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"Wohlwend, Karen E"
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One Screen, Many Fingers: Young Children's Collaborative Literacy Play With Digital Puppetry Apps and Touchscreen Technologies
This article examines the digital literacy practices that emerge when young children play together with digital apps on touchscreen devices. Children's collaborative composing with a digital puppetry app on a touchscreen-with many hands all busy dragging, resizing, and animating puppet characters, and many voices making sound effects, narrating, directing, and objecting-appears aimless, chaotic, and in sharp contrast to the orderly matching activities in prevalent letter and word recognition apps that dominate early childhood educational software. The crowded collaboration around a single touchscreen looks messy but produces a complex text built with (a) touches, swipes, and other embodied actions that make up digital literacy practices; (b) sensory or multimodal layers of colorful images, dialogue, sound effects, and movement that make up animated stories; and (c) negotiation and pooling of children's individual story ideas for shared pretense that make up playful collaboration-all contained on a 9.7 inch screen.
Journal Article
Damsels in Discourse: Girls Consuming and Producing Identity Texts Through Disney Princess Play
Drawing upon theories that reconceptualize toys and artifacts as identity texts, this study employs mediated discourse analysis to examine children's videotaped writing and play interactions with princess dolls and stories in one kindergarten classroom. The study reported here is part of a three-year ethnographic study of literacy play in U.S. early childhood classrooms. The specific focus here is on young girls who are avid Disney Princess fans and how they address the gendered identities and discourses attached to the popular films and franchised toys. The study employs an activity model design that incorporates ethnographic microanalysis of social practices in the classroom, design conventions in toys and drawings, negotiated meanings in play, and identities situated in discourses. The commercially given gendered princess identities of the dolls, consumer expectations about the dolls, the author identities in books and storyboards associated with the dolls, and expectations related to writing production influenced how the girls upheld, challenged, or transformed the meanings they negotiated for princess story lines and their gender expectations, which influenced who participated in play scenarios and who assumed leadership roles in peer and classroom cultures. When the girls played with Disney Princess dolls during writing workshop, they animated identities sedimented into toys and texts. Regular opportunities to play with toys during writing workshop allowed children to improvise and revise character actions, layering new story meanings and identities onto old. Dolls and storyboards facilitated chains of animating and authoring, linking meanings from one event to the next as they played, wrote, replayed, and rewrote. The notion of productive consumption explains how girls enthusiastically took up familiar media narratives, encountered social limitations in princess identities, improvised character actions, and revised story lines to produce counternarratives of their own.
Journal Article
Enriching and Assessing Young Children's Multimodal Storytelling
This article provides primary teachers with assessment tools and curricular examples to expand writers’ workshop by adding a multimodal storytelling unit on drama and filmmaking, allowing students to create engaging off‐the‐page stories through films and play performances that enrich writing. Too often, children's literacy abilities are assessed solely based on what they can write on paper, overlooking the rich ways children convey meaning through multiple communication modes like sound effects, gesture, movement, images, and language in their storytelling. This research recognizes play as an important literacy and argues that a multimodal emphasis in teaching and assessment more closely matches the ways children learn and make meaning in their everyday lives. This study is a part of a larger, ongoing multiyear, multisite study of literacy playshops in early childhood classrooms and teacher education.
Journal Article
Research & Policy: Playing to Our Strengths: Finding Innovation in Children's and Teachers' Imaginative Expertise
This article reviews recent research on young children’s literacy learning, with a focus on innovative ideas that reclaim a long-standing ethos in early childhood education: child over curriculum.
Journal Article
Kindergarten as Nexus of Practice: A Mediated Discourse Analysis of Reading, Writing, Play, and Design in an Early Literacy Apprenticeship
To reconceptualize kindergarten as nexus of practice, this dissertation draws upon cultural-historical activity theory and models (Engeström, 1990; Leont'ev, 1978; Vygotsky, 1978) and practice theory (Bourdieu, 1977) supported by critical sociocultural perspectives (Lewis, Enciso, & Moje, 2007) to (a) frame play as a cultural and transformative force in peer culture (Corsaro, 2003; Marsh, 1999); (b) analyze discourse through close readings of talk, actions, materials, and contexts (Bloome, Carter, Christian, Otto, & Shuart- Faris, 2005; Gee, 1999; Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996; Scollon, 2001); and (c) investigate early literacy as ideological practices situated within overlapping social spaces (Leander, 2002). Nexuses of practice in events and spaces that blended children's culture and classroom culture were located to examine the following: * How play and design practices function as meaning-making practices within an expanded definition of early literacy * How nexuses of play, design, reading, and writing practices expand and/or restrict opportunities for diverse learners to mediate materials and meanings and to participate more fully in peer and school cultures Through network sampling, teacher interviews, classroom visits, and classroom environment surveys, I identified a focal classroom in a U.S. midwestern public elementary school: an all-day kindergarten where literacy, play, and design opportunities were integrated in a daily two-hour period.
Journal Article
Dilemmas and Discourses of Learning to Write: Assessment as a Contested Site
Writing assessment is a contested site where competing discourses overlap and invoke conflicting expectations, creating dilemmas for teachers who want to do what they believe is best for children and fulfill their school’s writing targets. A critical look at assessment quandaries reveals surface dilemmas as clashes between overlapping discourses, freeing teachers to work with and against institutions that create the dilemmas and their immobilizing effects. To illustrate how competing discourses generate assessment dilemmas, I analyze data examples from emergent writing activity by a group of children at a kindergarten writing table, looking closely at the student’s and teacher’s actions through the lenses of several prevalent discourses that explain early writing development: maturation discourse, skills mastery discourse, intentionality discourse, multimodal genre discourse, social practices discourse, and sociopolitical discourse (adapted from Ivanic, 2004).
Journal Article
A New Spin on Miscue Analysis: Using Spider Charts to Web Reading Processes
This article introduces a way of seeing miscue analysis data through a spider chart , a readily available digital graphing tool that provides an effective way to visually represent readers’ complex coordination of interrelated cueing systems. A spider chart is a standard feature in recent spreadsheet software that puts a new spin on miscue analysis by quickly generating visual displays of children’s documented reading processes. Also known as radar charts, spider charts show webs that point to the apparent strategies that readers are using, providing a way to quickly visualize how well readers are noticing and coordinating syntactic, semantic, and graphophonic cues during the process of constructing meaning for a text. Following a brief overview of miscue analysis procedures, a range of spider charts is presented, using charts generated from reading analyses conducted by preservice teachers in the author’s early literacy methods course.
Journal Article
Playing to Our Strengths: Finding Innovation in Children's and Teachers' Imaginative Expertise
Seeing Children's Strengths in Diversity, Development, and Technology Play-based pedagogies expand learning, follow the developing child's lead, and draw from the depth of children's communities, cultural resources, and life experiences as a natural foundation for learning.From our collective experiences over the past four decades, we feel like we have seen it all: from popping M&Ms in the mouths of 4-year-old Head Start children each time a \"correct\" response was given to the DISTAR question \"What is this?\" to reading readiness workbooks to learning to read naturally, to invented spelling to emergent literacy to whole language to Phonics First to NCLB and Reading First, to evidencebased curriculum to Early Reading First to Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge.(Flewitt, Messer, & Kucirkova, 2014, p. 303) Like policies, teacher education programs should actively provide robust field experiences that help prospective teachers appreciate and build on children's cultural resources through play.A number of preservice teachers experienced a paradigm shift from a deficit orientation to a strength orientation toward immigrant families' language and literacy that resulted from long-term relationships with families that they formed through regular visits to children's homes during two years in the program.
Journal Article
Paying Attention to Procedural Texts: Critically Reading School Routines as Embodied Achievement
In this article, we look closely at the way power circulates through school routines with ordinary texts in everyday moments. We address texts that support different types of achievement and how critical literacy helps us redefine achievement and examine what we’re doing with texts and students in classrooms. We interrogate the notion of achievement outside the realm of traditional markers of school success (i.e. tests, academic content knowledge, etc.). We argue that more inclusive interpretations of achievement requires critical reading of texts all around us, in the language that constructs our worlds, from the products we buy to the most mundane routines. Using three elementary teaching vignettes: a teacher shopping for pencil boxes and back-to-school supplies, a first grader posting a complaint to call a class meeting, and a fifth grade class responding to a memo about a new school policy, we examine power relations in texts and routines that highlight achievement. The article includes critical routines with potential for empowering and diversifying opportunities for success.
Journal Article