ABSTRACT
The bumps along the way to my first site of research provide a dramatic illustration of how ignorance of the history of kamishibai, as outlined in the previous chapter, can drastically shut down the opportunities and potential reach of the medium. My interest in pursuing the connections between multimodality and bi(multi)lingual literacies had prompted me to seek out and negotiate research sites with a principal in a district known for its robust ESL program. The principal was initially enthusiastic. She expressed concern that her district’s curriculum was too rigid, and she thought kamishibai would be perfect for expanding her staff’s creative engagement with literacy. The teacher with whom the principal had arranged for me to collaborate, however, abruptly and unapologetically pulled out of the project just a few weeks before it was to begin, citing her school district’s newly adopted “scripted” curriculum as the reason. (It turned out to be the Columbia Teacher’s College curriculum, spearheaded by Lucy Calkins, which is not in fact “scripted” but was apparently being adopted there as though it were.) The teacher claimed that my project would prevent her from keeping up with the other teachers at her grade level, and, furthermore, she doubted research of the kind I was proposing was feasible in any public school classroom.
