During the 1970s, schema theory gained prominence as reading researchers took up early work by cognitive scientists to explore the role of schemas in reading. In the 1980s and ’90s, the field shifted as researchers increasingly used sociocultural theories, particularly the work of L. S. Vygotsky, to frame investigations of literacy. This article provides a brief review of schema theory as situated in literacy studies. The authors review various conceptions of schema theory to consider how recent social and cultural perspectives might prompt reconsideration of schemas as transactional and embodied constructs. Concomitantly, they explore how earlier conceptions of schema theory may assist researchers in their articulation of concepts such as ideal and material tools and the role of activity in Vygotsky’s work. The article concludes with considerations of implications for future work.
The work of Rom Harré was groundbreaking in attention to the dynamics of social episodes as discursively produced. In particular, Positioning Theory, as introduced and explicated by Harré and colleagues, focused on the examination of speech and other acts to consider positions and storylines. Positioning theorists also considered the shifting patterns of rights and duties that shape and are shaped by social interaction. In this article, we briefly revisit positioning theory. We then review two critiques of positioning theory—that positioning scholars have neglected real world, naturalistic data and that positioning theory places too much emphasis on verbocentric communication (e.g., speaking, writing). Drawing upon some of the earlier observations of Harré and his collaborators, we urge consideration of artifactual and embodied positions. Extending beyond conversational interactions, we consider how the embodied actions and the artifacts produced by individuals can be analyzed. The paper includes data‐based examples of embodied interactions related to artifacts and multimodal communication in a children’s engineering literacy club. The examples demonstrate the ways in which moral orders are created and represented through multimodal interactions with artifacts as well as gesture, speech, and embodied actions.
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