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14 Digital Narratives, Cultural Inclusion, and EducationalPossibility
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254 14 Digital Narratives, Cultural Inclusion, and Educational Possibility Going New Places with Old Stories in Elementary School heather lotherington Introduction I am reading a revised version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears as an underwater tale, written by a little girl in grade 2 (age seven to eight) who has clearly borrowed heavily from Disney’s animated movie rendering of The Little Mermaid to create this context. In her story, Goldilocks has become a mermaid, and she has invaded the home of three fish to find three bowls of . . . fish food. I question her on the menu—“What would Goldilocks like to eat?” “Carrots?” she enquires tentatively. “Well, they don’t grow underwater,” I respond. She looks at me, and frowns. “It is a ‘once upon a time’ story,” she replies rather disdainfully. “Maybe mermaids like fish food!” She is absolutely correct. I agree with her, smile broadly at my folly, and move on. This is an educational research project in which elementary schoolchildren reimagine narratives through their own cultural understanding to give traditional stories contemporary digital makeovers: Goldilocks living underwater or in outer space, told in hypertext; The Little Red Hen making a Kraft macaroni and cheese dinner or a birthday cake with Prince Charming, scripted as a play, acted and videotaped for other children to watch; The Gingerbread Man on the loose in the hallways of the school where he is spotted dashing cheekily into a computer screen, before ending up in the kindergarten classroom, captured in digital photography and programmed into a slide presentation; The Three Little Pigs created in multilingual Claymation, bringing the languages of the home into the school. Emergent Multiliteracies in Theory and Practice is a funded collabor- Heather Lotherington 255 ative university–school research project bringing together primary and junior grade teachers at Joyce Public School (jps) in the greater Toronto area (gta) with researchers at York University to develop multiliteracies pedagogies.1 The study is motivated by the challenges faced by contemporary urban children living in multicultural proximity who are acquiring literacy in an era of complex digitally mediated, globalized communication but are constrained educationally by standardized assessments that fundamentally limit literacy to reading and writing on paper in English. Our collaborative teacher–professor research takes up the challenge posed over a decade ago by the New London Group “to extend the idea and scope of literacy pedagogy to account for the context of our culturally and linguistically diverse and increasingly globalized societies, for the multifarious cultures that interrelate and the plurality of texts that circulate . . . [and] account for the burgeoning variety of text forms associated with information and multimedia technologies” (New London Group 1996, 61). Our objective is to engage a highly multicultural population socialized into interactive multimodal communications in narrative learning with a twist. Following Freire’s ideology of literacy education as writing the word through the world (Freire and Macedo 1987), we are developing ways of teaching emergent literacy that engage children who are relatively new to Canadian society in writing themselves into the narratives they are learning to read. This dimensional shift is facilitated by digital technology that allows the story to be picked off the page, reshaped, and retold in another voice. Theoretical Framework Narrative Learning as Socialization Stories form the bedrock of educational experience. As Davis and colleagues explain, the narrative is not simply an aide-mémoire, it is a memory structure: “Cognitive science researchers typically identify two sorts of conscious long-term memories: episodic (event-based, autobiographical, and narratively structured), and semantic (fact-based, rote, and often lacking an integrated structure). The former tend to be more stable and easily recalled than the latter—hence the effectiveness of the ancient teaching practice of embedding factual knowledge in rich images and narratives” (Davis, Sumara, and Luce-Kapler 2008, 13). [54.208.168.232] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 10:17 GMT) Folk and fairy tales were originally created by adults for adults, who by oral recitation, “instructed, amused, warned, initiated and enlightened” one another, and further “opened windows to imaginative worlds inside that needed concrete expression outside in reality” (Zipes 2007, 2). They have evolved into bedtime stories forming assumed common knowledge acquired in childhood. Children are expected to know how the prince tracked Cinderella down, who the seven dwarfs were, and what Aladdin’s lamp could do. Zipes caustically notes that one can buy everything from bathing suits to ashtrays to pornographic films based on folk and fairy tale motifs (2002, 2). Children...