Browsing by Subject "Literacy practices"
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Item Language, literacy practices, and identity constructions inside and outside of a fifth grade classroom community(2012-08) Burke, Amy Elizabeth; Bomer, Randy; Maloch, Beth; Schallert, Diane; Urrieta, Luis; Wetzel, MelissaThis case study investigated the ways in which its participants drew from available language and literacy practices as they constructed identities in various contexts. Data was gathered using ethnographic methods, including field notes, interviews, artifact collection, and video data. Observations took place within a fifth grade classroom and select focal participants were interviewed and collected video data on their own outside of school. The study was framed through theories of context-dependent identities, built from the semiotic resources available to people based on context and positionality. Findings suggest the participants engaged in multimodal, heteroglossic composing practices outside of school, while inside of school their composing practices were defined by accountability measures imposed on them from outside the classroom. Findings also showed how the classroom community was discursively built and maintained, at times functioning as a homogenizing force even though the discourses defining the community were those of acceptance and diversity. Participants cultivated what they viewed were acceptable identities within the classroom through the language and literacy norms and practices therein. The study suggests implications for educators in how language and literacy practices shape acceptable identities and the spaces for them, and for how the construct of community is understood and intended in classrooms versus how it functions in practice.Item Literacy as an interpretive art(2010-05) Cheng, An-Chih; Schallert, Diane L.; Ainslie, Ricardo C.; Emmer, Edmund C.; Reed, Ellis C.; Worthy, Mary J.Children as young as three seem already to possess amazing knowledge about what practice in a certain context is appropriate and what is not. This study investigated very young children’s literacy practices in an artifact-rich environment, a children’s museum. It focused on young children’s experience of enculturation such as how they respond to the symbolic qualities of cultural artifacts as well as their experience of socialization with teachers and peers. The research methodology involved photography and semiotic analysis based on a post-discourse perspective derived from post-modernism, post-structuralism, and critical theory. Specifically, the works of Bourdieu, Foucault, and Baudrillard were the theoretical basis of this dissertation. The findings indicate that children's literacy practices were context contingent and power laden, and that photography, as a means to study embodied literacy experiences, froze the moment of habitus and capital and revealed children’s sociohistorical backgrounds and traces from the broader society. The implications for early school education and critical pedagogy are also discussed.