Layering-Up Meanings: Recruiting Multiple Theoretical Lenses to Reimagine Child Engagement With School Literacy

• In Event: Roundtable Session 105
  In Roundtable Session: Engaging With Power: Learning From Children’s Early Composing Processes

Abstract

This paper presents a multilayered analysis of classroom literacy events to illuminate the complexity of children’s engagement with school literacy. Combining New Literacy Studies, post-structural notions of discourse, power, and positioning, and semiotic theories, the authors focus on one kindergarten student to show how the layering of analytic frames allowed the interpretation of children’s engagement with school literacy as constructed by discourses circulating in and beyond the classroom, and as concurrently dependent upon students’ “play” with the discourse as located in their negotiations with teachers, peers, and text that extended beyond the screen and the page. This holds implications for literacy researchers and educators who think critically about children’s engagement with school literacy and wish to reimagine school literacy itself.

Authors

• Marjorie Siegel, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Stavroula Kontovourki, University of Cyprus