Literacy in motion: A Case Study of a Shape-shifting Kindergartener

Abstract

This article presents a case study of a kindergarten girl from a Bangladeshi immigrant family who demonstrates her multiliteracies as she negotiates the multiple demands of the mandated literacy curriculum. The case is drawn from a year-long ethnographic inquiry of the literacy practices and cultural models in a balanced literacy curriculum where digital and print-based literacies intersected. Drawing on theories of discourse, multimodality, and positioning, the multi-level analysis shows that the child's literacies and social positionings were constantly in motion as she designed texts and her identities across writer's workshop and computer lab. She fluidly combined linguistic, visual, and bodily resources to design meanings on pages and screens, but her literacies were not easily captured on a printed page and thus she was not recognized as a successful in writer's workshop. In the computer lab, however, her multimodal literacies were more visible and she became someone with knowledge and skill who could act as tutor, friend, and successful literacy learner. The case suggests that the shape-shifting literacies and identities of a child considered "at risk" remain largely unseen in a monomodal, monolingual, and monocultural literacy curriculum.