New Affordances and Possibilities: Creative Literacies via Computational Storytelling in Early Childhood Teacher Education

• In Event: Saturday Roundtable Session 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Researching Play, Language, and Literacy Practices to Interrupt Injustice and Unburden Early Education (Table 24)

Abstract

The study explores early childhood preservice teachers’ translanguaging and computational learning experiences, via children’s visual programming software ScratchJr and Scratch, in relation to a course unit on Name Story through an undergraduate literacy methods course.


I am a bilingual teacher educator of Color, teaching early childhood and elementary literacy methods courses for preservice and in-service teachers in an urban, public university in the United States. The institution serves a large, diverse undergraduate population from low-income immigrant families, who have limited prior knowledge of digital literacies. Inspired by Nash et al. (2018), a Name Story course unit was developed on the cultural and linguistic histories of names in the current academic year. Name Story serves as a powerful literacy teaching method to foster and affirm students’ cultural and linguistic identities as part of teaching them the writing process (Author, 2022; Nash et al., 2018; Souto-Manning & Martell, 2016). In the course, I explicitly design it as a composing and visual-programming-integrated event, via ScratchJr and Scratch, through the teaching of writing. In integrating computational learning, Name Story provides a space for preservice teachers to explore how literacy, culture, and technology intersect for multicultural and multilingual learning. The study answers two research questions: How do preservice teachers take up visual coding for multicultural and multilingual teaching? How do they make meaning through computational storytelling in composing their name stories?


The study is informed by Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (CSP) (Paris, 2012; Paris & Alim, 2014) and Translanguaging (García, 2009; Garcίa, et al., 2017; Li Wei, 2018). Rooted in equity pedagogies, with a linguistic emphasis, CSP makes proactive connections to sustain students’ cultural and linguistic repertoires in their school lives. Translanguaging is both a theoretical tenet and a guiding pedagogy in the language education context (García, 2009; Li Wei, 2018). Baker (2011) notes, “Translanguaging is the process of making meaning, shaping experiences, gaining understanding and knowledge through the use of two languages” (p. 288). Therefore, in classrooms where translanguaging is deployed, it facilitates dynamic processes “in understanding, speaking, literacy, and, not least, learning” (Lewis et al., 2012, p. 655) for multilingual learners. Widely viewed as sociolinguistic and ecological, translanguaging helps us rethink how languages operate in classrooms and beyond. Thus, I apply CSP and translanguaging to address the research gap by analyzing the Name-Story course artifacts and experiences of diverse preservice teachers.


The study was informed by qualitative inquiries (Creswell & Poth, 2018), including artifact evaluation (name-story written text, visual, video, and computational artifacts) and content analysis (storytelling narratives and reflective journals). Data analysis reflects a recursive process through open and axial coding (Strauss & Corbin, 1990), followed by re-applying theoretical constructs to understand the data.


Findings of the study point to participants’ various ways of taking up visual programming, by juxtaposing their animated name-story designs with transcultural, translanguaging experiments afforded by digital software, including translation, transcription, and oral recording. The study addresses innovative digital literacy teaching in teacher education. It connects to the post-pandemic technologized landscape of resuming and expanding multimodal (digital) learning.

Author

• Ting Yuan, College of Staten Island - CUNY