The Power and Precarity of Play: Fort Building Literacies in an Early Childhood Methods Classroom

• In Event: Playful Possibilities of the #playrevolution: Narrating Necessary Stories of Literacies in Play

Abstract

Objectives
Using common world research (Haraway, 2016; Tsing, 2015) as an analytical tool, this poster explores fort building literacies with preservice teachers in a early childhood methods course as one possible way to reconfigure the commodification of public education. Intrigued by the material-discursive productions of play-literacies during a fort building event (see figure 1), I explore the following question:

•What happens when play is sanctioned as a necessary and expected practice within teacher education spaces?

Theoretical Framework←→Methods
Play is often seen as untamable, sprouting within the “unruly edges” (Tsing, 2012) of time-space-matter. As such, public education tends to relegate play to living on the margins where it is unpredictable and therefore poses an unknown that can cause discomfort to education’s tendencies towards imposing learning and order. The precarious nature of play and its ability to thrive in the traditional classroom despite attempts to keep in at bay illustrates its significance. Simply put, play seems to find a way. In this sense, play is a precarious practice growing among the ruins of hyper capitalism (Tsing, 2015) that has seeped into traditional educational spaces in the name of accountability, standardization, and privatization/for-profit schooling which produces education as a tool for economic gain. Perhaps reacquainting teaching with the literacies of play holds one possible future for education.  

This inquiry is part of a two-year action research project in preservice teacher early childhood methods courses examining what kind of emotional, political, and epistemic frames orient our teaching acts, why, and what do these framings produce? The data analyzed in this poster (video recordings, audio recordings, photographs, memos, fieldnotes) were all curated from a classroom fort building event.  

Findings
During the semester, classroom conditions were configured to encourage the possibilities of play. However, fort building seemed to generate a different kind of energy and pedagogical knowing than previous explorations. By making-doing-being forts, educators expressed a deeper understanding regarding the materiality of classroom space and objects within that space, as well as how play jostles “surviving collaboratively in disturbance and contamination” (Tsing 2015) in spite of the capitalist entanglements driving educational policy and practice. Likewise, preservice teachers explained that sitting inside the fort produced a space to “be with another” (both human and more-than-human) in a way that wasn’t possible under a teacher’s gaze. As one preservice teacher put it, “Fort building helped me see how important this [play] really is. Because what happens in the fort, stays in the fort.”

Significance
As literacies educators and researchers, we must care for the precarious worldlings. We must seek the “unexpected liveliness and...the ongoing practices of living in the ruins” (Haraway, 2016) of hypercapitalism and its effects on educational spaces. Play is one such practice and I argue that (re)learning the literacies of play serves a crucial role in teacher education if we are to work towards educational equity in public schooling and beyond.  

Author

• Jaye Johnson Thiel, University of Georgia - Athens