GVU Center Brown Bag Seminar Series: Krystina Madej

Studies in neurobiology substantiate the importance of physical activity in children's development. Grounded in orality and physicality, narrative rhymes enter our psyche at a young age to form a basis for physical, social, cognitive, and imaginative development. First read or sung to babies, rhymes are soon physically enacted by young children through play and games as they grow to be toddlers and pre-schoolers. Because of the physical immaturity of young children, and (until recently) the minimal physical engagement opportunities provided to them by digital environments, the physical engagement that has been an integral part of oral and print presentations of narrative rhymes for generations does not exist to any great extent in today's play within digital environments. This talk introduces research on the nature of children's physical engagement with narrative rhymes in which characteristics of young children's physical interaction with narrative rhymes in traditional oral and print media are contrasted with play in digital media.

Dr. Madej researches narrative, in particular the narrative as material culture, narrative structure, and user experience/engagement with/through narrative. Her current work is in somatic engagement with young children's narratives across media, the Disney master narrative, and social media collaborative authoring. She is presently writing “The Development of Narrative Intelligence” about the characteristics of children's engagement with print and digital media. She co-authored “Disney Stories: Getting to Digital,” (2012) with Newton Lee and co-edited “Engaging Imagination and Developing Creativity," (2010) with Dr. Kieran Egan. She teaches at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, and at the Master's of Digital Media, SFU, Vancouver, Canada.