Maureen Kendrick

Drawings as an Alternative Way of Understanding Young Children’s Constructions of Literacy

As teachers seek to reflect children’s diverse experience in the subject matter they present and in the questions they explore, they must also embrace children’s multifaceted ways of knowing. Their major pedagogical challenge is to help children transform what they know into modes of representation that allow for a full range of human experience. In their lives outside of school, children ‘naturally move between art, music, movement, mathematics, drama, and language as ways to think about the world [...]. It is only in schools that students are restricted to using one sign system at a time.’ (Shortet al., 2000: 160). This study uses young children’s drawings about reading and writing as an innovative way of investigating their perceptions and understandings of literacy across the broad contexts of their lives. The study challenges the politics of classroom practices that privilege language-dependent modes of representation over other modes.

Uncovering Literacy Narratives Through Children's Drawings

Children’s drawings about reading and writing have unrealized potential for helping uncover the literacy narratives students bring to school and use to make sense of reading and writing. In this article, we highlight how one boy’s drawing about literacy revealed his interpretation of his school’s policy on violence as a topic of writing, which tended to constrain his interest in writing. His drawing reinforced the importance of adopting multiple perspectives to interpret the various texts that students produce. Keywords: multiliteracies, children’s drawings, multimodal representations Les dessins d’enfants traitant de la lecture et de l’ecriture offrent un potentiel inexploite pour la decouverte des recits au sujet de la litteratie que les eleves apportent a l’ecole et dont ils se servent dans leur eveil a la lecture et a l’ecriture. Dans cet article, nous mettons en relief comment le dessin d’un garcon au sujet de la litteratie revelait son interpretation de la politique de son ecole sur la violence comme sujet de redaction, laquelle avait tendance a restreindre son interet pour la production ecrite. Son dessin renforce l’importance d’adopter des perspectives diversifiees lors de l’interpretation des divers textes que les eleves produisent. Mots cles : multilitteracies, dessins d’enfants, representations multimodales

Playing house: A ‘sideways’ glance at literacy and identity in early childhood:

Drawing on theoretical perspectives related to play and identity, play as a literary and social text, and multimodality, I present an analysis of a play narrative centred on the theme of playing house. The narrative exemplifies the interconnections between literacy and identity in the social and cultural world of a young girl growing up in a multilingual, multi-literate household in an inner-city area of a western Canadian city. The example brings to the forefront how systematic examinations of children’s play narratives have the potential to contribute to current thought on literacy learning and self-construction in early childhood. Understanding the imagined identities children portray in play may be particularly revealing in terms of understanding how they position themselves in the world.

Cartoon drawing as a means of accessing what students know about HIV/AIDS: an alternative method

Combating the spread of HIV/AIDS in Uganda has involved massive public education campaigns. One of the challenges of these campaigns has always involved the need to simultaneously respect and transcend cultural taboos around direct discussions about sexuality and sexual issues, particularly among youth. Research consistently shows that drawing, as a means of investigating what students know, has the potential to reveal students’ perceptions of given concepts and provides an alternative to predominantly language-based methods. Visual methods, however, have rarely been taken up in research on students’ sexual health and HIV/AIDS knowledge. This interpretive case study examines the use of cartoon drawing as a unique tool for understanding Ugandan secondary students’ conceptions of HIV/ AIDS, particularly concepts that are not directly discussed culturally.

ICTs as placed resources in a rural Kenyan secondary school journalism club

In this study, we draw on three interrelated concepts, i.e. placed resources, multiliteracies and the carnivalesque, to understand how information and communication technology (ICT) resources are taken up within the context of a print-based journalism club. Our research participants attend an under-resourced girls’ residential secondary school in rural Kenya. We used ethnographic methods to document how the 32 club members (aged 14–18 years) used digital cameras, voice recorders and laptops with connectivity to research, conduct interviews, photograph and create texts. Key findings include shifts in identity performance, journalistic competence, and hierarchical distinctions and societal power; growing writer activism and audiences; and the emergence of imagined identities and transformative social futures. Our research challenges current skills-based approaches to introducing new literacies and highlights how the introduction of new ICT resources, when situated within collaborative practices (both research and pedagogical), can result in enhanced literacy learning and text production. These changes have not been without tensions and dilemmas, including the extent to which such practices could only occur outside the formalized classroom with its traditional practices, structures and emphasis on exam results. In addition, some of these tensions raise new questions about the role of ICTs as pedagogical tools and the tendency to ‘romanticize’ their potential.

Letters, Imagined Communities, and Literate Identities: Perspectives from Rural Ugandan Women

Historically, letter reading and writing have been pervasive across human societies, cultures, and communities (Barton & Hall, 2000). Like all literate activities, it derives its meaning and significance from how it is situated within cultural beliefs, values, and practices. Despite its prevalence, however, little is known about the meanings and uses of letter reading and writing in diverse cultural contexts. The purpose of this article is to examine the desire to independently read and write letters as a rationale for rural Ugandan women to join an adult literacy program. Drawing on sociocultural theories, and in particular, the frameworks of a literacy ecology of communities, communities of practice, and imagined communities, the authors use ethnographic techniques to explore the role of letter reading and writing in the lives of 15 women participating in an adult literacy program in 1 rural Ugandan community. The authors argue that letter reading and writing practices, personhood, and identity are intertwined within an imagined community to which these women hope to belong, and these imagined communities may play a critical role in their success in adult literacy programs.

Meeting the Challenge of Health Literacy in Rural Uganda: The Critical Role of Women and Local Modes of Communication

This article seeks to better understand the relation between local and traditional modes of communication and health literacy within the context of a rural West Nile community in Northern Uganda. Drawing on social semiotics (multimodality) and Bakhtins notion of the carnival, the focus is on a group of women participating in a grassroots literacy program and their use of local modes of communication to address the endemic problem of malaria in the West Nile region of Uganda. The argument is that women and local modes of communication can serve a critical role in disseminating primary health care information in particular and in community health care development in general. This article also makes a case for adopting a more holistic approach to health literacy promotion; one that brings together local and new modes of communication and knowledge with desperately needed health care services and trained personnel.

Funds of knowledge in child-headed households: A Ugandan case study

Much of the research on orphan and vulnerable children in sub-Saharan Africa has focused on their risks and vulnerabilities. This article describes the ‘funds of knowledge’ (Moll and Greenberg, 1990) and means of acquiring new knowledge of children living in child-headed households in Uganda’s Rakai District. Using ethnographic methods, the authors documented the experiences and activities of children in five rural home contexts. They advance the view of children as resourceful, competent, and knowledgeable, highlighting their ability to build on, utilize, and acquire new funds of knowledge while simultaneously recognizing their conditions of extreme adversity. The authors’ aim is to expand and strengthen the current knowledge base on children living in child-headed households by providing a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between children’s risks and capabilities.

I wish I was a lion a puppy: a multimodal view of writing process assessment

ABSTRACT At the same time that creativity, play, and inquiry are receiving special focus in academic, professional, and educational settings, mandated assessments have never been more prominent, despite public debates that question the value of such testing. In the context of these apparently contradictory developments in literacy education, as a “telling case”, we explore writing as a strand within the multimodal compositional processes of one boy in one classroom during a three-day mandated writing assessment that was also a performance-based and process-oriented assessment. There are two primary areas of interest here: (1) what is made visible when one examines processes more closely, in an ethnographic and observational fashion, and (2) what a multimodal understanding of compositional processes offers, especially in terms of the learning that happens across modes of expression.

Multilingual cultural resources in child-headed families in Uganda

This article reports on a study focusing on the use of multilingual cultural resources in child-headed households (CHHs) in Ugandas Rakai District. Using funds of knowledge and sociocultural perspectives on childrens learning, we documented through ethnographic observations and interviews how children in four CHHs used multilingual cultural resources at home. Our findings show that children co-construct, re-appropriate and remix stories, songs, riddles and proverbs from their cultural environment in situated ways that are a response to the changing context of their social worlds. The study provides a window onto the unique production and use of multilingual cultural resources in CHHs, and further speaks to the need for educators and policymakers to better understand the critical role of siblings in their own learning of linguistic and cultural knowledge.