Karen E. Wohlwend

Damsels in Discourse: Girls Consuming and Producing Identity Texts Through Disney Princess Play

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.

Friendship Meeting or Blocking Circle?: Identities in the Laminated Spaces of a Playground Conflict

Drawing from an incident that took place during a year-long investigation of childrens play and peer culture on a school playground, the author argues that seemingly neutral child-centered techniques can maintain and even strengthen existing gender inequalities as teachers and children access laminated but contradictory identity positions surrounding agentic educational discourse. As children revisit the original conflict, they laminate time-spaces to discursively reconstruct events and position themselves advantageously. Critical discourse analysis problematizes the effects of a conflict resolution strategy based upon gendered notions of learner agency in a cultural model of teaching: developmentally appropriate practice (DAP). Although the focus of this article is a single event on one elementary school playground in the USA, the author suggest that the presence of the DAP cultural model internationally means that many early childhood teachers may experience similar ambiguity over gendered tensions that arise around issues of agency and authority as they attempt to resolve childrens conflicts during play.

From “What Did I Write?” to “Is this Right?”: Intention, Convention, and Accountability in Early Literacy

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 teachers plan to restore intention to compensate for a mandated curriculum that overemphasized convention. Childrens writing samples were analyzed before and after the teacher introduced peer sharing, a strategy aimed at reestablishing the childrens communicative intent.

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

ow does “playing school,” an ordinary child-hood pastime, shape children’s reading abili-ties, classroom identities, and relative social positioning? This ethnographic study of kindergarten literacy play situates children’s combinations of play, reading, writing, and design within a nexus of practice (Scollon, 2001), the web of seemingly natural combi-nations of ways of interacting shared by an embodied community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991). When literacy and play practices combine, they support and strengthen one another, proliferating ways for children to “do school” and increasing access for diverse learners. For example, playing school produces a reading/playing nexus where (a) reading supports play goals—reading to play—as children read books and charts to make play scenarios more credible or to gain the cooperation of other players and (b) playing supports reading develop-ment—playing to read—as pretending to be the teacher and teaching pretend students enables children to share and explore reading strategies.To reconceptualize kindergarten as nexus of prac-tice, this dissertation draws upon cultural–historical activity theory and models (Engestrom, 1990; Leont’ev, 1978; Vygotsky, 1978) and practice theory (Bourdieu, 1977) supported by critical sociocultural perspec-tives (Lewis, Enciso, & Moje, 2007) to (a) frame play as a cultural and transformative force in peer culture (Corsaro, 2003; Marsh, 1999); (b) analyze discourse through close readings of talk, actions, materials, and contexts (Bloome, Carter, Christian, Otto, & Shuart-Faris, 2005; Gee, 1999; Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996; Scollon, 2001); and (c) investigate early literacy as ide-ological practices situated within overlapping social spaces (Leander, 2002). In early literacy apprentice-ships, children as novices learn to take up reading and writing practices through mediated encounters in which expectations for participation are implicitly or explicitly expressed and responsibility for learn-ing is gradually released (Bomer, 2003; Rowe, 2008; Whitmore, Martens, Goodman, & Owocki, 2004). Children also engage in writing, play, and design prac-tices to appropriate and display peer-valued popular media and to participate in peer culture (Dyson, 2003). Nexuses of practice in events and spaces that blended children’s culture and classroom culture were located to examine the following:• How play and design practices function as meaning-making practices within an expanded definition of early literacy• How nexuses of play, design, reading, and writing practices expand and/or restrict opportunities for diverse learners to mediate materials and mean-ings and to participate more fully in peer and school culturesThrough network sampling, teacher interviews, classroom visits, and classroom environment surveys, I identified a focal classroom in a U.S. midwestern public elementary school: an all-day kindergarten where lit-eracy, play, and design opportunities were integrated in a daily two-hour period. One teacher and 21 chil-dren (12 boys, 9 girls; all 5- and 6-year-olds; 8 immi-grants from China, Russia, the Philippines, Mexico, and Sudan) participated in the research. Data collection and analysis was organized through a three-pronged

All Rigor and No Play Is No Way to Improve Learning

The authors propose and discuss their Playshop curricular model, which they developed with teachers. Their studies suggest a playful approach supports even more rigor than the Common Core State Standards require for preschool and early grade children. Children keep their attention longer when learning comes in the form of something they can play with. Research also shows, the authors say, that just because children are playing does not mean they are not developing intellectually or academically. The play/rigor binary is a false construct, the authors say, which has errantly led schools to shorten and eliminate recess and playtime for children, more specifically hurting low-income and diverse children’s chances for fuller academic and intellectual progress that could help close the achievement gap.

Media as nexus of practice: remaking identities in What Not to Wear

In this conceptual piece, we examine media as a nexus of a traditional schooling pedagogy and performance pedagogy to make visible how their overlapping elements produce medias pervasive educative force but also to gain a deeper understanding of the complexities of using media in educational contexts. Nexus analysis examines a fashion makeover television program – What Not to Wear (WNTW) – as an embodied lesson that produces identity revision but also disjunctures and slippages that enable critical responses and productive remakings. WNTW is a dramatization of remediation of one womans (portrayed) lived practices and clothing choices which are read on her body as personal expression of fashion trends. These globalized lessons with body texts require new ways of reading and responding that allow learners/viewers to see the power relations that construct particular identity performances as errors and cultural practices and ethnicities as unacceptable.

Theorizing the nexus of STEAM practice

ABSTRACT Recent advances in arts education policy, as outlined in the latest National Core Arts Standards, advocate for bringing digital media into the arts education classroom. The promise of such Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM)–based approaches is that, by coupling Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) and the arts, new understandings and artifacts emerge that transcend either discipline. Evidence of this can be seen through fundamental shifts in both fields; in the arts, artists are expanding the creative potential for design through computational flexibility, which affords artists the ability to exceed the limitations of their tools. The infusion of the arts into STEM has shown to be equally transformative, with the emergence of tools and communities that not only engender new content understandings but also invite participation from populations historically underrepresented in STEM fields. Drawing on over a decade of research at the intersection of the arts, creativity, and new technologies from the Creativity Labs at Indiana University, this article theorizes the learning that takes place at effective couplings of STEAM to assist todays educators in realizing the potential for transformative experiences for learners of all levels. This article provides a synthesis of this past work across two compelling cases of STEAM-based tools, materials, and activities (i.e., the media-rich programming environment Scratch as well as the work the LilyPad Arduino used to create electronic textiles), incorporating findings from more than 50 peer-reviewed papers and books, and conceptually outlines an approach to “gathering STEAM” in arts education classrooms today. Implications are explored for policy makers in teacher education to think about preservice curriculum and field experiences; policy makers in arts education to think about tools needed in classrooms today; as well as how art education can play a critical role in STEM disciplines and offer solutions to address STEM pipeline challenges. Such efforts extend current and prior discussions in the arts education landscape about the use of new technologies, and draw our attention to how new technologies can be leveraged for artistic expression.

Making Sense and Nonsense: Comparing Mediated Discourse and Agential Realist Approaches to Materiality in a Preschool Makerspace.

Two approaches to materiality (i.e. mediated discourse and agential realism) are compared to explore their usefulness in tracking literacies in action and artefacts produced during a play and design activity in a preschool makerspace. Mediated discourse analysis has relied on linguistic framing and social semiotics to make sense of multimodality. Can a multimodal lens grounded in embodied histories of meaning-making unpack sensory exploration, silly repetition and free-wheeling nonsense in children’s playdough play? Barad’s agential realism seems promising for unpacking the sensory and the emergent produced in the materiality, fluidity and messiness of entangled bodies and things in a makerspace. We compare key constructs of mediated discourse and agential realism, comparing interaction and intra-action in video excerpts from two weeks of play with playdough electronics kits in three early childhood classrooms in a US university childcare centre. Mediated discourse analysis of multimodality identified collaborative interaction among players in a small group and tracked a collective flow of materialized knowledge that moved through children’s sharing and collaboration. Agential realism tracked intra-actions among bodies, materials and spaces as transitory becomings and undoings that rupture definitions of sense-making as strategic design that manipulates materials into artefacts or as play that resemiotizes materials into roles and props in dramatized narratives.

Who Gets to Play? Access, Popular Media and Participatory Literacies.

Abstract Early literacy is often over-simplified as a set of skills for beginning reading, an approach which overlooks the ways that children play their way into cultures, using play as a literacy that accesses popular media as rich literary repertoires of characters and storylines. This article examines how children’s play reveals their participatory literacies in preschool classrooms where teachers provide play-based media literacy curricula. Participatory literacies are ways of interpreting, making, sharing and belonging in increasingly globally and digitally mediated cultures. Data are excerpted from a five-year study of literacy play in classrooms that provide a space for children to draw upon popular media repertoires as cultural capital and resources for literacy development. Mediated discourse analysis of classroom video located and analyzed children’s play for use of creative and collaborative dimensions of participatory literacies. Results showed that young children drew on their media knowledge during play to fluidly improvise dialogue and story action in ways that enriched and sustained play themes and friendships over time but also allowed isolated children to gain access to play groups.

Embodied signs: Expanding representations through and with bodies

We argue that a semiotic perspective is urgently needed to understand how embodiment blurs binaries such as language and action or text and context through representations of bodies and representations with bodies. Although the study of embodiment has long been present in semiotics, we consider emerging research in literacy studies that reconceptualizes the intersection of body, meanings, and representation. The embodiment of meaning through representations of the body and representations through the body is often just a potentiality or a possibility, a data source that is available for selection, whereas we see it as central to the field.