Candace R. Kuby

Go Be a Writer: Intra-Activity with Materials, Time and Space in Literacy Learning.

This article is based on research in a United States second-grade classroom during a multimodal literacy workshop. Observing students working with tissue paper, foam board, string, pipe cleaners and other materials, we asked how is intra-activity with materials, time and space influencing literacy learning in Room 203? While the research partnership of the authors spanned four years, video and audio recordings, artefacts and interviews with children for this article focus on year two of the research. Poststructural enquiry methods of pedagogical documentation and thinking with theory were used for data production and analysis. Pedagogical documentation focuses not only on the expected ways of being and learning (in this case, the norms of writing in an early childhood classroom) but also on unexpected occurrences (departures from what is typical or developmental) when students write. Thinking with poststructural and posthumanist theories allowed us to explore time, space and materials with three ideas: departures from the expected, the notion of becoming and intra-activity with materials. We illustrate how intra-activity with materials, time and space manifested in two projects: a 3D birdhouse and a 19-foot giraffe mural. We encourage educators to consider how expanded definitions of writing that include intra-actions with a range of materials create learning opportunities for children to live out literacy desiring with multimodal artefacts.

Navigating discourses in place in the world of Webkinz

Geosemiotics (Scollon and Scollon, 2003) frames this analysis of play, multimodal collaboration, and peer mediation as players navigate barriers to online connectivity in a children’s social network and gaming site. A geosemiotic perspective enables examination of children’s web play as discourses in place: fluidly converging and diverging interactions among four factors: (1) social actors, (2) interaction order, (3) visual semiotics, and (4) place semiotics. The video data are excerpted from an ethnographic study of a computer club for primary school-aged children in an afterschool program serving working-class and middle-class families in a US Midwest university community. Discourses of schooling in the computer room and Webkinz complicated children’s goal of coordinated game play and mutual participation in online games. Barriers to online connection produced ruptures that foregrounded childrens’ collaborative management of time and space. This foregrounding makes typically backgrounded practices, modes, and discourses visible and available for deconstruction and critique.

Young children’s identities becoming: Exploring agency in the creation of multimodal literacies

This cross-case qualitative study draws on poststructural notions of identity to explore the relationship between multimodal literacies of young children and their becoming identities. Although research focuses on the products or texts of multiliteracies, more research is needed to examine shifting identities in the process of students creating. This study uses mediated discourse analysis to analyse interactions across one school year in a kindergarten (five- and six-year-olds) and a second-grade (seven- and eight-year-olds) classroom. Four insights are discussed across cases: (1) understanding and recognition of shifting identities, (2) the children becoming and doing teacher, (3) being a multimodal visionary and (4) living as a mentor designer and teacher. Insights highlight a ‘multimodal as agency’ stance, suggesting that through the process of creating multimodal forms of literacy, positions were instantiated and identities were re/negotiated. We encourage early childhood educators to create multimodal curricular spaces to facilitate young children’s agency and becoming identities.

Teaching, Troubling, Transgressing Thinking With Theory in a Post-Qualitative Inquiry Course

The authors (teacher and doctoral students) seek to illuminate the transgressive experiences of teaching ↔ learning in a poststructural (PS) theory and research methods course. They aim to (a) illustrate teaching practices that open spaces for students (and faculty) to rethink, critique, unlearn, and ultimately un-inhabit dominant concepts and principles of qualitative research (QR) and the theory/method divide across research disciplines more broadly and (b) convey how thinking with PS theories become methodologies of post-qualitative inquiry (PQI). They used PS theoretical concepts from Deleuze and Guattari’s scholarship to work with co-produced data (e.g., memories, artifacts from class, notes from meetings, and written responses after the semester) to demonstrate our learning in terms of assemblages of desire, becoming, lines of flight, and smooth and striated spaces. The examples shared demonstrate how they tackled essential, assumptive attributes of QR and attempted to embody discourses and practices against (post)positivist, interpretive, and constructivist sciences.

‘OK this is hard’: Doing emotions in social justice dialogue

In this article, I explore emotions in relation to social justice dialogue and share vignettes to illustrate how emotions are embodied, situated and fissured, drawing upon narrative, critical sociocultural and rhizomatic theories. Data comes from a practitioner inquiry while teaching 5- and 6-year-olds in a summer enrichment program in a relatively affluent, suburban community in the southern USA. The article draws upon Micciche’s notion of doing emotions, a view that sees emotion as a verb, something we do in relationship to one another. Analysis focuses on moments of emotional collisions that prompted dialogic conversations about social injustices. I initially thought emotional collisions were off task, but upon closer analysis realize these moments were the richest discussions. Situating teaching from a critical literacy stance, the data demonstrates how children are curious to explore injustices. It is beneficial for educators to embrace the emotional collisions as productive sites of social justice dialogue.

Why a Paradigm Shift of "More than Human Ontologies" Is Needed: Putting to Work Poststructural and Posthuman Theories in Writers' Studio.

Abstract This manuscript puts to work ‘more than human ontologies’ drawing on poststructural (rhizomatic) and posthumanist (intra-active) theories by plugging-in concepts with data produced in a second grade Writers’ Studio to illustrate why a paradigm shift of ‘more than human ontologies’ is needed. Specifically, how ways of doing/being/knowing (ethico-onto-epistemology) literacies are produced through intra-actions of humans and nonhumans. A second aim is to demonstrate how theory(ies) shape inquiry, how we write up transcripts and do analysis. The author puts to work data of students constructing paper Robin Hood hats to demonstrate how a dominant perspective in literacy education, New Literacy Studies (NLS), is not adequate when conceptualizing literacy as rhizomatic and intra-active. The author demonstrates analysis and discusses how these theories are paradigmatically different from NLS, a human-centered ontology. The author encourages educators to consider inventive ways of researching/teaching with ‘more than human ontologies’ and the ethics of doing so.

Understanding emotions as situated, embodied, and fissured: thinking with theory to create an analytical tool

An emerging theoretical perspective is that emotions are a verb or something we do in relation to others. Studies that demonstrate ways to analyze emotions from a performative stance are scarce. In this article, a new analytical tool is introduced; a critical performative analysis of emotion (CPAE) that draws upon three theoretical perspectives: emotions as situated, as embodied, and as fissured. These three theoretical perspectives (i.e. critical sociocultural, narrative, and rhizomatic) allow researchers to think with theory. Data from teaching children with a critical inquiry curriculum demonstrates a CPAE. Educators are encouraged to continue to embrace the malleability of theories, to push educational research forward by finding new ways to research inquiries, and to adapt CPAE for further research interests.

Evoking emotions and unpacking layered histories through young children’s illustrations of racial bus segregation

Drawing on theories of multi-modality and critical visual literacy, this article focuses on images that five-and six year-olds painted in a class-made book, Voice on the Bus, about racial segregation. The article discusses how children used illustrations to convey their understandings of Rosa Parks’ bus arrest in Alabama. A post-structural view focusing on images that five- and six year-olds painted in a class-made book, Voices on the Bus, about racial segregation, the article discusses how children used illustrations to convey their understanding of Rosa Parks’ bus arrest in Alabama. A post-structural (Kind, 2010) idea of art as an encounter, not as a fixed representation, shaped how the images were experienced for analysis. Using the notion of synaesthesia (the joining of senses), paintings were analysed for evoked emotions and blended sensations (Berman, 1999; Boston, 2001). Additional analysis focused on sedimented meanings (Rowsell and Pahl, 2007), looking for traces from curricular conversations and local/global D/discourses about segregation, schooling experiences and religious undertones (Gee, 1996). The following analytical questions are discussed: In what ways does this illustration evoke a synaesthetic response? How is this image agentic? What are the sedimented meanings from the images? Insights gained are that children can create synaesthetic images to evoke emotions; educators can find traces of sedimented histories in student-made artefacts; and perhaps social action is embodied and expressed through art. Researchers are encouraged to continue using a hybrid of literacy theories and tools for multi-modal analysis.

Productive Aporias and Inten(t/s)ionalities of Paradigming: Spacetimematterings in an Introductory Qualitative Research Course:

We seek to illustrate the inten(t/s)ional ways we tried to create spaces for thinking about paradigms as polyphonic and proliferating. We also share the joyful tensions of this work (hence, inten(t/s)ionalities) and specific pedagogical practices that we believe created a space for students to lean into and explore paradigms not only as a thing but also as a doing—paradigming. Our focus is to discuss (a) how some of Barad’s posthumanist theoretical concepts (e.g., ethico-onto-epistemology and intra-action) became pedagogical inspiration, and (b) through a diffractive reading of data with Barad’s concept of spacetimemattering, we were able to explore what was produced in the course. As we read posthumanist theory, the concepts not only shaped our methodology (i.e., diffractive analysis) but also became pedagogy. A posthumanist paradigm shaped our pedagogical practices as we believe that students are (becoming) qualitative inquirers through a knowing/being/doing in a material world of humans and nonhumans intra-acting.

Persistence(ing): Posthuman agency in a Writers’ Studio

This manuscript focuses on agency from a posthumanist stance. For so long, educators’ definitions of agency have focused solely on people. As we read more on posthuman ideas of agency, we were also reading Deleuze and Guattari’s work on philosophy and concepts. These two bodies of scholarship intra-acted with each other to create newness of ideas for us. In other words, readings on philosophy and concepts have helped us to better understand what posthumanist enacted agency is (or what it does). In order to think about enacted agency, we invited the concept of persistence(ing) to think-with-us-and-data-and-theories. Situated in a second grade Writers’ Studio, during a study on personal narratives, we found ourselves intrigued by a 20-minute clip of Katie-working-with-materials to create a 3-dimensional cabin as a way to bring her readers/users to the National Parks to which she travelled with her family. We invite the reader to consider: What is posthuman agency? Or more-than-human agency? How do you know when you see it happening? How do you go about researching this agency? Perhaps most importantly, why does it matter for literacy educators to think of agency as enacted between humans and nonhumans? We conclude by discussing several insights from analysis and why posthuman agency is productive for early literacy research and pedagogy.