Sarah Vander Zanden

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.

Composing Film: Multimodality and Production in Elementary Classrooms.

Despite the proliferation of technology in contemporary lives, many elementary schools often do not account for other technologically-mediated ways of constructing meaning in their daily curriculum, including film. This article presents insights from 2 filmmaking projects with elementary-aged students illustrating how film allowed students to engage in collaborative, as well as multimodal, literacy practices. Greater instructional flexibility and possibility for nonlinear production are identified as positive benefits in approaching text production situated in filmmaking. Our investigation highlights how technology integration can bolster existing writing practices in the elementary classroom and can benefit students in ways that maximize flexible thinking and include diverse student perspectives.

Prairie restoration project: Alternatives for identifying gifted students

Abstract An authentic, challenging curriculum engaged middle school students from an urban district in exploratory work related to restoring a small prairie at the school. Integrated science-literacy-arts activities were coupled with a system of thinking skills that helped students view issues from different perspectives. Impassioned guest speakers and an enthusiastic teacher inspired students to build a relationship with the content, express their ideas creatively, interact with each other on student-designed projects, and to assume a leadership stance. Middle school students of all academic levels would benefit from teachers implementing similar subject-integrated, real-world-connected work in their classrooms.

Productive Taboos: Cultivating Spatialized Literacy Practices.

The fifth grade students in this project were part of a yearlong ethnographic study in an urban elementary school. They engaged in a student initiated inquiry project combining bakeries and mysteries, which culminated in the production of an original film. Situated in a socio-spatialized stance on literacy involving networks of participation and interaction in conjunction with Discourses and encoded texts, this study examines the co-construction of lived and ideologically charged spaces. The inquiry project privileged discussion, script writing, and a range of texts as literacy curricular tools, such as everyday texts (cookbooks and TV shows, e.g. Cake Boss) and cultural content (pop music icons Justin Bieber and Michael Jackson). The students, from three ability-grouped classrooms, reimagined their roles within the inquiry group through bargaining for tasks, wearing costumes, and taking on new roles to determine how to interact with one another effectively. Analysis, with an emphasis on the social co-con...The fifth grade students in this project were part of a yearlong ethnographic study in an urban elementary school. They engaged in a student initiated inquiry project combining bakeries and mysteries, which culminated in the production of an original film. Situated in a socio-spatialized stance on literacy involving networks of participation and interaction in conjunction with Discourses and encoded texts, this study examines the co-construction of lived and ideologically charged spaces. The inquiry project privileged discussion, script writing, and a range of texts as literacy curricular tools, such as everyday texts (cookbooks and TV shows, e.g. Cake Boss) and cultural content (pop music icons Justin Bieber and Michael Jackson). The students, from three ability-grouped classrooms, reimagined their roles within the inquiry group through bargaining for tasks, wearing costumes, and taking on new roles to determine how to interact with one another effectively. Analysis, with an emphasis on the social co-construction of school spaces for literacy practices in current educational settings, highlights the potential for productivity when student engage in literacy work outside of dominant trends of ability grouping, individual work, and compliance. Productive taboos in this study such as collaborative writing, embodying characters, and taking leadership roles fostered flexibility in thinking and engagement in student-initiated projects.