Playfully Entangled Trajectories: The Vibrant Matter-ing of Toys in Being/Becoming a Writer

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

Abstract

Objectives
In this paper, new materialisms and agential realism (Barad, 2003; Bennett, 2010, Lenz Taguchi, 2014) inform an exploration of how a small plush toy beaver named “BB” (see Figure 2.) wandered into a classroom one morning and became actively entangled in one first grader’s experience of being/becoming a writer. I aim to generate newness in relation to two analytical questions: How did this plush toy come to matter in this classroom community? How did this mattering affect what was possible for one young writer to be, do, and think?

Theoretical Framework←→Methods
Theories like mediated discourse analysis (Scollon, 2001) and multiliteracies (New London Group, 1996) bring attention to the materials present within a moment of writing production (e.g., paper, pencil, notebook, iPad), but there remains an emphasis on the human agency of the actor/writer. In order to more deeply explore the role of materials—in this case a plush toy—in writing development and identity production, this paper turns to poststructural and posthuman theories to equally attend to the role of human and material actants. “Thinking with” these theories (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012), I work to craft an analytical approach that brings the “material back in without rejecting the legitimate insights of the linguistic turn” (Heckman, 2010, p. 7).

This paper draws from a larger longitudinal classroom ethnography examining interactions of teachers and children in an extended multiage classroom (grades K-6) located in a public elementary school. The subset of data analyzed here (audio recordings, fieldnotes, informal interviews, digital and paper artifacts) trace the plush toy’s intra-actions with human and non-human actants across/with spaces, time(s), people/peers, and materials.

Findings
Across its four-month residency in the classroom, the plush toy beaver came to exceed its status as an object, manifesting “traces of independence [and] aliveness” (Bennett, 2010, p. xvi). This aliveness slowly emerged within/across inter-actions and was rooted in an ethical commitment by peers and teachers to engaging in playful forms of “emergent listening” (Davies, 2014) to/with the child-with-toy.
It is beyond the scope—or interests—of this study to claim this toy (non-human actant) was the singular catalyst, but a longitudinal analysis does suggest an increased production of intensities, flows, and forces in assemblages involving the child-with-toy, and of significance here, these intensities often manifested in/with the production of written text. Consequently, agency for this young writer, rather than being rooted in the individual, became distributed across a “heterogeneous assemblage” of human and non-human actants (Bennett, 2010).

Significance
This intra-active framing is critical in moving beyond thinking of toys as tools for (re)presenting meaning before putting pencil to paper (e.g., Rowe, Fitch, Bass, 2003; Schaeffer, 2010)), and instead positions toys as forms of “vibrant matter” that act as forces with “trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own” (Bennett, 2010, p. viii) on/with writerly practices, identities, developmental trajectories. Ultimately it pushes teachers and researchers to rethink what matters in the development of young writers.

Author

• Beth A. Buchholz, Appalachian State University