Technology and Critical Literacy in Early Childhood

Vivian Maria Vasquez, Bryan Woods, Carol Branigan Felderman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000521306
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

Now in its second edition, this popular text explores classrooms where technology and critical literacies are woven into childhood curricula and teaching. Using real-world stories, it addresses what ICTs afford critical literacy with young children, and how new technologies can be positioned to engage in meaningful and authentic learning. Concise but comprehensive, the text provides strategies, theoretical frameworks, demonstrations of practice, and resources for teachers.

Updated with discussions of media literacy and new pedagogical tools, the second edition features new classroom examples and experiences that highlight the ways in which critical literacy, technology and media literacy come together in everyday life in the early childhood classroom. The inviting examples model how to use the interests and inquiry questions of young learners as a springboard for creating a critical curriculum. Each chapter includes Reflection Points, pedagogical invitations, and Resource Boxes to imagine new possibilities of working with students in engaging and supportive ways.

The inspiring stories, guidance, and tools this book make it a great resource for pre-service teachers and students in Early Childhood Education and Literacy Education, and primary teachers and educators.

CHAPTER 1 Setting a Context for Exploring Critical and Media Literacies Using Technology

DOI: 10.4324/9780429398520-2

Figure 1.1 TJ’s Family

The opening image (Figure 1.1) was drawn by Vivian’s son TJ when he was 5 years old after he and his classmates were asked by his preschool teacher to make a picture of his family. While describing his drawing he explained that each person in his family has an iPod Touch™ in their hand. Upon closer inspection, it becomes obvious that each person has a different combination of colored dots on their iPods™. When asked what the different colors represent he explained that each person in his family has their own interests and therefore they would have a different set of applications, which he referred to as apps, on their iPods™. For instance, he suggested that he would have games like Rolando and Angry Birds on his iPod™ while his mother or father might have a grocery list application or a calendar on theirs.

Four-year-old Hannah was in the car with her father. Upon noticing they were in an unfamiliar neighborhood, she suggested, “ . . . use the GPS Daddy.” Two-year old Elizabeth handed her mother her toy phone and said “music,” knowing that her mom listened to music on her phone.

Children like TJ, Hannah, and Elizabeth are born and inducted into a world in which new technologies and new forms of communication are widespread. Janks and Vasquez (2011) note that today books can be immediately downloaded, music and images can be mixed and re-mixed and immediately retrieved using quick response codes. As such, there are new spaces in which children can produce and re-produce identities and enter global online communities (Janks & Vasquez, 2011). It should not be a surprise that these new communicative tools have found their way into children’s play; a site for the appropriation of cultural tools (Wohlwend, 2009). For instance, TJ used to make believe he was doing things on an iPad using toys at his disposal as an iPad before he ever held a real one in his hand.

Changes in the communicative terrain have made it very difficult to imagine what the landscape will look like by the time the generation currently in school will graduate (2011). This is especially true given the speed with which new communication technologies are being developed. Since the first edition of this book for instance, 4G networks have come into being offering download speeds that are ten times faster. According to Statista and Global X (retrieved from statista.com; www.globalxetfs.com/a-decade-of-change-how-tech-evolved-in-the-2010s-and-whats-in-store-for-the-2020s/) this increase in download speed has resulted in Daily time spent online on mobile devices also increasing from 32 minutes in 2011 to 132 minutes in 2019. Subsequently, the possibility of instantaneously broadcasting life experiences as they unfold has also increased with the use of social media spaces. Companies selling their products, news organizations, and governments have leveraged quick access to social media outlets as a way to rapidly make information available in real time. Such outlets are ripe for advertisers picking and pick they do, resulting in digital advertising spending surpassing that of traditional advertising like TV and radio (Vox, “Digital advertising in the US is finally bigger than print and television,” Feb 20, 2019). The number of global social media users has therefore “increased from 970 million people in 2010 to 2.96 billion in 2020” (Statista, “Number of global social network users 2010–2021,” Aug 14, 2019. Retrieved from www.globalxetfs.com/a-dec-ade-of-change-how-tech-evolved-in-the-2010s-and-whats-in-store-for-the-2020s/). As such, today the only certainty we can count on is that many more shifts in technology will take place in years to come and we cannot be certain as to what the future will demand of our young people. The best we can do is imagine possibilities. We hope that this book helps you to do just that – imagine ways of creating space to capitalize on what technology can afford the work that we do as well as imagine thoughtful and critical ways of engaging with media texts so that our young students of today can participate critically with media texts in the future.

We are assuming that you are interested in this book because you have at least some sense of the possibilities afforded by using technology as a tool for learning and teaching. A good place to start is by taking stock of your own history with using technology in your life as an entrée into imagining how the strategies and instances of critical literacy and media literacy learning with the use of technology that we share in this book can intersect with the work that you do in your setting.

DIFFERENTIAL ACCESS AND CONNECTIVITY

Janks and Vasquez (2011) note that where in some homes very young children are able to manipulate and create texts for touch screen smart phones, participate in multi-player online games, and play interactive games on computers, others remain without food, shelter, running water, and electricity. Subsequently, Janks and Comber (2006) state that mobility, as in the ability to navigate space and time as a result of technological advances, is a class marker. Janks and Vasquez (2011) have noted that connectivity is also a class marker and that social differences produce differential access to the world so that the world is more accessible to some than others. And as Price-Dennis and Sealey-Ruiz (2021) remind us, “Our obligation as educators is not just to digitize current practices but redistribute knowledge and power across modalities for social justice.”

We need to find ways to make the technology accessible to all children while simultaneously developing ways to accept the challenge(s) of the new technological world in which we live in order to best support children like TJ, Hannah, and Elizabeth, who participate in the world with new mindsets, identities, and practices, which impact their lives at home, at school, and beyond. This book sheds light on what this means for young children, between the ages of 3 and 8, growing up in the 21st century.

In 2002, Marsh argued that the multi-modal textual competencies and semiotic choices of children referred to by Luke (1999) as netizens are not given sufficient space within current curriculum frameworks to support their learning. Unfortunately, this continues to hold true in 2021. So as the world experienced the pandemic of 2020 and online schooling became “the reality for millions of children, youth, and teachers around the world [and] school [became] synonymous with digital learning,” (Price-Dennis & Sealey-Ruiz, 2021, p. 105) many educators and students struggled to do school online.

In response, the chapters that follow create space for thinking about how to use technology in different settings by exploring the technoliteracies (Marsh, 2002) with which children engage from a critical literacy perspective and as they engage with media texts. Throughout we will offer demonstrations of these technologically based literacies as they are used and produced by young children and why this matters for literacy teaching and learning. What differentiates this book from many others is that the teachers whose classrooms we enter frame the work they do using new technologies from a critical literacy and media literacy perspective. This is not a widely used intersection for working with young children. Further, the work presented here primarily focuses on curriculum that stems from the inquiry questions and passions of the children, building on their diverse lived experiences and their funds of knowledge (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992). Throughout we will show and tell what happens when teachers capitalize on opportunities for using technology and critical literacy based on matters of importance to children or based on a desire to make accessible to them new ways of communicating their ideas.

NEW TECHNOLOGIES AS TOOLS FOR ENGAGING IN CRITICAL LITERACY WORK

Critical literacy has been a topic of contestation for some time. This, in part, is due to the belief that it should look, feel, and sound different, and accomplish different sorts of life work depending on the context in which it is being used, as a theoretical and pedagogical framework for teaching and learning (Vasquez, Janks, & Comber, 2019; Luke, 2007; Vasquez, 2004, 2005; Comber & Simpson, 2001). Vivian (Vasquez,1994) has referred to this framing as a way of being since the nineties, when she began to argue that critical literacy should not be an add-on but a frame through which to participate in the world (1994). As such there is no such thing as a critical literacy text or topic. However, texts and topics can be read or engaged with from a critical literacy perspective. Moreover, since such texts can be drawn from the everyday world, it is often the case that media texts are studied alongside children’s literature and other multimedia texts. You will see this as you make your way through Part One and Part Two of this book.

KEY ASPECTS OF CRITICAL LITERACY

Vivian along with her colleagues have written about the key tenets of critical literacy (Vasquez, et al., 2019; Vasquez, 2014, 2017). They note that in spite of the fact that critical literacy does not have a set definition or a normative history, there are key tenets described in the literature. (Vasquez et al., 2019) Further, “It should be noted that such key tenets would likely take on a different shape depending on one’s orientation to critical literacy, the level at which one is working, and one’s social context” (p. 306). Media literacy is implied in these tenets but not necessarily named in publications on critical literacy. However, much of the work done by teachers and their students using multimodal texts use as their entrée various media texts from magazine ads to television commercials and other everyday texts. As such we decided to be more explicit about the intersections between critical literacy and media literacy. Following is a chart that includes key aspects of critical literacy in relation to media literacy. The key aspects of critical literacy are from Vasquez (2014, 2017) and Vasquez et al. (2019) and the core principles of media literacy education are from the National Association for Media Literacy Education (N...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Resource Boxes for Use in the Classroom
• ‘Try This’ Strategies for Use in the Classroom
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Setting a Context for Exploring Critical and Media Literacies Using Technology
• PART ONE One Teacher’s Journey
• PART TWO Further Insights into Teaching with Technology
• References
• About the Authors
• Index