Disembodied Voice and Embodied Affect: e-Reading in Early Childhood Education

Carina Hermansson

doi:10.23865/njlr.v3.467

Abstract

This article explores how processes of e-reading become in particular ways when six-year-olds read a digital narrative text in a Swedish classroom. The article assumes that the use of digital technology has changed both the way students read and how they make sense of what they read. With a particular interest in what the digital voice of an eBook may produce, I use an affective methodology as read through the work of Deleuze (1988) to develop the analysis. Using the concept of affect to explore and explain the production of processes of e-reading enables an account of relations and movements between various entities manifested in the reading activity such as sound recording, corporal movements, reading instruction and digital tablets. The analysis builds on video-recorded examples of e-reading and didactic work in three preschool classes. In the intricate interplay of this data, the e-reading processes were formed by often unforeseen intense moments of embodied actions. The analysis shows in specific ways that the mutual production of embodied strategies and metacognitive strategies are vital components for creating and communicating sense when six-year-olds read digital narratives.

Highlights

The sofa outside the classroom turns into a reading den when Oskar and Carolin, aged 6, read the e-book ‘‘Erik at the Circus’’
‘‘[t]he importance of affect in the classroom is inadequately considered in scholarship on pedagogy’’ (2003, p. 191), this study provides an exploration of the immediate, the indeterminate and the everyday processes of e-book-reading in schools
Regarding what and how elements become more or less forceful, the analysis shows that the disembodied digital voice is a vital component providing potential for activating engagement in and a drive for reading through the mo(ve)ments of embodied reading when children co-read on their own

Summary

Introduction

The sofa outside the classroom turns into a reading den when Oskar and Carolin, aged 6, read the e-book ‘‘Erik at the Circus’’. Affective methodology provides a language or vocabulary to describe students’ needs as e-readers and to analyze the ways in which e-reading processes unfold and develop, increase or decrease, in their capacity to produce moments and movements of intensity and sense through, for example, bodily movements, joy and passivity.

Results

Conclusion