Disentangling the Possibilities, Practicalities, and Progressions of Children's Writing and Making in the Digital Era

• In Event: Interrogating the Status of Digital Writing in Practice and Pedagogy

Abstract

Although there is a proliferation of digital devices across PreK-university classrooms and everyday life, educational research exploring how such technologies inform the teaching, learning, and assessment of writing within formalized literacies classrooms is still emerging. Specifically, because much of Western literacies education remains tethered to (testable) curriculum standards (Author, 2017; Dutro, 2010; Yoon, 2013), little scholarship has yet disentangled the possibilities, practicalities, and progressions of writing in the digital era. Instead, historically narrow interpretations of writing as separate from social, cultural, and material factors of literacies prevail, despite calls for expanded definitions that account for the wider transformations in everyday communications perpetuated by rapidly-changing technologies (NCTE, 2016).
Attending to this dearth of research, in this presentation, I draw on data generated in ethnographic ways alongside children in a third-grade classroom in the Midwestern United States to emphasize how they wrote across (non-)digital media. Specifically, I highlight analytic snapshots of the focal child, Gem (all names are pseudonyms), using a digital tablet to both create a digital product and capture her process of composing. For this inquiry and in the larger study, I generated data in a number of ways. For example, I collected the persuasive unit materials I collaboratively designed with the teacher and I conducted formal interviews. My primary mode of data generation was participant observation (n= 93 hours) as I observed afternoon class sessions 4x/week for 3-4 hours at a time. Each session was either audio- and/or video-recorded and Ms. Honey audio-recorded related class sessions that I was not in attendance for. Weekly, I generated field notes that I supplemented with children’s artifacts and informal conversations.
In this paper, I first provide an overview of studies related to children’s composing practices in the standardized English language arts classroom. I then detail the sociopolitical context that informed Gem’s text production and follow with descriptive findings to illuminate the complex ways Gem used the digital tablet to produce a meta-level commentary (without prompting) for her intended audience (in this case, me as the researcher). In particular, I demonstrate how Gem generated rich understandings of their process and often do so without mediation or prompting from adults. I focus exclusively on Gem to offer an in-depth look into a single child’s process and thus, provide a “thick description” (Geertz, 1973) not just of the site and participating adults, but also of Gem. The details I share are based on my account of the stories she told me and additional data generated through one-on-one interviews or whole-class participations.
Across the literacy moments described in the findings, I detail how, for Gem—as a representative early childhood learner—meaning was always made in relation to someone or something as she used digital devices to write for an abstract future. Simultaneously, Gem demonstrated the interplay of digital and non-digital materials. Ultimately, through my discussion, I raise new questions about how to account for the processes of digital writing while also illuminating how the young children generated rich understandings of their process without mediation from adults.

Author

• Cassie J. Brownell, University of Toronto