Well Beings: Lessons From Children’s (6-12) Diverse Play and Embodied Literacy Practices With Video Games

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 1:45 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 2-3
  In Roundtable Session: Resisting Curricular Flattenings Through Expansive Literacy Structures and Interventions (Table 11)

Abstract

Education is often hailed as a/the solution to social inequalities, not least through a passionate, but sometimes narrow, focus on (il)literacy as (non-)mastery of a set of discrete skills. In curriculum, and in formal education settings, children’s bodies, and their movements, are monitored and corrected in line with culturally predefined ideas of the literate child (Dixon, 2010) and the ‘well’ child (Evans & Rich, 2011). This paper brings a new literacies framing to an ecoculturally-informed study of the relationship between digital play and well-being for 20 UK children (6-12) in home/ family contexts. Building on past work, this paper foreground children’s bodies at (digital) play as a way of thinking otherwise about both literacy and well-being.

Author

• Fiona Scott, University of Sheffield