Examining Fluidity, Complexity, and Emergence in Young Children's Action Texts

• In Event: Literacy, Language, and the Exploration of an Online Text: Where Are We Now?

Abstract

Overview: YouTube, the dominant video-sharing site, is gaining on Google as the place where users go first to seek information (Sage, 2015). With the increasing time that children and youth are spending on video-sharing sites (Rideout, Foehr, & Roberts, 2010), comes an urgent need to better understand how and what they are learning when viewing, producing, and sharing videos.

Purpose: To examine young children’s media production as emergent collaborative flows and trajectories rather than individual and fixed processes, products, or effects of discourse. Specifically, how does MDA of young children’s digital storytelling reveal collaborative negotiation of the complexity in an emergent and fluid text?

Theoretical Perspectives: Mediated discourse theory (Wertsch, 1991) provides a nexus of practice (Scollon, 2001; Scollon & Scollon, 2003) framework that reveals how children’s play with digital media engages embodied expectations for participatory literacies with mobile technologies in converging cultures. In this view, play is a literacy, a set of social and semiotic practices that produces action texts--animated or live-action films that tell a digital story, that flow further and accrue further meanings when posted to a video-sharing site such as YouTube (Author, 2011).

Methods: Mediated discourse analysis (Scollon, 2001; Author1, 2007, 2014) enables the examination of collaborative production as movements of players, meanings, and discourses through close analysis of action-by-action turns within moments of shifting participation, looking closely at digital literacy practices to see movements in interaction order, historical bodies, or discursive interpretations of co-players. Close analysis of a viral YouTube video, The Scared is Scared, reveals emergent meanings in the stops, reversals, and corrections of the video, tracking multiple storylines as trajectories within the text as well as beyond the text in discursive connections to global scapes (Appadurai, 1996). Classroom activity around action texts is analyzed in data examples excerpted from four years of ethnographic research in early childhood classrooms (6 teachers, over 120 3-8 year-old children). Data sources included video of children’s play and filmmaking activities, and children’s toys, puppets, drawings, and films. The subset of data in this paper was gathered in a K-1 classroom with two teachers who team taught about 50 5- to 7-year-old children, focusing on children’s play during a 1 month theme on digital animation with iPads.

Findings: YouTube viral videos, like The Scared is Scared, often feature children as subjects, provoking comments, likes, and dislikes, shared and viewed by millions on global networks. but Analysis of the video reveals commonalities of a young child’s emergent storytelling, similar to less-polished videos that are made by children in collaboration with peers. A child’s viral video is an action text that brings together digital literacy practices, 2) sensory or multimodal layers of colorful images, dialogue, sound effects, and movement that enliven animated stories; and 3) negotiation and pooling of children’s conflicting story ideas for shared pretense in interactive collaboration.

Significance: The fluid transformations that occur in children’s action texts suggest the potential of digital media production and social media as key sites for understanding new practices of cultural participation for children and youth.

Author

• Karen E. Wohlwend, Indiana University - Bloomington