"I'm in a bad mood. Let's go shopping" - Victoria Carrington

This article examines the significance of Diva Starz, a new line of interactive dolls aimed at young girls between 6 and 11 years for current models of literacy. It argues that these dolls have much to tell us about the construction of children as consumers, our views about 'childhood', and the models of literacy instruction most appropriate for giving children the skills and knowledge needed to deal with the complex pedagogic texts characteristic of childhood in contemporary consumer culture.

Published in Journal of Early Childhood Literacy Volume 03 Issue 01 - Publication Date: 04/2003

Reading, Homes and Families: From Postmodern to Modern? - Carrington & Luke

New economic, social and cultural conditions have begun to alter the patterns of home/school transitions in two ways: first, by shifting the normative definitions of family in postindustrial communities and economies; and second, by shifting the basis of preschool linguistic and literate socialization from longstanding print culture to emergent, complex blendings of multiliteracies that engage digital and media texts. Our claim here is that for many children the normative site for storybook reading–the family–is changing, that the texts and discourses of home and community-based literacy practices are changing, and therefore, that the background knowledge, expertise, and habitus that children bring from home to school are also in transition. The cases we describe model new patterns of identity and practice at work in the early childhood classroom–patterns for which a generation of print-trained and acculturated teachers have limited explanatory schemata other than those related to "deficit."

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Troubling Practice - Victoria Carrington, Jane Mitchell, Shaun Rawolle and Agli Zavros (eds)

For many, the contemporary era is troubling. To find one's way in these challenging times is increasingly complex and requires new ways of thinking about academe, culture, society, methodology, ourselves. Researchers and theorists find they must transcend traditional boundaries as they attempt to account for and respond to these challenges. The papers in this collection reflect these issues as they set out to analyse, interrogate, describe, examine, 'unpack', disturb, and explain the practice of educational research and/or the educational practices under investigation.

Published by Post Pressed

Globalisation, literacy, curriculum practice - Luke & Carrington

What is the relationship between economic and cultural globalisation and everyday literacy practices for teachers and students in the stolid 20th century institution, the state primary school? What happens when the very institution that was designed for the propagation of print literacy, for the transmission of encyclopedic knowledge, for the inculcation of industrial behaviours, for the development of the postwar citizen, for the domestication of diversity into monocultural identity — the technology of the modern state par excellence — faces the borderless flows and ‘scapes’ of information and image, bodies and capital? And, no less important, what might happen if we engage in a momentary suspension of belief in current policy-driven preoccupations with pedagogical method, with decoding and basic skills — and ask a larger curriculum question: Within the existing walls and wires, capillaries and conventions of the school how might we construct a literacy education that addresses new economic and cultural formations?

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New Times: New Families - Victoria Carrington

The most pressing challenge facing contemporary educators and social theorists is how to deal with new configurations of family without slipping into nostalgia or deficit models. New Times: New Families reframes the nuclear family in a way that will challenge traditional theorizations. It takes the reader on a wide-ranging journey towards a new kind of family, drawing upon theorists such as Bourdieu, Wilden, and Deleuze & Guattari. Unlike other `family' oriented texts, this book reframes family in provocative and unexpected ways. As a result it has the potential to elicit vigorous debate amongst postgraduate students and other researchers involved in family and cultural studies.

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