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)

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App Maps: Evaluating Children's iPad Software for 21st Century Literacy Learning
(Routledge, 2016-11) Wohlwend, Karen E.; Rowsell, Jennifer
In this chapter, we introduce a rubric and a map that we developed for comparing early childhood apps on five dimensions of participatory literacies: multiplayer, productive, multimodal, multilinear, and connected. Using exemplar data from our North American classroom studies on children’s technology play with iPads, we evaluate and compare four apps to illustrate how the rubric and map can be used to assess each app’s potential for develop ing participatory literacies. A description of each app and an ethnographic data excerpt illustrate how children used each app’s features to provide a sampling of the ways that young children actually engaged with the app during classroom play.
Bringing Maker Literacies to Early Childhood Education
(Nordicom, University of Gothenburg, 2017) Scott, Jill A.; Wohlwend, Karen E.
Pre-service teacher training must better prepare teachers to respond to the student’s interests in popular culture, play, and making. Maker literacies (Wohlwend et al., 2017) such as popular media, toyhacking, and creating films can be included in literacy education if pre-service teachers develop an understanding of their value and place within the literacy curriculum. How do we tap into the creative potential of play and making interests in a way that aligns with school literacy goals? How can early literacy curriculum and instruction expand to incorporate making into primary literacy methods courses? This study documents maker literacies that pre-service teachers used when a play, toyhacking, and filmmaking module was added to their primary literacy methods class at the university. The main purpose was to encourage pre-service teachers to transform and expand their notions about what counts as literacy and literacy curriculum in early childhood education.
“Cause I know how to get friends- plus they like my dancing”: (L)earning the nexus of practice in Club Penguin
(Peter Lang, 2013) Wohlwend, Karen E.; Kargin, Tolga
What happens when young children sit side by side while their avatars play together on global playgrounds in virtual worlds? In this chapter, we examine activity in an afterschool computer club in which children play in Club Penguin (Disney), a social networking and gaming virtual world website where players are represented online as penguin avatars. Here, we focus on the ways children teach each other a range of digital literacy practices in order to read screens, gather social goods, and send messages to other avatars as they help each other understand how to participate in an online peer culture. We suggest this mediating and mediated activity in a virtual world depends upon their face-to-face cooperation, situated in peer-teaching practices that were common in computer affinity groups in the peer culture in one afterschool program. The interrelationships among peer cultures, popular media, and digital literacy practices of adolescents and young adults have been heavily researched (Black & Steinkuehler, 2009). Many pre-teens and adolescents access and wield spatialized literacies (Leander & Sheehy, 2004) that blur boundaries across time and space as they participate in social media or online games in complex digital networks (Leander & McKim, 2003). Far less attention has focused on how young children who are emergent readers and writers interact in online social networks, particularly in new media spheres that host children's digital cultures such as Club Penguin.
Chasing literacies across action texts and augmented realities: E-books, animated apps, and Pokémon Go
(Springer, 2017-07-06) Wohlwend, Karen E.
In this chapter, mediated discourse theory is used to compare how changing models of literacy learning reflect and shape educational expectations for children’s engagement with new technologies. Video analysis of children’s actual iPad interactions with an e-book app, an animation app, and an augmented reality app identifies the literacy practices in each model that interpret, create, and share a range of action texts. An action text is a played text that also supports an imaginary co-constructed context, negotiated among multiple players across digital screens and physical environments. Analysis of action texts created during app play identifies three prevalent models of literacies that circulate notions about who, what, and how children should use iPads: (1) digital literacy, (2) participatory literacies, and (3) socio-material literacies Each model is justified by educational discourse that prepares children to participate in particular ways in different conceptions of learning spaces: • digital literacy in the skills mastery discourse of educational standards in school cultures • participatory literacies in the social practice discourse of situated and connected learning in digital cultures and global networks. • socio-material literacies in post-human discourse of entangled assemblages of actions, bodies, and machines in converging realities.
Child’s Play: Reading and Remaking Gendered Action Texts in Toys
(Routledge, 2018-11) Wohlwend, Karen E.
When children pick up and play with their favorite toys, they are also taking up a complex mix of gender messages and cultural expectations about who they can be and how they should play. Drawing on sociocultural theories that conceptualize literacy as mediated action and play as a literacy that produces action texts, this chapter examines pre-schoolers’ pretend play to uncover the literacies that children use to make stories crafted with bodies, toys, and popular media. Toys are invitations to enact beloved character identities and media narratives but also engage playgroup practices and gender expectations for players. Mediated discourse analysis of young girls’ interactions with toys during dramatic play reveals how the smallest actions – cradling a doll or waving a stick – fit into live-action stories and into larger patterns of expectations for “doing girl.” This chapter examines how everyday play reshapes toys’ embedded meanings and remakes these expectations, making child’s play an important site for reimagining gendered possibilities.
Critical Literacy, Critical Engagement, and Digital Technology: Convergence and Embodiment in Glocal Spheres
(Routledge, 2010-12) Wohlwend, Karen E.; Lewis, Cynthia
This chapter examines critical literacy within an evolving digital and global landscape. The last decade has produced a steady stream of research focusing on digital literacy practices. Those who study these practices have been engaged in the making of a discipline as they explore how readers and writers negotiate the demands and affordances of literacy practices that employ digital technologies.
Design Playshop: Preschoolers Making, Playing and Learning with Squishy Circuits
(Routledge, 2016-05) Wohlwend, Karen E.; Keune, Anna; Peppler, Kylie
In the hum of activity in a sunny preschool classroom, young children bend intently over their projects on the small table strewn with Squishy Circuit kits: maker kits for crafting working electric circuits with playdough “wires,” battery packs, and LEDs, fans, or buzzers. As they busily stick small white plastic light bulbs into playdough caterpillars, spaceships, and pancakes, the children squeal “It’s red!” or “I made a yellow one!” as each bulb lights up to reveal its hidden color. One 5-year-old boy, Nate, leans across the table to offer helpful advice to a younger girl whose circuit is not working. “I want to tell you one thing. If you put one [battery lead] into one [playdough] ball, it won’t work. You have to make two balls, and put one [lead] into one ball and other [lead] into another ball.” However, the child with the nonworking circuit wants to instead flatten her playdough ball into a pancake. Suparna, a 5-year-old girl whose caterpillar glows with colorful lights, chimes in, “I know! You have to have two. So make a big pancake and then put into two [halves] and then put that battery pack into both of them.”
Embodied signs: Expanding representations through and with bodies
(Springer Science + Business Media, 2015-01) Wohlwend, Karen; Samuelson, Beth Lewis
From cutting out to cutting with: A materialist reframing of action and multimodality in children’s play and making
(Routledge, 2019) Wohlwend, Karen E.; Thiel, Jaye Johnson
Using examples of early childhood play from our independent research studies, we take a closer look to ask what did we miss? In initial multimodal analysis of these events, how did an implicit human-centered insistence on semiotic affordances and strategic design tame the mobile jumble of children’s play and making? The shift from multimodality to materiality in this retrospective analysis builds on and transitions from Kress’ (1997) ground-breaking work on multimodality in children’s play and making, where he noted that a child cuts around a drawing to bring its image into the world of action. “Cutting out” turns a two-dimensional drawing of a car into a three-dimensional paper toy that can be animated for play. In this chapter, we take a new materialist lens (Lenz Taguchi, 2014) to children’s making that considers the intra-action among all the actants in the toy/player/action assemblage that co-produce a flow of play moves and pretend meanings. When we look for materiality, emergence, and mobility, we can better appreciate play’s haphazard trajectories and recognize the embodied “muchness” (Thiel, 201X) of children’s play, we can see how assemblages of bodies, meanings, and actions create knowledge flows from the most ordinary of school supplies: paper.
Ghouls, Dolls, and Girlhoods: Fashion and Horror at Monster High
(Springer, 2016) Wohlwend, Karen E.
How does a zombie doll in a popular horror franchise for tween girls serve as a productive site of contestation among overlapping visions of girlhood? In this chapter, I examine Ghoulia Yelps, a zombie character in the popular Monster High fashion doll franchise, not only as a toy in a global flow of licensed consumer goods but also as a site of identity construction and digital media production where facile notions of girlhoods are both enacted and reimagined (Forman-Brunell, 2012). Monster High is reconceptualized here as the site of converging cultural imaginaries (Medina & Wohlwend, 2014) in which children play in and out of gendered futures around fashion, adolescence, diversity, and schooling. Critical analysis of tween girls’ digital play with a zombie doll on social media reveals the resonances, slippages, and paradoxes among identity texts produced about, for, and by girls. After describing the scope of the Monster High franchise and how it materializes expectations for characters, consumers, and players, I next examine how these dolls and identity texts circulate three dominant imaginaries of girlhood. Finally, I analyze YouTube videos of girls’ play with the Ghoulia Yelps character to see how tween’s foregrounding of horror and wielding of zombie tropes opens opportunities to rupture and reimagine girlhoods.
Hacking Toys and Remixing Media: Integrating Maker Literacies into Early Childhood Teacher Education
(Springer, 2018) Wohlwend, Karen E.; Scott, Jill A.; Yi, Joanne H.; Deliman, Amanda; Kargin, Tolga
This study examined a literacy playshop curriculum that integrated maker literacies (i.e., collaborative play, toyhacking, filmmaking, video-editing, and remixing media) in two US teacher education classes with approximately 60 university students. Students engaged in digital puppetry activities using makerspace tools, iPads, and puppetry apps for young children. The students used craft materials to hack or redesign the children’s favorite media characters action figures to make interactive puppets for original films and for teaching a filmmaking lesson with a young child. Nexus analysis of literacy playshop activity analyzed pre-service teachers’ knowledge of seemingly “intuitive” digital literacies as a nexus of practice, or the tacit expectations, social practices, and text conventions in viral videos or computer apps that become engrained through engagements with immersive and embodied technologies. The chapter concludes with a summary of maker literacies and implications for early education gleaned from the complex interactions around teaching and learning through collaborative storytelling with iPad touchscreens.
Making, remaking, and reimagining the everyday: Play, creativity, and popular media
(Routledge, 2014-04-28) Wohlwend, Karen E
This chapter critically reviews literacy research on play and creativity, with a focus on work in New Literacy Studies (Gee, 1996; Street, 1995) that redefine • play as collaborative and embodied semiotic practice • creativity as practices of cultural production (Pahl, 2007; Sefton-Green & Sinker, 2012) and imagination as a social practice (Appadurai, 1996). The chapter’s framing draws upon de Certeau’s (1984) view of creativity as small acts of improvisation using the stuff of daily living in ordinary places. Children live, play, and create within scapes (Appadurai, 1996) that flow into every aspect of everyday life where they engage texts in a range of commercial messages and global products that include clothing, household goods, school supplies, films, video games, and toys (Pugh, 2009). Cook (2008) points out that in commercialized societies we are born into ‘regimes of consumption’ where opting out of consumption is impossible. While children at play often reproduce stereotypical identities as they pretend to be adults engaged in typical practices in everyday activities, they can also use pretense to collectively challenge, disrupt, or reimagine accustomed ways of doing things. Play encourages social actors to collaborate and negotiate within a shared imaginary text, to try on alternate identities, and to make malleable the meanings of everyday artifacts, practices, and contexts, in ways that often prompt negotiation, improvisation or revision. Through pretense, players create collaborative cultural imaginaries (Medina & Wohlwend, 2014) where they mediate their lived realities by “making do” within a set of given constraints, by reimagining together what seems possible, and by pretending alternatives in order to remake contexts to fit their purposes. Play engages creativity to imagine otherwise: to expand the cultural practices of their worlds, improvising to “make do” with the available resources, negotiating to reimagine constraints into possibilities, and remaking to transform immediate contexts into alternatives.
Mapping Modes in Children’s Play and Design: An Action-oriented Approach to Critical Multimodal Analysis
(Routledge, 2011-04) Wohlwend, Karen E.
And so, a fork becomes a wrench. As children represent the world through their play, writing, drawing, and construction, they simply and flexibly use whatever “comes to hand” and seems apt for their particular message. Kress (2003) suggests that children as players and designers strategically emphasize salient features of objects to represent essential aspects of the surrounding reality: Daniel emphasized the lever function of a fork and exploited its potential as a stand-in for a wrench by simply using it to pry at the metal faucets, a transformation bolstered by his sink-fixing supine position and a strip of language, “I’m fixing the sink!” From this four-word utterance, a twisting gesture, and two legs poking out of a sink cabinet context, Ayeesha immediately recognized the fork as a wrench and took up her own fork/wrench without an explicit explanation. Ayeesha and Daniel along with Mitchell, Jack, and Stephen, whom you will meet later in this chapter, were students in a kindergarten classroom that I studied for one school year. In their classroom, I examined how the children’s play and design1 activity transformed materials in ways that shaped their classroom participation and peer power relations. While Ayeesha and Daniel used play to transform plastic forks for their imaginary plumbing scenario, other children used design to transform art materials into paper toys. Mitchell, Jack, and Stephen regularly sat together at the kindergarten art table where they experimented with new ways of handling tools such as scissors and tape and engaged in friendly competitions such as who was the best “draw-er” or who knew the “hardest” math facts. Multimodal analysis of the boys’ activity at the art table reveals how making a SpongeBob SquarePants puppet allowed Mitchell to demonstrate his status as a 6-year-old design expert to his tablemates.
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.
Mediated Discourse Analysis: Tracking Discourse in Action
(Routledge, 2013-08) Wohlwend, Karen E.
Mediated discourse analysis, sometimes called nexus analysis (Scollon & Scollon, 2004), is an action-oriented approach to critical discourse analysis that takes sociocultural activity as its primary focus, looking closely at a physical action as the unit of analysis rather than an ethnographic event or a strip of language (e.g., utterance, turn of talk). In this way of thinking about activity, every action is simultaneously co-located within a local embodied community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) and a far-reaching nexus of practice, the expected and valued ways of interacting with materials among people. The purposes of MDA are 1. to locate and make visible the nexus of practice-a mesh of commonplace practices and shared meanings that bind communities together but that can also produce exclusionary effects and reproduce inequitable power relations; 2. to show how such practices are made up of multiple mediated actions that appropriate available materials, identities, and discourses; 3. to reveal how changes in the smallest everyday actions can effect social change in a community’s nexus of practice.
Monster High: Converging Imaginaries of Girlhood in Tweens’ Digital Doll Play
(Routledge, 2017-07) Wohlwend, Karen E.; Medina, Carmen L.
This chapter examines the digital dress-up and online doll play that children produce and share on social media and shows that players also make use of the complexity that these entanglements produce to remake imaginaries for their own purposes in ways that both reproduce and rupture normative media expectations. It analyzes the Monster High (MH) website, tracking its connected play spaces for repetitions and ruptures in both the content of the website and content of fan-produced media such as blog posts and videos. MH fanvid makeup tutorials converge fashionista and high school imaginaries with tweens' visions of their future adolescent selves. A corollary of the hypersexualization of the MH characters is the anticipation of imperfection as girls fail to achieve the deathly thin body shape of the MH dolls. Convergences among cultural imaginaries produce resonances when their associated identity texts repeat across imaginaries, amplifying a coherent message.
P(l)aying online: Toys, apps, and young consumers on transmedia playgrounds
(Routledge, 2020) Wohlwend, Karen
Children engage their favorite media toys as interactive assemblages of virtual and real worlds, through popular characters and media narratives that ground a franchise's constitutive products-toys, video games, films, clothing, and other consumer goods. Often, toy transmedia retail websites resemble online playgrounds while advertising toys, games, and apps to young children. Children's transmedia sites are dense webs of consumer and imaginative practices, commercial products and playful desires, and embodied and digitized practices. Blurred practices of playing and paying on transmedia websites entangle children, popular toys, apps, avatars, and game mechanics as co-actants in assemblages in these contemporary play worlds
Play as the Literacy of Children: Imagining Otherwise in Contemporary Childhoods
(Routledge Handbooks, 2018-10) Wohlwend, Karen E.
In this chapter, I examine play as a literacy of children—made by children for children—and argue for early childhood research and teaching that attends to the meanings children make for themselves and one another in contemporary times. First, a definition: Play is a set of imaginative practices through which players voluntarily engage to suspend the conventional meanings in the surrounding physical context and agree to replace these with pretend meanings for their own purposes, with transformative potential for their participation in home, peer, school, media, and digital cultures (Wohlwend, 2013). During play, children produce action-based stories and imaginary scenarios by enacting pretend identities with bodies or by animating toys, props, and other materials that enable players to virtually inhabit a shared pretend context.
Play, Literacy, and the Converging Cultures of Childhood
(Sage, 2013-01-01) Wohlwend, Karen E.
In this chapter, play is examined as an embodied literacy, situated among multiple literacies in the overlapping cultures of modern childhoods: school, home and community, peer, media, digital, and consumer cultures. Key studies within each cultural frame are examined to discover the complex relationships among literacy practices, identities, and artifacts in children’s play in these cultural convergences. Qualitative studies using ethnographic methods clearly indicate the literate potential of play that enables collective imaginings and draws in children’s literacy repertoires: their personal goals, family histories, media passions, and school and peer expectations. Through play, children mediate cultural meanings as they negotiate peer relationships for diverse purposes: to sustain the group’s shared play scenario, for a media fan’s personal satisfaction, to improve one’s social positioning in peer culture, or to uphold prevailing masculinities or femininities. Given this complexity, educators need new approaches for teaching and researching complicated interactions of play and literacies in changing childhood worlds: early childhood teachers should be prepared to mediate the social and cultural tensions in children’s play and researchers need robust theories, multiple lenses, and syncretic research designs to capture the multidirectional relationships among practices, identities, and materials in the flows of play across cultures. Keywords: play, school cultures, home cultures, peer cultures, media cultures, digital cultures, consumer cultures
Playful Literacies and Practices of Making in Children’s Imaginaries
(Routledge, 2017-08) Wohlwend, Karen E.; Buchholz, Beth A.; Medina, Carmen Liliana
In this chapter, we examine literacy research that looks beyond print to recognize the action texts in young children’s media production and to better understand the mutually constitutive relationships among play and making in contemporary childhoods. How do these areas merge in children’s classroom productions in digital puppetry, toymaking, drama, animation, ﬁlmmaking, and crafting of artifacts? Our focus is on shared imaginative production in classroom cultures to understand play and making as powerful literacies with value in their own right, producing unapologetically printless texts assembled with physical actions and materials that move and recruit across digital networks. We draw upon contemporary research on imagination and literacies as social action, looking at the nexus of play and making as a site of collective meaning-making and cultural production, that both contests and reinscribes boundaries in digital cultures, resonates and ruptures dominant discourses, and mobilizes youth and materials. Play and making are literacies that run on peer culture passions, often centered on electronic games and digital play with popular media. But it is also important to note that it is not necessary for children to be online or to be using new technologies to be deeply entangled in imaginative labor as young participants in global ﬂows and digital cultures. In the following sections, we survey emerging theories and research that show the impact on children’s learning and participation in classrooms of playful literacies and practices of making within the collective imaginaries that circulate in and through childhoods.

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