Adolescents at Play: Fostering Civic Engagement Through the Affordances of Multiple Literacies and Humanizing Education

• In Event: 58.083 - Roundtable Session 26
  In Roundtable Session: 58.083-1 - Exploring Opportunity: Notions of Play, Agency, and Civic Engagement

Abstract

This presentation argues for a reinvigorated focus on play in work with and research on youth. Drawing on a five year study with six cohorts of youth co-researchers, the work suggests that educational research and schooling must open up spaces for play, among, between, and on behalf of youth, in order to better understand the ways in which kids orient to and come to understand the possibility of driving community change. Our work has consistently found that youth, in situations where they are afforded multiple modes of artistic expression (which we think of as part of play), are able to articulate clearly their emergent (and often quite mature) senses of inequity in the distribution of resources in their communities.

Authors

• Stuart Greene, University of Notre Dame

• Kevin Burke, University of Georgia - Athens

• Maria K. McKenna, University of Notre Dame