May 7, 2022
A (class)room of our own: Towards a multimodal grammar
of pedagogical conversation on the WhatsApp messaging platform
Dr. Cecilia Magadán
National University of San Martin, Argentina
Time: May 7, 2022. 11:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Zoom Link: https://bmcc-cuny.zoom.us/j/83448944812
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Meeting ID: 834 4894 4812
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“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” This claim for social justice by
Virginia Woolf back in 1928 resonated two years ago when many students and teachers in Argentina (and in
other parts of the world) found themselves without a physical classroom, and without means to afford digital
devices or connectivity. What did they have at hand? They had WhatsApp, the most popular messaging platform
that uses the Internet to send text, images, audio and video, already installed in almost all mobile devices in the
country. This presentation focuses on the study of school literacy practices during the COVID-19 pandemic
lockdown. It explores the uses of WhatsApp as an ad-hoc educational platform adopted by teachers in school
communities with little access to technological resources. Based on digital microethnographies, this talk opens a
theoretical dialogue between some already classic sociolinguistic and ethnographic studies of face-to-face
classroom interaction and the analysis of online pedagogical conversations in mobile platforms, such as
WhatsApp. Through a sample of selected online exchanges from different courses, I examine: (a) the dynamics of
online conversational exchanges between language teachers and high school students in Argentina in light of
sociolinguistic studies about classroom interaction (Cazden, 2017; Heath, 1983; Gumperz & Cook-Gumperz, 2006;
van Leeuwen, 2017); and (b) the participants’ redesign of WhatsApp as a classroom setting by means of reassigning
new linguistic and pedagogical functions to the feature-set made available by the app. Based on the findings and
following a multiliteracies approach (Kress et al, 2021; Serafini & Gee, 2017), I address how online talking/writing
(along a continuum of semiotic resources) –understood as a social and situated action– enables a dynamic
negotiation of linguistic and social identities. To conclude, I review how these recreated mobile spaces (re)shape
not only teacher-student interactions, but also the pedagogy of literacies. And returning to Woolf’s claims of
social justice, I discuss the tensions between digital inclusion, sociolinguistic repertoires, and school trajectories,
as one of the lessons that the pandemic has unmasked, demanding further review and remediation.