Literacy, Play and Globalization Converging Imaginaries in Children's Critical and Cultural Performances

This book takes on current perspectives on children’s relationships to literacy, media, childhood, markets and transtionalism in converging global worlds. It introduces the idea of multi-sited imaginaries to explain how children’s media and literacy performances shape and are shaped by shared visions of communities that we collectively imagine, including play, media, gender, family, school, or cultural worlds. It draws upon elements of ethnographies of globalization, nexus analysis and performance theories to examine the convergences of such imaginaries across multiple sites: early childhood and elementary classrooms and communities in Puerto Rico and the Midwest United States. In this work we attempt to understand that the local moment of engagement within play, dramatic experiences, and literacies is not a given but is always emerging from and within the multiple localities children navigate and the histories, possibilities and challenges they bring to the creative moment.

Part I: Literacy Research within Multisited Imaginaries and Converging Worlds 1. Global Networks, Cultural Production, and Literacy Practices 2.Understanding Multisited Imaginaries in Literacy Research PartII: Mapping Multisited Imaginaries in Literacy Research 3.Mapping Global Markets in Local Communities: Studying Cultural Chapter Four: Cultural Production of Telenovelas Dramatic Worlds Carmen Liliana Medina with María del Rocío del Costa 5.Cultural Production of Disney Princess Play Worlds Karen E. Wohlwend 6. Convergences and Slippages in Children’s Improvisations and Teachers’ Pedagogical Imaginaries PartIII: Convergences in Collective Cultural Imaginaries 7.Participation, Scripting, and Embodiment in Children’s Collective Imaginaries 8. Globalization, Imagination, and the Possibilities of Agency 9.Literacy, Play, and Globalization in Teacher Education

Carmen Liliana Medina is an associate professor in Literacy Culture and Language Education at Indiana University. Her research focuses on literacy and biliteracy as social and critical practices. She has published in journals such as Reading Research Quarterly, Language Arts, Theory into Practice and the Journal of Teacher Education. She has a forthcoming co-edited volume with Dr. Mia Perry entitled Methodologies of Embodiment (Routledge Research Series). Karen E. Wohlwend is an associate professor in Literacy, Culture, and Language Education in the School of Education at Indiana University. Her research critically examines young children’s play with toys, popular media, and digital technologies. She has authored two books: Literacy Playshop: Playing with New Literacies and Popular Media in the Early Childhood Classroom and Playing Their Way into Literacies: Reading, Writing and Belonging in the Early Childhood Classroom.