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In England, several developments combine in powerful ways to sustain certain ideas about literacy and research in education. These include the promotion of a specific model of 'evidence-based practice', frameworks for initial teacher education and early career professional development, and a strong accountability framework via inspection. However, as we illustrate through examples of activity on Twitter, to suggest that such ideas are all pervasive is to ignore other, less predictable, ways in which research circulates. Teachers, researchers and others working in literacy education, combined with the work of digital actors, assist the movement of ideas in sometimes unpredictable and even exciting ways. We argue that, if we are to understand how teachers encounter research, we need a better understanding of how research moves. We suggest that such movements are produced through shifting assemblages of human and non-human actors that combine to mobilise literacy research evidence differently and to varying degrees. This, we propose, calls for a new focus on what we call 'research mobilities' in primary literacy research.

Against the background of a data-driven education system that has detrimental effects on teachers' personal and professional lives, we report on an exploratory project in which seven primary teachers in England shared experiences of literacy teaching through generating 'small' data visualised on postcards. Thematic analysis of their data-sharing discussions identified three purposes for which they used data: demonstrating to others; reflection on practice; reviewing professional lives. We propose that the project worked -- albeit temporarily -- to recalibrate teachers' relations with data, foregrounding relational, embodied and ethical dimensions of teaching, and argue for the professional importance of open-ended, teacher-led data engagements.

Whilst there is plenty of debate on the nature and role of data in social science research, data in schools tend to be understood in terms of numbers and used in limited ways linked primarily to attainment. The 'datafication' of schooling has been strongly critiqued for its powerful impacts on policy and practice, pupils' experience, the curriculum, teaching and learning, and--as is particularly relevant to this article--teachers' professional and personal lives. There is a need therefore to expand what counts as data in schools, to think creatively about how data are communicated, and to consider what data do when inserted differently into professional dialogue. In exploring such possibilities and speaking to the field of critical data studies, this article reports on a project that set out to 'do data differently' by inviting teachers to create, visualise and share their own data on what mattered to them in their everyday literacy teaching using a postcard format. Characteristics of teachers' response to this project are explored, linked to: impressionism, imperfection and subjectivity in data collection; complexity and opacity of visualisation; and professional discussion as drift. Rooted in a sociomaterial perspective and drawing on Latour's ideas about immutable mobiles, it is argued that shifting the focus, visualisation and sharing of data can have 'complicating effects' which--through foregrounding the instability and partiality of data--can produce generative spaces for teachers' professional dialogue.

Existing work on literacy and affect has posed important questions for how we think about meanings and how and where they get made. The authors contribute to such work by focusing on the relation between text and affect. This is a topic that has received insufficient attention in recent work but is of pressing concern for education as text interweaves in new ways with human activity, through social media, surveillance capitalism, and artificial intelligence--ways that can be unpredictable and poorly understood. Adopting a sociomaterial sensibility that foregrounds the relations between bodies (people and things), the authors provide conceptual tools for considering how texts affect and are affected by the heterogeneous entanglements from which they emerge. In situating their argument, the authors outline influential readings of Spinoza's theories of affect, explore how these have been mobilized in literacy research, and identify how text has been accommodated within such research. Using texts from a political episode in the United Kingdom, the authors explore the idea of social-material-textual affects to articulate relations among humans, nonhumans, meaning making, and literacies. The authors conclude by identifying four ways in which text participates in what happens, raising questions about how different materializations of text (or indeed "not text") are significant to the diversifying communicative practices that inflect social, cultural, economic, and political life.

Since the 1990s, there have been repeated calls for the systematic use of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) to inform educational decision-making. The advent of the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) -- described as England's What Works Centre for Education -- in 2011 has made this a reality in England: by 2020, over a third of English schools were involved in such trials. Despite much debate about the value and role of RCTs, less attention has been paid to one specific effect of such trials, a phenomenon we refer to as interventionisation. This article uses two examples, focused on language and literacy education and teacher professional development, to demonstrate how increased use of trials may work to 'interventionise' education through channelling the focus of innovation and development to tightly structured interventions and generating a series of narrowing effects. It argues that a broad view of research and a diversity of methodologies is needed not only to generate rich understandings of educational practice but to develop and sustain educational provision that is fit for a dynamic world and which responds to the challenges and opportunities presented in complex educational contexts.

For many young children in developed countries, family and community life is mediated by digital technology. Despite this, for early years educators, the process of integrating digital technologies into classroom practice raises a number of issues and tensions. In an attempt to gain insights from early years teachers, we draw from semi-structured interview data from ten practising teachers which explored their perspectives on digital technologies within their personal and professional lives, and of children's use of digital technologies within and outside educational settings. Our analysis builds on previous work that suggests that teachers draw on multiple discourses related to conceptualisations of childhood when thinking about digital technology and young children. In this paper we contribute to these discussions, drawing specifically on examples from the data where teachers articulate their understandings of children's use of digital technology where this relates directly to children's literacy practices. We assert that narrow conceptualized notions of literacy, compounded by national imperatives to raise print literacy standards, add another layer of discursive complexity that comes to the fore when teachers are asked to provide a rationale for the promotion of digital literacies in early years classrooms. A broader framing of literacy therefore, is needed if the potential of digital technologies in the early years is to be realized.

This article uses a sociomaterial perspective to explore how deficit views of young children's language and literacy are sustained and can be challenged. Foregrounding the notion of multiplicity, it considers how diverse sociomaterial relations work to uphold particular kinds of practice and particular arrangements of bodies and things over others. These relations may interfere with and interface with each other in different ways, sometimes sustaining but also potentially disrupting deficit discourses and practices. Our sociomaterial perspective is illustrated with a short vignette from a study of children and touchscreen tablets in an early years setting. An initial analysis is followed by a series of alternate and tentative tracings of other kinds of relations that play through those moments. The article contributes to debates about social inequality by troubling the certainties generated though deficit models of children's literacy, whilst working proactively to envision and produce alternate possibilities that foreground the potentialities generated as people and other materials assemble together.

This conceptual article examines how ready-made assumptions about literacy both frame and limit understandings of new communicative practices in educational contexts. Proposing a tripartite heuristic that interrogates the appearance of literacy in terms of emergence, semblance and performance, it uses stories from a study of touchscreen tablets in one early years setting to illustrate the social-material arrangements associated with moments when tablets became texts to be looked at, shared or made. The authors argue that a sociomaterial sensibility can not only sensitise researchers to new communicative practices, but also to the ways in which sociomaterial arrangements help to construct habits of noticing often active in accounts of literacy practice and research. It is their contention that exploring the relations between emergence, semblance and performance is particularly valuable at a time when conceptualisations of literacy are being challenged in response to diversifying communicative practices.

Research in New Literacy Studies has demonstrated how literacy consists of multiple socially and culturally situated practices illuminated through a focus on literacy events. Recently, this sociocultural perspective has been complemented by relational thinking that views literacy as an ongoing reassembling of the human and more-than-human. This conceptual article proposes that, in exploring how relational thinking might be deployed in literacy research and practice, it is helpful to revisit conceptualisations of literacy events. Specifically it proposes the notion of 'literacy-as-event' as a heuristic for thinking with the fluid and elusive nature of meaning-making, elaborating on three propositions: (1) event is generated as people and things come into relation; (2) what happens always exceeds what can be conceived and perceived; and (3) implicit in the event are multiple potentialities. Approaching literacy research through engaging with literacy-as-event promotes an expansive, reflective, and imaginative engagement with literacy practices that aligns with relational thinking.

Touch screen tablets are now widely available and due to the increasing use of these technologies in homes and early years centres, it is important to consider parent and teacher views about their use. This paper reports on an interview study which explored the perspectives of four parents of children aged 20-36 months and their two teachers in one early learning centre in the north of England. Key findings were that parents and teachers had a positive perspective on young children's use of tablets and viewed them as educationally valuable. They expressed that they did not wish children to be left behind in learning about new technologies and emphasized having a 'balanced' approach to tablets. However, there were also concerns voiced over the potential overuse and misuse of tablets at home suggesting more guidance for parents is needed to support young children's experiences with tablets.

While it is commonplace to argue that technology integration in educational contexts should be pedagogically appropriate, in some contexts, the notion of "appropriate" integration can be slippery. This is the case in the context of educational theatre, which builds on the experience of "liveness" and of being together in a shared space. In this article we report on a collaborative qualitative study of one iteration of a participatory theatre programme delivered to 7-9 year olds at a primary school in England, through which artist/practitioners worked with researchers to investigate the integration of iPads in ways that were appropriate to the programme's underpinning pedagogy. Drawing on a sociomaterial analysis of what happened moment to moment in practice, we describe three aspects of the experience that appeared to amplify, shift and/or dissipate as iPads came into play, particularly with respect to the iPad's video function: narrative complexity; multiplicity; and togetherness. Considering these in relation to the programme's established principles and practices, we argue that part of "appropriateness" in this context involves responding to the unexpected pedagogical possibilities that open out as digital technologies combine with other people and things.

In an age of environmental crisis, financial instability, widespread migration, and political extremism, the case for critical literacy is pressing. Navigating criticality in the digital age, however, is challenging, not least because digital media, digital devices, and digital architectures are implicated in broader social, cultural, commercial, and political activity. Critical literacy in this context needs to do more than focus on the significance of texts within networks of humans. The authors developed a model designed to support a relational approach to critical literacy, drawing on a sociomaterial perspective to consider how broader social-material networks help generate meanings that may amplify, undermine, or contradict the activities of individuals and groups. The authors end with questions that provide a starting point for broadening the scope of critical literacy in education to reflect on relationships among people, texts, and materials across time and spaces.

Existing research on the use of technology in participatory theatre in education has paid little attention to the moment-to-moment unfolding that characterises the liveliness at the heart of such practice. In this conceptual article, we show how a sociomaterialist perspective can illuminate the contingent co-emergence of people, things and technologies that produces this liveliness of events. Perspectives drawn from actor-network theory are used to illuminate one example of the integration of technology in participatory theatre in an educational context. The concepts of mutability, disruption, maintenance, potentialities and multiplicities are developed as an explanatory framework for future research and practice in these and similar forms of educational activity.

In this paper we look at what the critical tradition in education has to offer to the phenomenon of social media. Through an overview and evaluation of the approaches advocated by practitioners of critical literacy and critical media literacy, we illustrate the limitations of applying these frameworks to the fluid and densely interwoven spaces of social media. In particular we focus on the problematic nature of textual analysis and textual production as foundations for a critique of new media. By proposing a conceptual model that maps the inter-relationship between practice, identity and networks, we make a new contribution to the field, suggesting that this approach may provide a more fruitful analytical tool for educators. Drawing on the work of Greenhow and Robelia (2009), and particularly their notion of advantageous practice, we work towards a model for enabling children and young people to move from a consideration of what they do through social media to a view of what they might do. We suggest that this may be a more fruitful way of approaching social media, but one which remains faithful to the overall project of the critical tradition. (Contains 3 figures.)

Discourses of reading for pleasure have seldom addressed the multiple and complex digital media practices of children and young people or the changing nature of literacy. This article explores the affective encounters that are generated in the relations between readers, digital texts and things by applying Bennett's notion of enchantment. Using examples of everyday literacies, it considers the diversity of ways in which such encounters manifest, noting how such practices are located within intersecting continua ranging from immersive to lightweight, sustained to ephemeral, individual to collective, serious to flippant and from momentary hilarity to deep engagement. The article outlines some implications of enchantment for thinking about reading for pleasure in education focusing on the importance of potentiality and relationality.

At a time of increasing calls from policy makers for the use of "hard evidence" in driving decision-making at national and local levels in educational contexts, this article contributes to debates about evidence-based practice in early literacy research. It proposes that a reliance on studies designed to generate 'hard' evidence limits understanding about innovations and interventions, arguing that such reliance is not just problematic because interventions and innovations are interpreted differently in diverse sites, or because programmes need to be locally relevant, but because they are "constituted differently through different evaluation studies." The article draws on Law's notion of "method assemblage" to consider how different studies produce different assemblages that have implications for how innovations are conceived. These ideas are exemplified using studies scrutinised through a systematic literature review of one kind of literacy intervention, early years book-gifting, which aims to promote book-sharing in the home. The discussion focuses specifically on how books as mediating objects are instantiated in various ways through different studies, with different implications for how book-sharing, book-gifting and, ultimately, reading are understood. When considered together, these studies construct book-gifting in multiple ways, problematising and complicating the causal relations assumed in methodologies driving for "hard" evidence. Drawing on the book-gifting example, this article explores what might be gained by embracing "multiplicities", the multiple ways in which things--such as objects, activities, principles and indeed literacy interventions--are constituted through method assemblage. It argues that literacy evaluations can best serve children and their families, and the organisations, agencies and groups working alongside them, by seeking fluid, open and "generous" accounts of innovations and interventions. Such accounts, it is argued, are more likely to acknowledge the complex relationships and practices associated with early literacy and to generate new understandings and productive possibilities for early literacy learning.

Digital literacies abound in playing a foundational role in the rhythm and pattern of our lives, yet debates continue about how to harness them to teach and learn literacy. In an effort to humanize digital literacies, this department column offers a vast array of topics, from participatory work that pushes educators and researchers to communicate in local and global spaces to ways of redefining core reading and literacy skills through a screen-based, multimodal logic. This column also provides a venue for research and practical applications that depict technology use as a part of the fabric of being human. The column helps educators reconceptualize the ways that children learn with technology, media, and new communication systems; honors educator success stories and burning questions and issues; and reimagines literacy futures.