Draft: Research Narrative
I. One( of many) crystallizing moments...or different one? How to pick?
Sean’s back is hunched tightly over his desk again. Face down. Fists clenched inside the It is late October and he has not communicated a word to me since school began. The psychologist calls it “selective mutism,” while the administration plays around with the idea of “autism.” Last year’s teacher rolls her eyes when discussing him as her “emotionally disturbed project” last year. His parents told me that he is “just stubborn” and rarely speaks at home. Therefore, I should not “expect him to communicate” at school. But, Sean is communicating. His seven year old body is bent in frustration, wound up with resistance and tells me so much. While other second graders fill the room with written and oral expression, it is Sean’s body language that keeps me ruminating over my teaching practice. It is his very clear message of resistance to my classroom literacy instruction that tells me about his internal space: he is not ready to communicate through typical classroom literacy practices. But, by slowly realizing that he is sending me (and his classmates) messages about himself through his body made me believe that he was ready to communicate. I would not pathologize his unique mode of expression so far. By the end of the school year, I knew he would be reading aloud and writing in a more “conventional” sense.
I have always felt blessed to be able to teach the earlier grades because it is my job to support children as they acquire the cultural tools of expression. Working with my 6 and 7 year olds and focusing on language, phonology, reading, writing and words became a sacred act. Teaching my students to find patterns and beauty within language was transformative for both them and for me. Aiding my student as they constructed language and became meaning makers on their own is the most fulfilling activity I have engaged in so far in my life.
---Other idea: I learned that attempting to have power over children is criminal and learning how to give children power to express themselves is critical. I felt privileged to enter this space each day and help give my students power to their own thoughts by being able to express them or read more about them. Enmeshed in reading, decoding, imaginary characters, nonfiction reports and writing, I felt deeply fulfilled and felt that, “Teacher and learners are correlates, one of which was never intended to be without the other.”(Author unknown)---
II. Outline of thoughts about Research: Language and Literacy as Social tool for Communication and Self-Knowledge, Play and Social/Emotional Learning as Critical Medium
Ø Theoretical Frame: Transactional Theory of Language Development (as developed by Whitmore)
o Goodman built on Piaget (theory of constructivism, 1967) and Halliday (social-semiotic, 1975)
o “Shaping of language us accomplished through the myriad language transactions that involve children with others. The language is generated by the child but is changed in transactions with others by their comprehension or lack of comprehension and by their responses (Goodman et al., 1987:34).
§ Relates to restrictive vs. responsive teacher language
§ Invention of children’s literacy knowledge vs. society’s construction (Whitmore et al 293)
· Ways in which children respond or shut down as a result of teacher’s language, choice of words, tone, conversation, worldview
· Invented language (twin language, in classroom, terrarium, world of languages, rules, etc..) within a social context, communal context of a classroom
§ More research on transactional theory
o Drawing on concepts in Vygotsky - Mind in Society (1978)
§ Interrelationship between learning and development
· Learning is not development but it engenders mental development that set in motion developmental processes
· What children can do with assistance demonstrates their potenv tial and their mental development more than what they can do alone (Whitmore et al, 295)
§ More research on Vygotsky and learning
Ø Play as symbol system that is critically relevant to young children’s literacy and cognitive developmentàPolicy Implications
o Cognition and Language: Research based connections between cognitive competence and high quality pretend play (
§ Processes involved: receptive and expressive languae, mental representation, transformation of objects and actions, dialogue, negotiation, problem solving and goal seeking
§ Access to self: Without given time, space to express selves, SEL curriculum, kids are limited in the ways that they can explore themselves, their being
§ Further research: Theory of Mind
§ Further research: Framing
o Literacy: Play encourages and supports literacy
§ Play as text, literacy oriented space for expressing and constructing knowledge
§ “Medium to test their hypotheses about written language and to expand their developing literacies” (Whitmore et al 309)
§ Vygotsky (1978: 102, as found in Whitmore): in play, children behave above her average age, free to incent and explore culturally patterned activities (language and literacy) that they may not have confidence or authority to examine outside of play, testing ground
§ Express selves through language and text (literacy)-sense of control over their own expression
§ Teacher as mediator
§ Further research: Vygotsky, nuances within ZPD
o Importance of the ‘Symbolic’ Words: Children construct and represent meaning through multiple symbol systems
§ Dyson (1989): child development as resolving tensions amoung symbol systems, social activity, talk, pictures, actions---modifying, shaping of stimulus
§ Early expression comes in many forms, not just the written (ELL, children with learning challenges)
§ Further research
o Semiotic research (emphasis on social) (Saussure, Derrida, Barthes, Baudrillard, Halliday) and cultural codes
o Reggio Emilia (early childhood philosophy, ‘100 languages of children’)
o
o Malaguzzi (1998)
Ø Nature of Potential Research: Classroom Process Studies
Ø Question: (that can be observed and researched empirically)
o Observation and research of classroom process, activities
§ Reading, writing, listening, speaking=organic, holistic, unified, codependent process, coexistence
§ Literacy is not “dumped” into children but they construct within a societal frame
§ Bring meaning and take meaning from text
§ Children’s composition of texts as composition of their existence in multiple social worlds (Dyson, 1993)
o Critical discourse analysis (Gee, 1999)
§ Classroom discourse (Cazden), cultural notions played out
§ Moving away from “centrality of print” (Gunther Kress, Multimodal Discourse)
· Early childhood: not print based yet, attuned to the “multimodal” first (physical, music, emotion, art, shapes=all different languages through which to express themselves)
III. Play and a Child’s Classroom “Literacy Profile” Questions and Hypothesis:
What is the impact of a child’s socioeconomic status on their literacy development, as evidenced by activities during play? How do children “script” their play according to personal events, school experiences and daily occurrences in their lives (Schank and Abelson, 1977). How do teachers acknowledge and develop childrens’ linguistic and conversational patterns? Studies based on the oral language and linguistic patterns during play will provide greater information about a child’s background and what s/he is bringing culturally to the classroom; ultimately, these findings have a great potential to provide a more thorough literacy profile of children and thus inform instructional decisions made by teachers.
These years are foundational in terms of language and cognitive development. Children are not only learning to decode and encode words; they are learning to interpret, “decode” and make sense of the world around them (Cohen, 2004). Although the classroom is a multi-faceted framework in which to explore these issues, the school playground provides a more natural environment in which to observe the communicative and social tendencies among students. While I was a teacher, I observed play activities; during these observations, I saw more varied dimensions to each child than I had in the classroom. For my students and others, the playground was a social gathering place of varied discourse. It was during recess that I was able to record these authentic, relatively unstructured literacy activities and discourse. Many of the observed “playground literacies” served to inform some of my instructional decisions. Some of these “playground literacies” were: letter writing between students, designing of playground maps or using new vocabulary and/or syntactic structures when calling to each other from the slide. These events contributed to the literacy profiles I created for each student in my class. It made me realize that, when viewing students as readers and writers, it is critical to understand the ways in which they weave language into their worlds of play. Social and recreational activities give a very different (and perhaps more authentic) view of a child’s communicative skills.
According to Macoby and Jacklin (1974), oral language “scripts” are co-constructed and tell observers a great deal about a child’s world. To this effect, they write that, “Children use their personal and cultural knowledge of events (shopping, cooking, weddings, street scenes, and television settings) to build scripts together. Using the outline of their daily life experiences, children create new scripts through shared predictability and collaborative novelty” (116). This notion inspired me to further research the ways in which these “scripts” can be studied during play, to further understand language development as it relates to a child’s background and SES status.
V. References
Early Childhood Research and Practice (4)1, URL (consulted September 2007): http://ecrp.uiuc.edu
Cohen, Jonathan. (2001) Introduction. In Jonathan Cohen (Ed.), Caring
Classrooms/Intelligent Schools: The Social Emotional Education of
Young Children (3-29).
Basic Books.
Gee, J.P. (1999) An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Mehod.
Gentile, L. The Oral Language Acquisition Inventory (OLAI): Linking Research and
Theory to Assessment and Instruction,
Maccoby, E.E. and C.T. Jacklin. The Psychology of Sex Differences.
Mungo, D., and Rosenblitt, D. (2001) “Helping Emotionally Vulnerable Children:
Moving Toward and Empathetic Orientation in the Classroom.” In Jonathan
Cohen (Ed.), Caring Classrooms/Intelligent Schools: The Social Emotional Education of Young Children (59-76).
Oliver, S. and Klugman, E. (2007) “Building a Play Research Agenda: What Do
We Know About Play? What New Questions Do We Need to Ask?” Exchange, 14-17.
Roskos, K., and Christie, J. (2004). “Examining the play-literacy interface: A critical
review and future directions” in Edward Zigler, Dorothy G. Singer, and
Sandra J. Bishop-Josef’s Children’s play: the roots of reading.
DC: Zero to Three Press. 116.
Schank, R. and R. Abelson. Scripts, plans, goals and understanding: An inquiry
into human knowledge.
Whitmore, K., Martens, P., Goodman, Y. and G. Owocki. (2004). ‘Critical Lessons from
the transactional perspective on early literacy research’, Journal of Early
Childhood Literacy,(4)291-325).
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