Marjorie Siegel, Stavroula Kontovourki, Stephanie Schmier, and Grace Enriquez

Literacy in Motion: A Case Study of a Shape-shifting KindergartenerA young child’s literacies and identities are constantly, yet imperceptibly, in motion, as she reads the text of her kindergarten literacy curriculum and negotiates its multiple demands for literacy success.

Jewel is a child in motion. A member of a fam-ily who emigrated to the U.S. from Bangla-desh, Jewel moves across languages (Bengali,

English), identities (e.g., Bengali girlhood, kin-dergartener), and, when her family is able to make the trip to Bangladesh for a summer or longer, national borders. In school, we can see the move-ment in her literacies as she writes, draws, and designs texts on pages and screens during the daily writer’s workshop in her classroom, and in the weekly digital writer’s workshop held in the school’s computer lab. Across these social spaces, Jewel shifts her body, her texts, and her identities in ways that offer a glimpse of the fl uid meanings literacy has for this child of globalization.

One of three Bengali children in a kindergarten classroom rich with diversities of race, ethnicity, language, and social class, Jewel arrived at school already labeled “at risk” by virtue of a social cal-culus that reads specifi c elements of her fami-ly’s status—“working poor,” recent immigrants, and speakers of a language other than English—as predictors of her future school literacy achieve-ment (Snow, Burns, & Griffi n, 1998). As such, it would not be surprising if all the motion we observed were read as “commotion”—an inability to sit still and absorb the lesson that reading and writing are stable, rule-bound skills. Yet, under-standing Jewel as a fl exible, multiliterate person is overdue. More than ten years ago, the New Lon-don Group (1996) observed the emergence of a global economy built on “change, fl exibility, qual-ity, and distinctive niches” (p. 61) and called for a shift to a pedagogy of multiliteracies that might better prepare students for citizenship in a global-ized world. Becoming multiliterate was a mat-ter of design: learning how to design meanings by shaping and reshaping the plurality of available semiotic resources (languages, modalities, social

practices), but also learning how to design oneself as a “shape-shifting portfolio person” (Gee, 2002, p. 62) capable of assembling and reassembling portfolios of skills, experiences, and achieve-ments so as to fi t changing social and economic opportunities.

Literacy educators have tended to exclude young children when considering the implications of changes signaled by the call for a pedagogy of multiliteracies. But in failing to see this connec-tion, we run the risk of ignoring the complex lives and literacies of the very children who are the subject of current policy mandates. In this article, we draw on theories of discourse, positioning, and multimodality to present a multi-layered analysis that represents Jewel as a shape-shifting kinder-gartener in the making, wide-awake to the expec-tations and opportunities for literacy learning she encountered in her public school classroom. The following questions will serve to focus our case study of Jewel:

• What shaped the literacy curriculum in Jewel’s classroom?

• What counted as literacy in Jewel’s classroom? What were the literacy practices and identities Jewel was expected to demonstrate in order to be recognized as literate?

• How did Jewel participate in school literacy? How did she design meaning and design her-self in relation to the expectations and opportu-nities she encountered in school?

In addressing these questions, we take a cue from the New London Group’s observation that under-standing the design of meaning “should start from the social context, the institutional location, the social relations of texts, and the social practices within which they are embedded” (1996, p. 76).

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Thus, we look fi rst at how literacy was regulated within the institutional context, before shifting to the local classroom setting to see what it meant to be a “successful” literacy learner. Then we turn to theories of multimodality and positioning to explore the ways that Jewel designed texts and her identity as a literate person across the social spaces that comprised balanced literacy. In this way, we take up the recent call to attend to power, identity, and agency in sociocultural studies of lit-eracy learning (Lewis, Enciso, & Moje, 2007).

THE RESEARCH CONTEXT

The broader study from which this case was drawn was an ethnographic inquiry into the literacy practices and cultural models that constituted the mandated balanced literacy curriculum in a kin-dergarten classroom where digital and print-based literacies intersected. Understanding how children took up these practices in their engagements with texts in the regular classroom and the computer lab, and how their participation formed their lit-erate identities were key ques-tions. Theoretically, this study was grounded in New Literacy Studies (NLS), which assumes a social practice perspective on literacy, and a sociocultural per-spective on literacy learning. As a lens for understanding liter-acy and literacy learning, NLS “approach[es] literacy as part and parcel of, and inextricable from, specifi c social, cultural, institu-tional, and political practices” (Gee, 1999, p. 356), and focuses on the literacy events and practices that shape and are shaped by the social interactions and power relations inscribed in institutions (Gee, 1996; Hamilton, 2000; Street, 1984). Further, a sociocultural perspective on literacy emphasizes the ways in which children’s literacy learning is accomplished through participation in social activ-ities that occur in specifi c contexts, and is medi-ated by talk, texts, and social relationships (Dyson, 2001, 2003).

The site for the study was P.S. ABC, a PreK–5 public elementary school located in a predomi-nantly bilingual community in New York City. The school served approximately 600 students (83% Latina/o, 13% African American; 3% Asian, and 1% White), 92% of whom qualifi ed for free lunch. This particular classroom was selected because the teacher had participated in a school-based tech-

nology study group for two years, and introduced digital literacy practices into the curriculum while teaching the mandated literacy program. The entire class was observed for a period of four months, after which two children (one boy and one girl) were selected as focal students. The two children were chosen because they brought different racial, ethnic, linguistic, and gender identities to their par-ticipation in the literacy curriculum, and took up the literacy curriculum practices quite differently. The case study presented in this article focuses on only one of these children. Jewel, a Bangladeshi girl from an immigrant family who spoke Bengali at home and was learning English, was considered a “struggling” reader and writer but more able and enthusiastic in computer lab.

Data were collected two mornings a week over a nine-month period (October 2003–June 2004) through participant observation in the morning lit-eracy block, supplemented by artifact collection and conversations with the teacher. Classroom lit-eracy events and practices were documented in

fi eldnotes, with special atten-tion to texts, actors, actions, and interactions. Selected events were videotaped and transcribed for analysis, and artifacts relevant to observed literacy events (e.g., student writing) were photocopied. Data analysis was a multi-stage process that began with index-

ing and coding of fi eldnotes for the literacy prac-tices and cultural models that shaped children’s participation in the literacy events. Videotapes of the two focal students’ practices and identities in readers workshop, writers workshop, and com-puter lab events were viewed and selectively tran-scribed to examine how they shaped and were shaped by the classroom literacy curriculum.

THE INSTITUTIONAL CONTEXT: REGULATING LITERACY

Jewel entered kindergarten in a New York City PreK–5 public school in September 2003, just as Chancellor Joel Klein launched Children First, a two-part reform initiative designed to address the demands of the national educational policy articu-lated in the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. One part of this initiative was the unifi cation and stabi-lization of the school system; “balanced literacy” was thus adopted as the single approach for teach-

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Jewel, a Bangladeshi girl from an immigrant family who

spoke Bengali at home and was learning English, was considered a “struggling” reader and writer but more able and enthusiastic in

computer lab.

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ing reading and writing. “Balanced literacy” has no single, unitary meaning (Freppon & Dahl, 1998), but in New York City it came to signify a particular set of instructional routines and practices designed to teach children the “habits and strategies of effec-tive reading and writing” (NYC DOE, 2003). Teachers were expected to devote each morning to a “literacy block” consisting of a writer’s workshop, a reader’s workshop, read-alouds, and word study, supplemented by shared reading, interactive writ-ing, and guided reading groups in K–2 classrooms. The Department of Education Handbook directed teachers to begin each workshop with a mini-lesson that explicitly taught a particu-lar concept or strategy, followed by opportunities for children to apply that concept or strategy to their own reading or writing. Each workshop concluded with a sharing time, during which the teacher invited children to show how they had used the strategy. Across the year, writer’s work-shop consisted of units of study of required genres (e.g., per-sonal narrative, how-to, nonfi ction, poetry, fi ction) whereas reader’s workshop emphasized reading strategies (e.g., looking for chunks in words, using pictures to identify unknown words) and literary elements (e.g., character development) necessary for profi cient reading.

New York City’s mandated literacy curriculum was not simply a set of classroom routines and teaching methods, but a discourse. French social theorist, Michel Foucault (1995), defi ned a dis-course as a culturally authoritative way of talking about things and argued that discourses construct and organize knowledge in ways that make it seem as if a particular way of talking about some-thing is just natural and neutral. Balanced literacy practices, such as “shared reading” and “writ-er’s workshop,” were treated as taken for granted, sidestepping the question of how they came to be. Furthermore, because discourses are always part of broader relations of power that are often linked to institutions like the school (Weedon, 1997), they produce the very object they appear to “describe” and, in doing so, regulate what can be said, done, and known. In Jewel’s classroom, this meant that the discourse of “balanced liter-acy” produced particular kinds of literacy prac-tices and normalized some ways of demonstrating

literacy as “successful,” therefore creating a hier-archy within the school system and the class-room. Thus, teachers and students could not read, write, or interact in whatever ways they wanted—an effect of power that had material consequences for all involved.

This shows that language is not simply a mat-ter of communication, but a matter of power and knowledge. Gee (1996) distinguished between discourse and Discourse to call attention to the social and ideological ways that language works in/on social interactions. The former refers to con-nected stretches of language (e.g., texts, conver-

sations) that make sense in a community of people (the social dimensions of language in use). On the other hand, Dis-course extends beyond lan-guage in use to refer to ways of being in the world. Although Gee’s defi nition of Discourse refl ects aspects of a poststruc-tural approach to discourse (he himself notes that he drew

on poststructural theorists like Foucault and Bourdieu; see Gee [1996, 1999] for his discussion of these theorists), he thought it important to con-sider the ways Discourses produced and regulated social interaction. Thus, he defi ned Discourse as an identity kit—“a socially accepted association among ways of using language [and other non-language stuff] to identify oneself as a member of a socially meaningful group or ‘social network,’ or to signal (that one is playing) a socially mean-ingful ‘role’” (p. 131). This means that getting recognized as a member of a Discourse is part of the social work of everyday life.

WHAT COUNTS AS LITERACY?: GETTING RECOGNIZED AS LITERATE IN JEWEL’S CLASSROOM

School literacy was not monolithic in Jewel’s kin-dergarten classroom, but, instead, required facility with multiple literacy practices (Campano & Car-penter, 2005), defi ned as “material differences in ways of using written language in specifi c social settings: different kinds of texts, physical arrange-ments, and ways of communicating and inter-acting” (Bloome & Enciso, 2007, p. 298). As Gee’s notion of Discourse as an identity kit sug-gests, getting recognized as a successful literacy

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In Jewel’s classroom, this meant that the discourse of “balanced

literacy” produced particular kinds of literacy practices

and normalized some ways of demonstrating literacy as

“successful,” therefore creating a hierarchy within the school

system and the classroom.

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learner in this classroom required that children demonstrate particular ways of talking, acting, and interacting, using the symbol systems consid-ered appropriate for learning to read and write in this setting. Failing to “signal they were playing a socially meaningful role” (Gee, 1996, p. 131) in the Discourse of balanced literacy meant that children were constructed as “struggling” literacy learners.

During the mini-lesson that initiated each reader’s workshop, for example, children were expected to sit on their assigned carpet square, hold their bodies in a “perfect magic 5” (described on a wall chart as “legs in a pretzel, hands in your lap, mouths closed, eyes forward, ears ready to lis-ten”) and speak only when called on by the teacher. But when they moved to independent work time, the expectations for participation shifted, and stu-dents were to engage in any number of practices with their assigned “partner,” such as sitting back to back and reading separate books, taking turns reading books to each other, and stopping to talk about books with their partners. Only during the nonfi ction unit did reading part-ners become writing partners, collaborating on the research and writing a nonfi ction book about a wild animal.

Being a good reader meant being a “friend to books” and taking up the strat-egies introduced in mini-lessons and shared read-ing, such as identifying words using graphophonic and picture cues, changing your voice while read-ing, and making connections between text and life. Within writer’s workshop, writing was an individual practice of “authoring” multiple texts, starting with personal narratives before moving to how-to books, poems, nonfi ction books, and fi c-tion stories. Being a good writer in writer’s work-shop meant that children followed the 1-2-3s of writing listed on a wall chart: write your name, draw a picture to match your story in the picture box, and write your words on the lines.

Writing in the computer lab was similarly shaped by the mandated curriculum. Jewel’s teacher treated the computer lab as an extension of writer’s workshop, and the literacy practices in the lab followed the routines set out in the mandated curriculum. For example, she always began with a mini-lesson in which she demon-strated the tools to be used on a computer (e.g.,

pencil, paint bucket tools in KidPix) and would then show the class, who sat on the rug, what they were expected to do in that particular period (e.g., draw a picture of what they saw at the aquarium and label it). Students were expected to follow the 1-2-3s of writing in the computer lab, as they composed short personal narratives and created pages for their nonfi ction and fi ction texts on the screen. Yet, there were some impor-tant differences. Because there were not enough computers for each child, the class worked with their reading partners, often taking turns design-ing on the screen after drawing a line down the middle. There were even multiple practices for writing your name. In writer’s workshop, stu-dents were to write their name on the line pro-vided on their paper, whereas in computer lab, they could use the stamp pad or open a text box and use the typewriter keys to write their name on the screen.

Jewel demonstrated her awareness of the restrictions on literate practice in her classroom when she announced, “If you don’t put a sticky

note in the book, you’re not going to be a good reader.” When her teacher praised another girl as a “friend to books,” Jewel made a bid to be recognized as a good reader

by announcing, “Look how I turned the page.” Similarly, she showed awareness of the 1-2-3s of writing when she joined one of her table-mates in admonishing a boy new to their class that he could not start coloring yet. When Jewel herself did not fully adhere to the 1-2-3s, her teacher would acknowledge the picture Jewel had drawn but point out that Jewel needed to add her name and some words. On one occasion, after the teacher had moved on to confer with another child, one of her tablemates looked over at Jew-el’s paper and told her she was doing “scribble scrabble.” Clearly, the children knew what it took to be counted as literate in the balanced literacy curriculum.

On the very day following the “scribble scrab-ble” exchange, Jewel demonstrated her awareness of what was expected of her as a writer. She wrote letters and explained to Marjorie that she was writing her “word,” and when Marjorie asked, “What’s your word?” Jewel pointed to the picture she had drawn and said, “about my story.” Later during writer’s workshop, she told her teacher she

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was “writing all the details,” and when her teacher pointed out that she had not written any words, Jewel promptly began writing words, repeat-ing her teacher’s observation, “there’s no words.” Thus, even if Jewel did not always succeed in get-ting recognized as a successful writer, she repeat-edly demonstrated that she was wide-awake to the expectations that regulated writing in this classroom.

JEWEL IN MOTION: DESIGNING MEANINGS AND IDENTITIES

Jewel’s participation in writer’s workshop and com-puter lab was complicated, shaped by the Discourse of balanced literacy, her own efforts to design texts, and her bids to be recognized as a literate, success-ful student, a friend, and someone with her own desires. The Discourse of balanced literacy, espe-cially the way in which language was privileged over other modes of communication, served to reg-ulate the kinds of texts that would “count.” But designing meanings is active and dynamic, so we cannot understand Jewel’s liter-ate practices without attending to her appropriation and trans-formation of the available sym-bolic and material resources. Looking at Jewel’s writing from a multimodal lens can shed new light on her participation in writ-er’s workshop and computer lab by situating her literacy practices within a much wider communication landscape (Dyson, 2003). Multimodality means that texts are constructed from multiple symbolic resources—images, ges-tures, sound, movement—and thus depend on more than words to produce meanings (Jewitt & Kress, 2003; Kress, 2003; Siegel, 2006).

Jewel was not only an agent in the design of meanings, but in the design of her identities, and it is therefore necessary to attend to her position-ing within the Discourse of balanced literacy. It is often assumed that because discourses regu-late what counts as knowledge and who counts as knowledgeable, people are without agency. Understanding literacy learners as active par-ticipants in social processes thus requires con-sideration of the ways teachers and students position themselves in relation to one another as they participate in discursive practices, that is, all the ways in which people actively produce social reality (Davies & Harre, 1990; Eckert &

McConnell-Ginet, 2003). This includes their talk and language, along with ways of acting, inter-acting, believing, valuing, and using tools and objects, all of which can be considered discur-sive practices (Gee, 1996, 1999). These ways of talking, acting, interacting, thinking, and believ-ing are indicative of particular positions produced by and embedded in Discourse (Gee, 1996, 1999), but that does not mean they are static. Instead, positions are shifting, fragmented, and often-times contradictory (Davies, 1994), and learners use discursive practices to negotiate new positions (Davies, 2000).

Designing in Writer’s WorkshopJewel’s teacher described her as a “real kinder-gartner” who needed time with tools and manip-ulatives rather than pens and papers, which was not possible given a policy climate that put a pre-mium on school literacy achievement. The pre-vious year, Jewel had attended preKindergarten across the hall and was observed by her teachers

to have been silent the entire year. Thus, Jewel entered kin-dergarten with a history of par-ticipation that represented her as “silent” and “not ready” for the curriculum she would encounter. But she was far from silent, as the examples of Jewel’s work to be recognized, presented earlier, suggest. A

multimodal lens can offer a counterpoint to this image of Jewel as “silent” in writer’s workshop.

During the time devoted to independent work, Jewel could often be observed leaning over, with her head close to her paper, pen in hand, intently drawing images and, when prompted, letters. Despite the fact that students were only given pen and paper to compose during writing workshop (crayons were not made available to students, since coloring was seen as taking away from the time for writing), she used the tools (paper, pens) available in this setting and stretched their affor-dances to design multimodally. She wrote words, though not always on the lines. She told her story through her pictures, though they were often not within the genre that defi ned that assignment. Jewel wrote entire sentences within the picture box on her paper, though the words in the picture box did not count as part of the 1-2-3s of writ-ing in writer’s workshop. By using the picture

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[D]esigning meanings is active and dynamic, so we cannot understand Jewel’s literate practices without attending

to her appropriation and transformation of the available symbolic and material resources.

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box on the writing paper as a space for design-ing multimodally, Jewel appropriated this space for her own meaning making. She did not treat the story paper she was expected to use as a “tra-ditional” page. Instead, she saw multiple entry points within the page to write and design. Within the Discourse of balanced literacy, however, these designs were often interpreted as signs that Jewel was a “struggling” writer.

During one particular writer’s workshop in April, students were to write poems about the animals they were studying. Jewel looked like the other stu-dents at her table, with her writing folder and poetry paper atop her desk, but she did not participate in the ever-present cross-table peer talk. Jewel’s body was bent over her paper as she concentrated quietly on c omposing detailed drawings. She had not yet writ-ten any words at the bottom of her page. When she began writing some letters, she placed them above her picture rather than on the lines below the picture box. “I ‘was’ . . . ,” she began to dictate, then stood up and walked to the Word Wall. After a few moments, she returned to her seat with a word card, added some details to her drawing, then wrote “T” on her picture, copying it from the word card (“Today”). Jewel then began to write the let-ter “o.” Turning to Marva, she asked “This is was?” and showed Marva the word card. Marva looked at the card and shook her head. Jewel then held up the card so that Beatriz, who sat at the other end of the table, could see it. “Beatriz, this is ‘was’? Beatriz, this is ‘was’?” she tried again. “No,” Beatriz replied. “‘Was,’ look at ‘was.’” Jewel put the card down on the table and crossed out the letter “o.”

In this event, Jewel does not adhere to the con-ventions of the page (i.e., writing only on the lines and drawing only in the picture box) and thus stretches beyond the limits of the page to design meaning, while simultaneously designing her-self, both as someone who knows the Discourse of writer’s workshop and as a struggling writer in need of help. Jewel takes up the Discourse of writer’s workshop when she uses the word card as a resource for her writing and attempts to add some words to her image. However, she is not positioned as a successful writer, considering that the card she chooses does not match the word she is trying to write. By asking Marva and Beat-riz for help, Jewel positions them as more literate

than herself. Beatriz, who is regularly recognized as a successful reader and writer by virtue of her participation in whole-class literacy events, takes up the position Jewel has offered her and directs Jewel in her efforts to produce a text that would meet the curricular expectations. Jewel’s par-ticipation in the Discourse of balanced literacy is thus more complex than it fi rst appears. Even though she positions herself as less literate than Beatriz, she knows what it means to be a writer in this class and actively works to be recognized as successful by taking up such practices and seek-ing out resources for her writing.

Designing in Computer LabIn the computer lab, Jewel’s literacy practices were always in motion. This is immediately appar-ent in a scene that took place the very next day after the writer’s workshop event described above. On this particular day in the computer lab, stu-

dents were asked to prepare webs of a frog habitat. Accord-ing to the teacher’s directions during the mini-lesson, they were to work in pairs to create a page that showed their main idea of a frog habitat to which other parts of the habitat could be added. Before leaving the classroom to climb two fl ights

of stairs to the computer lab, the teacher explained what a web was, invited the children’s ideas, and cautioned that whatever they added to their webs needed to be realistic, an idea that was reinforced throughout the nonfi ction unit as they learned facts and collected information about their animals. As soon as the children settled in the computer lab, the teacher demonstrated the process of creating a web. She sat at a computer and used the pen-cil tool from the KidPix software program to cre-ate a circle in the middle of the screen, and then drew four straight lines radiating out from the cen-ter (and central idea). As in the classroom, chil-dren offered suggestions about things that could be added to the habitat, and once again the teacher emphasized the importance of accurately repre-senting a frog habitat.

After the mini-lesson, Jewel moved to her computer, and Marva, an African American girl who had joined the class midway through the year, sat at one to her right (see Figure 1). Once Jewel was settled at her computer, she adjusted

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such practices and seeking out resources for her writing.

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the position of the computer monitor to suit her. She looked at the screen, where a new document in KidPix appeared: a white rectangle in the mid-dle of the screen (representing the page) and two toolbars adjacent at its left and bottom. Jewel used the mouse with her right hand and drew some cir-cles, one inside the other. She clicked on differ-ent icons, chose the eraser, and started erasing her drawing, moving the mouse back and forth. She then moved the cursor over different icons, and clicked on one that fi lled the entire screen with the color red, making her earlier drawings invisible.

Marva: “Uh oh!”

Jewel: I know how to fi x all that.

Jewel moved the cursor back over the color menu and selected the color white. When she moved the curser to her document to apply this action, the screen became blank again and she started again.

Marva: There . . . Oh, you picked white and then you see all white.

Marva sighed as Jewel adjusted the thickness of the line and drew a new red circle.

Marva: I need help. (walks away toward the teacher)

Jewel (to Terrance, who is sitting next to her): Don’t help us.

As she was working on her screen, she offered help to Marva, who was having diffi culties chang-ing the color and creating a circle. She provided directions on how Marva should work and then

volunteered to erase Marva’s drawing and start over, so that she could guide Marva through the process. Because Marva still had diffi cul-ties, Jewel and Marva switched computers. Jewel asked Marva to erase what Jewel had drawn on her computer, while Jewel worked on creating a template web for Marva. At that point, the teacher came by and praised Jewel for her work on Mar-va’s computer. She told her to stay at her new spot and asked about her habitat. Jewel replied she added rocks and that she planned to add some lilacs and another frog. After the teacher left, Jewel focused on her text: she added another frog and eggs to her drawing and typed her name. She was soon ready to print her work, and her page was among those shared with the whole class at the conclusion of the lesson.

In this scene, which lasted less than six min-utes, Jewel is a multiliterate person who moves across modalities and social positionings while working to be recognized as literate within the Discourse of balanced literacy, which in this classroom includes facility with digital tools. The series of screen shots shown in Figure 1 can serve as a metaphor for the movement we observed in Jewel’s participation in the digital writer’s workshop. She utilizes tools from the available software, as well as her knowledge of what is expected to be recognized as a successful literacy learner, and creates a text that corresponds to the directions of the teacher: a realistic representation of the elements of a frog habitat. As the students

were frequently reminded, their drawing, their descrip-tion, and their typed name were all parts of the defi ni-tion of text that children were expected to produce in the computer lab.

Yet, even as she accom-modates classroom expecta-tions, her visual text is in fl ux: she erases multiple times, changes colors, and adjusts the thickness of lines until she is pleased with the fi nal repre-sentation. The speed at which she works—and her fl uid-ity in shifting from the screen to interactions with peers—indicates that she knows the modes, the practices, and the

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Jewel and Marva working at the computer

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Discourse. Her comments—I know how to fi x all that. Don’t help us—verify that she considers her-self and verbally positions herself as a person with knowledge. Further, she is confi dent enough to act on the environment that surrounds her text, as when she adjusts the screen and keyboard so she can see better. Her bodily involvement with the text suggests that what she is doing as a designer of meanings is not only important to her as a stu-dent, but as someone with preferences and playful intentions. She enjoys touching and changing the colors of the screen and states that she drew a red rock because red was her favorite color. Naming the colors she chose soon becomes the focus of the two girls’ interaction and positioning as friends, as they distance themselves from their texts to talk about colors they like. We can see this in the ways they move their bodies in relation to the screen. They lean back in their seats and turn to each other, thus indicating that what matters most at the moment is their social relationship. However, this is not totally disconnected from the text itself. With Jewel stamping blue circles on her drawing, the girls incorporate the text into their discussion of color preferences. In this process, their social bond is sealed on the screen.

This social bond soon morphs to refl ect the girls’ differential positioning as literacy learners in this particular context. This scene starts with Jewel offering suggestions to Marva about how she could start her own text (Look . . . You make . . .; refer to Figure 1). Marva, who has been asking for help since the beginning of the episode, follows Jewel’s suggestions, thus positioning her as a more knowl-edgeable peer, a switch from their interactions during the pre-vious day’s writer’s workshop. Jewel, who talks her identity as a competent student into being (I know how to fi x all that. Don’t help us.), ends up positioning herself as the one in control of the whole interactional context and not just of her own learn-ing. Although later Jewel’s teacher guided her as she designed the fi nal draft of her habitat web, her positioning as “in the know” was reinforced by the acknowledgement and praise she received from the teacher and student teacher. That Jewel’s text was included in the sharing time that day was a sure sign that she had met the expectations for being lit-erate in this setting.

SHAPE-SHIFTERS IN THE CLASSROOM: CONCLUDING THOUGHTS Navigating the complex of Discourses, social practices, and identities that children encounter across multiple social worlds is the work of child-hood literacy (Dyson, 2001, 2003) and requires a different sort of fl uency than what is called for in the National Reading Panel Report (2000). Jewel may not yet fully control her movement across modalities and positionings, but she proved to be a shape-shifter “in the making.” This was evi-dent in her efforts to be recognized as a writer in writer’s workshop, despite the fact that she found it hard to stay within the boundaries of a literacy curriculum that privileged language over all other modes of making meaning. It was in the social space of the computer lab, however, that her fl uid shape shifting across modalities and positionings was most clearly visible. As she created and re-created visual texts on the screen, changing col-ors, adjusting the thickness of lines, erasing, and redrawing, the same idea and content were rep-resented on the screen multiple times. These changes happened so quickly, it would be hard to appreciate—without the luxury of a videotape to view long after the event had concluded—how much knowledge and dexterity it took for Jewel to create these multiple texts. The web she created with the help of her teacher, which was printed out and shared with the class, could never repre-sent the fl uidity of her text design. What was also missing from her written text was her design of the environment beyond the screen. The adjust-ment of the screen, the move from one seat to

another, the touching and point-ing to the screen, her bodily position and movement all con-tributed to her multiple posi-tionings as a literacy learner and student. While she voiced this position multiple times, the availability of resources in the computer lab provided a venue for overcoming limita-

tions set by the prioritization of Standard English in school. Her pointing to appropriate icons on the toolbars (and even her concurrent reference in Figure 1 to the “thingy” [mouse]) exempli-fi ed how bodies, images, and talk were all integral parts of the ways she communicated meaning and gained control over her writing.

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Navigating the complex of Discourses, social practices, and

identities that children encounter across multiple social worlds is the

work of childhood literacy and requires a different sort of fl uency

than what is called for in the National Reading Panel Report.

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The fl uidity of her designing was matched by the fl uidity of her positioning. Moving from being a student with know-how to being a friend, then a tutor, and back to being a student was almost imperceptible. This is signifi cant when we con-sider the school experiences of children like Jewel, who come from Bangladeshi immigrant families. Ethnographic studies of Bangladeshi children in English-speaking public schools have pointed to their construction as low achievers, even though education was highly valued by their families (Tomlinson, 1991; Williams & Gregory, 2001). Brooker (2002), who studied the home literacies of a Ban-gladeshi boy, noted that he was instructed to “sit still, say noth-ing, listen, and study hard” (p. 237). If we accept that as true, we are able to see how Jewel was stepping in and out of her cultural positions when she eagerly participated in whole-class events and took initiative in the ways she designed her texts and environment.

Jewel’s literacies-in-motion are also signifi cant in light of the emergence of globalization, with all the attendant changes it is bringing to our world. The school curriculum continues to treat literacy as monomodal, monolinguistic, and monocultural, and thus appears to have more in common with what children learned about literacy a generation ago than with the literacies needed for the world in which Jewel lives. In this sense, school literacy is not ready for Jewel.

How might teachers make their literacy cur-ricula more “ready” for the Jewels in their classrooms, even at a time when they, too, are subjected to regulation with little room to move? Perhaps one place to start is the acknowledgment and use of the multiple lenses teachers bring to their literacy teaching. The profession remains caught in what some have called the “meth-ods fetish” (Bartolome, 1994), the never- ending debate over the “correct” method of teaching lit-eracy. This focus keeps us tied to the past and makes it diffi cult to look beyond the meanings of literacy, learning, and childhood that have shaped school literacy for so long. The importance of refl ecting on what counts as literacy across mul-tiple social settings, and considering how school literacy may only allow for the recognition of a single literacy, cannot be overstated; it is the starting point for noticing how children move

across multiple modalities and identities and how expertly they read the text of classroom power to sort out what counts and who counts as literate. Given all the labels children like Jewel acquire in school, it may be surprising to realize that she was aware of what literacy practices were valued in her classroom, and that she tried to sound like the kind of learner the Discourse of balanced literacy is intended to produce.

It was common for Jewel’s teacher to name the strategies children displayed as they partici-pated in mini-lessons, independent reading and

writing time, and sharing ses-sions, excitedly commenting that the child’s practices were very “smart” or that a child had acted as a “friend to books.” However, this way of nam-ing served primarily to privi-lege the Discourse of balanced

literacy and position the children within it. With an awareness of the children’s multiple literacies and identities, this naming could be expanded. “I noticed that Jewel told her story through pic-tures,” a teacher might say, and then show dif-ferent ways that stories are told—some through words, others through pictures, movement, music, and so on.

Talking differently about literacy might tune teachers’ and children’s ears to a wider liter-acy landscape than currently exists in schools, but talk, by itself, will not be enough to support Jewel, who was able to take up the Discourse of balanced literacy to some extent. What is needed is a rethinking of literacy curriculum that con-siders the changing texts and practices that are already part of students’ worlds. At a time when federal policies are holding tight to narrow ver-sions of literacy, it would be naïve to think teach-ers could make wholesale changes in their literacy curricula. However, in Jewel’s classroom, some untapped possibilities for weaving multilitera-cies into school literacy exist. For instance, one practice we never questioned during the time we spent in Jewel’s classroom was the way in which writer’s workshop practices were imported to the computer lab (a focus of the technology study group at the school). The reverse never occurred, even though there were several working comput-ers in the classroom. Placing a computer screen next to the whiteboard easel might make design-ing on a screen as vital to writer’s workshop as

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How might teachers make their literacy curricula more “ready”

for the Jewels in their classrooms, even at a time when they, too,

are subjected to regulation with little room to move?

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writing with the paper specially designed for writ-ing personal narratives, how-to texts, poems, non-fi ction books, and fi ctional stories. Whether by juxtaposing screens and pages or by fi nding some other entry point, today’s classrooms need to fi nd ways to tap students’ multiliteracies and help them develop ever more control over the Dis-courses, practices, and identities in the globalized world that lies beyond school walls.

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Marjorie Siegel is associate professor in the Depart-ment of Curriculum & Teaching at Teachers College, Co-lumbia University, New York. Stavroula Kontovourki, Stephanie Schmier, and Grace Enriquez are doctoral candidates in the Department of Curriculum & Teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University, New York.

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