Creative Language Play(giarism) in the Elementary English Language Arts Classroom (original) (raw)
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Teachers College Record, 2021
This study contributes to larger conversations about how children use play to make schooled writing personally meaningful and build upon their (digital) funds of knowledge. The author uses a descriptive case study design and ethnographic methods to examine how one child exemplified creative language play. Specifically, the author considers how the child used his physical play in the virtual world of Minecraft to invoke creative language play as a tool within the standardized curriculum. This study calls attention to the connection between children’s lived experiences and play in digital spaces—as physical acts enacted through screens—and their relation to, and being evidenced in, schooled writing. In turn, the author encourages a rethinking of what it means for adults to maintain clear lines between what is digital play and what is not. Further, the author argues for the importance of cultivating a space for children to build on what was previously familiar to them by offering scaffolds to bridge these experiences between what we, as adults, understand as binaries.
Early Childhood Education Journal, 2024
Questioning the common practice of treating texts as property that can be stolen and instead exploring the social and rhetorical dimensions that define what is owned (and what is not), as well as what can be taken and appropriated, I drew on data from a yearlong qualitative investigation of young children writing with technology to interrogate how one young child’s scene of play(giarism) can be rendered as consequential writing. Entering this work from a sociocultural perspective wherein literacy learning is intersubjective, findings highlight the descriptive contexts wherein individuality came to intersect with the politics of social belonging and academic obligation. Realizing individual freedoms through contesting compositional forms, play(giarism) meshes personal ways of being and knowing with the doing of (and sometimes disciplining from) others.
Imagination, Play and Becoming the Text
This is a chapter from "We Saved the Best for Your: Letters of Hope, Imagination and Wisdom for 21st Century Educators," Tricia Kress and Robert Lake, Editors, Sense Publishers, Rotterdam, The Netherlands (2013).
Supporting Emergent Writers Through Guided Play in a Kindergarten Classroom
Journal of Childhood Studies, 2018
In this paper, we describe a teacher-initiated imaginative-play scenario that took place in a kindergarten classroom in a small northern town in Ontario, Canada. The Fairy Door scenario afforded the 3- to 5-year-old children the opportunity to become writers in order to communicate with and make sense of an elusive visitor to the classroom. It presented the teachers with opportunities to scaffold the children’s writing attempts and provided them with valid assessments of the children’s understanding of texts and writing. We offer this unique form of pedagogical practice as a means to fulfill the play-based learning mandate of the Ontario provincial curriculum.