Assembling the assignment

In the recording of the assignment, we see the ‘digital literacy event’ beginning as a set of instructions for an assignment which is issued by the teacher and elaborated upon extensively in the previous session. The whiteboard display has remained up as the students have their

interim break before the writing workshop. These instructions are then transmitted by means of the teacher’s verbal instructions, her notes on the whiteboard in the lecture preceding the writing session, and the outline of the unit criterion relating to this assignment. The criterion being written about is E6: Show how the child protection policy and procedures in the setting

protect and safeguard the babies (see figure 10).

Figure 10: The unit criteria covered for the CACHE Certificate in Childcare

In the vignette below, taken from the video log of the recording, Sara is asking lots of questions about the assignment. These questions are directed to her immediate classmates primarily, and to the teacher. The questions concern the content of the assignment (the

Children’s Act 1989) and how they relate to the criteria, but her motives for asking are to

ascertain the extent to which this content relates to the content of previous work. This is an important part of her strategies for tackling this assignment task and indicated in the previous vignette, and also here:

A quarter of an hour into the assignment, Sara is discussing its contents a lot, repeating the same question she asked the teacher, to her friends

beside her. There is a lot of guesswork and working out of what is required, as if that too is part of the overall assignment task. She discusses the contents of the legislation e.g. “Children’s Act 1989” with Lauren [the student beside her]. Lauren says that she will “copy and paste” it, “cos it’s our own words anyway, it’s not like we copied from somewhere else…”. The teacher hears this, and walks over to ask if anyone on the table needs any help.

Sara now opens up another previous assignment, one which related to unit 4 (we are now at unit 18), as this contains previous work on the Children’s Act 1989. They are instructed to “not just copy and paste”, and that this criterion only carries 5 marks and that they just need to mention the main legislation acts (e.g. The Children’s Act). This is because Sara and Lauren are not sure how many and which policies, acts etc. they are supposed to write about. The teacher clarifies that it is the ‘settings’ which dictate this, i.e. where they have worked before or done their work placement.

Nevertheless there is some sort of an understanding between Sara and Lauren that they have discovered a ‘short-cut’ method of getting the assignment done. This leads to a swift movement between files already open in different windows on her laptop, judiciously stored previous work through Sara’s meticulous and personal digital archiving allows her to open her files, move between them, and inter-weave the contents of a previous assignment into the current file. She does this whilst discussing ‘henna’ styles with Lauren.

She stops typing, and pauses upon mentioning the ‘six areas of development’ of the ‘EYFS’ (Early Years Foundations Stage), and then refers to Google.

Previous work serves an important role for Sara throughout writing this assignment, and we can draw on the notion of ‘collateral realities’ too better understand this. Sara draws on practices from a previous time, a different place and with a different intention – and their collateral realities; these realities also extend beyond the immediate temporal domain of her present, and into the past as she mobilises previous work into purposeful (re)use here. When

she considers how to approach the assignment and to understand what is expected of her, she thinks back and refers to the regulations and patterns that have informed her previous work – her previous assignment. This provides Sara with validation of how to work in the present: outlining the font to be used, stylistic considerations (headings, title, etc.), the appropriate style and the length of the piece.

Figure 11: A classroom display reminds learners how issues such as identity, disability, etc. interface with work in childcare

This is something which occurs throughout the writing of the assignment, as Sara relies on her documents of previous work carefully organised and archived on her pen drive. Issues related to policies, disability, identity, etc. are recurring themes in this kind of work (see figure 11) and have emerged repeatedly in previous work. These topics are displayed on the board to remind learners of how they interface with the work of childcare. Previously written content related to these recurring themes is often retained in past assignments meticulously kept by Sara, and mobilised into action in this digital literacy event. The life of one literacy event, therefore, segues into another. This is, as she testifies later in the interview, a type of rehearsed behaviour, and part of her writing tactics. She is drawing on realities beyond her immediate practice, by informing her present situation with her own experience of acceptable prior

practices, extending the digital literacy event though temporal domains. This practice of drawing on previous work as a validation occurred throughout the writing of the assignment, and is further substantiated when she is asked about it in the interview. We were watching the recording as we spoke:

Ibrar: Did you get stuff from a previous assignment?

Sara: First when I started writing I was just blank coz the way she was

explaining, like, you need to include different settings and that.

Ibrar: Ok

Sara: But later on when I looked into it and then when I looked back on

the work then I clicked on that and knew what to do coz I’d done it previously.

Ibrar: So you knew something about this topic but you needed to get some

background?

Sara: Yeah …

Ibrar: How else did you get that background, from Google? Sara: Yeah

Ibrar: Did you have an outline in your head of how you’re going to do it?

... Or did it just slightly develop?

Sara: Just slightly developed as I went on ...

As Law (2012) notes, both the act of note-taking, giving a talk, and writing down a version of that talk create and describe different “putative realities”: the reality of ‘the assignment’ as understood and created by the teacher; the simplified version on the whiteboard which creates a new reality through the exclusion of a number of elements; and the reality of the reinterpretation, which exists and evolves on Sara’s screen. Each retransmission of the idea, by what it includes and excludes about the task, and how the task relates to the end purpose

of aim of meeting criterion E6 for the assignment, are enacting multiple versions of what, if we approached the matter from a representationalist perspective, appear to be the same (or a singular) thing, i.e. the doing of the assignment. Yet, all of these elements are actor-networks informing and creating their own collateral realities which are, in turn, combining and working with the other elements (actor-networks) of the classroom, and instantiated by a range of digital literacy practices. I will return to how my analysis is illuminated by non- representationalist thought in later parts of the thesis (Chapter 7).

Fifteen minutes into the session, Sara is still considering ways of how to integrate the contents of previous assignment/s into the current one. She opens a group of files and, as a tactic, scrolls through them discussing with Lauren what particular aspects of the previous files (on ‘legislation’ and ‘policies and practices’) relate to the work that needs to be done, and which aspects do not, and the amount of marks allocated. The requirements of the current assignment, at this stage, are being negotiated with the criterion, previous criteria, a previous assignment, Sara and Lauren’s prior knowledge, and guesswork between all of these elements.

Immediately prior to this Sara was busy figuring out what is required of her and asking the teacher and her immediate peer (Lauren). There is an obvious task here to be completed: an assignment. But there remain a multitude of other subsidiary tasks contained within it: to search the Web for certain Children’s Act policies, to synthesise the way these policies have been implemented in the ‘setting’ (where Sara did her placement), etc. Some of this is guesswork.

Guesswork of various sorts remains a constant theme during this process. Sara’s guessing what the teacher’s instructions entail for her, to guess what the teacher interprets from the criteria, and guessing how her setting would implement the legislation. Perhaps the teacher is

also guessing in how the assessment criteria should be addressed in her envisaged reality of the assignment, and how it is to be written (based on her previous experience). Perhaps the writers of the criteria also made guesses about the kinds of things to include in their assessment of this specialist vocational area.

Nevertheless, for Sara, to ‘copy and paste’ (i.e. from previous assignments) then becomes a suggested strategy from the student sitting next to her (Lauren). The tactics emerging therefore are both explicitly stated (such as the teacher’s instruction to Web search) and also implicit and muttered under the breath of Lauren (“just copy and paste …. cos it’s our own words anyway”).