Maureen Kendrick Bücher

Over the past three decades, our conceptualizations of literacy and what it means to be literate have expanded to include recognition that there is a qualitative difference in how we communicate through modalities such as the visual, audio, spatial, and linguistic and that different modes are combined in complex ways to make meaning. The field of multimodality is concerned with how human beings use different modes of communication to represent or make meaning in the world. Despite the rapid growth of international research in this area, accounts of a broader range of global sites, particularly economically under-resourced and culturally diverse contexts such as Sub-Saharan Africa, remain under-researched and under-represented in the literature. This book contextualizes a range of literacies including health literacies, community literacies, family literacies, and multilingual literacies within broader modes of communication, most specifically play and the visual. The claim is that powerful pedagogies, methodologies and theories can be constructed by taking a more detailed look at multimodal meaning-making in diverse contexts. By describing and analyzing multimodal practices and texts across a diverse range of contexts, the book highlights different constructs, issues and emerging questions dealing with the study of literacies and multimodality.

Although there are studies that examine play and literacy relationships, literacy and family relationships, and childhood play in cross-cultural contexts, there are currently no detailed, grounded studies that weave these together as a way of re-theorizing traditional approaches to the study of play and literacy in early childhood. Framed within the perspectives of emergent literacy, social constructivism, and social positioning theory, this qualitative case study explores the intersections of play, literacy, and culture through an in-depth examination of the home-based play activities of a five-year-old Chinese girl. The unique focus of the book offers an up-to-date viewpoint on the bi-directionality and reciprocity between play and literacy learning by exploring issues of gender, identity, family literacy, and culture. Written in narrative format, this highly accessible book paints a rich portrait of what it means to be a child language learner in and across complex linguistic worlds where dissonant cultures must sometimes be negotiated.