UC Berkeley

Recently, research efforts to close the achievement gap have highlighted the importance of understanding children’s experiences in the early years, how they come to learn about literacy practices and about their identities and positions in the world, in order to identify and address the challenges they soon may be facing. As the educational community continues to seek effective approaches to pedagogy and curriculum that will curtail the trend of a widening literacy gap in the future, researchers and practitioners look to the careful study of small-scale interventions in their target settings as a viable path for improving teaching and learning practices through the refined articulation of principles and processes that underpin their activity. Through that understanding, the design of learning ecologies can be approached by leveraging the potential in those elements of interventions that show promise in increasing the individual achievement and social participation of children, especially those most underserved by the prevalent cultural approach to learning in our schools. Using cultural historical activity theory as a lens, this design-based study instituted an Urban Griots Playground intervention and a researcher developed Drumball-Alphariddims digital platform as an embodied rhythmic-based learning system to stimulate children’s literacy development and multimodal meaning production through joint child-parent activity. Qualitative data on five 3 – 6 year-old participants and their parents were collected in the form of pre- and post-tests, interviews, surveys, observations, audio/video recordings, and focus group discussions.  Key findings from this study were that the intervention model encouraged the children’s exploration of literacy behaviors through embodied learning, fostering emotional understanding and key social participation dispositions, while providing parents’ with tools for evaluation and positioning them as social partners and enablers of their child’s learning. The significance of this study is that it provides children, parents and educators with a culturally-grounded approach to early literacy experiences that combines rhythmic communication with new tangible and wearable media technologies.