Mimicked Models and Remixed Recipes: Tracing the Textual Trajectories of Young Children's Play(giarism)

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

Abstract

Introduction and Overview
Although work in narrative writing is characterized as that which has the most potential for play in early literacy (see, for example, Dyson, 1993, 2003; Wohlwend, 2009; Yoon, 2021), young children’s right to remix texts in and across expository genres is equally important. Indeed, as this scholarship suggests (see, for example, Author, 2022; Ghiso, 2013; Lenters, 2016), early writers engage creative forms of composition to subvert traditional notions of non-fiction’s form and typifications of text. Taking these interests forward, this paper examines young children’s itineraries for writing as sites and signs of writer-ly remix and assemblage, or what Brownell (2018) names “play(giarism).” More specifically, it follows these two children’s textual trajectories in composing a “mimicked model” (the teacher’s words, not my own) and a remixed recipe to ask: How do young writers inquire into and remix facets of popular culture to assemble new authorial forms of “factual” information across genres?

Theoretical Framework
Grounded in sociocultural theories of literacy – particularly new literacy studies (Street, 1984), this presentation adopts concepts from rhetorical genre studies (Bazerman, 1994; Devitt, 2004; Miller, 1984) and assemblage theory (Deleuze & Parnet, 1987; Johnson-Eilola & Selber, 2007). Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) understands genres as rhetorical typifications that are derived, intersubjective, and socially mediated (Bazerman, 1994; Devitt, 2004; Miller, 1984). Genres, as social artifacts, coordinate specific ways of knowing and doing. Leveraging RGS to trace how children (re)appropriated particular pop culture discourses, genre conventions, and design affordances, this presentation understands children’s remixed compositions as forms of play(giarism). Advancing what Tachino (2012) names “intermediary genres” (genres that facilitate the uptake of a genre by another genre), young children played with the politics of publication to redefine authorship in the classroom community.

Methods
This presentation draws on a subset of data from a larger qualitative project examining young children’s personal digital inquiry (see, for example, Author 2019; 2022). Focusing on two students in one table group across a writer’s workshop unit, I draw on a range of data, including talk transcripts, textual artifacts, fieldnotes, and 1:1 design interviews (Dalton et al., 2015). Tracing their writer-ly production, I coded their textual production, consumption, and social interaction for moments in which (a) elements of writing served as distinct rhetorical choices for subverting form and (b) authorial production transformed into peripheral play(giarism).

Findings & Significance
Following two young writers as they designed a diagram and remixed a recipe, my analysis revealed how these texts became interdiscursively mediated by their imagined worlds, social hierarchies at school, and polyphonous performances as authors. Compounded through micro-ethnographic analyses of young writers composing in situ, this paper presents new understandings into thinking about the social dimensions of play(giarism) as it is made manifest in and through remix, assemblage, and the social nuances of children writing across genres. Focusing less on what the texts are, this paper forwards early writing research by highlighting the effects and contexts through which young writers are known and come to be in the early years.

Author

• Jon M. Wargo, University of Michigan
  Presenting Author