Acting Virally: Postdigital Metatheatricality in Children’s Playmaking

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 7:45 am - Gold 3
  In Roundtable Session: Stories on the Move: Tracing the Flows of Student’s Embodied Literacies

Abstract

As children’s digital performances go “viral” on platforms such as TikTok, Youtube, Instagram, and other platforms (Trezise, 2023), their dances, role-plays, lip syncs, and other forms of digitally mediated embodied composing are more visible than ever in the public sphere. Even so, such postdigital forms of embodied writing, whereby children’s embodied literacies move across interwoven digital and nondigital environments (Author, 2018; Marsh, et al., 2019), remain underexplored in elementary literacy curricula, despite their growing role in children’s literate lives. Drawing on transliteracies as a theoretical framework (Stornaiuolo et al., 2017), this study invited elementary-aged children to co-inquire into the ways they saw their embodied meaning-making circulate across a dynamic postdigital landscape.
As digital and non-digital ecologies are now inextricably woven together in a postdigital era (Jandric & Knox, 2022), children are finding new ways of using their bodies to create meaning on and in dialogue with digital interfaces that surround them (Author, 2015). Situated within a rich history of dramatic inquiry in literacy studies, which positions children as experts in their own meaning-making (Edmiston, 2020; Heathcote, 1985; Wolf et al., 2004), and within digital literacies’ emerging positionings of children as “philosophers of technology,” (Vakil & McKinney de Royston, 2022), this study asked how children themselves understood and shaped the digital flows of their embodied texts. To critically engage with children’s expertise, this study operationalizes transliteracies (Stornaiuolo et al., 2016) to interrogate issues of power as children’s meanings move across digital and non-digital environments.

This study invited children to participate as resonance co-mappers (Hall & Stornaiuolo, 2020), capturing, viewing, and tracing the movement of their own embodied storytelling. Partnering with a local playmaking nonprofit, this study invited 13 children aged 7-11 to use the child-friendly, multimodal documentation platform, “Seesaw,” to capture rehearsals, monologues, prop-making, and creative processes across five day-long, child-led theater workshops. Data sources included child-produced videos, photographs, notes, and a recorded talkback session with the audience, their families. The children participated in collaborative sharing circles, a virtual scroll-back session (Robards, 2019) and a collaborative resonance-mapping session (Hall & Stornaiuolo, 2020) to co-analyze their footage. Through this participatory analysis, children were invited to trace the emergence, uptake, resonance, and scale (Stornaiuolo et al., 2017) of their own embodied texts.
The findings of this study are grounded in three focal participants who, by addressing their audiences in monologues, self-consciously performing social media challenges or trends, or even gesturing towards their stories “going viral,” take up digital flows as meaning-making tools. These children’s metatheatrical moves engaged with the lens, screen, Seesaw App, and other interfaces as part of a performative boundary space (Drucker, 2013) in theatrical meaning-making, requesting others film them and breaking the “fourth wall.” Such practices highlight children’s self-conscious, critical performances for multiple platform audiences as part of their embodied composing processes. They also highlight the affordances and ethical considerations of leveraging embodied storytelling in the postdigital classroom, as children take up imagined digital audiences, as well as the screens, platforms, and interfaces which mediate them, as key semiotic tools.

Author

• Clara Abbott, University of Pennsylvania