Play as a Critical Participant With/in a First-grade Literacy Assemblage

• In Event: The Productive (In)actions of Do-Nothing Literacies

Abstract

Thinking-with (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) the concept of “doing nothing” (Odell, 2019), this paper explores do-nothing literacies in a first-grade classroom where the teacher resisted the increasing demands of of skills-based tasks that were beginning to relegate play to “wasted time.” In doing so, I ask: What is afforded to children and to our understanding of the composition process when play is recognized as a critical participant during writing?

Making connections between children’s existing means of expression (play, art, movement) and the intricacies of print is necessary to writing instruction (Cremin & Flewitt, 2017; Rowe, 1998; Wohlwend, 2011), yet, after kindergarten, easily displaced (Bentley & Souto-Manning, 2019). A posthuman approach to literacies (Author 2 & Colleague, xxxx; Colleagues & Author 3, xxxx) shifts writing and play into thinking-with human and more-than-human participants in classroom spaces–the roles played by each and the agency that arises with/in their relations.

This paper maps the activities of two groups of children over five months, documented in field notes and images, as they participated in daily composing processes that involved building and creating with materials, as well as "playing the story," prior to writing and drawing. In the first group, I focus on Annie who refuses rushed acts of embodied composition. In the second group, I zoom in on four girls playful(l)y negotiating the task of creating a fractured fairytale. Both animate how play serves as a form of "do-nothing" literacy, while fostering world-building, collaborative storytelling, agency, and authorial pride—qualities that emerged when what is often seen as the opposite of work (and therefore a threat to productivity) was protected.

Author

• Kimberly Lenters, University of Calgary