Writing to Play, Playing to Write: (Re)Constructing the Social Scene in Kindergarten

• In Event: 72.047 - Rumblings From the #playrevolution in Literacies: Transforming Knowledge Into Action Through the Power of Play

Abstract

Along with formal academics (e.g. literacy, math), children learn to create social connections and build peer culture; these shared practices are constructed through play. Furthermore, learning is applied and authenticated in unofficial spaces where children are free from adult control, much like Bakhtin’s notion of “carnival” (1984). Bakhtin described carnival as a countercultural space where folk ideologies dominated, hierarchies were removed, and people engaged in joyful laughter, playful mockery, and the enactment of various discourses. Thus, this unofficial space allowed for multiple voices, giving individuals an opportunity to create and re-create identities in dialogic with others. For young children, free spaces can be considered carnivalesque – children try out multiple voices, appropriate different identities, and create their own set of practices as they interact with others.

Drawing from a semester-long study on the teaching and learning of writing in a kindergarten classroom, I focus on 5 children who sat at one table together, a “community of learners” as the teacher liked to call them. Within this diverse group of children, I focus in on the playful mockery of print literacy (official reading and writing) and their pleasurable engagement with popular culture (unofficial childhood practices) by analyzing the construction of printed texts. As Dyson (1997) points out, popular culture became an entry point for children to play out possibilities and their written products became “tickets to play” within the social life of their peers. The data collected and analyzed includes all of the children’s written products during the course of the semester as well as the dialogue and threads of conversation that occurred within the table group. Important to this analysis is the idea that written products are artifacts of the on-going social scene and should be seen as representations of the social lives of its creators - in this case, the children themselves.

Examining the construction process of children’s cultural texts, especially in a flexible curricular space, reveals that playing with popular culture can be innovative and creative while simultaneously being contentious and problematic. Children’s symbolic texts represented artifacts where ideologies were disrupted, tested, and defended. Therefore, children’s unofficial play became a cultural activity for negotiating relationships using literacy to accomplish personal and social goals. In other words, texts are much more meaningful than marks on the page. Writing as a social activity allowed for the pursuit of local knowledge (e.g. Halloween parties and haunted houses) and the critique of popular knowledge (e.g. the horror movie genre) as “ideological refractions” (Dyson, 1997, p. 81) where discourses, plotlines, preferences, and roles could be created with others.

Author

• Haeny S. Yoon, Teachers College, Columbia University