(Play)giarism "Among Us": Composing New Ways to Be Together During Lockdown

• In Event: Reconfiguring the Politics of Play(giarism): Examining Children's Intertextual Itineraries in Three Contexts

Abstract

Introduction & Research Context
The limitations of virtual classrooms/learning during COVID-19 are well-documented, particularly in relation to historically marginalized communities, but rarely are counternarratives offered: examples where such children shaped the creation of new kinds of virtual spaces/places centered around meaningful home-based and community-based literacies (Hammond, 2021). This presentation shares insights from one such community: Literacy-Cast, a geographically-dispersed community of K-5 children, in-service teachers, and faculty who co-constructed a virtual space for reading and writing/composing from March 2020 to May 2021. The Literacy-Cast community met daily for hour-long interactive “episodes,” but deeper levels of knowledge production, and community formation itself, developed through children’s extensive, volitional engagement in digital bookmaking between meetings.

Methods
In the thousands of digital books created by children, books featuring video/online games were the most numerous and imitated as part of intertextual chains. Video/online games like Roblox, Fortnite, and Minecraft featured prominently, but in the 24 books featured here, children remixed elements of Among Us, an online multiplayer social deduction game where players must identify the “imposter” before getting killed. These books were of particular interest, given clear tensions with school-based notions of what topics are “appropriate” for young writers. Additional data include video and chat-based transcripts from episodes where children shared and discussed these books.

Theoretical Perspectives
Situated within a larger research project examining community creation through the tenets of collaborative ethnography (Campbell et al., 2018; Campbell & Lassiter, 2010; Rasool, 2017), the digital library was framed as a collaboratively produced ethnographic text (Lassiter, 2005). When examining the subset of Among Us books for this presentation, the assemblage-based work of Johnson-Eilola and Selber (2007) helped move away from evaluating children’s acts of composing in the library as performances rooted in questions of originality and toward viewing them as forms of action– writers working/playing at solving or exploring a problem in a particular context. Using this framing and the generative notion of play(giarism) (Brownell, 2018), I examined children’s Among Us books by asking: What problem(s) were children solving and/or exploring through these digital books?

Findings & Significance
Children’s Among Us books were a way to connect virtually–to play(giarize)–with other children when it was impossible to gather at school, on school buses, and at recess. Video/online games have long been a rich source for children’s composing (e.g., Dyson, 2001; Taylor & Clarke, 2021), but, in this particular digital context, analyses revealed increasingly blurred lines between playing video/online games and composing/play(giarizing) digital books. The ability to (re)use, alter, layer, and remix screenshots (and photos/videos) when assembling these remixed books/texts meant children moved fluidly between playing and composing–as they extended playful invitations to engage in/with the game for all community members. Understanding children’s approaches to bookmaking in this context are significant in helping educators and researchers consider how children’s engagement in home-based literacy and language practices nurture their abilities to solve/explore real-life problems through digital play(giarism).

Author

• Beth A. Buchholz, Appalachian State University
  Presenting Author