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

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

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

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)

A New Spin on Miscue Analysis: Using Spider Charts to Web Reading Processes

Copyright © 2012 by the National Council of Teachers of English. Used with permission.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 pre-service teachers in the author’s early literacy methods course

“Are You Guys Girls?”: Boys, Identity Texts, and Disney Princess Play

This is the postprint, author's accepted manuscript version of this article after peer review.Drawing from critical sociocultural perspectives that view play, literacy, and gender as social practices, boys‟ Disney Princess play is examined as a site of identity construction and contestation situated within overlapping communities of femininity and masculinity practice where children learn expected practices for “doing gender.” The article presents critical discourse analysis of two instances of 5- and 6-year-old children‟s doll play excerpted from data collected during a year of weekly visits to one focal kindergarten in a U.S. Midwest public school, part of a larger three-year study of literacy play as mediated discourse. Through princess play, children enacted femininities and masculinities and negotiated character roles with peers in ways that enforced and contested gender expectations circulated in media marketing and enacted in play groups. Findings indicate that doll play is a productive pedagogy for mediating gendered identity texts circulating through global media and for creating spaces for diverse gender performances in early childhood settings

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

From cutting out to cutting with: A materialist reframing of action and multimodality in children’s play and making

Using examples of early childhood play from our independent research studies, we take a closer look to ask what did we miss? In initial multimodal analysis of these events, how did an implicit human-centered insistence on semiotic affordances and strategic design tame the mobile jumble of children’s play and making? The shift from multimodality to materiality in this retrospective analysis builds on and transitions from Kress’ (1997) ground-breaking work on multimodality in children’s play and making, where he noted that a child cuts around a drawing to bring its image into the world of action. “Cutting out” turns a two-dimensional drawing of a car into a three-dimensional paper toy that can be animated for play. In this chapter, we take a new materialist lens (Lenz Taguchi, 2014) to children’s making that considers the intra-action among all the actants in the toy/player/action assemblage that co-produce a flow of play moves and pretend meanings. When we look for materiality, emergence, and mobility, we can better appreciate play’s haphazard trajectories and recognize the embodied “muchness” (Thiel, 201X) of children’s play, we can see how assemblages of bodies, meanings, and actions create knowledge flows from the most ordinary of school supplies: paper