This paper contributes to the contemporary focus on literacy and digital stories in early childhood education and care (ECEC) institutions. When a group of young children create an animated story together, they might collaborate, both with their peers and with their teacher. By drawing on social semiotic multimodal perspectives as the theoretical…

This paper explores the context of a Kindergarten team in a suburban P-3 school in Wisconsin developing literacy coaching support. Facing recent neoliberal accountability reforms that have greatly expanded teacher competition, dismantled teachers' unions, and added the role of the coach to the school, "confidence" is an issue that the…

The face of early childhood education continues to change. In Australia, the national early childhood guidelines, "Early Years Learning Framework" (2009) and the "National Quality Framework" have articulated and defined the work of early years' educators in a range of areas, including literacy. Both frameworks state that their…

A sociocultural approach to emergent literacy and growing concerns over the de-emphasis on literacy of the New Zealand early childhood education curriculum "Te Whariki" call for locally situated emergent literacy programmes co-constructed by teachers, parents and children. While teachers' approach to emergent literacy takes centre stage…

This paper explores dance as literacy. Specifically, it examines qualitative case study research findings and student examples from a dance artist-in-residence that explored curricular content using dance as its primary mode of enquiry and expression. Throughout the residency, students constructed meaning through their dance experiences in dynamic…

This paper draws data from a 5-year ethnographic study of young multilingual (Mixteco/Spanish/English) children in their early childhood classrooms. In this paper, we focus on two of the children and their distinctive paths as they develop language and literacy. Using a sociocultural and multimodal theoretical framework we examine how these two…

This article examines six years of ethnographic research in Robyn Davis's pre-kindergarten classroom in the USA. Using a theoretical framework to embed writing within a social semiotic that is multimodal and has social intent (Street, 2003), the authors show how children used interactions during writing to create various written products. Three…

In this article, semiotic analysis of children's practices and designs with video game conventions considers how children use play and drawing as spatializing literacies that make room to import imagined technologies and user identities. Microanalysis of video data of classroom interactions collected during a three year ethnographic study of…