Peer-Reviewed Papers

Permanent link for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/2022/1130

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How to Succeed in Physics Without Really Crying
(Science and Children, 1996-05) Dickinson, Valarie
As a first-grade teacher, I enjoy watching my students learn as they explore and investigate. So I welcomed the chance to make my own discoveries in an introductory college-level course titled "Physics and Society." I soon learned, however, that there would be no hands-on learning or cooperative group participation in this class.
Teaching Science When Your Principal Says "Teach Language Arts"
(Science and Children, 2001-04) Akerson, Valarie
As an assistant professor of elementary science education, I teach many practicing teachers in graduate courses and teacher institutes. While some elementary teachers may avoid teaching science (Borko 1992; Enochs and Riggs 1990; Smith and Neale 1989), the elementary teachers who take my courses are generally very enthusiastic about teaching science and want to learn strategies to help them become better science teachers. These teachers believe that language arts are important and that science and other important disciplines can be supported by language arts, even with a reciprocal relationship (Akerson and Flanigan 2000; Dickinson, Burns, Hagen, and Locker 1997; Dickinson and Young 1998). Recently, however, several teachers have commented that principals tell them to focus on language arts and mathematics because those subject areas are being tested. While some teachers may be specifically told not to teach science, most are being asked only to emphasize language arts. This can make it difficult to satisfactorily meet state and national recommendations that indicate science content should be learned in kindergarten through high school. To help address this problem, teachers are seeking strategies that can help them focus on language arts while continuing to do a good job teaching science.
Designing and implementing meaningful field-based experiences for mathematics methods courses: A theoretical framework and a program description
(The Mathematics Educator, 2003) Akerson, Valarie; Morrison, Judith; Roth McDuffie, Amy
Performance-based approaches to learning and assessment are consistent with goals for standards-based instruction and show promise as a vehicle for teacher change. Performance assessment involves students participating in an extended, worthwhile mathematical task while teachers facilitate and assess their learning. We designed and implemented a project in an elementary mathematics methods course in which preservice teachers developed performance assessment tasks and then administered these tasks in K-8 classrooms. We present our guiding framework for this project, the project design, and the teaching and learning experiences for project leaders and preservice teachers. Recommendations and reflections are included for others intending to implement similar projects.
Nonfiction Know-How
(Science and Children, 2004-03) Akerson, Valarie; Young, Terrell A.
Children love nonfiction books, and their reading of such texts has shown a strong relationship between science achievement and informational reading and writing abilities (Bernhardt, Destina, Kamil, and Rodriguez-Munoz 1995). How can elementary teachers capitalize on this natural affinity and make the most effective use of nonfiction trade books in their classroom? There are numerous strategies to increase students' exposure to and facility with nonfiction. This article offers a few suggestions to help increase students' science learning and develop their literacy skills.
Life as Theater and Theater as Life:
(United States Society for Education Through Art, 2005) Manifold, Marjorie Cohee
Since media technologies have distributed visual narratives of popular culture to the masses, characters from popular narratives have appeared in the spontaneous drawings of youth. Over time, changes in the subject matter and aesthetic characteristics of these youth-produced drawings have reflected the evolution of popular tastes. However, due to a convergence of 21st century technological media; sociological influences; cross-cultural exchanges of aesthetic traditions; and natural inclinations for play, the spontaneous art works of contemporary youth now represent more than imitative appreciation of popular culture. Youth who are fans of particular phenomena of popular culture are projecting their understandings of the world through art expressions that function as ‘life as theater and theater as art.’ If art teachers and students are to engage in critical examinations of the new visual art forms, functions, and meanings of these works they must recognize concepts and terminologies appropriate to deciphering the works’ inherent characteristics.
Chasing Friendship: Acceptance, Rejection, and Recess Play
(Taylor & Francis for Association for Childhood Education International, 2005-12) Wohlwend, Karen E.
The tension in a game of hide-and-seek typifies the social flight and pursuit recorded in an ethnographic study of recess play during weekly observations on an elementary school playground. Analysis of field notes revealed that 1st-grade children frequently blurred the line between acceptance and rejection while they worked through peer relationships within the complex social web of playground friendships. One body of research on childhood relationships indicates that children may suffer peer rejection or lags in their social development as a result of ineffective play behaviors (McCay & Keyes, 2001; Yanghee, 2003). Other ethnographic studies (Corsaro, 2003; Fernie, Kantor, & Whaley, 1995; Kantor & Fernie, 2003; Scott, 2003) expand interpretations of exclusion beyond individual deficits, situating peer rejection within the social context of children's culture and the institutional structure of schools. In this article, inclusion and exclusion are interpreted not as functions of individual developmental deficit but rather as socially constructed phenomena within the peer group, highlighting the need for teachers to intervene with the entire class rather than focusing on perceived social skills deficits of particular children. The article describes how children in this study used play materials and themes to create play group affiliations, restrict or challenge group membership, and stretch peer social boundaries. The final section offers a playground observation tool and classroom implications and suggestions for teachers to help young children form more inclusive play groups.
Science the "Write" Way
(Science and Children, 2005-12) Akerson, Valarie; Young, Terrell A.
Learning to write well is a long process that comes through teacher modeling, instruction, practice, and feedback. Luckily, the writing process can be used to improve science learning, too. Here are a few good writing suggestions that integrate science while helping students develop their informational writing skills.
“I am not an American girl!” Resisting discourses of patriotism, child innocence, and agency.
(International Journal of Equity and Innovation in Early Childhood, 2006) Wohlwend, Karen E.
This paper presents a case study of a young Arab-American girl struggling against a united front of innocence, patriotism, and peer culture in an American first grade class one year after ‘9/11’. Through her writings, language interactions, and play, Hanan, a six year old student in the first grade class I taught, asserted an ethnic identity and resisted interpellation as an American as she coped with ritualized post- 9/11 patriotism in the school culture and in the peer culture.
Learning from the Inside Out: Using Art to Deal with Difficult Issues in the Classroom
(National Taiwan Arts Education Center, 2006-12) Manifold, Marjorie
Discussions of events and issues that cause grief may be seen as too difficult to be discussed openly in the classroom, since they may trigger emotionally charged responses from distressed students. The author of this paper argues that grief work and aesthetic experiences have similar dimensions that may be triggered by engagements with art and art making. The role of imagination in the grief work process is described. Strategies for using art to call forth various tools of imagination to assuage the anxieties of grieving students and awaken empathy among non-grieving students were used during a workshop for pre-service and in-service teachers. The aim of the workshop was that its participants experience how knowing of and within works of art assists a restructuring of one's ability to make meaning of the world. As a result, the workshop participants were able to model, design, and implement experiences in which art was used to bridge to inner and outer spaces of knowing, and refocus the attentions of anxious or grieving students towards learning.
Reading to Play and Playing to Read: A Mediated Discourse Analysis of Early Literacy Apprenticeship
(National Reading Conference, 2007) Wohlwend, Karen E.
How does “playing school,” an ordinary childhood pastime, shape children’s reading abilities, classroom identities, and relative social positioning? In an ethnographic study of literacy play in one kindergarten classroom, I discovered that young children regularly combined reading and play practices to make the meanings of texts more accessible and to take up empowered identity positions in child-ruled spaces. Two examples, excerpted from the data, illustrate how reading a book while playing the teacher transformed a classroom meeting area into a pretend school space where children could assume identities as readers and leaders.
Friendship Meeting or Blocking Circle?: Identities in the Laminated Spaces of a Playground Conflict
(Symposium Journals, 2007) Wohlwend, Karen E.
Drawing from an incident that took place during a year-long investigation of children's 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 children's conflicts during play.
Large-scale second language writing assessment: What's involved?
(Michigan State University, 2007) Samuelson, Beth Lewis; Dyste, Susan; Crawford, Mary Ann; Vellenga, Heidi; Youngquist, Julia; Boehm, Diane
This review addresses three areas of significance in the design, implementation and use of large-scale writing tests that impact ESL writers: writing assessment tasks, rater decision-making, and test washback. First, we discuss integrated writing tasks, as exemplified by the TOEFL iBT, in contrast with impromptu or independent writing tasks. Then we examine results from recent think-aloud studies of raters and their decision-making while reading essays. Finally, we review the current research on test washback in several international contexts. Additionally, we offer some research directions and practical considerations, particularly the need to educate teachers and other test users about the needs of ESL writers.
Play as a literacy of possibilities: Expanding meanings in practices, materials, and spaces
(National Council of Teachers of English, 2008) Wohlwend, Karen E.
This reconceptualization of play as an embodied literacy explores how its multimodal facility for manipulating meanings and contexts powerfully shapes children’s learning and participation in classrooms. Three examples from one focal kindergarten in a three year study of literacy play in early childhood classrooms illustrate how young children emphasize or combine particular modes to strategically amplify their intended meanings as they play 1) to try out social practices, 2) to explore the multimodal potential of material resources, and 3) to construct spaces for peer culture within classrooms. Multimodal literacy research holds promise for convincing administrators and policy-makers to reverse the erosion of play in schools. In this classroom, a pedagogy of literacy fusion (Millard, 2003) merged two literacies—multimodal play with school literacy—producing an inclusive space where children could play with meanings and achieve school goals as they enacted literate identities in both peer and school cultures.
From “What did I write?” to “Is this right?”: Intention, convention, and accountability in early literacy
(The New Educator, 2008-01) Wohlwend, Karen E.
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 teacher’s plan to restore intention to compensate for a mandated curriculum that overemphasized convention. Children’s writing samples were analyzed before and after the teacher introduced peer sharing, a strategy aimed at reestablishing the children’s communicative intent.
IRA Outstanding Dissertation Award: Kindergarten as Nexus of Practice: A Mediated Discourse Analysis of Reading, Writing, Play, and Design in an Early Literacy Apprenticeship
(International Reading Association, 2008-11) Wohlwend, Karen E.
The International Reading Association’s Outstanding Dissertation Award, which has been given annually since 1964, recognizes exceptional contributions made by doctoral students in reading or related fields. Candidates are self-nominated or nominated by their dissertation advisors. Applicants must be current members of the International Reading Association. Each submits a monograph based on the dissertation, which must have been completed during the previous academic year. These monographs undergo rigorous review by the Association’s Subcommittee on the Outstanding Dissertation Award.
Dilemmas and discourses of learning to write: Assessment as a contested site
(National Council of Teachers of English, 2009) Wohlwend, Karen E.
Writing assessment is a contested site where competing discourses overlap and invoke conflicting expectations, creating dilemmas for teachers who want to do what they believe is best for children and fulfill their school’s writing targets. A critical look at assessment quandaries reveals surface dilemmas as clashes between overlapping discourses, freeing teachers to work with and against institutions that create the dilemmas and their immobilizing effects. To illustrate how competing discourses generate assessment dilemmas, I analyze data examples from emergent writing activity by a group of children at a kindergarten writing table, looking closely at the students’ and teacher’s actions through the lenses of several prevalent discourses that explain early writing development: maturation discourse, skills mastery discourse, intentionality discourse, multimodal genre discourse, social practices discourse, and sociopolitical discourse (adapted from Ivanic, 2004).
Mapping Multimodal Literacy Practices through Mediated Discourse Analysis: Identity Revision in What Not To Wear
(National Reading Conference, 2009) Wohlwend, Karen E.
In this conceptual paper, I examine the exaggerated revision critique in one “makeover” television program to illustrate how MDA’s filtering process pinpoints practices of identity revision that are so essential to makeovers, whether in reality television episodes or in schooling. To suggest MDA’s potential for revealing the identity-building accomplished through physical activity with objects, I analyze multimodal practices in one television episode of What Not to Wear, concluding with connections to familiar embodied literacy practices in classrooms. The dramatized and edited excerpts provide vivid examples of gatekeeping that make this fashion makeover program an apt choice for illustrating how the MDA process uncovers identity-building activity.
Gaming Fluencies: Pathways into Participatory Culture in a Community Design Studio
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2009) Kafai, Yasmin B.; Peppler, Kylie A.
Many recent efforts to promote new literacies involve the promotion of creative media production as a way to foster youth’s literate engagement with digital media. Those interested in gaming literacies view game design as a way to engage youth in reflective and critical reading of the gaming culture. In this paper, we propose the concept of “gaming fluencies” to promote game design as a context in which youth not only learn to read but also to produce digital media in creative ways. Gaming fluencies also present the added benefit of addressing equity issues of participation in the new media literacy landscape. We report on an ethnographic study that documented urban youth producing digital games in a community technology center. Our analyses focus on an archive of 643 game designs collected over a 24-month period, selecting a random sample to identify evidence of creative and technical dimensions in game designs. In addition, we highlight three case studies of game designs to identify different pathways into the participatory culture. Our goal is to illustrate how gaming fluencies allow for a wide range of designs, provide low thresholds and high ceilings for complex projects, and make room for creative expression. In our discussion, we address how gaming fluencies represent a complementary pathway for learning and participation in today’s media culture.
Damsels in discourse: Girls consuming and producing identity texts through Disney Princess play
(International Reading Association, 2009-01) Wohlwend, Karen E.
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.
Mediated discourse analysis: Researching children's nonverbal interactions as social practice
(Sage, 2009-03-01) Wohlwend, Karen E.
Young children often use actions rather than talk as they interact with objects and each other to strategically shape the social, material, and cultural environment. New dynamic research designs and methods are needed to capture the collaborative learning and social positioning achieved through children’s non-verbal interactions. Mediated discourse analysis (MDA), a hybrid ethnographic/sociolinguistic approach rooted in cultural-historical activity and practice theories, analyzes mediated actions with objects. A three-year ethnographic study of children’s literacy play illustrates the five-stage process in MDA research design that resulted in microanalysis of children’s activity with social practices, positioning and spaces that included and excluded peers.

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