Those Are For Learning, Not Play”: Play as Youth Contestations and Desires

• In Event: Reimagining Resistance: Playfulness as Decolonial Praxis in Marginalized Communities

Abstract

This project explores how young students playfully interact with figures of schooling, focusing on an afterschool digital literacy program serving elementary students of color from migrant communities in Santa Cruz County. This is done by pairing undergraduate mentors with elementary students. By analyzing student actions, I highlight play as a tool for young people to contest the demands and expectations of schooling while imposing their own desires for joy. By analyzing their engagement, I seek to understand how play can critique and reframe the relationship between schooling and students of color while also imagining new possibilities for future interactions, worlds, and relationships.
I utilize María Lugones' (1987) concept of “Playfulness” as a contestation to winning and competition and a means of engaging with the world in a nurturing way. Lugones (1987) argues that “[a]gonistic travellers” fail to travel worlds lovingly because they attempt to conquer rather than appreciate other worlds (p. 16). This concept applies to the afterschool program, where mentors are expected to travel to the students’ world empathetically while students engage with storytelling and retelling about their experiences of injustice at their school. This is particularly guided by the notion of acompañamiento (Sepúlveda, 2011). However, mentor’s roles come with their own set of demands and expectations, which can lead to the very “agon” Lugones critiques. To address this, Lugones (1987) offers loving playfulness as “in part, an openness to being a fool, which is a combination of not worrying about competence, not being self-important, not taking norms as sacred and finding ambiguity and double edges as source of wisdom and delight” (1987, p. 17). This approach, as demonstrated by the students, offers valuable lessons for educators.

This project examines two key instances from a school year. One involves a student who imposed his desire to be a “disruptor” during a game where others adhered rigidly to rules. The other focuses on how technology, as a symbol of school demands and expectations, is engaged with playfully by students. Nexus Analysis (Scollon & Scollon, 2004: 2007) is used to interpret these playful actions. This approach involves three components: Engaging the nexus–my role as a facilitator/mentor is integral to the practices being analyzed.
Navigating the nexus–this involves mapping discourse cycles by tracing the historical context of the program and collecting data through memos, discussions, and student photovoice projects.
Changing the nexus–this analyzes how the actions and findings influence discourse cycles within the program.
Significance. The findings of this project highlight how young people’s ways of playing, especially in spaces that are incongruent with their ways of being, should inform educator’s pedagogical practices. In other words, this work contributes to significant scholarship on culturally sustaining pedagogies (Alim & Paris, 2017; Paris, 2021). If we want to center students’ cultural practices, particularly toward the “radical transformation of the purpose and practice of schooling…,” then we must center playfulness as María Lugones defines it, and as the young people in this afterschool program live it (Paris, 2021, p. 372).

Author

• Joel De Jesus Lovos, University of California - Santa Cruz