Children's intra-actions with the natural world offer an important lens to revisit notions of literacies. They allow for a decentring of humans – here children – as actors. Also, forest schools and nature-based learning programmes are increasingly erupting across North America, although more commonplace in Europe for a longer period. In this presentation of our research, we feature a storying/(re)storying of data from a yearlong research study of children's entanglements with the forest as a more-than-human world. We ask what we might learn if educators, children and researchers think with sticks, not separate from, but in relation to sticks? Eight preschool children, two educators and two researchers ventured into the forest twice a week over the course of a year, documenting their interactions with a mosaic of data generation tools, such as notebooks, iPads, Go-Pro cameras. The forest offered diverse materials that provoked “thing-matter-energy- child-assemblages” that were significant for the children's play and literacy framing. Through post-humanist theorizing, we have paid particular attention to the stick within the children's forest play and illustrate the ways in which the stick was entangled with children’s bodies, relations, identities and discourses. The stick was a catalyst, a friend, a momentary and changing text, an agentic force acting relationally with children's play and stories. The post humanism storying/(re)storying of the children's encounters in the forest with sticks invites infinite possibilities for literacy teaching and learning. How might educators foster such relations, enquiring with and alongside children with an openness toward what the sticks (forests) might teach us?

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In the early years of schooling, children represent themselves as writers in diverse ways. Writers write to communicate with audiences but they also construct their social and literate identities as they write; writers write their lives (Richardson, 2000). I maintain that writers write to learn and to learn about themselves. They also learn to write as they write. In this way, writing practices, which include social and discursive practices, have transformative potential. Writing at school can be preparation for future academic writing but it also can be a site for dialogue with oneself (John-Steiner, Panofsky & Smith, 1994;Street, 1984). The goal of this review of research is to examine how children's identities as beginning writers are constructed through writing practices, as represented in empirical studies of writer identities.Literacy and identity are inextricably linked (Bourne, 2002, Lewis & Fabos, 2005Moje & Luke, 2009). Through literate practices (i.e., reading, writing, drawing, and other forms of interaction with multimodal texts), one draws on identities and constructs new ones. Through the making of texts, writers are able to remake themselves and their relations with the world. Writing is a dialogic process wherein one takes up the words of others and creates new hybrid texts. One's utterances always reflect traces of other utterances. Our texts borrow elements from and speak to one another and we -live in a world of others' words‖ (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 143).Building on the crucial and interdependent relationships between literacy (here, writing) and identity, and the implications for young children's journeys as beginning writers, this paper is an investigation into empirical literature on writer identities, focusing on research that explored the literate identities of children, as they began to learn to write and to think of themselves as writers. The literate identities of youth have been explored in much more depth (e.g., Bulfin & North, 2007;Gilbert, 1992, Lewis & Fabos, 2005 but we know less about literate identities at the time that they are first being constructed, when children are beginning writers. The importance of writing, and how writing practices play out in the construction of literate identities, especially in the face of increasingly standardized writing assessment practices, is addressed here.In this review, I begin with a theoretical discussion of how literacy (with a focus on writing) and identity work together and consider Moje and Luke's (2009) question: -How does one know identity when one sees it?‖ (p. 419). I follow with a review of key research studies about children's writer identities and relevant findings. The questions I pose are: How do writing practices, including daily practices as well as both formative and summative assessment, operate to construct children's writer identities within classroom settings? Do conceptions of writer identities allow for change and development across contexts and time? How might one re-imagine literacy settings in classrooms, in order t...

This article is a product of qualitative analyses followed by a collaboration and conversation amongst critical friends. Three methodologies (social semiotic/sociocultural, ethnomethodology, and rhizomatic analysis) were used to analyze the same piece of interview data. An inquiry into the various characteristics, commonalities, and distinctions of these diverse approaches to analysis was then undertaken through extended conversations. Authors worked through the kinds of questions that could be asked and the answers that might be possible given particular theoretical and methodological stances and choices. Analysis of the ensuing inquiry suggests the possibility of deeper reflexivity and new understandings in talking across paradigms. Struggles over representation and compromises in the process created tensions and questions that could not be easily resolved.