From meaning-making to life sustaining: A narrative ethnography of students’ out-of-school daily practices
Date
2026
Authors
Misana, Leonard
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Abstract
Students’ out-of-school daily practices play a central role in shaping their lives, yet literacy-centred frameworks often marginalize them. This study examines how such practices relate to academic learning and personal development in a rural secondary school in Ukerewe District, Tanzania. Guided by an interpretivist paradigm, I conducted a narrative ethnography with 10 participants: four students, four parents, and two teachers. Data were generated through ethnographic conversations, focus group discussions, and participant observation, and analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. I used the multiliteracies framework to examine students’ meaning-making and identity construction across modes and cultural contexts. Throughout the study, I worked within the Heshima framework, an ethical Afrocentric approach to engaging with Black people and people of African descent. Findings show that students participate in diverse everyday practices, including household and economic work, academic activities, and the arts. Schools privilege school-based academic practices, such as remedial classes and private tutoring, while often overlooking the educational significance of farming, animal care, and domestic work, despite the ways these practices sustain students’ participation in schooling. Although this hierarchy is partly shaped by pressures associated with high-stakes examinations, I argue that it also reflects limited theoretical attention to how student’ out-of-school daily practices sustain schooling. While the multiliteracies framework explains meaning-making across modes and contexts through design, representation, and identity, my analysis suggests that it offers less conceptual space for understanding how life-sustaining practices enable participation in schooling. I therefore propose Life-Sustaining Practices (LSP) as a framework for understanding how practices grounded in survival, care, and reciprocity sustain schooling while also giving rise to meaning-making and design
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Keywords
life-sustaining practices, multiliteracies, narrative ethnography, out-of-school daily practices, Heshima Framework