Confessions: My Father, Hummingbirds, and Frantz Fanon

Looking Towards the East (M.A Reilly, 2010)

Confessions: My Father, Hummingbirds, and Frantz Fanon

                             - Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Every effort is made to bring the colonised person to admit
the inferiority of his culture...
—Frantz Fanon

                                    And there are days when storms hover
Over my house, their brooding just this side of rage, 

An open hand about to slap a face. You won’t believe me 

When I tell you it is not personal. It isn’t. It only feels 

That way because the face is yours. So what if it is the only 

Face you’ve got? Listen, a storm will grab the first thing 

In its path, a Persian cat, a sixth grade boy on his way home 

From school, an old woman watering her roses, a black 

Man running down a street (late to a dinner with his wife), 

A white guy buying cigarettes at the corner store. A storm 

Will grab a young woman trying to escape her boyfriend, 

A garbage can, a Mexican busboy with no papers, you. 

We are all collateral damage for someone’s beautiful 

Ideology, all of us inanimate in the face of the onslaught. 

My father had the biggest hands I’ve ever seen. He never 

Wore a wedding ring. Somehow, it would have looked lost, 

Misplaced on his thick worker’s hands that were, to me, 

As large as Africa. There have been a good many storms 

In Africa over the centuries. One was called colonialism 

(Though I confess to loving Tarzan as a boy). 

                                                    In my thirties, 

I read a book by Frantz Fanon. I fell in love 

With the storms in his book even though they broke 

My heart and made me want to scream. What good 

Is screaming? Even a bad actress in a horror flick 

Can do that. In my twenties, I had fallen in love 

With the storms in the essays of James Baldwin. 

They were like perfect poems. His friends called 

Him Jimmy. People didn’t think he was beautiful. 

Oh God, but he was. He could make a hand that was 

Slapping you into something that was loving, loving you. 

He could make rage sound elegant. Have you ever 

Read “Stranger in the Village?” How would you like 

To feel like a fucking storm every time someone looked 

At you? 

                                                                    One time I was 

At a party. Some guy asked me: What are you, anyway? 

I downed my beer. Mexican I said. Really he said, Do 

You play soccer? No I said but I drink Tequila. He smiled 

At me, That’s cool. I smiled back So what are you? 

What do you think I am he said. An asshole I said. People 

Hate you when you’re right. Especially if you’re Mexican. 

And every time I leave town, I pray that people will stop 

Repeating You’re from El Paso with that same tone 

Of voice they use when they see a rat running across 

Their living rooms, interrupting their second glass 

Of scotch. My father’s dead (though sometimes I wake 

And swear he has never been more alive—especially when 

I see him staring back at me as I shave in the morning). 

Even though I understand something about hating a man 

I have never really understood the logic of slavery. 

What do I know? I don’t particularly like the idea of cheap 

Labor. I don’t like guns. And I don’t even believe 

White men are superior. Do you? I wanted to be 

St. Francis. I took this ambition very seriously. Instead 

I wound up becoming a middle-aged man who dreams 

Storms where all the animals wind up dead. It scares 

Me to think I have this dream inside me. Still, 

I love dogs—even mean ones. I could forgive 

A dog that bit me. But if a man bit me, that would be 

Another story. I have made my peace with cats. 

I am especially in love with hummingbirds (though 

They’re as mean as roosters in a cock fight). Have 

You ever seen the storms in the eyes of men who 

Were betting on a cock fight? 

                                               Last night, there was hail, thunder, 

A tornado touching down in the desert—though I was 

Away and was not a first hand witness. I was in another 

Place, listening to the waves of the ocean crash against 

The shore. Sometimes I think the sea is angry. Who 

Can blame it? There are a million things to be angry 

About. Have you noticed that some people don’t give 

A damn and just keep on shopping? Doesn’t that make you 

Angry? A storm is like God. You don’t have to see it 

To believe—sometimes you just have to place 

Your faith in it. When my father walked into a room 

It felt like that. Like the crashing waves. You know, 

Like a storm. This is the truth of the matter: I am 

The son of a storm. Look, every one has to be the son 

Of something. The thing to do when you are caught 

In the middle of a storm is to abandon your car, 

Keep quiet. Pray. Wait. Tell that to the men  

Who were sleeping on the Arizona when 

The Japanese dropped their bombs. War is the worst 

Kind of storm. The truth is I have never met a breathing 

Human being who did not have at least one scar 

On his body. Bombs and bullets do more than leave 

A permanent mark on the skin. I have never liked 

The expression They were out for blood. 

                                                   There are days 

When there are so many storms hovering around 

My house that I cannot even see the blue in the sky. 

My father loved the sky. He was trying to memorize 

The clouds before he died. I confess to being 

Jealous of the sky. 

                                                  On Sunday mornings 

I picture Frantz Fanon as an old man. He is looking up 

At the pure African sky. He is trying to imagine how it appeared 

Before the white men came. I don’t want to dream all the dead 

Animals we have made extinct. I want to dream a sky 

Full of hummingbirds. I would like to die in such a storm.

from The Book of What Remains. (2010). pp. 6-9.

White Privilege, Classroom Discourse, and Being Other

Where No One Speaks English (April 2011 by M.A. Reilly)

As a small child living in Ireland, my grandmother practiced speaking Irish, a Gaelic language, with other children secreted behind the tall hedgerow that skirted the lane where she and her family lived.  Such were the times in the decades preceding the Republic’s freedom from Britain--a time when British rule still prohibited the Irish from speaking their language of home. From the Anglo-Norman Invasion of Ireland in 1169 through the subsequent centuries of conquest, colonization, and genocide--speaking Irish remained a punishable matter.  Irish culture, language, and music were banned by the British through the Penal Laws and through institutions, such as the national schools. Irish Catholics were considered subhuman. Consider Cambridge historian Charles Kingsley (1860) who in a letter to his wife wrote:

I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country...to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black one would not see it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as out own.

Or Oxford historian James Anthony Froude who in describing the Irish wrote: "...more like squalid apes than human beings...unstable as water...only efficient military despotism...the wild Irish understand only force."

Prior to the Easter, 1916 uprising, Michael Collins, a republican leader said:

We only succeeded after we had begun to get back our Irish ways; after we had made a serious effort to speak our own language; after we had striven again to govern ourselves. We can only keep out the enemy and all other enemies by completing that task. The biggest task will be the restoration of the Irish language (quoted in Ó Fiaich 1969: 111).

More than one-hundred years after my grandmother learned to speak her language of home behind a hedgerow, I sit here in the United States, thinking of this woman I never met, of a country, I too left, and wonder about the intersections among occupation, language, and stories. What does it mean to have to leave your language, religion, and rituals behind in order to survive? What does it mean generations later, when one’s native tongue is strange sounding to the ear? 

Although these matters have historical importance, they are also relevant and contemporary as situating some as Other remains with us, (in)forms our actions, and demonstrates our values and core understandings. One only needs to pop into 10-minutes of the current Republican ‘debates’ to see other being displayed.  I want to suggest here though that we can (and I hope do) also look more closely at the work we do at schools and perhaps become brave enough to see our own hand at work in othering, especially for those of us who are White and middle class.

Years ago at York University, Edward Said delivered a speech in which he defined imperialism, colonialism, and empire.  Said said:

As I shall be using the term--and I'm not really too interested in terminological adjustments--"imperialism" means the practice, the theory and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center that rules a distant territory. "Colonialism," which is almost always a consequence of imperialism, is the implanting of settlements on distant territory. As the historian Michael Doyle puts it, "Empire is a relationship, formal or informal, in which one state controls the effective political sovereignty of another political society. It can be achieved by force, by political collaboration, economic, social or cultural dependence. Imperialism is simply the process or policy of establishing or maintaining an empire.”

My grandmother lived under colonial rule. At the close of the 19^th century as a child in Ireland, she was subject to British rule, an empire surely in decline, but nonetheless still a permanent force operating in her daily life. Although Empires collapse, the groups who have been privileged via the Empire often remain privileged well after the collapse, as the belief system that has set them apart and above from others is institutionalized and becomes the bearer of what ‘normal’ and ‘right’ is. I want to suggest here that much of what has informed what is ‘normal and right’ via past (and current) Empires filters into our classrooms and schools, is reflected in our definition of literacy as a singular, decontextualized matter.  We see it in the text choices that fill our classrooms, the way we limit essay and narrative to ‘correct’ forms, and the belief and practice that literacies can be represented as a finalized list of skills. We operate as if there was one 'correct' discourse and those who do not have this discourse are inferior. We have not come that far from the thinking that informed Kingsley and Froude. Such thinking permeates our daily work and may be less than visible to us, depending on who we are and how we live. 

As a white woman, middle class, and the mother of a child of color—white privilege is oddly noticeable, foregrounded.  In this post I want to take a few minutes to situate it, reveal it in its subtle and not so subtle forms as it operates in our schools.  W.E.B. Du Bois warned in 1903: “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.”  In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois wrote:

Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.

In the opening chapter, Du Bois asks the critical question of the last and I want to suggest this century as well: How does it feel to be a problem? He deftly surrounds this question with the discourse we speak:

Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.

It is this ‘real’ question that we need to attend to, say aloud so that we can get beneath it and wrestle with how we situate those we consider ‘other’. Situating another as a problem represents imperialistic discourse--a belief, still with us today that informs pedagogical and content decisions, language and special education policies and practices, as well as how we situate ‘potential’ – a pernicious term if ever there was--on some learners and not others.

I had occasion a few years ago to speak with an elementary principal, Dr. Fallon (pseudonym). She explained that she did not think of the children at her school as children of color—of any color.  She did not see color, nor did anyone at the school, she told me. She insisted that the faculty and staff simply saw children; not their race.  Dr. Fallon is white. As I listened to her, I realized that she deeply believed she and the faculty were race neutral.  Such thinking is White myth-making—stories we tell and retell ourselves that allow us to remain polite, non-confrontational, removed.  If we claim to not see race, then we need not attend the underbelly of racial discrimination—the ways children get situated as problems.

As I listen to Dr. Fallon, I was equally aware of the function of memory and recalled a story I had been recently told about a child, a teacher, and the failure to see race at the school where she had indicated all were race neutral.

“When you can act like a third grader you will be allowed to sit with the other children,” Mrs. Carls, a teacher tells Jae. It is early October.

Jae, who is shy, easily embarrassed and desirous to not stand out in social settings gets up from the table where he normally sits and moves across the classroom and sits by himself at the one desk located away from the other children.  He has been caught talking loudly to a friend seated across the room, again.

This “event” is the last one in a long series of challenges that have happened only a few scant weeks into a new school year where Jae has been seen by his teacher as being a problem. One might wonder if other children in this classroom call out?  Or fidget?  Is it truly possible that only this one child does both? Is it so unexpected that an 8-year-old will do such things?

Earlier that day, Jae had yelled, “Yes!” out loud apparently disrupting his class after hearing an announcement calling for the boys and girls to try out for the school patrol.

“Aaron didn’t hear the announcement,” Jae would later tell his mother.  “He had to know. We were waiting for this. I didn’t mean to yell. I just got excited and wanted him to know we could try out. I didn’t want him to miss it.”

Being able to be part of the school patrol is a privilege reserved for third graders. Jae and his friends had been waiting until they were in the requisite grade. It would be an opportunity Jae would not come to know at this public school; a school situated in a largely white suburb. Because he blurted out, “Yes” and called across the classroom to a friend to tell him the announcement, he was left behind when his teacher and all of the other children went to the tryouts.  This was his punishment for talking out of turn.

Jae’s mother didn’t hear this story until later that night well after she had picked her son up from school, but said that she had noticed that he was extremely quiet and withdrawn throughout dinner. Hours later, in tears, he finally told her the story. She would learn that it was not only being left behind that injured Jae, but also his belief that his teacher did not like him as he is ‘different’ from the other children. The other boys, Jae would explain, can call out.  

“What did you do in the classroom by yourself?” Jae’s mother asked him.

“I wasn’t allowed to do anything. I just had to sit there with Mrs. Nomba (an aide) and wait until my class came back.”

It would be an hour later when the white teacher and the 18 white children came back to the classroom—their voices raised in the excitement that marks such occasions. Here they would find Jae, embarrassed by his misdeed, sitting alone.

It is in these small, perhaps even to some--inconsequential moments--that we need to pause and look critically for “White privilege” is an institutional matter. Peggy McIntosh explains: “I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was "meant" to remain oblivious."  She continues by saying that her schooling “followed the pattern my colleague Elizabeth Minnich has pointed out: whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work that will allow ‘them’ to be more like ‘us’."

I think again of Jae’s primary grade experience and wonder what did he learn about his self-worth that day?  What did being left behind echo?  How might it have reinforced racially charged encounters he had already experienced? What is the weight of memory a child of color carries and how might teachers better understand such weight? What has Jae been learning each day in the classroom since?  What undercurrents of white privilege that is reserved for boys and girls whose skin is light and whose eyes are round has Jae internalized?  What did his white classmates learn that day about children who are located as “other’ by their teacher?

These are not small matters; ones we can tuck away with pleasantries and polite conversations alongside promises to do better next time. We need to talk openly and at length about the ways that white privilege permeates our schools and communities—even if it means feeling discomfort. We need to look inwardly at our own actions and assumptions and critically and honestly interrogate ourselves. How do our actions reinforce privilege for some? How does such history inform how we see and fail to see children?

I am not writing about the gross racial injustices that become front-page news. The ones read about from the comfort of one’s home and later talked about across expanses of lawn with all the requisite outrage truly intact. It seems almost, easy, to gather these stories and wear them as symbols of our sense of justice—as if such practice might absolve us from the seemingly smaller instances when we fail to stand up for what we know to be right. Yet overt hate crimes such as the heinous killing of African-American James Byrd, Jr., chained to the back of a pickup truck and dragged to death by three white men in Jasper, Texas in 1998 or the murder of Asian Mohammad Parvaiz, beaten to death by six white teens in West Yorkshire, England in 2006 have potential reiteration each time we fail to stand up and acknowledge the smaller, less obvious moments of racial injustice.

Literacy, Colonialism, and Web 2.0

When my grandmother was a child, she practiced speaking Irish with other children secreted behind the tall hedgerow skirting the lane where she and her family lived. Such were the times in Ireland, the decades preceding the Republic’s freedom from Britain--a time when British rule prohibited the Irish from speaking the language of home.  One-hundred plus years later, I sit at home 20 minutes west of Manhattan, thinking of this woman I never met, of a country, I too left, and wondering about the parallels between colonialism and our national need to reclaim teacher and student voices in the classroom. To be sure, this imperative is not new.

In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said defines imperialism as "the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory."  He defined "colonialism, which is almost always a consequence of imperialism" as "the implanting of settlements on distant territory." In thinking about the relationship between the two, I wonder about those educational practices that serve to colonize classrooms, students, teachers, and schools, of which there are many.

In this post, I want to examine one example of colonized practice: prescribed units of study for writing. I want to explore how prescribed, commercial units of study act as agents that "re"settle classrooms into "writing workshop" products, stripping from teachers and students agency, voice, and maintaining "literacy" as a Web 1.0 practice. Now to be sure, I am not talking about organic workshops that are made by teachers and students, although these too may maintain web 1.0 practices. First a bit of clarity as to what I mean by Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 literacy practices.

According to Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel (2003), Web 1.0 practices privilege:

letter recognition, skill sharpening, and enhanced fluency with reading and writing conventional linear texts via use of word processing software, drill and skill software, electronic early reader books, audio software functions for matching sounds to letters, authoring software and so on. (Lankshear & Knobel, 2003 as quoted in Wohlend, 2010).

In contrast, Web 2.0 literacies integrate "the principles of Web 2.0 online interaction: global participation, multi user collaboration, and distributed resources and knowledge. Web 2.0 includes social networking sites like Facebook, fanfiction sites, wikis, massively multiplayer online games, and music- and video-sharing sites such as YouTube. Literacy 2.0 practices involve ways of participating in vast digital networks through posting, blogging, recording, remixing, uploading and downloading" (Wohlend, 2010, p. 147).

When schools (such as all public school in New York City) adopt prescribed units of study for writing that situate literacy as a single user event, a misdirection occurs.  As the mother of a 12-year-old boy, I have watched as his literacy learning has been largely influenced by "Units of Study" borrowed and in some cases, wholly adopted, from Teachers College Reading and Writing Project (TCRWP). Whereas he has benefited by having caring teachers and administrators, he also has been defined and to a some degree, limited, by the his schools' misunderstanding of what it means to be literate. In every classroom he has occupied, authorship has been situated as  solo event, limited to the mind of one.  Yet, when I watch my son play online at home, he is composing narratives with other players from across three continents. I listen as he strategizes with players in order to complete missions, advance troops, considers his partners, and win/lose contests. The work emerges as the play ensues. Recently when he was teaching me how to play an online game, he told me that I needed to be sensitive to emerging situations.

"You can't figure it all out on your own," he told me.  "You got to look and see what you partners are doing and figure out how you are going to lead or assist."

A very different type of narrative emerges in the virtual world where authorship is inherently collaborative, subject to emerging situations, and located in partially constructed narrative worlds. Against this richness, I worry each school year when my son (and I imagine so many other children) is required to dust off a small moment narrative as one of the genres he must write. 

"I just gotta get it done," he tells me as I read a rather poorly written story. "It doesn't mean anything."

We all suffer through these narrative attempts and what is learned is significant. My son learns compliance and I learn about practices that colonize a classroom. Allow me to elaborate. 

Not too long ago I worked at a NY college as professor in the department of Literacies, Language and Culture. The graduate students I worked with were usually certified teachers, mostly teaching in New York City public schools, and returning to college to earn a post graduate degree in literacy.  At the beginning of a spring semester, two of the graduate students in a leadership and literacy course teaching at public schools in the South Bronx showed our class their multi-page curriculum map. The maps were voluminous, stretching across legal size paper and containing many pages that indicated what they were to teach each and every month.  Further, the school day was also parsed, and indicated what techniques they were to use at each given moment in the day.  Many of us were pretty amazed at the level of detail the maps contained and were alarmed that anyone would be given such a map, let alone a teacher. Consider this exchange:

“You have to follow this exactly,” Sophie indicated, pointing to the curriculum map she had been given by her principal. The kindergarten map, highlighting writing, was several pages.

“Can you actually teach all of this in a single year?” I ask cautiously as I turned page by page.

“You have to,” Sophie said. 

“If at 10:00 it says shared reading and someone comes into your class and you aren’t doing shared reading, you’re in trouble,” explained Lana, who teaches at a different public school in the Bronx.

“What kind of trouble?” I asked.

“Well I don’t really know.  I just know you have to do everything the way it’s spelled out if you want to be teaching next year. The threat is implied.”

"We have to follow exactly as the Unit prescribes. I mean we spent a week on learning about writing instruments and I never would have done that."
"What kind of writing instruments?"
"Crayons, markers, pencils," Sophie answered. "I had to introduce each instrument. The kids were so bored and it was the first month of kindergarten. It's not how I wanted to start, but I have no voice in this."

"Everything is scripted," explained Lana.  "I was reprimanded by a literacy coach because I called my kindergartners, children, instead of writers. It's all so absurd."

Having no voice is problematic, especially when you are a learner and required to do things that make little sense. Imagine what is being learned by children who watch their teachers following a script. Now to be sure, prescribed curriculum abounds and there are variations on writing workshop by other for profit groups.  What these groups have in common though is a belief that a prescribed curriculum is superior to a locally invented one.  That is a colonial mind set: the belief that some foreign entity holding more power knows better than the local people what is good and bad for them.  Additionally, as these prescribed literacy curricula are all lodged in Web 1.0 methodologies, they not only remove agency and strip voice from teachers and students, but they also ensure that the work that is being privileged is out of date with the times.

In the opening to A Guide to the Writing Workshop (Heinemann, 2006) the first of Units of Study for Teaching Writing, Grades 3-5, Lucy Calkins channeling Isaac Newton writes, “The books are intended to be read and used in sequence, each book standing on the shoulders of the books that go before it…A few homemade units can be inserted between the fifth and sixth book. I suggest one of these be a unit of study on poetry, and I will later direct you to sources of support for that unit and others” (p.4).  A few pages later Calkins writes, “There is no one ‘right way’ for a yearlong curriculum to proceed. In this series, I lay out one curricular journey, one that is especially important to the community within which I teach” (p. 25). Yet, the units of study as suggested by Calkins would fill all but four weeks of a school year.  Precious little time remains for teacher ingenuity or student interest. Calkins explains, “I’ve deliberately left this month absolutely open. Chapter 9 in this book helps you to imagine possible units of study you could coauthor with your colleagues…Whatever unit a group of colleagues decides to pursue, the process of designing that unit will probably follow a course similar to the one I outline in Chapter 9” (pp. 33-34).

 

Web 1.0 literacies are privileged in the Units of Study.  In contrast consider the classroom  Karen Wohlend (2010) describes in A is for Avatar: Young Children in Literacy 2.0 Worlds and Literacy 1.0 Schools. She writes about observing two first graders who wrote an invented version of Digimon Rumble Arena, a two-player video game. Wohlend writes:

Attempting to understand this game from the Literacy 1.0 convention of narrative fiction shrinks the boys’ divergent, rapidly changing messiness into a one-outcome progression (Ranker, 2006). Literacy 2.0 activities, such as video games, produce nonlinear and dynamic interactive texts, as opposed to the Literacy 1.0 linear and fixed narratives (beginning, middle, end) that are typically generated through story writing in an elementary school writing workshop. Video-game play merged the boys’ individual play and design moves into a joint text that blurred the line between reading and writing as each interpreted the other’s move and produced a counter-move. The pretended video game demonstrates that new texts require coordinated action.

In writing workshop, a single author produces a book with support from others who consult but do not produce the text; responsibility for production is alleviated but always individual (p. 148).

Wohlend's observations are important and offer a different understanding of authorship. The Units of Study movement posits the belief in specific types of genres that students should learn about and replicate across grade levels.  Yet missing from these units are the types of texts the two first graders compose in the classroom depicted by Wohlend. Hybrid works informed by new uses of technology are sorely missing, even though  the youngsters populating public school classrooms are avid users of virtual worlds ( Marsh 2008, 2010; Merchant 2005 ).  Ironically, in the opening to the NYC Units of Study (influenced by TCRWP)  - Launching the Reader's and Writer's Workshop: Where We Begin, the authors state the curricular intention:

The focus of the curriculum in the early grades is to offer young children the opportunity to ‘bring their lives to school'.

Yet, the very world of digital media is missing. Researcher Jackie Marsh (2008) indicates that there were12 million registered users of the virtual online world, Club Penguin back in 2007. Club Penguin targets children 6 through 14. No where in the units of study does it include privileging the extended play by students in virtual worlds as an example of authorship.  Authorship within the units of study is limited to a paper-bound text, even if computers are used.  Where is the potential for remix inside units of study?  Where is the potential for the emergence of a made genre, not already delineated by adults? Where is the potential for agency and voice?

Works Cited

Calkins, L. 2006. A guide to writing workshop. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

------------. 2006. Units of study for teaching writing, grades 3-5. Portsmouth NH: 

Marsh, J. 2010. Young children's play in online virtual worlds. Journal of Early Childhood Research, 8, 23-29.

Marsh, J. 2008. Embedded link.

Merchant, G. 2005.Barbie meets Bob the Builder at the workstation: Learning to write on screen. In J. Marsh's (ed.) Popular culture, new media, and digital literacy in early childhood (183-200). New York: Routledge/Falmer.

Said, Edward. 1994. Culture and Imperialism. NY: Vintage.

Wohlend, K. 2010. A is for avatar: Young children in literacy 2.0 worlds and literacy 1.0 schools. Language Arts, 88 (2), 144-152.