Underscoring Uptake as a Social Process in Young Children's Composing: Writing (Righting) Expert in Personal Digital Inquiry

• In Event: Moscone Center West Roundtable Session 7
  In Roundtable Session: Social Justice and Equity in Classroom Practices

Abstract

Drawing on data from a year-long ethnographic inquiry examining how children in a multi-age classroom wrote with technology, this paper follows the gendered negotiation and discursive uptake of ‘expert’ in personal digital inquiry. Zeroing in on “genius hour” as a “site of engagement” (Scollon & Scollon, 2004), it thinks with rhetorical genre studies and mediated discourse analysis to examine how four second grade students positioned themselves across the nexus of writing. More specifically, it asks: (1) How is ‘expert’ discursively taken up in the literacy artifacts, social practices and classroom conversations of four second-grade students in a multi-age classroom? and (2) How do these four students negotiate the gendered boundaries of play and classroom life through writing across genre?

Author

• Jon Michael Wargo, Boston College