Foregrounding the Material Element of Literacy: Investigating Student-Technology Relationships

This article foregrounds the material element of literacy and contributes new perspectives on the roles of technologies in literacy events. Discarding deterministic ideas of linearity between the introduction of technologies and effects, a sociomaterial perspective is adopted to foreground materiality and human-technology relationships. The article investigates how higher education students engage with paper-based, analog technologies, and how students’ relationships with technologies can be understood when viewed from a sociomaterial and postdigital perspective. Three vignettes, each presenting a literacy event, illustrate how students from computer science, engineering, and philosophy respectively engage with paper-based materials and tools. Our analysis, using the postdigital notion of positionalities, shows that students’ relationships with technologies are shaped by their disciplinary and social positionalities, leading to different degrees of cognitive, affective, bodily, and behavioural engagement in and sometimes to disengagement from literacy events. Our conclusion is that the introduction of paper-based materials and tools offers opportunities for reflecting on the role of technologies in literacy practices and that materiality should not be taken for granted when designing for disciplinary academic literacy. Technologies entangle with students’ disciplinary and social positionalities, impacting forms of engagement and forming more-than-human literacy events. These findings point to a need for explicitly considering and discussing positionalities and the co-shaping role of technologies in designs for literacy. For this purpose, we offer a set of reflection questions that teachers can use to support students in identifying their disciplinary, social, and more-than-human positionalities to become aware of how these entangle with technologies in literacy practices.