Go Be a Writer!

Go Be a Writer! provides an introduction to poststructural and posthumanist theories in order to imagine new possibilities for expanding literacy education. The authors put these theories to work in the context of an elementary school classroom, examining literacy-based activities that occur as students participate with materials in a multimedia writers’ studio. Focusing on literacy processes, the book emphasizes the fluid and sometimes unintentional ways multimodal artifacts come into being through intra-actions with human and nonhuman materials. Because these theories emphasize the unplanned, nonlinear aspects of literacy, the authors demonstrate an approach to literacy that works against the grain of standardization and rigid curricular models. Go Be a Writer! reveals that when educators appreciate the value of unscripted intra-actions, they allow for more authentic learning.

Book Features:

• Allows educators to imagine news ways of thinking, teaching, and researching about texts in schools.
• Embraces entangled literacy practices that involve materials, time, and space.
• Demonstrates a long-term teacher/researcher partnership, including data from four years of teaching.
• Disrupts traditional forms and standards of academic texts, experimenting with new ways of writing.

Candace R. Kuby is assistant professor of early childhood education at the University of Missouri. Tara Gutshall Rucker is a public elementary school teacher in Columbia, Missouri.

"This is an important and eye-opening examination and evaluation of this present-day challenge within the school systems."

--M. G. Paregian

"For years Kuby has watched young children make things, the whole time wrestling with what, quite precisely, unfolds when a child shapes an idea into a material thing. Documenting choices, materials, and practices, the authors thoughtfully and intelligently give readers a language and conceptual framework for multimodal meaning making."
—From the foreword by Jennifer Rowsell, Department of Teacher Education, Brock University

"This transformative work encourages teachers to look at writers through a new lens. The reader will question, struggle, celebrate, and re-envision the writing process through this study of pedagogy, philosophy, collaborative conversations, and the voices of children."
—Jenine Loesing and Linda Wycoff, Columbia, Missouri, public school teachers

"Candace and Tara invite us into a rich theoretical and pedagogical conversation about literacy, prompting us to ask ourselves what the two-dimensional and three-dimensional texts created between children and materials do rather than what they mean. Readers will be smart to ask the same of this book. What this book does in the world will surely open up classrooms to playful ways of being with materials and one another, and to divergent ways of doing what has been called literacy teaching and learning."
—Stephanie Jones, professor, Department of Educational Theory and Practice, The University of Georgia