“It’s a Black Hole . . .”: Exploring Teachers’ Narratives and Practices for Digital Literacies in the Adult EAL Context

Deficit Discourse and Learning Assets

In many contexts, people from refugee and migrant backgrounds are perceived and positioned by policy, public media, and research as deficient. This perspective, and its ensuing destructive consequences, has been problematized by some scholars who argue that this deficit discourse focuses too much on what learners lack and cannot do (Ryu & Tuvilla, 2018; Shapiro & MacDonald, 2017). In Australia, as evidenced in national and state curriculum frameworks, there has been a shift to a more inclusive stance (e.g., from English as a Second Language to English as an Additional Language). Nevertheless, the pervasiveness of the deficit discourse is still apparent in policy and practice and continues to sustain long-held stereotypes that affect teaching and learning. According to Roy and Roxas (2011), many deficit practices have their roots in “common sense notions” (p. 521), established attitudes, and “unconscious discursive practices” (p. 522) that have become normalized in use by the majority of educators. Hence, the lack of awareness and “invisibility” of these practices makes them difficult to address and change.

Tuck (2009) highlighted how even research promoting social justice can be “damage-centred” because it “reinforces and reinscribes a one-dimensional notion of these people as depleted, ruined, and hopeless” (p. 409). The same discourses often become embedded in programs (Baldridge, 2014). According to Ryu and Tuvilla (2018), “while with good intentions, these practices inadvertently perpetuate the idea that refugees are helpless victims who need extra help” (p. 541). Furthermore, Baldridge (2014) illustrated how educators were often caught in a dilemma because access to funding is contingent on engaging with and, to some extent, subscribing to the dominant discourse about learners.

We are mindful that even by discussing and critiquing the dominant deficit discourse we are bringing attention to it and, therefore, potentially reinforcing it (Lakoff, 2010). The challenge is to step outside taken-for-granted deficit discourses and to appreciate learners’ needs without falling into deficit thinking (Benseman, 2014; Roy & Roxas, 2011). Vella (1994) emphasized the importance of a genuine “listening effort” (p. 6) to solicit learners’ personal and material resources that they bring to learning. This perspective aligns with other scholars’ work who suggested that deliberately searching for strengths, assets, and resources, rather than perceived deficits, is more beneficial (Ryu & Tuvilla, 2018; Shapiro & MacDonald, 2017). If it is the adult learners who articulate what they have, know, and can do, then they are afforded agency and, thus, bring their own resources, concerns, and needs into decision making that shapes teaching and learning.

Principles of strength-based pedagogy have long been discussed in the literature (Gramsci, 1999; Rettew & Lopez, 2009). Sanguinetti et al. (2005) proposed a framework outlining principles for ACE pedagogy, many of which reflect a strengths-based approach and a focus on the efficacy of negotiation. Thus, one of the principles that is especially orientated to strength and enhancing agency is “sharing power-empowering people and communities” (p. 278). The authors focused on the importance of empowerment for all stakeholders built on negotiation and an articulation of need.

Digital Literacies in Adult Language Learning

Research exploring teachers’ work with digital literacies in the adult language learning sector is scarce. Nevertheless, existing literature suggests a relative diversity of digital technologies being used in language programs for adults from refugee and migrant backgrounds. For example, van Rensburg and Son (2010) explored the use of desktop computers, online games, images found online, and word processing tools. Pearson (2011) researched the potential of mobile phone-based language learning for migrant families. Cowans (2018) reported the use of virtual reality and Google Expeditions.

While research reported that teachers used different digital technologies in language classrooms for different purposes, only one study on teaching some aspects of digital literacies in the adult language learning context was identified. Van Rensburg and Son (2010) explored how computers were used to improve the participants’ English language skills alongside with teaching “basic computer literacy skills” (p. 72). Through different language activities, the teachers introduced basic computer terminology, explained some functions of the devices, introduced the Internet, and taught simple word processing techniques. This research did not explore teachers’ experiences and perspectives, but it recognized that learning with and about technologies was not always easy for adult learners.

This suggests that teaching digital literacies may be difficult too. Smyser (2019) points out that teachers often have little or no training in how to teach digital literacies; while McClanahan (2014) argued that language teachers and program managers have concerns that technology integration will face many complexities due to the deficit assumptions that they have about adult learners from refugee and migrant backgrounds. Through consideration of our research questions, we aim to contribute new knowledge on teachers’ perspectives and practices associated with teaching digital literacies in the adult EAL sector.

Sociomaterial Theory

The perspective of sociomaterial theory is used as a lens in this research design for understanding the interconnections between the various materialities, including digital technologies, and teachers’ practices within the organization. We conceive of sociomaterial theory as being about the complex connections of agency, meaning, and action that cross the social and material worlds (including all forms of technology) and emerge fluidly within institutional settings and everyday life (Orlikowski, 2010). One of the core concerns of sociomaterial theory is that materiality needs to be acknowledged as an integral part of all spaces and networks in which people interact. Furthermore, these interactions are often contingent on the spatial designs in which material objects and people intermingle (Cruickshank & Trivedi, 2017). Such spaces might also be virtual and contain elements that replicate the physical world. Our understanding of sociomaterial theory is thus especially oriented to (but not limited to) the technological.

In terms of the place of technologies as complex materialities in juxtaposition to human activity, Barad (2007) suggests that technologies are relationally fundamental to and have agency within both social and institutional processes and are pivotal to the formation of meaning for people that includes affective engagement. Technologies also engender assemblages of different sociomaterialities that emerge from their ontological features and design characteristics. Importantly, technologies have agential power that affects how humans think and behave. Thus, technologies are integral to the materiality of living and critical to the ways that people construct the world and develop personal agency in the process of generating knowledge (Orlikowski & Scott, 2008). The material interacts in multiple ways with the agency of people in institutional contexts. Indeed, as Fenwick and Edwards (2013) argue: “Research influenced by sociomateriality adopts the notion of many worlds, and multiple ontologies, enacted through the different forms of material assemblings” (p. 54).

The core dimensions of sociomaterial theory are schematized in Figure 1 where the material is positioned agentially as an important part of and having substantial power within the interactions of all the other dimensions ontologically.

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Figure 1.

Dimensions of sociomaterial theory.

At the center of the diagram are the complex assemblages and multiplicities that emerge from a set of agencies that operate within an institutional setting. This representation also suggests that an array of meanings is formed in the fluid interactions and confluence of people with the material content of their worlds, including the tools and technologies they employ, bodily movements and haptic engagement, human actions, and the interconnections of objects, texts, discourses. The central notion is the often unrecognized but pivotal agencies of the material with human agency (Fenwick et al., 2011). Some of these entanglements between humans and the material (including the technological) can be unpredictable and lead to unexpected outcomes, which might even be deleterious (Hodder, 2014).

Sociomaterial theory has particular significance for understanding technology use in education. Technologies have tangible effects on the humans who engage with them (in affective flow, in shaping choices, and in being instrumental in sociomaterial assemblages). The potential agency of technologies also shapes how they are deployed and used in innovative ways in teaching and learning. Digital literacies might be viewed as an outcome of the purposeful interaction between human agencies and technological agencies. The theory also has the potential to help understand the complex intersectionalities of the human, the social and the material (including the virtual) in terms of the institutional outcomes and productivity. Materiality, thus, cannot be separated from all the outcomes of an organization, including the ones that are positive, strength-based, and effective.

Institutional Ethnography

In conducting the 6-month ethnographic study reported in this article, we employed an institutional ethnographic approach, centering on Dorothy Smith’s (2005) ideas about the explicit and implicit professional relationships within an institution. According to Smith, there is a positive correlation between the interactions of individuals within an organization and the effectiveness of that organization in meeting its goals. Kearney et al. (2019) describe Smith’s approach this way: “Institutional ethnography orients to exploring and explicating the social relations that organize . . . experience in the institutional setting or settings in which they exist” (p. 18). Core to Smith’s (2005) rendering of institutional ethnography is a focus on what is experienced by individuals within the institution, what is done practically, and the efficacy of the professional relationships that afford or constrain practice and collegiality, thus bringing attention to the operation of power.

Institutional ethnography is positioned as the larger methodological position of this study as a whole. In this article, sociomaterial theory is used to understand the agential interactions between the material and the human within an institutional context, bringing an alternate perspective alongside the human-to-human interactions that are emphasized in institutional ethnography. Given the focus of this article on digital literacies and the importance of engaging with digital devices in teaching and learning, this attention to materiality is justified, even though there are evident differences of analytic focus between sociomaterial theory and institutional ethnography.

Research Context and Participants

The study was conducted in one ACE provider operating under the Adult Migrant English Program–Langfield. It is a registered government-funded multisite provider of English and employment programs for adult learners in several different locations in Melbourne. At the time when the study was conducted, Langfield catered for 200 learners whose age ranged from the early 20s to 80s. They mainly came from Vietnam, China, Thailand, Somali, Ethiopia, and South Sudan. The majority of Langfield learners were not employed at the time of the reported research and lived in social housing estates. They were no longer homeless or stateless and were building cultural and language foundations for the future. Many learners had little or interrupted schooling – yet despite difficult histories, they remained committed to education. Some could not read and write in their home languages, but they embodied important cultural and linguistic understandings that may richly inform learning, including the development of their digital literacies.

The Langfield chief executive officer (CEO), 20 adult learners, and six EAL teachers volunteered to participate in the study: Kate, Andrea, Susan, Polly, Tanya, Nicole (pseudonyms). As a Vietnamese-Australian Nicole was bilingual; the others were monolingual, of Caucasian heritage. Across its sites, Langfield had two dedicated computer rooms, several sets of iPads, as well as projectors and teachers’ laptops in some classrooms. There was a specific learning program at Langfield—Techno-Tuesday (pseudonym)—initiated and led by three teachers (Tanya, Nicole, and Polly). The program focused on digital literacies and was delivered on a weekly basis. It was based on a rotating model: three teachers simultaneously led 30-minute sessions each focusing on a particular digital practice. These sessions typically involved and were centered on mobile phones, iPads, and desktop computers. The learners split into three groups and rotated from one session to another, which allowed them to practice different digital literacy capabilities with a range of devices.

Methods and Data Analysis

This ethnographic study relied on triangulated qualitative data collection methods (Merriam & Tisdell, 2015) to understand different interactions and practices with and about digital technologies within Langfield. Data collection methods included individual interviews with the teachers (six in total), an interview and a guided tour of the facilities with the CEO, one focus group with five of the teachers, two focus groups with adult learners (four participants per group), photographing of teaching and administrative spaces at Langfield, collecting artefacts, and six extended video-recorded observations of class teaching, followed up by additional reflective interviews with the teachers. Due to the focus of the article, we mainly use data from the teachers and the CEO in the findings.

Brooks’s (2015) approach to coding and identifying themes in qualitative data was used in this research. The data analysis in the study included the identification of emergent themes grounded in sociomaterial theory. This theory is applied contextually and holistically to tease out the relationships between the material, social, personal, and institutional world in intersectionality, rather than being a demonstrative set of static categories for analysis. The use of a priori codes, based on the sociomaterial theory (Figure 1) and an inductive iterative process of reading and understanding the data facilitated the development of several categories which later, through refining and revision, were merged into themes. Using collaboratively generated codes, the researchers coded the data separately before comparing their categories and themes. Discussion of discrepancies in analysis occurred until a consensus about important themes was reached. This article focuses on one of those themes—inconsistency between teachers’ assumptions about students and their grounded practices with a range of digital technologies.

Teachers’ Assumptions About Learners’ Digital Literacies

Referring to Langfield learners, the CEO and participating teachers often identified their English proficiency levels using terms “low level” and “illiterate.” The CEO said: “We’re also working with low level, you know, beginner level adults, especially those with low literacy because they are quite difficult; it’s a difficult cohort to teach.”

Similar comments were made by the teachers about their learners’ capacity to use technologies and engage in digital literacy practices in both everyday life and learning at Langfield. Nicole explained: “The level is too low. Actually, it’s really hard to think of something else except for typing and using the mouse and creating the folder.” Andrea shared similar concerns: “Some of them don’t know how to turn on the computer. Some don’t know how to turn off the computer. Very few of them know how to use the keyboard . . . They find it difficult.” The data contain language that suggests a deficit discourse and negative assumptions about learners’ literacies and capacities to utilize digital technologies as material provisions for learning. The teachers’ frequent use of the word “low” and focus on gaps in learners’ capacities to engage with technologies, are especially illustrative of such thinking. Such perspectives tend to be normative and broadly representative of the discourse about adult learners from refugee and migrant backgrounds. Ironically, in conventional policy terms, these “deficits” are the reason for the program’s existence in the first place.

There was another discourse evident in the data. Most teachers were aware of the learners’ life circumstances and they empathized with their learners:

They’re [adult learners] often intimidated by their own children in that their children don’t want them to speak English because their English isn’t very good, and so they feel disempowered a lot at home. When they come here, I’d like to think that if I could give them the skill . . . that empowers them a little bit. They can take that skill home and they might feel a little empowered . . . I love to see them empowered. (Andrea)

Empathy for, and even apprehension about, their learners was emphatic in what the teachers shared. They thought that learners’ lives were complex, and they hoped that learning at Langfield could improve their life prospects. The empathy and aspirations were well-intentioned, but they were still based on perceptions of what the learners lacked, rather than their resourcefulness, resilience, and capacity for transformation. The teachers tended to view their learners as victims who needed help.

While they believed that agency is a key to better lives, Andrea and other teachers conceptualized it as “giving students a skill” rather than framing it around learners’ capacities for agency, voice, and decision making within the instructional context, especially in recognizing the power of technologies to forge with human agency effective assemblages for learning. The complex phenomenon of displaced people transitioning into a new society clearly involves a range of contextual adaptations; and, in terms of the perspective of sociomaterial theory, adaptations with regard to what technologies can provide is a critical substrate to their learning for a digital world.

Strength-Based Approaches to Digital Literacies

Although teachers’ perspectives on their learners often focused on what they lack and need, some teaching practices observed in the study seemed to be effectively informed by strength-based principles. During the interview, Tanya shared one example. Her class discussed their weekend and then, building on this positive discussion, students created digital texts about the weekend activities. Similarly, Nicole described how the focus of Techno-Tuesday classes was often planned in her case: “Okay, what we did this morning? So in the afternoon in the computer room they can just type it.” Nicole further elaborated that if there was a focus on particular vocabulary, then the activities in the Techno-Tuesday class were also centered around this vocabulary intersecting with learning about technologies.

Indeed, we observed this integrated approach during her class that included centralizing the agency of the devices in the learning. The devices tended to direct the learning. Sitting in the circle, the learners used their personal mobile phones to engage with the app that allowed them to video record their pronunciation practice and then playback. The affordances of these devices for this task became centralized in the pedagogical frame of the lesson and its twofold focus. First, the learners practiced pronunciation to achieve better intelligibility—something the class learned before. Second, they also learnt how to video record, which was new to them as Nicole explained: “I think most of the time they just take pictures, but they don’t really use the video recording . . . I think that they learned how to do the recording.”

In this example, the assemblage of the affordances of the mobile device with the learners’ affective engagement enabled the integration of a digital literacy practice into language learning. When teaching digital literacies, the teachers often drew on learners’ previous experiences. For example, Nicole organized the activities with video recording considering what learners could already do with technology (e.g., take photos). As we observed, she used learners’ existing haptic input skills, their prior knowledge of the apps, and pronunciation practices (completed in previous classes) as a starting point in the video recording activities. In sum, the materiality of the mobile phones and their agential impact on the learners (as recording devices) in complex interplay with human learning was integral to the learning phenomenon that emerged.

Tanya’s and Nicole’s examples also suggest that to scaffold learning they focused on what their learners were familiar with in their material and social worlds and used the intersections between the two as a resource for teaching digital literacies. This means that their teaching practices were implicitly informed by a strength-based principle of learning from learners’ prior knowledge, experience, and familiarity with the mobile devices that are in constant interplay in their lives beyond the institutional context. Another strength-based principle was evident in this work. Learning was largely experiential and collaborative. It drew on the multiplicity of learners' intersubjectivities, together with affective engagement with technologies and social interactions within the physical setting of the learning spaces.

Building from strengths and offering experiential learning worked well. We observed that the learners were able to use video recording independently and confidently to practice pronunciation skills. There was a complex interconnection of a human learning act with the material provisions that supported that act. The larger material dimension—the classroom physical space constructed by Nicole for this class and the use of learners’ personal (and thus, familiar) devices—also seemed to contribute agentially to this successful learning in directing how learners were able to move in the space in interaction with each other. This approach also allowed Nicole to integrate some aspects of digital literacies almost seamlessly into language learning, such that technologies were integral, not peripheral, to learning experiences and to the social engagements in situ. The technologies in the space had a generative function in learning that appeared to transcend even what the teacher provided.

Another pertinent example of strength-based pedagogy was observed in Susan’s class. The learners used iPads to access interactive digital books that were specifically commissioned by Langfield for its learners. After the class, Susan said,

Our students have been very keen to use these stories . . . So we’d have a story featuring one of our Somali students. We also have a family who is a Vietnamese family who are going shopping . . . So, we’re hoping that our students can open these stories and the environment looks familiar. But also, the people look familiar and they’re going about their everyday lives and doing things that they would ordinarily do. They also are very engaged with them because they’re actually quite autonomous in their use [of the book]. They have control over it so they’re able to go back over words that they can’t pronounce, or they’re trying to pronounce and need support with.

These digital books featured content and targeted language that were relevant to adult English learners living in Australia (e.g., medical appointments, contacting a child’s school, daily routines, etc.). The books had a significant focus on English language, but they also provided an opportunity to learn how to interact with digital texts as material objects. They evoked language learning and meaning creation apart from the teacher’s pedagogical input in class time, suggesting the extent to which the technology shifted agential focus in learning. Susan’s work also demonstrated a number of strength-based principles. In particular, these books were contextualized around everyday social and institutional language practices reflecting learners’ unique social and material worlds. This helped make their learning meaningful. Figure 2 captures Susan showing a hard copy of the book at the beginning of the lesson before learners accessed an interactive digital version on iPads. This book features one of the Langfield learners present in this class.

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Figure 2.

Susan’s class with interactive books.

The photograph captures the participants smiling and laughing as they see their peer as a book character. Tapping into learners’ identities and affective flow helped Susan to connect to learners and create a welcoming and relaxed environment for learning. Furthermore, Susan’s comment about opportunities for autonomous learning suggests that she employed these books as a strategy to further empower learners. This productive and successful example from practice reflected some but not all the teaching and learning at Langfield.

Teachers’ Perspectives on Their Own Practice

In the teachers’ discussions of their work, there was a lot of uncertainty about their own ability to address learners’ needs associated with digital literacies. Tanya, describing a recent class on creating an email account, said: “I think I got grey hair that day . . . it was so stressful.” Another teacher, Kate, expressed similar feelings: “I wouldn’t say that I’ve been overly successful in teaching technology.” This echoed Andrea’s perspective:

Even though I’ll sit down with them before, we’ll sit at the desk and we’ll go through each of the steps and then I’ll show them on the data projector and then they go to the computer and they can’t remember how to do it . . . So, it’s not easy.

During the activity-based focus group, the teachers used the image of a “black hole” to represent their experience associated with teaching digital literacies. One teacher explained the meaning of the image: “It is a black hole that we find ourselves in because we’re lost, and we can’t go any further because of the ineffectiveness of equipment and not skilled enough.” She conveyed an overt sense of frustration and inadequacy shared by all the teachers. Their “black hole” image reflects perceived uncertainty about the efficacy of their digital pedagogies.

There is evident tension about how the material can be placed strategically with the social as part of effective assemblages for learning. Their words reflect a belief evident in the larger data set that sometimes even their best efforts were not good enough for these learners. Interestingly, as evident in Andrea’s comment, it was not only the learners that were identified as the problem. This discourse was evident in the teachers’ self-identification. They did not seem to recognize their agential power. The power of the material as a constructive force in learning was also not fully understood in their teaching practices. These teachers did not seem to recognize that their extant successful embodied classroom practices were actually informed by strength-based principles and they viewed their own work as pedagogically deficient and, perhaps, even inadequate.