Abstract of

Rewriting “Goldilocks” in the Urban, Multicultural Elementary School

Heather Lotherington

Sandra Chow

At a multicultural elementary school in Toronto, Canada, students in grades 1 and 2 digitally rewrote the traditional children's story “Goldilocks and the Three Bears.” The traditional tale was transformed into individualized narratives, with new characters, setting, and plot twists, and the students moved from reading the original story on paper to writing a revised version on screens. This process enabled them to engage with narrative structure, not only as emergent readers external to the text but also as authors of their own text versions.

The project aimed to teach narratives, to experiment with the creation of digital literacies, and to test a process by which traditional children's literature can be made more socially and culturally inclusive for contemporary readers. The article describes the sociopolitical context of the study and places it within an evolving theory of multiliteracies, focusing on the pedagogical process used to create a digital narratives in a primary classroom. Examples from the children's rewritten stories are provided.

Abstract from Lotherington, H., & Chow, S. (2006, November). Rewriting “Goldilocks” in the Urban, Multicultural Elementary School. The Reading Teacher, 60(3), 244–252. doi: 10.1598/RT.60.3.4