Karen Wohlwend Research Collection

Permanent link for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/2022/22805

Karen Wohlwend is a literacy professor who studies young children's play, across early childhood classrooms, digital cultures, and media imaginaries. Through play, even very young children can collaborate to create their own pretend scenarios--whether in doll play in the house corner, Lego building in the block center, video games, or animation and filmmaking apps. My research reconceptualizes young children’s play as an embodied literacy that produces action texts made with moving bodies or animated avatars, which is so much more meaningful and dynamic than print on a page or screen. Taking a critical sociocultural perspective, I study play in playrooms, classrooms, museums, and makerspaces, and develop methodologies for looking closely at the ways players interact with toys, popular media, video games, YouTube, Twitter, and other social networks.

Current research projects include:

Literacy Playshop: Critical media literacy through play and filmmaking with media toys, toyhacking, and popular media in PK-16 classrooms
Literacy, media, and STEM learning in first person video with toys in a Doc McStuffins museum exhibit (with Dr. Adam Maltese)
Design Playshop: Embodied literacies across sciences and arts in e-textile makerspaces (with Dr. Kylie Peppler)

Browse

Now showing 1 - 20 of 30

A Is for Avatar: Young Children in Literacy 2.0 Worlds and Literacy 1.0 Schools
(National Council of Teachers of English, 2010-11) Wohlwend, Karen E.
We talk about children as digital natives (Prensky, 2001) growing up in brave new virtual worlds, but also as vulnerable innocents who are especially attuned to—and in need of—nature. But do we really see these children? Do we understand them as emergent users of new literacies and new technologies? If so, how might early literacy education change to prepare children to read, write, be, and act as full participants in digital worlds and unknowable futures? This article examines tensions across literacy, play, and technologies in early childhood classrooms in order to understand how the meaningmaking possibilities we offer children are shaped by the ways we see them. How might new ways of seeing open our eyes to “new basics” (Dyson, 2006) in early education and help us reshape inschool literacies to more closely match children’s lived worlds?
A New Spin on Miscue Analysis: Using Spider Charts to Web Reading Processes
(National Council of Teachers of English, 2012-11) Wohlwend, Karen E.
This article introduces a way of seeing miscue analysis data through a spider chart, a readily available digital graphing tool that provides an effective way to visually represent readers’ complex coordination of interrelated cueing systems. A spider chart is a standard feature in recent spreadsheet software that puts a new spin on miscue analysis by quickly generating visual displays of children’s documented reading processes. Also known as radar charts, spider charts show webs that point to the apparent strategies that readers are using, providing a way to quickly visualize how well readers are noticing and coordinating syntactic, semantic, and graphophonic cues during the process of constructing meaning for a text. Following a brief overview of miscue analysis procedures, a range of spider charts is presented, using charts generated from reading analyses conducted by pre-service teachers in the author’s early literacy methods course.
“Are You Guys Girls?”: Boys, Identity Texts, and Disney Princess Play
(Sage, 2011-07-15) Wohlwend, Karen E.
Drawing from critical sociocultural perspectives that view play, literacy, and gender as social practices, boys‟ Disney Princess play is examined as a site of identity construction and contestation situated within overlapping communities of femininity and masculinity practice where children learn expected practices for “doing gender.” The article presents critical discourse analysis of two instances of 5- and 6-year-old children‟s doll play excerpted from data collected during a year of weekly visits to one focal kindergarten in a U.S. Midwest public school, part of a larger three-year study of literacy play as mediated discourse. Through princess play, children enacted femininities and masculinities and negotiated character roles with peers in ways that enforced and contested gender expectations circulated in media marketing and enacted in play groups. Findings indicate that doll play is a productive pedagogy for mediating gendered identity texts circulating through global media and for creating spaces for diverse gender performances in early childhood settings.
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.
Children’s Reading Today and in the Future: Igniting Their Passions and Engaging Their Interests
(National Council of Teachers of English, 2010-01) Elias, Martille R.; Rogers, Rebecca; Saul, E. Wendy; Sipe, Lawrence R.; Wilson, Jennifer L.; Wohlwend, Karen E.
Often, the reading practices that children encounter in school represent only a small range of the countless ways in which students engage meaningfully with texts. Recent reports indicate that children are reading less literature than they have in the past. Are children reading less overall, or is it simply that the texts they are reading are changing? The reviews in this column reflect the complexity of these questions. The review of Play, Creativity, and Digital Cultures edited by Rebekah Willett, Muriel Robinson, and Jackie Marsh examines how children’s interactions with digital media influences their multi modal literacy development. It addresses ways for teachers to connect children’s love of new media to classroom practice. In keeping with the theme of new literacies, the second entry in this column does not review a book, but rather a website, INK: “Interesting Non-fiction for Kids,” that seeks to encourage children’s reading of non-fiction. This site includes commentary by non-fiction authors and provides opportunities for sparking young readers’ interest in non-fiction texts. This is a particularly salient issue as the concern that children are reading less is perhaps exceeded only by the concern that readers have abandoned non-fiction altogether. The next title, Embracing, Evaluating, and Examining African American Children’s & Young Adult Literature edited by Wanda Brooks and Jonda McNair highlights the importance of including rich, culturally diverse literature in the classroom. If we are to engage all readers, then children of all cultures, ethnicities and races should be able to see themselves in the literature of our classrooms. The final title reviewed in this column is Readicide: How Schools are Killing Reading and What You Can Do About It by Kelly Gallagher. This book challenges educators and administrators to consider how policy and curriculum is extinguishing children’s passion for books. Gallagher asserts that the only way to create readers is to give them books that matter, and teach them to read deeply.
Critical Lessons and Playful Literacies: Digital Media in PK–2 Classrooms
(National Council of Teachers of English, 2012-11) Husbye, Nicholas E.; Buchholz, Beth A.; Coggin, Linda Skidmore; Wessel-Powell, Christy; Wohlwend, Karen E.
Digital literacies present opportunities to expand ways of making meaning. Utilizing a New Literacies Studies framework, this article presents critical lessons in film production from a multiple site case study using examples of classroom experience to demonstrate how filmmaking and play come together in a process of storying, a multimodal approach to text composition. Students in both preschool and early elementary contexts expressed an expanded understanding of composing through digital means, utilized technology in sophisticated ways, and accessed their knowledge of popular culture and film conventions through the process of storying.
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.
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).
Early Adopters: Playing New Literacies and Pretending New Technologies in Print-Centric Classrooms
(Sage, 2009-08) Wohlwend, Karen E.
In this article, semiotic analysis of children’s practices and designs with video game conventions considers how children use play and drawing as spatializing literacies that make room to import imagined technologies and user identities. Microanalysis of video data of classroom interactions collected during a three year ethnographic study of children’s literacy play in kindergarten and primary classrooms reveals how the leading edge of technology use in print-centric classrooms is pretended into being by 5- , 6-, and 7-year-old “early adopters” a marketing term for first wave consumers who avidly buy and explore newly-released technology products. Early adopters signals two simultaneous identities for young technology users: 1) as developing learners of new literacies and technologies and 2) as curious explorers who willingly play with new media. Children transformed paper and pencil resources into artifacts for enacting cell phone conversations and animating video games, using new technologies and the collaborative nature of new literacies to perform literate identities and to strengthen the cohesiveness of play groups.
Enriching and Assessing Young Children's Multimodal Storytelling
(International Literacy Association, 2016-06) Wessel‐Powell, Christy; Kargin, Tolga; Wohlwend, Karen E.
This article provides primary teachers with assessment tools and curricular examples to expand writers’ workshop by adding a multimodal storytelling unit on drama and filmmaking, allowing students to create engaging off‐the‐page stories through films and play performances that enrich writing. Too often, children's literacy abilities are assessed solely based on what they can write on paper, overlooking the rich ways children convey meaning through multiple communication modes like sound effects, gesture, movement, images, and language in their storytelling. This research recognizes play as an important literacy and argues that a multimodal emphasis in teaching and assessment more closely matches the ways children learn and make meaning in their everyday lives. This study is a part of a larger, ongoing multiyear, multisite study of literacy playshops in early childhood classrooms and teacher education.
Free Play or Tight Spaces? Mapping Participatory Literacies in Apps
(International Literacy Association, 2016-05) Rowsell, Jennifer; Wohlwend, Karen E.
Building on existing research applying app maps (Heins-Israelson, 2015), the authors take ideological orientation to broaden app evaluations and consider participatory literacies, social and communicational practices relevant to children’s everyday digitally-mediated lives. Drawing from their North American elementary classroom studies on children’s technology play with iPads, the authors compare four typical literacy practices with apps: practicing a skill, reading an e-book, animating a film, and designing an interactive world. A rubric and radar maps are introduced to help teachers assess and visualize educational apps’ potential to develop six dimensions of participatory literacies: multiplayer, productive, multimodal, multilinear, pleasurable, and connected.
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.
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.
Hands On, Hands Off: Gendered Access in Crafting and Electronics Practices
(Taylor & Francis, 2014-07) Buchholz, Beth A.; Shively, Kate; Peppler, Kylie A.; Wohlwend, Karen E.
The Maker movement promotes hands-on making, including crafts, robotics, and computing. The movement’s potential to transform education rests in our ability to address notable gender disparities, particularly in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields. E-textiles—the first female-dominated computing community—provide inspiration for overcoming long-standing cultural divides in classrooms. Analysis of children’s use of e-textiles reveals that materials like needles, fabric, and conductive thread rupture traditional gender scripts around electronics and implicitly gives girls hands-on access and leadership roles. This reconceptualization of cultural divides as sets of tacitly accepted practices rooted in gendered histories has implications for reconceptualizing traditionally male-dominated areas of schooling.
“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.
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.
Keune, A.Recognition in makerspaces: Supporting opportunities for women to "make" a STEM career
(Elsevier, 2019) Keune, Anna; Peppler, Kylie A.; Wohlwend, Karen E.
Making is a playful exploration of tools and materials to design personally meaningful artifacts, providing a particularly impactful entry point for traditionally underrepresented youth in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. However, it remains unclear how these constructionist explorations translate to eventual professional and educational STEM opportunities, especially for women. This paper tracks an exemplary case in a makerspace to theorize, describe, and analyze the behavioral patterns of young women as they engage in making and move toward expertise in STEM. Building on a material-based and constructionist notion of making, we use mediated discourse analysis to examine how recognition (materialized in artifacts as displaying, legitimising, and circulating emergent STEM expertise) leads to transformational development over time. We introduce the notion of tinkering with development, which conceptualizes playful project design, spatial project placements, and emergent online project sharing as drivers of human developmental trajectories. Implications of this work include a set of design principles to support makerspaces and other constructionist learning environments to foster participation in STEM. Further, implications for constructionist theory and STEM gender representation are discussed.
Media as nexus of practice: remaking identities in What Not to Wear
(Taylor and Francis, 2012-06-15) Medina, Carmen L.; Wohlwend, Karen E.
In this conceptual piece, we examine media as a nexus of a traditional schooling pedagogy and performance pedagogy to make visible how their overlapping elements produce media's pervasive educative force but also to gain a deeper understanding of the complexities of using media in educational contexts. Nexus analysis examines a fashion makeover television program – What Not to Wear (WNTW) – as an embodied lesson that produces identity revision but also disjunctures and slippages that enable critical responses and productive remakings. WNTW is a dramatization of remediation of one woman's (portrayed) lived practices and clothing choices which are read on her body as personal expression of fashion trends. These globalized lessons with body texts require new ways of reading and responding that allow learners/viewers to see the power relations that construct particular identity performances as errors and cultural practices and ethnicities as unacceptable.
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.
More than a Child’s Work: Framing Teacher Discourse about Play
(InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 2007-03) Wohlwend, Karen E.
In early childhood education, tension between accountability pressures and romanticized notions of play influences teacher decisions, shapes classroom activities, and determines what counts as learning. Critical discourse analysis shows how discourses of work and play were activated as the teachers analyzed videotaped instances of children’s classroom activity. Microethnographic discourse analysis tracks the interactional frames within the teachers’ discussion. To interpret and justify their classroom practice, teachers voiced a prevalent cultural model, “play is a child’s work,” a naturalized storyline that circulates expectations for how teachers and children should act in school. Shifts between hypothetical, metalinguistic, and play frames enabled participants to self-critically assess their own teaching and to invent ways of successfully fulfilling teaching ideals within competing discourses.

Browse

Browsing Karen Wohlwend Research Collection by Type "Article"