Children's agency and reading with story-apps: considerations of design, behavioural and social dimensions

A comprehensive understanding of children’s motivation to read e-books requires a multifaceted and contextualized conceptualization of children’s agency. In this study, agency was operationalized as a set of behaviour indicators of children’s control (behavioural agency), adults’ perceptions of reader identities afforded by the content and format of books (social agency), and specific multimedia and interactive features that afford personalisation (agentic design). In a comparative qualitative case study, seven preschool children and their mothers were observed reading four story-based interactive e-books (story-apps). Multimethod analysis that combined design evaluation with observational and interview data revealed behavioural agency was demonstrated in the children’s frequent, prolonged, and repetitive physical engagement with the story-apps. Social agency became foregrounded in relation to constitutive reader identities. Agentic design was related to children’s sense of autonomy. The findings have implications for how we theorize, operationalize, and apply the concept of agency in children’s e-books and reading for pleasure

How Can Digital Personal(ized) Books Enrich the Language Arts Curriculum?

Digital personal(ized) books are a relatively recent addition to the rich repertoire of literacy resources available to pre-K and elementary school teachers. This article summarizes the key ways in which personal(ized) books can enrich the language arts curriculum, drawing on a series of empirically based examples. The value of personalization in the digital stories is explained theoretically using the framework of five As: autonomy, authorship, authenticity, attachment, and aesthetics. The five As apply to personal(ized) stories created for, or by, young students and are used to generate some practical suggestions for future use of touchscreens in the classroom

Trans- and intra- apps: innovating the app market and use

This book provides an in-depth analysis of the challenges, potential and theoretical possibilities of apps and considers the processes of change for education and home learning environments

Promoting democratic classroom communities through storytelling and story acting

We live at a time of unprecedented migration – between rural areas and urban metropolises and between impoverished and war-torn countries and wealthy nations. This migration presents opportunities (e.g. the vitality of new immigrants; the richness when different cultural groups interact) as well as challenges (e.g. disruptions of communities experiencing an influx of migrants). Successful navigation of these challenges will require a new generation of citizens with the abilities and dispositions to listen, take the perspectives of others, and collaborate. It will require people and communities to act with a shared sense of humanity and fairness; to be able to act and solve problems democratically. In this chapter we focus on how children’s sense of democratic responsibility can be promoted through storytelling and story acting