Playful Constructions of Childhood Literacies: Risky Co-Making

• In Event: Rethinking Literacy Ontologies Through the Eyes of Participants, Objects, and Sites: Public Pedagogies of Possibility

Abstract

Objective: Childhood is constructed through a myriad of material-discursive forces and “risky co-making” (Haraway, 2016). One such force is place-making. However, as educators and researchers, we are but one part of an intricately entangled thread that constructs place, and hence, constructs the ebbs and flows of childhood. Using Haraway’s (2016) conception of String Figures, this paper suggests that place-making is, in fact, world-making and by proxy, literacies-making. I do this work by carefully reading through play-making data (Haraway, 2015) at an afterschool community center in a multilingual/multicultural neighbourhood experiencing economic inequalities to map the abstractions of play (Haraway, 2015).

Theoretical Perspectives: Unfolding the abstraction of play (Haraway, 2015) suggests that we might better understand the ways all bodies (human and otherwise) engage in composing the world and realities. Scholars who have focused on play as literacy in their scholarship (Author 2015, 2016, 2017; Dyson, 1997, 2003; Wohlwend 2011, 2013; Kuby & Gutshall Rucker, 2016) have long been advocating that educational researchers engage in a special attention to play as an actant in the fabrications of literacy ontologies. Therefore, one might understand play literacies as a form of public pedagogy and place-making. Yet play has never been solely enacted by humans alone.

Indeed, children perform public pedagogy, and thus literacies, through acts of play in various places. However, this paper argues that there is much more entangled in the mesh (Morton, 2010) and knots (Ingold, 2015) of play-making and literacy-making. Taking a critical posthumanist stance, I argue that play literacies are never solely the invention of humans but permeate and pulsate in concert with the material-discursive powers of place and with socio-political forces that are world-affecting. Consequently, which stories make worlds and which worlds make stories matter (Haraway, 2016) and if those stories focus on the doing and being of humans alone, surely something is to be missed.

Methods: I use multispecies storytelling to analyse the “sensual trans-ing, and interstitial jointings” (Haraway, 2016) between humans and more-than-humans during play-making at a community makerspace and how play-making is a public pedagogy and thus a literacies-making endeavour. I do this via string-figuring by using string to visually explore data sources. Constituting both thinking and making practices, string figuring as a method looks to think and rethink the fabrications and “risky co-makings” (Haraway, 2016, p. 14) that emerge when looping lines are pulled taut, loosened, dropped, and reconfigured. String figures tell the story of possible worlds by “weaving paths and consequences rather than determinisms” (p. 31).

Data Sources: Data includes photographs, videos, and maps of play-making in a community makerspace and playground.

Scholarly Significance: The AERA 2018 call for proposals invites scholars to contemplate public education. If we are to truly consider education public, we must also account for public pedagogies that emerge from the non-school spaces young people traverse. Seeing the abstractions of play that emerge from human and more-than-human material-discursive forces as public pedagogies attenuates a deeper noticing of literacy ontologies and their world-affecting entanglements.

Author

• Jaye Johnson Thiel, University of Georgia - Athens