Affective and Playful Literacy Learning in Bilingual Teachers and Young Children Translanguaging Read-Alouds

• In Event: Friday Roundtable Session 3:05 pm
  In Roundtable Session: (Re)Considering the Critical and Affective Potentials of Playful Literacies (Table 11)

Abstract

Introduction: The recent affective turn in literacy education has further underscored its critical potential as an act of resistance against dehumanizing forces that impact students’ schooling and life experiences (Dutro, 2019; Leander & Ehret, 2019). In this presentation, we take up affect as relational and performed forces that emerge from the inbetweenness among people, objects, and material and discursive contexts. We examine how two U.S. Latinx teachers and their young bilingual students co-constructed affect and play in translanguaging read-alouds with a bilingual text that centered their culturally-rooted ways of knowing and being.

Theoretical Framework: To analyze the teachers’ and the students’ affective encounters and playful engagement with the text and each other during the translanguaging read-alouds, we draw upon these theorizations of affect as “relations, practices, and performances” (Zembylas, 2019, p. 223). We view affect as never predetermined; it emerges from the in-betweenness as people act and react with each other and with material and discursive contexts in unfolding interactions (Beach & Bloome, 2019; Author, 2021). We also draw upon the concept of languaging, as a theory of language use, refers to the notion that we do things through languaging and our languaging acts constitute social reality (Beach & Bloome, 2019). We also utilize the concept of translanguaging which evolved from the concept of languaging to refer to the notion that multilingual speakers’ fluid, dynamic languaging practices constitute one unitary linguistic repertoire, and it transcends both the boundaries of named languages and the boundaries between languages and other semiotic systems and embodied actions (Canagarajah & Dovchin, 2019; García, 2012; García & Kleifgen, 2020; Li, 2018; Zhang, 2022).

Methods: We adopted a multiple-case study design (Yin, 2009) utilizing a cross-case synthesis approach. To understand how the teachers and their students co-constructed affect and playfulness in the read-alouds, we engaged in an inductive coding process (Thomas, 2016) to identify categories of languaging acts and embodiment that constituted affect and playfulness in the read-alouds. We then utilized Bloome et al. (2022) approach of microanalysis of interactions, we focused on how a play frame was proposed, recognized and sustained or terminated in the interactions. For each theme, we selected one classroom episode from each teacher for analysis to show the similarities and differences between them on how affect and playfulness were engendered.

Findings: The analysis indicated that the teachers’ intentional selection of the Spanish–English bilingual picturebook Niño Wrestles the World created opportunities for the children to leverage their full linguistic repertoire and funds of knowledge to engage with the text. During the read-alouds, the children and the teachers co-constructed affect and playfulness through embodied performance and translanguaging. We conclude that literacy instruction that seeks to center on affect and play should center on minoritized students' ways of doing and being. This paper also has implications regarding what it means for teacher education to take up the notion of affect and play in the teacher education experiences of literacy and language teachers.

Authors

• Faythe Beauchemin, Boston College

• Kongji Qin, New York University