportunity to take on the script of the teacher, posting a comment online:

People take learning and school as a joke. They think it’s all about being popular and pretty. But it’s really not. Learning is about having a mind of your own and positive attitude … If you believe that learning is good for you, go to my forum called what learning means to you and write how you feel about learning and what you need to work on.

Thus, practice in this Third Space altered the power balance between what De Certeau (1984) calls the ‘strategies’ of institutions and the ‘tactics’ used by those subjugated in the institutions to navigate their way through the structures of power. The focus on the intransitive implicit in the wayfaring metaphor, with its emphasis on becoming rather than being, allows us to reflect on the generative. In this case, the wiki pedagogy created a Third Space with potential for ‘translanguaging’ (Wei 2018) where lines of different linguistic repertoires, both academic and vernacular, could be harmonised. The digital allowed the ‘counterscript’, what Goffman (1962) called the ‘underlife’ or ‘undercommons’ (Webb 2018; Gourlay 2023), to materialise in this space of strong literacy and poor pedagogy. Some of those disenfranchised in the traditional classroom were then able to ‘tune-in’ and make the transition from stranger to expert in the taskscape of the wiki, becoming ones to deliver teacher-like ‘scripts’ as opposed to scripts of resistance.

For Moje et al. (2004: 43), Third Space is ‘a way to build bridges from knowledges and Discourses often marginalised in school settings to the learning of conventional academic knowledges and Discourses’. However, in this study, the wiki taskspace was also a learning environment where new literacy practices emerged with the technology playing ‘an active role between author and text’ (Verbeek 2005, 115). Three boys, Finlay, Vladimir, Finlay and Amir produced a collaborative narrative based on their online Minecraft gameplay, a different literacy practice from any that the children were engaged in either at school or at home.

When the Trails Go Cold: Taskscapes of the Home as Ecological Niches

I am gathering anecdotes again, interviewing Finlay and his mother at the end of the school day. Finlay tells me how he came up with the idea of a joint Minecraft story.

It was on a day that me, Joe, Vladimir and Amir were really into Minecraft and were talking about it lots. We all have our characters. I decided maybe if we write down an adventure, it could be quite cool, because then we could relate back to that if we are every playing it. It would also help us understand each other’s character a little bit. Then I did think – if we all had separate adventures, it could take quite a while and we might argue. If we do it all from our point of view, on that story, we could really collaborate and it would really work out well.

Finlay and Vladmir, who had been struggling with the gestures of handwriting in the taskscape of the class and becoming increasingly resistant, were starting to thrive. Online, they were developing a lengthy Minecraft narrative which I was noticing and praising.

I asked Finlay’s mother what was happening at home.

He spent a great deal of time and care, beyond what I thought he would ever do, in really building stories and really thinking about his vocabulary and whether things made sense and he would ask me to comment on what he had written in a way he would never do with his handwritten work, because it holds him back—it hinders his real natural storytelling abilities…

Offline in class where I sometimes now allowed them to use laptops for writing, Finlay and Vladimir were meshing themselves back into classroom literacy practices with increased purpose and improved outcomes, as measured by traditional assessment methods. However, the wiki’s role as a transformative space was limited to certain students. I was starting to wonder about Joe and others who weren’t contributing on the wiki at all, those for whom the trail had gone cold.

As we saw earlier, the materiality of both software and hardware was transforming how some pupils experienced writing, as they engaged with the affordances available in the taskscape of the wiki. De Boer (2021) and Rietveld and Kiverstein (2014), building on Ingold’s work on skilled perception (2011), argue that, rather than just seeing affordances as linked to the material design of technology, we need to reconceive them as dependent on both our skills and our ability to exercise those skills in a specific context or niche. They revive Gibson’s idea of the ‘ecological niche’ as a set of affordances ‘available in a particular form of life on the basis of the abilities manifested in its practices—its stable ways of doing thing’ (Rietveld and Kiverstein 2014: 330). In other words, our practices shape and sculpt our respective niches and consequently our uptake of the set of affordances they consist of.

By asking the children to draw pictures of their technology use at home, I was able to visualise the different ecological niches children lived in and understand how the literacy practices in these niches affected the children’s uptake of affordances on the wiki.

Joe, who played Minecraft with the other boys but didn’t take part in the collaborative narrative despite being invited, has access to multiple devices at home (see Fig. 3). Yet the practices around technology in this household revolved round games playing and online shopping. In this ecological niche, Joe’s extensive use of technology notwithstanding, the landscape of affordances does not lead to the same trajectories of literacy practices between home and school as it does in Finlay’s case.

Fig. 3
figure 3

Joe’s drawing of the taskscape of the home

Full size image

As Ingold argues (2011: 155), knowledge ‘is generated within the practices of wayfaring’. His (2000) ‘education of attention’ emphasises ‘sociomaterial scaffolding in skill acquisition’ (Rietveld and Kiverstein 2014: 331). This scaffolding changes the trajectory of some wayfarers: the parents, like Finlay’s mother, who Lareau (2003) called the ‘concerted cultivators’ give their children a headstart along life’s path by encouraging them to develop mastery with digital tools, attuning them to the ‘dynamic coupling of affordances and bodily abilities’ (Zukow-Goldring 2012: 573) and linking this mastery to literacy. By contrast, other parents, like Joe’s mother, who follow a ‘natural growth’ model are less likely to intervene to align their children’s home use of technology with educational goals. In this way, parents have a role in the energy of the meshwork and the interplay of forces conducted along its lines.

Verbeek (2005: 117) argues that ‘technology can only be understood as technology in-order-to’. The ‘in-order-to’ indicates that technologies always and only function in concrete, practical contexts and cannot be technologies apart from such contexts. Ihde calls this ‘multistability’. For Bas de Boer (2021), the introduction of the Gibsonian idea of the ‘ecological niche’ helps explain not just what multistabilities are but how they arise when technology is used. If we see affordances as socially situated, this can explain ‘why certain stabilities of technology use are likely to arise’ (de Boer 2021: 2272). Our uptake of affordances depends first on the ‘landscape of affordances’, that is the particular ecological niche that we are in, and second on our individual ‘field of affordances’ which determines how relevant we perceive those affordances to be for us.

Conclusion: Emplacement in the Postdigital Classroom

This paper looks at what made some students more comfortable than others dwelling in the wiki taskscape. In this taskscape, which was framed by an ‘education of attention’ (Ingold 2000) or what Masschelein (2010) calls ‘poor pedagogy’ to support the transformation of pupils from apprentices to more skilled practitioners of literacy, some pupils took up the affordances to use more comfortable gestures of writing and to express the counterscript as they wove literacy lines between home and school. However, in following the trails that went cold of the pupils who were not able to take up the affordances of the technology as readily as others, we see the need to ask how schools can foster equity in relation to technology. Extending Verbeek’s (2005) and Ihde’s (1990) notion of technology as always related to context, this paper argues that a postdigital ecological view of literacy (strong literacy) involves us understanding the ‘ecological niche’ of each child and hence the possibilities they may have to enact the affordances around them in the different taskscapes, both virtual and physical, that their paths trail through.

Returning to the etymology of ‘dwell’ from the German buan still evident in the English word ‘neighbour’ reveals an additional meaning of caring and cultivating. Thinking of our practices as we dwell with technology in the classroom as akin to cultivating or caring offers new possibilities in the postdigital age. As Rousell (2016: 148) argues, although ‘everyone has a body that “dwells” in an environment of some kind, not everyone feels like they have a home’. He argues that the job of posthumanist educators is to create a sense of ‘emplacement’ i.e., ‘the bundle of social and sensory values contained in the feeling of “home”’ (Howes 2005: 7). Thinking of our role as helping children ‘find their (ecological) niche’ in the taskscape of the postdigital learning environment is a significant move away from the postcolonial practices of surveillance and performance which governments are currently promoting the use of technology in education for. Ingold (2015) in Life of Lines (quoted at the beginning of the article) asks us to use the metaphor of music to describe our lifeworld. In this article, I have argued that, from what I observed in a postdigital literacy class, the idea of us in perfect harmony as we interact with each other and things around us is not always borne out. However, music may still be an apt metaphor for a more optimistic view of education (Baynes 2023; Levitas 2013). For as Levitas (2013: 61 quoting Bloch 1986) argues, music ‘reflects cracks under the social surface’ and in doing so presents us with opportunities for transformation.