by Jennifer Rowsell
Brock University
Dec. 18, 2014

Why are movies like Frozen, videogames like Minecraft, and book series like The Hunger Games fixtures in so many classrooms? What compels students to take up popular culture stories and become so preoccupied with their songs, characters, storylines, and associated objects? Researchers including Anne Haas Dyson , Jackie Marsh (2005), Deborah Rowe (2008), and Karen Wohlwend (2008; 2009a; 2009b) have written extensively about how young children play with media and popular culture texts and how these texts and associated practices have the potential to open up spaces for learning in early years and primary learning contexts.

Wohlwend provides a particularly incisive, critical framing of the often hidden practices and competencies children display when they play and think through media and popular culture. As she repeatedly demonstrates in her research (Wohlwend, 2008; 2009a; 2009b), children perform their identities through media and, in turn, media and popular culture powerfully shape children’s thinking and learning. In her various research studies, Wohlwend shows how adults have become more constrained by conventions, where children easily move across a variety of text genres (e.g. information, narrative, visual/image-based, haptically driven, and explanatory) and through a variety of modalities (e.g. sounds, visuals, gestures, animation). They do this seamlessly and often with abandon.

In one example of Wohlwend’s work, Wohlwend (2009a) examined closely how a group of children engage with toys and artifacts as identity texts. Wohlwend spotlighted Abbie Howard, a kindergarten teacher with 15 years of experience in early years classrooms, who had an inquiry-based style of teaching in which she would plan out and negotiate activities for each day with the children in her classroom. Once they had a plan, children set to work on a project or compositional task. Children worked independently as Abbie circulated. Children naturally consulted with peers and engaged in collaborative work as needed. In her seminal article about the research project during 24 once-a-week visits over one school year, Wohlwend offered a detailed discourse analysis interpreting a group of girls named “Disney Princess Players.” The group loved such Disney animated films as The Little Mermaid, Sleeping Beauty, Mulan, Aladdin, Cinderella, and Snow White and they spent much of their class time talking about the films, enacting parts of the films, extending their own stories based on characters. Wohlwend particularly looked at gendered tensions that arose during their playing and writing particularly around their sophistication with animating characters—that is, moving them, speaking for them, building on stories about them.

Wohlwend provides an in-depth, bird’s eye view of material features of Disney princess characters (costumes, physical features, colour schemes, skin colours, etc.), connecting these material features to ways in which the girls in the group perform their own identities in the classroom and within their peer groups. Wohlwend shows how the girls not only negotiate their relationships with peers, but also how Howard had them critically reflect on the content and respond with their own plays. Howard fosters an environment in her classroom encouraging “approximated writing” and she builds on the children’s funds of knowledge (Gonzalez, Moll, & Amanti, 2005) about popular culture. In her article, Wohlwend notes the Princess Players engaged in 42% more authoring than other children in the class, primarily because of authoring considered texts they dearly love, and they invested a lot of time in viewing, thinking about, and remixing into other texts and compositions.

Stepping back and thinking about research informing practice, Wohlwend’s work tells us some important things that we might know on a tacit level, but that are not as prominent in theory and pedagogy, such as the power of incorporating media and popular culture in classrooms and how young children negotiate and even contest gender stereotypes naturally and in productive ways.

Three pieces of advice emerging from Wohlwend’s work are: 1) talk about popular culture and media texts, discussing material qualities, critically engaging with stereotypes, assumptions, and underlying ideas; 2) provide students with opportunities to focus on particular scenes or characters in popular culture texts, such as Katniss in The Hunger Games, and devise alternative storylines or scenarios; 3) have students work in pairs or small groups to compose a response to a popular culture texts, such as a short film, a rant, or visual montage that depicts a part or theme of the text.