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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Item App Maps: Evaluating Children's iPad Software for 21st Century Literacy Learning(Routledge, 2016-11) Wohlwend, Karen E.; Rowsell, JenniferIn 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.Item “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.Item The boys who would be princesses: Playing with identity intertexts in Disney Princess transmedia(Taylor and Francis, 2012) Wohlwend, Karen E.Using data from a 3-year ethnographic study in US early childhood classrooms, I examine two kindergarten boys’ classroom play with their favourite Disney Princess transmedia to see how they negotiated gender identity layers clustered in the franchise's commercially given storylines and consumer expectations. This analysis contributes necessarily syncretic methods of analysis that enable critical examination of the complexity in children's play interactions with popular media artefacts as collaborative and heteroglossic negotiations of gender. Mediated discourse analysis of action and multimodality in boys’ Snow White princess play makes visible how children pivoted and anchored their performances as they negotiated, played, and blurred boundaries among gender identity intertexts.Item 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.Item “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, TolgaWhat 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.Item 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.Item 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.Item 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.Item 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.Item 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.Item Critical Literacy, Critical Engagement, and Digital Technology: Convergence and Embodiment in Glocal Spheres(Routledge, 2010-12) Wohlwend, Karen E.; Lewis, CynthiaThis 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.Item 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.Item Design Playshop: Preschoolers Making, Playing and Learning with Squishy Circuits(Routledge, 2016-05) Wohlwend, Karen E.; Keune, Anna; Peppler, KylieIn 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.”Item 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).Item 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.Item Embodied signs: Expanding representations through and with bodies(Springer Science + Business Media, 2015-01) Wohlwend, Karen; Samuelson, Beth LewisItem 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.Item 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.Item 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.Item 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 JohnsonUsing 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.
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