Developing Understandings of Play in a Connected Collaboration Between Elementary Teachers and Digital Media Mentors

• In Event: From Connected Learning to Connected Teaching: Toward a New Vision of Digital Literacy Teacher Education

Abstract

Drawing from across one year of ethnographically-informed data collection at a school implementing connected learning, we explore how a professional learning community comprised of elementary teachers, digital media mentors (e.g., graphic artists, photographers), and a media integration specialist (a former teacher who also held a digital media arts background) supported teachers to deepen their understandings of connected learning, and to implement connected learning instruction.

In this paper, we look closely at a connected learning principle that the team took up over the course of the year: play. Jenkins et al. (2006) argue that play is one of several core skills associated with digital and new media literacies, along with others such as performance, appropriation, multitasking, distributed cognition, networking, and visualization. Additionally, in their design principles for connected learning environments, Ito et al. (2013) argue that “playing” with ideas, theories, and concepts is one way that “learning happens by doing” (p. 79). We saw teachers take up this principle and develop new ways to integrate play into their instruction through weekly PLC meetings with digital media specialists.

Data collection included weekly observations of first grade PLC meetings (n=32), observations of classroom instruction (n=11), interviews with teachers, digital media mentors, and the media integration specialist (n=4), and the collection of artifacts and writing produced during and after observations (e.g., posts that the teachers wrote about play for their school’s website and blog). In data analysis, we examined how teachers’ ideas about play changed, tensions they experienced, and their attempts to deeply integrate play into their teaching. We did this by coding the data set for explicit references to terms like “play,” “games,” and “competition,” as well as for more implicit conversations around the principle of play.

Findings showcase how over the course of their inquiry, teachers moved from hesitation about incorporating play into their tightly-monitored classrooms to unpacking and complicating the meaning of “play”--both generally, and in pedagogical terms. In their PLC meetings, the teachers read both pedagogical and non-pedagogical texts about play, watched theoretically-driven videos about play, and played and experimented themselves (e.g., participating in a “hack-a-thon” to re-imagine traditional board games). They also created voiceover videos to showcase examples of play in their classrooms. Ultimately, collaborations between the elementary teachers and mentors supported more expansive understandings of play and its role in connected teaching and learning.

Authors

• Emily Machado, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Becca Woodard, University of Illinois at Chicago