Abstract
In this book, Go Be a Writer! Expanding the Curricular Boundaries of Literacy Learning with Children, Candace R Kuby and Tara Gutshall Rucker use post-structural and posthumanist lenses to engage in children’s literacy practices. Candace, a university-affiliated researcher, and Tara, a teacher, were jointly interested in understanding and expanding the children’s multimodal and collaborative ways of writing that occurred in Tara’s 1st- and 2nd-grade classrooms. During this collaborative research, they opened up spaces for the students’ interests and inquiries in literacy which go beyond understandings of traditional, structured literacy learning.
The authors emphasize concepts of literacy desiring and intra-action throughout the book. They conceptualize literacy desiring as a critical element of children’s literacy practices that “focus[es] on literacy processes—the becoming of artifacts” and “emphasizes the fluid, sometimes unintentional, unbounded, and rhizomatic ways multimodal artifacts come into being through intra-actions with humans and nonhumans such as time, space, materials, and the environment” (xv). Intra-action is one of the posthumanist concepts that is different from interaction. Interaction is about interpersonal relationships between people or entities that are separate from each other, but through intra-active relationships, human and nonhuman bodies are entangled and engaged in each other. In order to understand the students’ fluid, unboundaried exploration with materials, time, and spaces, the authors draw on the idea of intra-action.
In the introduction and first chapter, the authors describe how and why they followed the students’ literacy desiring. Rather than focusing on the final products, literacy desiring allows readers to pay more attention to children’s processes. Chapters 2 and 3 offer ideas of how the theoretical concepts from post-structural and posthumanist theories and literacy teaching and learning are interwoven as a pedagogy. Tara reconceptualized literacy and gave permission for time, space (physical, curricular, relational), and materials to her students. Through the new conceptualization, the students de- and reterritorialized structured and linear curricular spaces. They were able to communicate and intra-act with others and materials such as writing papers, three-dimensional printers, iPads, and cubes, which are not regarded as conventional materials in the literacy classroom.
The remaining seven chapters illustrate several projects that the children conducted and what was produced through the projects. The literacy projects introduced in chapters 4 and 5 promote a discussion on how intra-active writing occurred through the projects. In one project, the children and their materials, such as a marker to edit news on a whiteboard, intra-acted and became entangled. While the students were making videos for a nonfiction project, their bodies, scripts, iPads, writing papers, and other materials were also all entangled. The entanglement produced an unintended flow of literacy processes which allowed the students to follow literacy desiring. In chapter 6, the authors introduce the students’ writing for personal narratives to show how spaces, materials, children, and writing processes for personal stories are intertwined. Even though the students were aware of the traditional writing cycle, they did not stick with the linear way. Rather, they experienced rhizomatic writing by collaborating with others and intra-action with materials. They were also moving back and forth in striated space and smooth space during the writing of their personal narratives. Knowing what writing in school is supposed to be (striated space) and what they understood and wanted to follow in the writing processes (smooth space) made them experience becoming and openness.
Chapter 7 suggests what “social” means in a classroom by describing the students’ fiction and series writing. During this writing project conducted by three students, they shared and added their ideas on writing and made a series story. The partnership they experienced in the writing process produced various forms of intra-action and communication from others. Post-structural and posthumanist theories challenge the idea of “social” between humans. As the students and materials—such as a book they made, ebooks, paper books, pencils, desk configurations, and erasers—intra-acted and produced social and collaborative partnerships, humans and nonhumans must be included in social intra-action. Chapter 8 looks closely at the concept of absent presence or silences in large, noisy events, such as a paper-airplane tournament and craft-making projects. Tara herself played a role as an absent presence or silence, which provided time, space, materials, and support for the students to become writers. Even though the classroom did not look like a writing classroom because of the noise, movements, flows, and fissures, these emerged and unfolded literacy desiring.
In the final chapter, the authors question whether literacy desiring can be woven in with standards in literacy teaching and learning. As the students in Tara’s literacy class showed, learning is not a simple one-way process, but rather can be deemed as “a force that entangles the body, objects, time, space, and places” (196). The authors demonstrate that ways of teaching and learning literacy emerge from the entanglement of all matter. In this respect, if teachers open up to becoming-pedagogy and regard humans and nonhumans as active agents, students’ literacy desiring and the standardized curriculum can be intertwined with each other.
Throughout the book, the authors provide many helpful insights, especially regarding children’s right to be listened to in curricular spaces. They are engaged in children’s processes with pedagogical documentation and emergent listening. Pedagogical documentation invites “participants at any moment of being to be aware of being, and to be open to thought and its emergent multiplicity” (Davies, 2014: 27). Emergent listening allows educators to be involved in “new ways of knowing and new ways of being, both for who listen and those who are listened to,” and against habitual practices (196). Even when intended to be “child-centered,” the early childhood curriculum often tends to be rigidly structured. The idea of child-centeredness is criticized as a consensual and ideological understanding (Chung and Walsh, 2000), and an “apparent pedagogical determinism” (Cannella, 1997: 130). In this sense, Go Be a Writer! offers not only theoretical and practical understanding, but also spaces for rethinking children’s right to be listened to and politics in literacy education.
Furthermore, paying close attention to ideas from post-structural and posthumanist theories—such as rhizomatic literacy, intra-active and entangled writing practices, becoming-pedagogy, and assemblages of literacy desiring—could generate a discussion on what early childhood educators should focus on in the classroom. As the authors discuss, the literacy processes that occurred in the projects were nonlinear, unbounded, and unexpected. The teacher and the children were becoming-together through intra-activity and entanglements of all matter. Go Be a Writer! proves that subjects, objects, time, and space are all matter in the learning process.
As an early childhood researcher and former teacher of young children, I was intrigued by the creative and critical approach to emergent literacy from all matter, including humans and nonhumans. This innovative approach made me rethink assumptions in early childhood education in terms of theory, methodology, and pedagogy. Thus, I would recommend Go Be a Writer! to early childhood teachers, parents, curriculum makers, and researchers who are interested in challenging the structured and scripted early childhood curriculum—not just a literacy classroom. Kuby and Gutshall Rucker’s compelling text invites us to rethink and reconceptualize what curriculum means for early childhood educators and for children, and what is being produced in curricular spaces.