Despite how the population of elementary school children continues to grow ever more diverse, elementary literacies classrooms are becoming more standardized due to increasing educational reforms. Thus, few young learners are yet provided space to engage their home, cultural, or linguistic practices because such communicative practices not often accounted for or included in mandated curricula. In turn, the number of educational studies that amplify the voices of children, particularly those from continually marginalized communities (e.g., children of color, children from working-poor or working-class families, multilingual children, etc.) remains relatively low. In response to this paucity of research, this interpretive project interrogates a compositional fluency (Shipka, 2016, p. 255)—an expansive skillset of communicative practices inclusive of multiple cultural, material, and modal ways of knowing—as one avenue to foster and sustain children’s cultural, linguistic, and modal ways of knowing while amplifying how children come to know, to be and to be known in the elementary English language arts classroom. This dissertation builds on contemporary critical sociocultural scholarship centering children’s varied and complex communicative practices and data generated alongside urban third grade learners during the 2016-2017 academic year. By nuancing children’s processes and accounting for children’s sophisticated rhetorical moves as writers, findings from this study demonstrate how children flexibly adapted their diverse ways of knowing using a multiplicity of modes in order to create rich and personally meaningful texts.
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