Young Children’s Play and Self-Censorship Across Home and School Composing Spaces

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

Abstract

Background: In a recent study, I, along with two colleagues, examined seven first and second-grade teachers’ concerns regarding what they felt was the “adult nature” of two videogames (Among Us and Huggy Wuggy) and the games’ appearances in their students’ play. Taking their concerns as a provocation for examining children’s transmedia playscapes (Abrams, et al., 2017; Jenkins, 2006; Medina & Wohlwend, 2014), we discovered a world of familial play through machinima (Ito, 2011) produced by families with young children.

Objectives: In this paper I extend the exploration to consider two young boys’ understandings of the classroom proprieties of including particular literacies associated with their play occurring in spaces ostensibly peripheral to the classroom.

Theoretical framework: In this work, thinking with assemblage theories (e.g., Deleuze & Guattari, 2004; Latour, 2005), I plug into (Jackson & Mazzei, 2011) the concept of relational contamination (Tsing, 2015) to think with the empirical materials. While contamination is commonly thought of pejoratively, Tsing invites consideration of contamination as a generative force, an important, and perhaps critical, aspect of living in assemblage. She notes that all of us – human and more-than-human – are entangled with projects that carry “histories of extermination, imperialism, and all the rest” (p. 29) and are transformed in multiple ways by these contaminating encounters.

Empirical materials: I work with empirical materials from two six-year-old boys who were participants in the second phase of the study referenced above (and whose teacher was a participant in the first). These include: field notes of observations taken during classroom visits with a first grade class over an eight-month period of time; conversations with the boys, transcribed during and after two particular classroom visits; and samples of the boys’ writing and drawing gathered during the two visits.
Results: In two instances of literacy-as-event (Burnett & Merchant, 2020), the two boys engaged in contaminating encounters in their classroom writing workshop. Cody: including an illustration of a character from the Among Us video game; and Troy, a producing an oral story of using an antique camera to take photos of someone in the shower. Both boys discussed these elements openly with me and the peers at their writing tables but shortly thereafter obscured/removed them prior to sharing their written work with their teacher.
Scholarly Significance: Ultimately, I ask what the boys’ actions communicate to us as educators and researchers about what is and is not considered acceptable in classroom literacy assemblages, and ask what some of the implications of young children’s self-censorship might be. The study both animates children’s dynamic and playful meaning-making practices across virtual and material spaces and simultaneously presents vexing questions for how educators respond to that which is entangled in children’s classroom composing.

Author

• Kimberly Lenters, University of Calgary