Although isolating, lockdown also created unexpected opportunities for connection and inspiration. This article describes the lockdown literacies of a sibling pair, Marco and Mara, as they wrote ...digital texts/books for Literacy-Cast, a virtual, interactive literacy space offered by Appalachian State University from March 2020-present. Since lockdown began, this virtual space has been enacted 4-5 days weekly with 70-250 participants logging in from “home” to co-construct a multigenerational, multilingual, geographically-dispersed community engaged in reading, writing/composing, making, speaking, and listening. Literacy-Cast was imagined, built, and enacted collaboratively among faculty, laboratory school teachers, graduate-level teacher candidates, and children (and families) in grades K-5. We hear a lot about the limitations of virtual classrooms/learning (e.g., COVID “learning loss,” lack of engagement, unequal access), particularly in relation to historically marginalized communities, but rarely are we offered counter-narratives: examples where young children who live and go to school in these communities shaped the creation of new virtual spaces/places by making visible meaningful “at home” literacy/language practices, cultural artifacts, and people. Through invitations embedded in the multimodal texts/books shared on Literacy-Cast’s digital bookshelf, children brought the community into their homes–bedrooms, kitchens, backyards, back porches, and backseats, reframing “home visits'' as sites/events for new kinds of community knowledge production. Research about home visits, educators visiting students’ homes to learn about children’s lives, has documented the impact of home environment awareness on school interactions, improved relationships between caregivers and teachers, typically focused on intervention supporting school-based achievement and school practices, often with unidirectional flow from school-to-home; however we conceptualize Literacy-Cast’s daily activity as multidirectional “home visits,” where invitations to come over and play, read, and write together brokered relationships and strengthened a gamut of literacy practices for all participants. Through collaborative ethnography, we explore ways “home” (e.g., objects/people/practices/languages/events) became tools/co-authors for children’s digital composing/making and, ultimately, home/community-making.
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.
Death didn’t come up at center time Husbye, Nicholas E.; Buchholz, Beth A.; Powell, Christy Wessel ...
Language arts,
07/2019, Volume:
96, Issue:
6
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Four educators reflect upon sharing children’s picturebooks about grief with students and colleagues, encouraging others to take up similar brave and difficult conversations.
The comparative effectiveness of graphic novels, heavily illustrated novels, and traditional novels as reading teaching tools has been sparsely researched. During the 2011-2012 school year, 24 ...mixed-ability fifth grade students chose to read six novels: two traditional novels, two highly illustrated novels and two graphic novels. Students participated in discussion groups structured with thinking skills, and completed assignments during and after reading the books. Student comprehension and enjoyment were measured by rubric-graded assignments and rating scales. The numbers of student responses during discussions per type of novel were tabulated. The graphic novel received the highest scores in all categories. The researchers conclude that graphic novels be considered an engaging and effective method of teaching reading to fifth graders. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
As teacher education programs shift to more practice‐based methods in the preparation of literacy teachers, the ways in which teacher educators support the learning of their preservice teachers ...(PSTs) becomes paramount. In an effort to support PSTs in developing competency in instructional literacy routines, coaching has been found to support PSTs’ understandings of how to teach for student learning. In this article, three approaches to coaching are explored: rehearsals, a modified behind‐the‐glass approach, and structured video reflection. Drawing from rich examples of practice, attention is paid to the ways each method of coaching supports novice teachers in developing competency and the contexts in which each is used.
Nonfiction stories of animal compassion were used in this literacy-social studies integrated lesson to address both efferent and aesthetic stances in transmediation of text from picture books to ...maps. Preservice early childhood and elementary teachers chose places from the nine recent children’s stories, symbolizing them on a map while completing other map elements such as legend, index, title, and compass rose. Compassion and social-emotional skills were woven into the project by representing the affective tone of story events at various places through choice of place name adjectives. A social studies extension included analysis of how the five themes of geography were depicted on the map. Synopses of the books, one map made by first graders, and three preservice teacher-made maps, along with efferent and aesthetic elements and examples of geography themes from the maps are included. Suggestions for implementation and extension of the lesson with early elementary students are provided.
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.
Purpose
The concept of an American Dream was interrogated during a service-learning partnership between university students and a multilingual, racially diverse class of sixth graders. The one-on-one ...service-learning partnerships were at the heart of the semester-long project and sought horizontalidad, or non-authoritarian democratic communication and shared knowledge creation. The paper aims to discuss these issues.
Design/methodology/approach
This project leveraged the arts and humanities within the context of social studies education to promote youth civic engagement. This project used Photovoice methodology in which all participants took photos and wrote about their American Dream. Participants then shared their photography and writing at three public gallery events in the community in an effort to educate others about their perspectives, experiences, and hopes regarding the American Dream.
Findings
Findings from the reciprocally minded partnership centered on the sixth-grade students taking a collective approach to the American Dream. Specifically, they noted their commitment to their families and desire to support others, with some sixth graders even sharing a commitment to promoting social justice. Some participants demonstrated a “we consciousness,” or a collective approach to social justice.
Originality/value
The study provides insights into how educators can engage middle school students in democratic practice as active citizens in a service-learning partnership. Through a service-learning themed project about the American Dream, middle school students were able to share their voices and experiences with the larger community via a project rooted in horizontalidad.
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.
This educational ethnographic case study explores Melissa’s literacy experiences in an urban elementary school. Using a modified domain analysis (LeCompte & Schensul, 1999), this paper focuses ...specifically on what it meant for Melissa to ‘Do the Right Thing’ in various school spaces. Her application of doing the right thing in different spaces complicates what it means to take ‘right action’. Therefore, ‘taking right action’ was divided into three domains: 1) Institutional Domain: Code of Compliance 2) Dominant Literacy Domain: School Code and 3) Personal Domain: Melissa’s Self- Reliance. While Melissa was considered a model fifth grader in her urban elementary school setting by her teachers and peers, her personal code of literacy often subsumed the dominant school discourse of ‘do the right thing’. Analysis generated prospective inroads for understanding how literacy learning is inextricably intertwined with relationships of space and discourse. Insights from this close analysis point to the need for nuanced recognition of students’ intellectual lives and underscore the plague of low expectations that narrowing curriculum imposes upon students.
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