The Maker movement promotes hands-on making, including crafts, robotics, and computing. The movement's potential to transform education rests in our ability to address notable gender disparities, particularly in STEM fields. E-textiles-the first femaledominated computing community-provide inspiration for overcoming longstanding cultural divides in classrooms. Analysis of children's use of e-textiles reveals that materials like needles, fabric, and conductive thread rupture traditional gender scripts around electronics and implicitly gives girls hands-on access and leadership roles. This reconceptualization of cultural divides as sets of tacitly accepted practices rooted in gendered histories has implications for reconceptualizing traditionally male-dominated areas of schooling.
In this commentary, the authors move beyond digital literacy and take up the question of what digital citizenship means and looks like in the context of the COVID‐19 pandemic. To engage with questions of ethical practice, the authors begin with the International Society for Technology in Education framework for digital citizenship. They expand on these standards to argue for an awareness of the ethical questions facing citizens online that are difficult to encompass as a set of skills or competencies. The authors then take these considerations into a set of practical steps for teachers to nurture participatory and social justice–oriented digital citizenship as part of the curriculum. The authors conclude by noting the digital divide and social inequities that have been highlighted by the current crisis.
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to theorize teacher agency as enacted through a P/policymaking lens in three elementary classrooms. Big-P Policies are formal, top-down school reform policies legislated, created, implemented and regulated by national, state and local governments. Yet, Big-P policies are not the only policies enacted in literacies classrooms. Rather, little-p policies or teachers’ local, personal and creative enactments of their values and expertise are also in play in daily classroom decisions. Little p-policies are teachers doing their best in response to their students and school contexts. Design/methodology/approach Adapting elements of discursive analysis, this interpretive inquiry is designed to examine textual artifacts, situated alongside classroom events and particular local practices, to explicate what teachers’ policymaking enactments regarding time and curriculum look like across three distinct contexts. Using three elementary classrooms as examples, this paper provides analytic snapshots illustrating teachers’ policymaking to solve problems of practice posed by state and school policies for curriculum, and for use of time at school. Findings The findings suggest that teachers ration (aliz)ed use of time in ways that enacted personal politics, to prioritize children’s personal growth and well-being alongside teachers’ values, even when use of time became “inefficient.” An artifact from three focal classrooms illustrates particular practices – scheduling, connecting and modeling – teachers leveraged to enact little p-policy. Teachers’ little p-policy enactment is teacher agency, used to disrupt temporal and curricular policies. Originality/value This framing is valuable because little-p policymaking works to disrupt and negotiate temporal and curricular mandates imposed on classrooms from the outside.
Building a better public education system for our children begins with providing students with real‐world learning experiences from the very beginning. To this end, the authors explored how two kindergarten teachers scaffolded scientific literacy learning using an authentic multimodal text before, during, and after a zoo field trip in ways that fostered the identity of kinder “scientists” along with good literacy skills. From their experiences, public educators can help their students develop strong science knowledge and scientific literacy through rich literacy practices intertwined with learning science content, over a period of time, with multiple, varied, and scaffolded uses of an authentic, multimodal text and paired with authentic, out‐of‐school learning experiences.
Using data from a 4-year longitudinal ethnography, this study moves from a classroom to the playground to examine a multiage community engaged in a deeply revered playground game with a history stretching back nearly a decade. Mediated discourse analysis is leveraged to examine the game’s historical nexus of practice, rooted in embodied and oral modes of transmission, and to understand how the nexus was transformed with the introduction of written transmission in the form of the first official rulebook. Contentious negotiations on the playground and in the classroom emerged regarding questions of textual ownership, authorship, and authority. Findings suggest that written text did not supersede oral transmission but instead prompted more talk as well as more writing. Significantly, making space for these negotiations created opportunities for writing to be(come) significant to children as children as they passionately and critically negotiated how to sustain their own collective brand of literacy.
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