Examining young children’s envisionment building responses to postmodern picturebooks

2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 439-464
Author(s):  
Angie Zapata ◽  
Lenny Sánchez ◽  
Ariel Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Postmodern Picturebooks ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
Literary Meaning ◽  
Textual Features

The purpose of this study was to examine how young children and their teacher constructed literary meaning through engagement with postmodern picturebooks. We framed our enquiry around Langer’s Envisionment Building theory and specifically examined how young children formed meaning as they moved through Langer’s five stances during and after text encounters. We draw special attention to the dialogic nature of transactions around texts, children’s understandings and appropriation of postmodern picturebook metafictive devices, and the ways in which they hybridize personal experiences with intertextual storyworlds. Our enquiry illuminates how young children and their teacher, having engaged with postmodern picturebooks, readily took up the work of envisionment building to construct novel and complex understandings and ‘go beyond’. Our research further exemplifies how the multifaceted nature of postmodern picturebooks provides rich opportunities for young children to negotiate diverse textual features and respond in unique and meaningful ways as they engage in literary meaning making.

East-Asian Philosophical Concepts as Analytical Framework for Interpreting Non-Western Images in Children's Picturebooks

2020 ◽  
pp. 393-420
Author(s):  
Ngoc Tai Huynh ◽  
Angela Thomas ◽  
Vinh Thi To
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Learning To Read ◽  
Intercultural Awareness ◽  
Semiotic Approach ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
Cultural Constraints

In contemporary Western cultures, picturebooks are a mainstream means for young children to first attend to print and start learning to read. The use of children's picturebooks has been reported as supporting intercultural awareness in children. Multiliteracies researchers suggest that other theoretical frameworks should be applied in addition to the semiotic approach of interpreting picturebooks, especially picturebooks from non-Western cultures. This chapter theorizes how Eastern philosophical concepts influence the meaning-making potential of illustrations in Eastern picturebooks. To do this, the authors first discuss the cultural constraints when applying a contemporary semiotic framework in analyzing non-Western images. The authors introduce a framework developed based on philosophical concepts that have influenced East-Asian art forms, particularly that of painting, to understand the Eastern artistic traditions. The chapter demonstrates how to apply this framework for interpretation of non-Western images to working with multicultural picturebooks.

scholarly journals The best game in the world: Exploring young children’s digital game–related meaning-making via design activity

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 275-289 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pekka Mertala ◽  
Mikko Meriläinen
Keyword(s):  
Early Childhood ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Digital Games ◽  
Design Activity ◽  
Male Character ◽  
Childhood Education ◽  
Drawing Task ◽  
The World ◽  
Research Questions

Although digital games have become a constituent part of young children’s lives, not enough is known about the kinds of meanings children give to games and gaming. This qualitative study contributes to resolving this need by engaging 26 5- to 7-year-old Finnish preschoolers in an open-ended drawing task to answer the following research questions: What aspects of digital games appear meaningful for young children when they act as game designers? Why are these aspects meaningful for young children? The findings suggest that children are not mere passive consumers of digital games but are agentic meaning-makers who are capable of critically evaluating digital games when a safe and supportive space and the appropriate medium are provided. The children refined, modified, and personalized existing influential games by replacing the leading male character with a female one or by having a player operate as the antagonist instead of the hero. The findings suggest that there are vast unexplored dimensions for scholars to engage with in young children’s gaming cultures, children’s perceptions of game content, early game literacy, as well as children’s meaning-making in games. Implications for pedagogy of early childhood education are discussed.

scholarly journals A manifesto for critical narrative research and pedagogy for/with young children: Teacher and child as critical annalist

2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-24
Author(s):  
Michael O’Loughlin
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Narrative Research ◽  
Evidence Based ◽  
Cultural Meaning ◽  
Teachers And Students ◽  
Students As Teachers ◽  
Curriculum Making ◽  
Narrative Mode

Abstract In this essay I pose the question of whether it might be possible to articulate a collaborative, critical narrative mode of research in which teachers and students come together using a critical and analytic epistemology to engage in adventurous pedagogy. This approach has echoes of Freire’s “teachers-as-students and students- -as-teachers,” but elaborates the Freirean metaphor to include conceptions of emotion, creativity, and incorporation of the latent historical subjectivities of teachers and students in the process. Contrary to the deadening, circumscribed epistemology of putatively “evidence-based” pedagogies, in which teachers and children are expected to check their cultural meaning-making capacities and their emotional investments at the door, this is a plea for a regenerative, engaged, local curriculum making process. As I note in the essay, “This is a strategy that cannot work in the service of utilitarian modes of education that are focused only on value (cf. Appiah, 2015). It can only work for forms of schooling that seek to foster values of receptivity, cultural respect, open-mindedness, and critical imaginaries. In these coldly utilitarian times we need to provide leadership to progressively minded teachers to allow them to develop, document, and disseminate such practices.”

Multimodal map making with young children: exploring ethnographic and participatory methods

2011 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 311-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Clark
Keyword(s):  
Longitudinal Study ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Learning Communities ◽  
Learning Environments ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Participatory Methods ◽  
Professional Boundaries ◽  
Mosaic Approach ◽  
Cultural Brokerage ◽  
A Site

Researching the ‘insider’ perspectives of young children requires a readiness to not only tune into different modes of communication but also to create opportunities for this knowledge to be communicated to others. This research is based on a longitudinal study involving young children and adults in the design and review of learning environments. This article first explores mapmaking, one of the methods used in the Mosaic approach as a site of multi-modal communication. Second, it investigates how the maps, as informant-led representations can promote ‘cultural brokerage’ (Chalfen and Rich, 2007) by facilitating the exchange of meanings within learning communities and beyond. This applied ethnographic and participatory research raises questions about the importance of making visible these opportunities for meaning-making across generational and professional boundaries.

Examining meaning making from reading wordless picture books in Chinese and English by three bilingual children

2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 214-238 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ran Hu ◽  
Xiaoming Liu ◽  
Xun Zheng
Keyword(s):  
Picture Books ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Language Ability ◽  
Gradual Release Of Responsibility ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
Wordless Picture Books ◽  
Responsibility Model ◽  
Chinese And English ◽  
Gradual Release

This qualitative study examined three bilingual children’s (aged 2, 3 and 4) meaning making and storytelling in relation to five wordless picture books over a period of 10 weeks. Guided by the Gradual Release of Responsibility Model the children were asked to read each book through four stages in both English and Chinese: I Read You Listen, I Read You help, You Read I help and You Read I Listen. The results suggested that the children applied a variety of techniques in their meaning-making process and that there were commonalities among the strategies they used as well as differences due to age, personal experiences and language ability. The children interacted with these books by making different connections and prompts from adults were also useful in facilitating their storytelling. Finally, the children’s preferences for language use and their unique characteristics in storytelling were also discussed.

Young Children's Literary Meaning Making: A Decade of Research 2000–2010

2013 ◽  
pp. 395-408
Author(s):  
Caitlin McMunn Dooley ◽  
Miriam Martinez ◽  
Nancy L. Roser
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Literary Meaning

Contemporary Autoethnography Is Digital Autoethnography

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-59
Author(s):  
Tasha R. Dunn ◽  
W. Benjamin Myers
Keyword(s):  
Digital Technology ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Digital Spaces

Autoethnography has become legitimized through its ability to connect culture to personal experiences. This legitimization has occurred alongside a titanic shift in communication made possible by digital technology, which has rapidly transformed, multiplied, and mediated the ways through which we engage one another. This essay explores and exemplifies the necessity of autoethnography to evolve in concert with the ways our lives have become inextricably tethered to digital technology. Due to this shift, we propose that contemporary autoethnography is digital autoethnography, a method we propose that relies on personal experience(s) to foreground how meaning is made among people occupying and connected to digital spaces. Digital autoethnography is distinguishable from traditional autoethnography because the cultures analyzed are not primarily physical; they are digital. In short, the work of digital autoethnography is situated within and concerned about digital spaces and the lived experiences, interactions, and meaning-making within and beside these contexts. Embracing digital autoethnography pushes us to consider and reflect upon the ways we have changed over time with the influx of digital technology. Additionally, the method provides a framework to keep autoethnography relevant in spite of the inevitable changes to human experience that will occur as digital connectivity becomes increasingly enmeshed in our everyday lives.

Young children developing meaning-making practices in a museum: the role of boundary objects

2012 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Carr ◽  
Jeanette Clarkin-Phillips ◽  
Alison Beer ◽  
Rebecca Thomas ◽  
Maiangi Waitai
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Boundary Objects

scholarly journals Generative listening: Using arts-based inquiry to investigate young children’s perspectives of inclusion, exclusion and disability

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathy Cologon ◽  
Timothy Cologon ◽  
Zinnia Mevawalla ◽  
Amanda Niland
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Critical Pedagogy ◽  
Inclusive Education ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Arts Based Research ◽  
Children’S Perspectives ◽  
Critical Approaches

While the importance of inclusive approaches to research has been identified, much childhood research is still done ‘to’ not ‘with’ young children, with research focusing on the experiences of children who experience disability commonly involving data from parents/families/practitioners, rather than from children themselves. In this article, we explore the development of an arts-based research project involving young children who experience disability as active participants in an exploration of their perspectives on inclusive education. Accordingly, we ruminate on questions about how we can genuinely ‘listen’ to children who experience disability in an aesthetic and ethical manner, and how we can use artistic ways of knowing to engage in meaning-making with children. Using arts-based research as an aesthetic framework alongside insights from critical pedagogy as a theoretical framework, we explore ‘aesthetic’ approaches to being, teaching, researching and knowing. As a team of researchers who do and do not experience disability, we share reflections on arts-based methodologies informed by critical approaches to conceptualising disability and research. As artistic modes of expression are central to young children’s everyday lives and play and can create enjoyable and safe communicative spaces, we share dialogues, artwork and methodological reflections on opportunities for children to choose ways of interacting and communicating, allowing possibilities for agency, expression and creativity. Specifically, we conceptualise and concentrate on possibilities for using arts to foster ‘listening’, meaning-making and generative or transformative praxis, in order to explore how arts-based research can be a powerful, authentic, ethical and meaningful provocateur for listening ‘generatively’ to young children who experience disability in research.

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