Early Adopters: Playing New Literacies and Pretending New Technologies in Print-Centric Classrooms

The final, definitive version of this paper has been published in the Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 9/2, 2009 by SAGE Publications Ltd. All rights reserved. ©In this article, semiotic analysis of children’s practices and designs with video game conventions considers how children use play and drawing as spatializing literacies that make room to import imagined technologies and user identities. Microanalysis of video data of classroom interactions collected during a three year ethnographic study of children’s literacy play in kindergarten and primary classrooms reveals how the leading edge of technology use in print-centric classrooms is pretended into being by 5- , 6-, and 7-year-old “early adopters” a marketing term for first wave consumers who avidly buy and explore newly-released technology products. Early adopters signals two simultaneous identities for young technology users: 1) as developing learners of new literacies and technologies and 2) as curious explorers who willingly play with new media. Children transformed paper and pencil resources into artifacts for enacting cell phone conversations and animating video games, using new technologies and the collaborative nature of new literacies to perform literate identities and to strengthen the cohesiveness of play groups

Play(ful) Pedagogical Practices for Creative Collaborative Literacy

This is the pre-peer reviewed version of the following article: Portier, C., Friedrich, N., & Peterson. S. S. (2019). Play(ful) pedagogical practices for creative collaborative literacy, The Reading Teacher, which has been published in final form at doi:org/10.1002/trtr.1795. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Versions.With the goal of supporting children’s writing and content area learning using play as a pedagogical model, K-1 teachers’ action research projects involved children collaborating to create texts for a range of purposes. Their project activities were analyzed for their starting points/motivators, student- and teacher-roles, and artefacts. The activities took the form of small initiatives, a range of themes connecting curriculum areas, and imaginative scenarios. Within each, teachers took on various roles to support student interactions and scaffold literacy learning, while students responded through collaboration, creative expression, and writing. Each activity addressed curriculum objectives related to literacy, while presenting children with opportunities to engage in collaborative, play(ful) learning with peers and/or the teacher and express their learning through creative means. These projects show that there does not have to be a disconnect between the achievement of curriculum objectives and the implementation of play(ful) learning activities