Rachel Heydon

Making meaning together: multi‐modal literacy learning opportunities in an inter‐generational art programme

This naturalistic study reports the language and literacy‐learning opportunities, and the conditions necessary to bring them about, in the art component of an innovative intergenerational programme. The focus is on the children in the programme (median age 4), their interaction with adult participants (median age 85) and facilitators, and the ways in which they used various sign systems to communicate meaning. There were many semiotic opportunities within the art programme, and these opportunities were enhanced by the intergenerational factor.

Learning opportunities: The production and practice of kindergarten literacy curricula in an era of change

This case study using ethnographic tools was designed to identify and gain analytic insight into the dimensions and dynamics of kindergarten literacy curricula during an era of early childhood education and care reform. Focal questions concerned how literacy curricula were produced and the ways in which children and their linguistic and multi-modal funds of knowledge may have been implicated in curricular production and practice. Focusing on one public school kindergarten in Ontario, Canada, and drawing on curriculum theory, actor-network theory, and multi-literacies, the study found curricula to be plural and dynamic and produced through networks that included the provincial government, school district, commerce, teachers, children, and discourses of early childhood education. Findings suggested that children’s funds of knowledge were not part of the official curriculum, yet children translated the curricular effects of other actors in the network or created alternate assemblages to enact literacy practices that more reflected their interests and knowledge. The study contributes to the dialogue on literacy curricula in early childhood education and care and hopes to provide information that can help policy-makers and educators (re)consider how networks might promote expansive literacy learning opportunities for children.

Orchestrating literacies: Print literacy learning opportunities within multimodal intergenerational ensembles

This exploratory case study considered the opportunities for print literacy learning within multimodal ensembles that featured art, singing and digital media within the context of an intergenerational programme that brought together 13 kindergarten children (4 and 5 years) with seven elder companions. Study questions concerned how reading and writing were practised within multimodal ensembles and what learning opportunities were afforded to the children while the participants worked through a chain of multimodal projects. Data were collected through ethnographic tools in the Rest Home where the projects were completed and in the children’s classroom where project content and tools were introduced and extended by the classroom teacher. Themes were identified through the juxtaposition of field texts in a multimodal analysis. The results indicate that the multimodality of the projects and the reciprocal intergenerational relationships forged in and through text-making afforded children opportunities to improvise and refine their print literacy practices as part of multimodal ensembles. The study is designed to contribute to the nascent, yet growing, body of knowledge concerning print literacy practices and learning opportunities as conceptualized within multimodal literacy and intergenerational curricula.

Multimodal Communication and Identities Options in an Intergenerational Art Class.

This case study of multimodal pedagogies within an intergenerational (IG) art class addresses questions about the learning opportunities that were created therein and what the fixing of participants’ ideas within a semiotic chain said about their facility with communicative modes and media, interests, and identity options. Key findings include: when compared to the adults’ work, the children’s use of media was more elaborate, experimental, and less inhibited and their designs more complex; the content of the children’s communication was multifaceted, and future-looking while some of the adults’ were constrained by limited identity options related to their position in the life course; and the class’s multimodal pedagogies provided occasion for the exploration of modes and media with support for working through key communicational decisions.

Biomedical Approaches to Literacy: Two Curriculum Teachers Challenge the Treatment of Dis/Ability in Contemporary Early Literacy Education

This paper is a critical examination of the state of Canadian literacy education and research and its effects on young children. Its purpose is to appraise the ways in which disability is currently being produced and practiced in early school curricula and to argue for a theoretically rich curricula which begins from children’s strengths. To accomplish these goals, this paper commences with a brief appraisal of curriculum studies’ lack of attention to issues of dis/ability, considers major movements in literacy curricula, then contends that an innovation in literacy curricula the authors term, “the biomedical approach”, is pathologizing entire school populations and inflicting upon them reductionistic literacy curricula. This paper illustrates the biomedical approach through a narrative of a public school and the experiences of its early years staff and students.

The de-pathologization of childhood, disability and aging in an intergenerational art class Implications for educators

Based on a naturalistic study of an intergenerational art program at a colocated child and long-term care facility, the purpose of this article is to discuss the implications of the program’s learning opportunities, primarily for young children, in light of current conceptualizations of childhood, aging and disability. Through a critical, postmodern framework which sees childhood, aging and disability as situated phenomena which are produced as objects in relation to power, I argue that programs such as this one are radical in their de-pathologization of these three social groups.

Every Day He Has a Dream to Tell: Classroom Literacy Curriculum in a Full-Day Kindergarten.

Within an era of change to early childhood education and care, this case study of kindergarten classroom literacy curricula sought to understand the production and effects of the curriculum within one urban, Canadian full-day kindergarten that included culturally and linguistically diverse children. Central was a concern for the place of children’s interests and funds of knowledge within this production and what opportunities the curriculum provided for children’s literacy and identity options. Theoretically, the study drew on actor-network theory and multiliteracies. Using ethnographic tools, the study found that the curriculum diverged significantly from what might have been expected. It was comprised of literacy events characterized by educator attempts to control a dynamic classroom through the management of the children’s bodies and voices. Findings suggest that this constrained children from being curricular informants and limited their literacy and identity options. Major actors in the network that produced the classroom literacy curriculum were class size, materials and space with a surprising relative absence of the programmatic curriculum and assessment. The case demonstrates what can happen when a network of actors come together and other actors are not in place to promote literacy curricula that create opportunities to expand children’s communication and identity options.

Lived literacy curriculum in a globalized schooling context: a case study of a Sino-Canadian transnational programme

This paper focuses on the lived curriculum from the vantage of the students in a case study of a Sino-Canada transnational education programme in China. The programme consisted of subject area curricula transplanted from Ontario, Canada, and taught in English, as well as subject area curricula from Mainland China that was taught in Mandarin. The study’s methodology capitalized on nine student participants’ creation of multimodal texts that were designed to articulate their identities and experiences within the programme. The paper reflects on the affordances and constraints of multimodal data collection and analysis with the goal of illuminating the participating students’ literacy learning opportunities and identity options as they experienced them in the programme. Key findings include that students experienced the curriculum and the programme in sometimes contradictory ways. The programme seemed to allow students to interact with imagined global others and the curricular learning opportunities seemed to expand students’ literacy and identity options. SCS’s Canadian/Chinese literacy curriculum, however, seemed to be bifurcated along linguistic and cultural lines and did not seem to promote syncretic literacy practices where students were encouraged to create new forms of meaning making.

Straining to Hear the Singing: Toward an Understanding of Successful Intergenerational Singing Curriculum

Assuming that intergenerational singing curricula can facilitate well-being through the production of expansive learning opportunities and relationship-building between skipped generations, this study aimed to discover the prevalence, form, and characteristics of intergenerational singing programs in a 50 kilometer radius of one urban center in Ontario, Canada. Of the 170 organizations serving children and older adults with the potential to offer intergenerational singing programs, the study found that only 36 had offered some form of intergenerational singing activity. Informants from seven of these organizations were interviewed to probe deeper into the initiators, sustainers, and potential for future programming.

The theory and practice of pedagogical ethics : features for an ethical praxis in/out of special education

In this paper, through the case of Craig,1 a young child who was labelled as behaviourally exceptional, I identify and analyse the shortcomings of a special education that is dependent upon instrumentalism (Skrtic 1995a), and I forward a radical alternative to this hegemonic form of special education. My alternative is an ethical pedagogical praxis which holds at least five inter-related features: