Boundary-Making, Boundary-Breaking: Playful Entanglements in the Digital Dialogue Project

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

Abstract

Objectives
This presentation examines the sometimes boundary-making and sometimes boundary-breaking nature of playful literacy practices (Author 9, 2015) by looking at the ways young people made sense of self and other after collaborating with students from very different schools and age groups to create a performative mash-up. I examine how playful, face-to-face interactions might impact young people’s perceptions of others.
 
Framing
Undergirded by the current turn in transliteracies (Stornaiuolo et al., 2017), a framework that illuminates the ways literacies move across space, time, materials, and bodies, this piece looks to illuminate the emergence of the “paradox of mobility,” the notion that literacies’ systemic underpinnings have the potential to both break free from and reproduce already-existing inequities. This foundation emboldened a fluid look at what’s produced by the playful literacies that emerged at the final event with the dual-edged sword of optimism and skepticism.  
 
Methods
This iteration of the Digital Dialogue Project occurred throughout the Spring Semester of 2016 and connected a diverse set of seventy-five students across five different schools in sharing digital productions and face-to-face collaborative performance. (See Table 1.)  This analysis zooms in on the culminating event at Phase 3 (see Figure 3.), during which young people finally met face-to-face with the students they had been virtually grouped with throughout the semester. During this dramatic collaboration, each group of five created a performance that incorporated key lines from their previously created multimodal compositions.
 
Analysis involved an iterative Critical Discourse Analysis process (Gee, 2014) transcribing and emergently coding interviews accumulated from the seventy-five student participants before the and after the culminating event. Video was also used to further illuminate focal events described by participants during the interviews.  I marked focal moments described in speech as “border” or “bridge” to indicate whether students felt closer to or more distanced from the members of their group from different schools.  
 
Findings
Findings reveal that young people spoke frequently about various social constructions that were powerful forces in their negotiation of self and other during the semester-long partnership: age, gender, race, socioeconomic class, and neurological difference.  Interviews after the culminating performative event, however, revealed a theme of “I thought they were going to be ______ but instead they were ______.”  Play and collaborative performance emerged then, as not merely “empty fun”, but as an agent, one that accomplished world-making (Nicolopoulou,1997), at times blurring initially perceived boundaries and at other times making those border-lines more explicit.  
 
Significance
In this increasingly polarized time, it is essential that we, as teacher educators and researchers, reckon with how well we are preparing young people to dialogue across difference (Burbules & Rice, 1991). This study suggests that creating playful spaces for collaborative performance across difference may have the potential to destroy previously-existing assumptions about self and other. However, the same playful literacy practices that can disassemble boundaries can also promulgate inequities, especially without proper channels to reflect upon and continue to grow newly-established relationships.

Author

• Julie Rust, Millsaps College