Loh, Chin Ee

With increased access to technologies for reading, more understanding is needed about how adolescents engage with print and digital reading across school and out-of-school contexts. In this study, mobile ethnography was used to document the everyday print and digital reading practices of adolescent girls from one all-girls’ school. They responded to real-time researcher prompts about their reading across various timings, locations, and devices over four days, and participated in photo-elicitation interviews. Findings showed that as students moved between locations, they also transited across devices, platforms, and formats, making use of different print and digital resources for varied ways of reading. Their ability to ‘style-shift’ flexibly across the boundaries of school and personal spaces, various devices and platforms allowed them to independently optimise reading as a resource for their everyday leisure, information seeking, and learning purposes. Insights, implications, and challenges for learning in a post-pandemic digital age are discussed.

This article takes a comparative socio-spatial approach at the intersection of social class and reading politics to provide a fresh way of examining school reading policies and practices, unearthing previously hidden spaces of inequity for reading intervention. The juxtaposition of two nested case studies in Singapore, one of an elite all-boys’ school and another of a coeducational government school with students in different academic tracks, revealed inequitable practices, specifically in the designs and uses of school library spaces between schools serving different social classes. The study argues that attempts to design reading interventions should move away from the view of student-as-problem to structure-as-problem in order to discover new perspectives for reading intervention. Additionally, this study demonstrates how foregrounding social class in educational research is necessary for effective design of educational strategies that aim to transform education and society by narrowing the gap between students from different social classes.

Dominant views of reading in educational contexts tend to portray reading as a solitary event, often conducted in silence and over a sustained period of time, popularized in images of reading across different contexts and times. Yet, social perspectives of reading suggest that there are multiple ways to enact reading even within the urban adolescent schooling contexts. This article shows how visual data can reveal new ways of understanding the varied everyday micro-practices of reading that are enacted across different schools. It further argues that visual juxtaposition as critical analytic method can provide new understandings of visual data and generate insights through deliberate comparison. Using the dataset from an ethnographic study of reading in Singapore secondary schools, this paper examines the varied ways that juxtaposition can be applied to the analysis of two forms of visual data, namely documentary photography and time-lapse data to show how concepts of reading, social relations and space are expanded through this form of analysis.

This article examines how three Singaporean boys constructed their identities as global literate citizens through their reading practices in and out of school. An invisible network of resources contributed to their construction of a global literate identity relevant for local/global markets. The acquisition of a global literate identity as a form of intercultural capital is an unequal game in a neoliberal education system and social networks must be recognized as key nodes for literacy re-vision.