Parent Research on Playful Emergent Language and Literacy

• In Event: Saturday Roundtable Session 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Researching Play, Language, and Literacy Practices to Interrupt Injustice and Unburden Early Education (Table 24)

Abstract

Recent literature highlights how processes of learning and developing language and multimodal literacies are dynamic (Souto-Manning, et al., 2019). Play has been central to these lines of inquiry. In play young children learn by critically transforming (Guss, 2005) as they employ symbolic tools to navigate their social worlds (Dyson, 2019).
This paper examines how a young emergent bilingual child developed through play practices. As a mother scholar, I examined events drawn from longitudinal parent research as an inquiry process. I identify as a white, bilingual and biliterate educational researcher and former dual language bilingual teacher and program director who is the mother of an emergent bilingual labeled with a disability. Data were gathered through participant observation and documented in fieldnotes, a blog, photographs, and videos transcribed for analysis and supplemented by artifact collection, reflective conversations, and a collaborative process of descriptive review (Carini & Himley, 2001) with bilingual early educators.
The descriptive process adapted from The Prospect Descriptive Review of the Child provided a methodological approach and components to frame observations, description, and reflection. Translanguaging and multimodality offer theoretical perspectives that afford recognition of the dynamic fluidity and multiplicity of practices employed by emergent bilinguals and provide analytic tools for examining my child’s sign-making and engagement in play. Simultaneously, I was also “foregrounding and attending to documents and systems that positioned him as broken rather than the whole being” (Cioè-Peña, 2023,p. 380) to open spaces to allow my whole child to bring his interests, resources, tools, preferred modes, and languages.
Findings suggest that play, language, and literacy practices developed over time reflected the processes of being a player, sign-maker, and symbol-weaver as well as becoming a thinker, composer, and learner. Experimental use of materials and interactions were shaped by the context and child and adult participants present during events. Emergent language, communication, and literacy practices involved asking questions, inventing words, experimenting, acting things out, creating installations of arranged objects, and drawing representations of characters and concepts. Use of critical agency was demonstrated in interpreting, disputing, displaying information, and representing for purposes of self-expression and investigation of self, language, literacy, and the world. Issues of reflexivity, identity, and role relationships were central to understanding in data and illustrating reflexive accounts of events as well as processes entwined with power relations (Kabuto, 2008; Kabuto, 2022).
As a parent researcher, I engage in ethnographic work to offer an up-close, detailed, and meaningful look at the developing child as a social being. Centering the emergent bilingual child’s experience, I take a long view of the child and seek to see and respond to my child’s questions, interests, and agency. I interrogate how my positionality impacts the extent to which I am able to observe and facilitate learning. Taking a collaborative inquiry approach with families or taking up an ethnographic perspective may help educators to draw on a wide range of learners’ resources and repertoires as tools for teaching and learning to notice, reflect, and respond to young children as agents in their learning.

Author

• Lorraine T. Falchi, CUNI PDI