(De/re)Territorializing Writing/Composition: Becoming With Playful Objects Through Maker Literacies

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

Abstract

Using a post-qualitative research approach, this paper/presentation attempts to make sense of playful making events that took place at a community makerspace during an afterschool enrichment opportunity. I do so by exploring those events as ways we might deterritorialize traditional composition practices and pedagogies in the literacy classroom. Thinking alongside theories (Jackson and Mazzei, 2012) of (de/re)territorialization, becoming (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) and intimacy with objects (Bennett, 2010), I argue that children are always, already engaged in writing practices through their everyday maker literacies. By analyzing different moments when young people were engaged in self-directed maker literacies, this paper illustrates how children’s playful compositions are writing practices and mimic many of the skills teachers seek out during more traditional writing instruction. I also argue that literacy educators must deterritorialize their own practices to notice the ways children are engaged in these skills. Conceptually, this paper contends that seeing humans/nonhuman objects as being in co-relational partnerships offers us new ways to conceptualize literacy practice. Additionally, rather than call for a dismissal of traditional practices, I encourage literacy educators and researchers to add to existing practices for a more robust and creative engagement with literacies. In addition, I will discuss additional ways children are engaging in literacies during their everyday play practices outside of schools and how schools might leverage children’s out-of-school lives to better serve them in educational settings.

Author

• Jaye Johnson Thiel, University of Alabama