Squeezed, Stretched, and Stuck: Teachers Defending Play-Based Learning in No-Nonsense Times

Describes how playful and inquiry-based engagements in kindergarten and first grade classrooms eventually gave way to the demands of district-mandated teacher evaluation plans that called for targeted reading strategies, seatwork, and instruction using basal reading materials. Wohlend describes the resulting impingement on children\u27s emotional lives and the professional authority of teachers in these midwestern classrooms

Welcoming Play in Times of Trauma: A Response to Cassie Brownell

I’m honored and delighted to welcome Cassie Brownell to a growing community of early childhood play researchers. In one sense, welcoming implies an unequal power relation where an established member of a community introduces an unknown newcomer. This feels a bit disingenuous. Cassie is already a rising star in our field and really needs no introduction! Her work is part of an exciting new trend in literacy research that blends play with social activism and community building

Improving Cape Canaveral\u27s Day-2 Thunderstorm Forecasting Using Meso-ETA Numerical Model Output

The 45th Weather Squadron (WS) is responsible for the protection of billions of dollars worth of Air Force and NASA equipment from weather hazards. They produce a seven day planning forecast as one tool to support the space launch community. Improving this forecast can potentially save millions of dollars of government funds. This research focuses on the feasibility of improving the day two thunderstorm forecast by applying Meso Eta numerical forecasts to the Neumann-Pfeffer Thunderstorm Index (NPTI). The NPTI is currently used by the 45th WS for same day thunderstorm probability forecasting utilizing the morning radiosonde as input. The perfect prognosis assumption was used when assessing the value of this technique. NPTI thunderstorm probabilities were calculated using input variables extracted from the day two Meso Eta. The NPTI output was verified against coincident thunderstorm observations taken at Cape Canaveral Air Station. Accuracy and bias statistics were used to calculate a forecasting skill score versus persistence. Statistically significant positive skill scores were produced, indicating that the proposed method is a potentially useful forecasting tool for day two thunderstorm probability forecasting. A test of NPTI over 20 years of climatology revealed a moderately accurate forecasting method

From “What did I write?” to “Is this right?”: Intention, convention, and accountability in early literacy

This is a post-print version of the published article, in accordance with the distribution stipulations set by Taylor & Francis.When children enter public kindergartens in the current atmosphere of high stakes testing, they often encounter an emphasis on correctness that casts doubt on the integrity of their personally invented messages, prompting them to ask not “What did I write?” but “Is this right?” This ethnographic case study examines early writing by 23 kindergarten children within the context of their free-writing time and their teacher’s plan to restore intention to compensate for a mandated curriculum that overemphasized convention. Children’s writing samples were analyzed before and after the teacher introduced peer sharing, a strategy aimed at reestablishing the children’s communicative intent

Damsels in discourse: Girls consuming and producing identity texts through Disney Princess play

This is the postprint, author's accepted manuscript version of this article after peer review.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

IRA Outstanding Dissertation Award: Kindergarten as Nexus of Practice: A Mediated Discourse Analysis of Reading, Writing, Play, and Design in an Early Literacy Apprenticeship

The International Reading Association’s Outstanding Dissertation Award, which has been given annually since 1964, recognizes exceptional contributions made by doctoral students in reading or related fields. Candidates are self-nominated or nominated by their dissertation advisors. Applicants must be current members of the International Reading Association. Each submits a monograph based on the dissertation, which must have been completed during the previous academic year. These monographs undergo rigorous review by the Association’s Subcommittee on the Outstanding Dissertation Award

Reading to Play and Playing to Read: A Mediated Discourse Analysis of Early Literacy Apprenticeship

How does “playing school,” an ordinary childhood pastime, shape children’s reading abilities, classroom identities, and relative social positioning? In an ethnographic study of literacy play in one kindergarten classroom, I discovered that young children regularly combined reading and play practices to make the meanings of texts more accessible and to take up empowered identity positions in child-ruled spaces. Two examples, excerpted from the data, illustrate how reading a book while playing the teacher transformed a classroom meeting area into a pretend school space where children could assume identities as readers and leaders

Mapping Multimodal Literacy Practices through Mediated Discourse Analysis: Identity Revision in What Not To Wear

In this conceptual paper, I examine the exaggerated revision critique in one “makeover” television program to illustrate how MDA’s filtering process pinpoints practices of identity revision that are so essential to makeovers, whether in reality television episodes or in schooling. To suggest MDA’s potential for revealing the identity-building accomplished through physical activity with objects, I analyze multimodal practices in one television episode of What Not to Wear, concluding with connections to familiar embodied literacy practices in classrooms. The dramatized and edited excerpts provide vivid examples of gatekeeping that make this fashion makeover program an apt choice for illustrating how the MDA process uncovers identity-building activity

Dilemmas and discourses of learning to write: Assessment as a contested site

Copyright © 2009 by the National Council of Teachers of English. Used with permission.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 students’ 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)