Reframing research and literacy pedagogy relating to CD narratives: Addressing 'radical change' in digital age literature for children

Abstract

Electronic books have become quite common in the early school years. The types of stories include instructional materials for packaged reading programs, traditional tales, well known classic and contemporary children's literature and recently authored digital narratives. Some of the latter deploy hypertext and multimodal resources in ways that facilitate innovative construction of point of view and metafictional elements, to engage readers in active, reflexive reading in ways not possible in conventional books. The range of CD stories reflect reading practices from those most closely aligned with reading conventional books to those associated with new digital narratives. Current research and classroom practice seems to be largely positioned at the conventional literacies end of the continuum. This paper proposes rethinking that position and the relationship between research and practice in the classroom use of CD narratives.