Creative Language Play(gerism): Exploring Elementary Writing as Resistance in the #playrevolution

• In Event: 72.047 - Rumblings From the #playrevolution in Literacies: Transforming Knowledge Into Action Through the Power of Play

Abstract

Drawing from a larger 18-week case study (Dyson & Genishi, 2005), this paper explores how one fourth grade student—Jairo—used language as play to resist the standardized, “official” curriculum (Dyson, 2013). Jairo served as a primary example of how students playfully tailored the explicit curriculum for their own purposes. Conceptual frameworks positioning theory (Davies & Harre, 2001) and figured worlds (Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998) were used for analysis to explore the available ideas, features, and resources taken up as tools of play. While writing samples were primary data sources, interviews (Holstein, & Gubrium, 2002) also served as data points to triangulate findings (Glesne, 2014). Findings, segmented by two snapshots of Jairo’s writing, illuminated how students engaged in play(gerism), an interactive space where students used facets of heteroglossia, intertextuality, and embodied action to participate in social worlds of play.

Jairo acted as a tailor, stitching his own interests—Minecraft (see Figure 1) and Adventure Time—to fit mandated prompts of the explicit curriculum. Jairo wove in characters from the popular game of Minecraft and threaded embodied experiences from the virtual world throughout his writings. Jairo indexed an identity of an expert gamer in spite of the perceived constraints of the explicit curriculum. In another instance, Jairo’s writing depicted creative language play(gerism) as he borrowed from a commercially published text. The limited view of writing purported by the standardized curriculum, however, did not fully account for the intricacies present in Jairo’s writings. This study illuminates the narrow scope and sequence of the standardized curriculum while challenging the notion that play is solely an embodied action. Ultimately, findings highlight how creative language play, read here as play(gerism), is used by students as a tool towards equity and to develop counterstories.

Author

• Cassie J. Brownell, University of Toronto