WritingWithWearables? Young Children’s Intra-Active Authoring and the Sounds of Emplaced Invention

Abstract

Drawing upon conceptual approaches in sound studies, posthuman literacies, and new materialisms, this article highlights how writing for young learners is always already an emplaced invention of withness. Zeroing in on a diffractive experiment of young children reauthoring Showers’s picture book, The Listening Walk, this study charts how the withness of writing is a communicative project that is all at once elliptical, relational, and coexistent. Reading the literacy desirings and material←→discursive intra-actions of 12 young children writing with wearables, the article illuminates how more-than-human ecologies of literacy amplify composition not as a practice of being, but of becoming. Thinking with Henriques’s conception of rhythmic elements (periodic pulses, reciprocal resonances, and oscillating overtures), findings are presented as strategic sketches. Attuning to writing as a more-than-human assemblage, this article pedagogically amplifies new be(com)ings of writing and literacy-in-action while theoretically resituating research as a process that thinks with.

Answering the world: young children’s running and rolling as more-than-human multimodal meaning making

“…This builds on the recent critique of theories that assume literacies to be cognitive, pre-designed or intentional (Ehret, 2018;Kuby, 2017;Leander & Boldt, 2013). Extant scholarship bridging posthumanism with literacy studies has begun to unpick the issue of human intentionality in literacy practices (Hackett & Somerville, 2017;Kuby, 2017;Wargo, 2018). Most notably, Kuby et al (2015) propose the Deleuzian notion of desiring rather than design as a way of thinking about what happens between children and craft materials in a writing workshop.…”

A Gender Gap in Literacy? Exploring the Affective Im/materiality and “Magic” of Allure with/in a First Grade Classroom

“…The classroom moments I have chosen to include here, thus, offer a "strategic sketch," or "an invitation to an alternative means of experiencing data-to think and feel with the possibilities of the data and not 'over' them toward conclusion" (Leander & Boldt, 2013, p. 26). As I imagine them, strategic sketches are provocations (see also Wargo, 2018) that invite us to experience literacy practices as more-than-human scenes of entanglement. Such provocations create a sense of liveliness that enables us to consider not what a particular scene "means" within a representational frame but, rather, what it may have to offer once we "plug into" (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) and play with different theories.…”

Introducing Offlineness: Theorizing (Digital) Literacy Engagements

“…Among the first researchers were Leander and McKim (2003), who proposed a "connective ethnography" to trace the "sitings" of on-and offline contexts of adolescent literacy practices. Since then, many studies have explored the ways young people continually traverse online-offline spaces in various literacy activities (e.g., Lewis & Fabos, 2005;Stornaiuolo, Smith, & Phillips, 2017;Wargo, 2018).…”