Mapping Apps: Looking for Playful Literacy Learning in the App Store

   photo: Luis Villa del Campo cc2.0                                                    

This week, Lisa Guensey and Michael Levine exposed the "confusion and disarray in the educational aisle of the App Stores", noting that "among free apps, more than 50 percent focused on teaching children to recognize the letters and sounds of the alphabet. Less than 10 percent of free apps focused on reading comprehension, and even rarer were skills like reading fluency (the ability to read without stumbling over certain words) and self-expression."  However, they also point out that the best-selling apps that parents buy tend to focus on simplistic reading rather than the creative literacy that educators most value. So what's going on here? 

In a forthcoming article, fellow literacy researcher Jennifer Rowsell and I look critically at apps to examine their underlying assumptions about learning. We found that rather than an educational definition of literacy based on reading research, an oversimplified and commonplace notion of reading is  operating here-- for both parent consumers and app developers. And oddly, it seems based on 20th century learning models of drill and memorization in flashy flashcards, ignoring the rich potential of 21st century literacies in touchscreen animation and digital media production.

Guernsey and Levine call for clear criteria to ensure educational apps truly promote learning that has relevance beyond the screen, such as literacy learning that is meaningful, authentic, and social. Toward that end, Jennifer Rowsell and I have developed a rubric and mapping tool to compare educational apps on key aspects of digital literacies, that move well beyond word and letter recognition. Importantly, these rating tools are grounded in our ethnographic research in which we closely observed children with a range of apps to see if and how deeply they engaged in literacy. The most engaging (and popular) literacy apps earned high ratings in all dimensions:  multiplayer activity that allowed children to play together but also to design their own content using image, sound, movement, and animation in open-ended play. Good apps, like good books, also engaged a learner's passion for learning more and could be shared on digital networks.

Playing Star Wars Under the (Teacher's) Radar

When young children play together in school, they produce action stories with themes that draw upon experiences from their worlds, including themes from their favorite media. When playing heroes and villains, this often involves mock fighting, which can be prohibited in school. Yet children sometimes play these forbidden themes “under the radar”, claiming that a Tinker Toy sword or a gun made of Legos is "just a stick” or “ car” or “design” or anything else in order to turn a pretend weapon into something innocuous and acceptable within the classroom. Of course, this shows so much about the ways children negotiate the complex tensions among peer culture, school culture, and popular culture in ways that allow them to play themes that matter to them. But this pivoting and pretending also shows how play functions as a literacy of fluid action texts.

During one of my studies of literacy play in early childhood classrooms, several boys created paper tubes which they immediately used as light sabers in impromptu Star Wars play but when the teacher approached, they stopped dueling and began swimming the tubes along as "electric eels". When the boys enacted eels, they quietly held the tubes horizontally and maneuvered individually, walking side-by-side, sometimes tumbling the tubes in slow circling motions or undulating waves. When they enacted light sabers, they turned toward each other, tilted the tubes diagonally or vertically, and voiced the shoom, shoom, shoom of humming light sabers as they engaged each other in momentary fencing moves. 

This Star Wars example shows how play functions as an embodied literacy to produce play narratives with action texts that the boys could use to pivot the meanings of their paper toys. Action text describes how movements convey meanings when children play a shared narrative together. In other words, their swooshing sword fights relied on moves with paper tubes that conveyed a nonverbal (and covert) meaning shared among the boys. Their swings and taps with paper tubes could be read and reread as fencing moves in a laser swordfight by other children who were also Star Wars fans.

We tend to look for some print on a page when we consider children’s literacy development and overlook the action texts in children's play.  In a digital world where webpages routinely include YouTube links to videos on every imaginable topic, actions clearly speak louder than words. In this dynamic textual landscape (Carrington, 2005), children’s played texts take on new significance as a way of understanding and producing live action texts. At the very least, we should be looking beyond print media and recognizing and mediating the fluid meaning-making and embodied storytelling in children's play that develops skills for communicating through digital media. 

For the full paper, see:

https://www.academia.edu/5487251/Playing_Star_Wars_under_the_Teachers_Radar_Detecting_Kindergartners_Action_Texts_and_Embodied_Literacies

Wohlwend, K. E. (2013). Playing Star Wars under the (teacher’s) radar: Detecting kindergartners’ action texts and embodied literacies In V. M. Vasquez & J. W. Wood (Eds.), Perspectives and provocations in early childhood education [National Council of Teacher of English Early Childhood Assembly Yearbook] (pp. 105-115). Charlotte, NC: Information Age.

Technology Deserts and Other Imaginaries of Childhood

Notions of childhood morph as rapidly as the technologies that zip in and out of our daily lives in an endless stream of updates: 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, and so on.  As early childhood teachers, our visions of childhood shape how we teach young children who are living immersed in rapidly shifting technologies, literacies, and global innovation. Our teacher imaginaries about childhood cause us to offer one literacy to children while making another technology-based literacy off-limits. On one hand, visions of developmentally appropriate practice privilege “natural” materials, creating oases in our classrooms from a daily barrage of popular media and glowing screens. On the other hand, a vision of young children as "digital natives" and teachers as "technology laggards" blames teachers for turning the early childhood education landscape into a widespread technology desert. 

However if we recognize that our imaginaries of childhood are dynamic and negotiated ideas, we can open up possibilities to look critically at these visions, question our assumptions, and reconsider ways of doing things. We can question:

• Can technoliteracies be compatible with developmentally appropriate approaches? Can we argue for digital play spaces as not only appropriate but necessary? 
• Can we retool an "all-natural" and "commercial-free" classroom to support children's actual popular media knowledge, literacy resources, and technological repertoires? 
• Do our own assumptions and reluctance to provide experiences with technology in early childhood education perpetuate ongoing digital inequities built upon economic and gender disparity? 
• Or are early childhood teachers being blamed as technology laggards when the real issue is under-resourced classrooms and over-stretched budgets unable to afford up-to-date iPads and touchscreens?

Digital toys and tools are expensive and out of reach for many families as well as for many early childhood classrooms.  A financial divide separates not only have and have-not households but also early education centers--doubly discouraging as schools are the key site for ensuring equitable and regular access to new literacies for all children.  Recently in Literacy Playshop workshops, I've talked with many preschool teachers excited to try apps, iPads, and filmmaking with young children. Their faces fall when they discover the price of tablets; even the $100 for the now-discontinued  Flip cam would be out-of-reach. These dedicated preschool teachers who fund so much of their curriculum out of their own pockets have no idea how to find the money to bring digital tools into their classrooms. In these cases, we are asking all the wrong questions. The root of technology deserts in early childhood education is not teacher resistance based on a romantic vision of natural child but the pernicious and systemic under-funding of early childhood education.  

Literacy Playshop: Playing and Storying with Media

To address the realities of early childhoods, we need to think beyond even our best practice in literacy teaching--our  familiar reading and writing workshops--and envision a play-enriched and technology-inspired literacy curricula that makes sense for today’s video-saturated world. In other words, we need expand reading and writing workshops into vibrant and creative classroom studios that I'm calling “literacy “playshops” with media-rich literacy curricula where children produce storyboards, live action plays, and digital films. I documented how literacy playshops bridge literacy, children’s peer culture, and popular media when I spent a year and a half in one kindergarten conducting research for my book, Playing Their Way into Literacies.

Now in a forthcoming book with four graduate students, we have documented how six preschool and K-1 teachers studied, planned, and taught in Literacy Playshop. The teachers supported children’s video explorations and collaborative film projects as we researched in their classrooms to understand how children  produce new kinds of literacies as they make texts together during play and media production. The shift was dramatic. In play spaces where film can now capture the otherwise temporary play scenarios, children created stories on their terms using the materials and narratives that they know best.

In Support of Giggly, Wiggly Lines

I've been listening this week to teachers of young children and watching them wince as they describe school orientations that insist upon correct procedures and regimens for talking, walking, and living in school. I was powerfully reminded of Georgia Heard's amazing poem...

Straight Lines

All the kindergartners
walk to recess and back
in a perfectly straight line
no words between them.
They must stifle their small voices,
their laughter, they must
stop the little skip in their walk,
they must not dance or hop
or run or exclaim.
They must line up
at the water fountain
straight, and in perfect form,
like the brick wall behind them.
One of their own given the job
of informer--guard of quiet,
soldier of stillness.
If they talk
or make a sound
they will lose their stars.
Little soldiers marching to and from
pretend
their hair sweaty
from escaping dinosaurs
their hearts full of loving the world
and all they want to do
is shout it out
at the top of their lungs.
When they walk back to class
they must quietly
fold their pretends into pockets,
must dam the river of words,
ones they're just learning
new words that hold the power
to light the skies, and if they don't
a star is taken away.
One star
by one star
until night grows dark and heavy
while they learn to think carefully
before skipping,
before making a wish.
--Georgia Heard


Here's wishing little children and their teachers a little wiggle room as they march single-file into new school years.

Less is More: Literacy Learning, Standards, & Engagement

Here's a great quote about the power of deeply engaged learning by Susan Engel in the Op Ed section of the New York Times. Engel argues that instead of a curriculum crushed by "laundry lists" of superficial skills, students would be better served by rigorous focused goals such as immersing learners in purposeful reading and writing:

"In this classroom, children would spend two hours each day hearing stories read aloud, reading aloud themselves, telling stories to one another and reading on their own. After all, the first step to literacy is simply being immersed, through conversation and storytelling, in a reading environment; the second is to read a lot and often. A school day where every child is given ample opportunities to read and discuss books would give teachers more time to help those students who need more instruction in order to become good readers.

Children would also spend an hour a day writing things that have actual meaning to them — stories, newspaper articles, captions for cartoons, letters to one another. People write best when they use writing to think and to communicate, rather than to get a good grade."

Read more at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/opinion/02engel.html?emc=eta1