Abstract:

In my educational career, I have taught and/or been a student in a variety of contexts and before this semester, I did not believe anything about reading or writing in an Educational context could surprise me. In my opinion, educational concepts seem to be cyclical and not a lot of anything new emerges. I was not familiar with the expected curriculum for writing in the primary grades and honestly, I thought young children could not truly participate in “Writing Workshop” kinds of activities because they were probably not yet proficient readers or writers. I had a preconceived notion that emergent literacy learners were not capable of written communications, only scribbling. Although I was not consciously asserting that early learners were “less than,” I would almost venture to say I was using a deficit learning model (Jordan, 2009) in my own theories about emergent learners.
However, as I began to explore texts from the leading researchers in the ways emergent learners write, I discovered that they could, indeed, participate in writing workshop. Ray and Glover (2008) state in their touchstone text, Already Ready: Nurturing Writers in Preschool and Kindergarten, that primary school children already know how to believe themselves into different contexts, such as a firefighter, a truck driver, a dancer, a parent, etc. Therefore, believing themselves to be writers and illustrators is no different.
The students are encouraged from the first day to create “books” about whatever interests them. In the beginning, the teacher takes dictation from the students about the story in their pictures and writes the words down. Eventually, students will transition to writing their own words down, but being able to create a “story” with pictures communicates their thoughts just as well.

Fast-forward to the beginning of this semester, Fall 2012. I entered my classroom confident in my new-found knowledge and eager to explore the ideas I had researched about emergent literacy with my preservice undergraduate students. Unfortunately, they held the same preconceived notions that I did prior to the semester. Each week, my students post a reflection on their readings and a response to someone else’s post. It was interesting for me to see the transformation in their ideas about student “writing.”

Another difficulty my preservice teachers had was coordinating the students’ drawings with the “story” they orally created and dictated to the teacher/parapro/intern. My students were unconvinced in the beginning that emergent learners’ scribbles could actually be a meaningful drawings created to convey communication. They did not have the experience, or the “openness” to see the congruency between students’ texts and images. And often when my students took dictation from their young learners, the drawn images seemed to suggest a different story than the one the student was communicating. However, once they repeatedly heard their primary placement students orally tell the same story about the same set of pictures nearly word-for-word, they began to understand that the drawings represented text for their students and it made perfect sense to the young “writers”.

Keywords:

Multimodality, text/image congruency.