Session Information
31 SES 14 A, Innovative Methodological Approaches to Investigate Literacies and Languages Learning in Education
Symposium
Contribution
In this paper we present findings from an on-going study with a six-year-old girl, Leah, focusing on the spatialities and embodiments of childhood. We explore her play(ful)-processes and production of digital and print texts during collaborative play. Two key elements of Rautio and Wilson’s (2015) work underpin this presentation. Firstly, they view play as intra-active where play is always interdependent, generative and becoming. This view enables an exploration of how collaborative play is both a means to an end and an end in itself. Second is their contention that language is material. Language generates play and we are interested in the ways it is entangled with the making of imaginary worlds captured across time and in space. Aware of post-qualitative critiques of ethnography and participatory research with children that do not accord children full autonomy or acknowledge complex material encounters, we use the term collaborative play. Collaborative play brings together ethnography and participatory methods so that the researcher becomes a 'playmate in the moment'. It disrupts adult-child binaries (Murris and Haynes 2018) and hierarchical power relations, as well as acknowledging human and material intra-actions. Data comprised of filmed or photographed recordings of play in-the-moment, retold reconstructions of play events, objects used during play (e.g. blocks, princess costumes, books, ipad, dvds, pencils, stickers, scissors, glitter, paper) and (un)finished texts in the form of maps, drawings and co-constructed books. We use diffraction as a practice of analysis, reading theoretical insights through the data (Barad 2007). Fairclough’s (1995) dimensions of discourse enable us to consider both process and product; and the material and social conditions that affect what children make and how they make them. This is diffracted with Barad’s concept of intra-action that foregrounds knowing and being. Two examples are discussed: Leah’s map making that combines characters from a range of stories and genres and where materials act as the inspiration for textual production; and her co-authored book Pigeon goes to the beach, where improvisations with language and matter are influenced by textual and embodied experiences. This paper shows the importance of connections forged within sociomaterial relationships where print and digital literacies become entangled through sensory and affective engagements. A sociomaterial approach provides insights into the meaning potential of modes, genres and devices used in the creation of literary worlds.
References
Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fairclough, N. (1995) Critical discourse analysis. London: Longman. Murris, K., Haynes, J. (2018) Literacies, literature and learning New York: Routledge. Rautio, P. & Winston, J. (2015) Things and children in play – improvisation with language and matter, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 36(1):15-26.
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