Search

Purpose Using a postqualitative inquiry approach, the purpose of this paper is to make sense of playful making events that took place at a community makerspace during an afterschool enrichment opportunity and to explore those events as ways we might deterritorialize traditional composition practices and pedagogies in the literacy classroom. Design/methodology/approach Thinking alongside theories (Jackson and Mazzei, 2012) of (de/re)territorialization, becoming (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) and intimacy with objects (Bennett, 2010), the author argues that children are always, already engaged in writing practices through their everyday maker literacies. Findings By analyzing three different moments when young people were engaged in self-directed maker literacies, this paper illustrates how children’s playful compositions are writing practices and mimic many of the skills teachers seek out during more traditional writing instruction. The author also argues that literacy educators must deterritorialize their own practices to notice the ways children are engaged in these skills. Originality/value Written as a narrative, this paper adds to the ever-growing body of work that suggests seeing humans/nonhuman objects as being in co-relational partnerships offers us new ways to conceptualize literacy practice. Additionally, rather than call for a dismissal of traditional practices, the author encourages us to add to existing practices for a more robust and creative engagement with literacies.

Background/Context Neoliberalism has both feet firmly planted in educational contexts around the globe (United States, Australia, United Kingdom). Due to the precarious nature of unstructured play and its unwillingness to fit neatly into a neoliberal framework of quality and high returns on investments, play for play's sake has taken a backseat to standards, “evidence-based” curriculums, and high-stakes testing. These changes are often justified as a way to “mind the gap” or as a way to build a quality workforce in years to come, however, there is a large body of research (including a call from the Pediatrics Association) that suggests play for play's sake is necessary for wellbeing, humanization, and learning itself. Focus of the study In this study, I considered how teachers might get reacquainted with play as a practice in early childhood methods courses through engaging in fort building pedagogy. Specifically, I consider the ways an attunement to embodied play literacies opens up possibilities beyond the commodification of schooling associated with the affective forces of neoliberalism. This essay tries to better understand the ways fort building in particular, moves bodies away from stories of neoliberalism through experimentation and playful practice. Participants and Setting The teachers represented in this study range from soon-to-be teachers to practicing teachers in undergraduate and graduate methods courses in three different university classrooms across the Southeastern United States. The events that produced this data were part of weekly face-to-face class meetings. Research design This article uses narrative writing and thinking-with-theory as a postquali-tative research approach to better understand the ways fort building as an embodied play practice can work against the affective forces of neoliberalism in educational practice. Using action research, this article analyzes the happenings that took place during fort building pedagogy in several early childhood methods courses across the span of five years and three states. Data sources included: observational fieldnotes, written reflections, videos, audio recordings, and photographs. Conclusions Analysis illustrates the importance of teachers (preservice and inservice) getting reacquainted with playful practices from their early years (such as fort building) to unearth and reawaken embodied literacies of play. These reawakenings suggest that when teachers engage in such practices, they actively begin to resist neoliberal ideations of schooling through the process of making forts collectively with peers. The article concludes that fort building is a vital practice in making way for new stories in education and in remembering why play for play's sake is important in early childhood settings.

This special issue continues a two-year conversation about a #playrevolution in literacies research, theory, and practice. The juxtaposition of play and revolution is intentional, highlighting the tension between play's prosocial benefits and collaborative production and the rapid change, uncertainty, and violence in today's schools, where we desperately need more humanizing elements that build people's connections to one another. The #playrevolution calls educators and researchers to explore the (un)predictable, (un)expected knots emerging through the coalescence of play and literacies, while also considering the possibilities play holds for educational equity in contemporary times. Bringing together twelve educational researchers across the United States, Canada, and Australia, this #playrevolution special issue explores the lively ecology of play-literacies in a variety of spaces—traditional writing and storytelling workshops, digital dialogues, video games, teacher-education courses, makerspaces, and playgrounds—with learners from preschools and kindergartens to high schools and universities.

In this article, we playfully revisit the same data scene, but from three different perspectives. We call these revisits re-turns to data. These re-turns draw upon moments with young boys playing at a makerspace located in a multiracial, working-class community. This idea of re-turn is not simply about revisiting a data scene; it is about re-sensing the social and what it means to be human through feeling with blackness. We offer Crawley’s theory of sonic epistemologies as a way to think and feel blackness, that is, to create otherwise worlds/knowledges/subjects. We argue that tuning into the sonic—or feeling with blackness—can help literacy educators thinking with affect to sense and develop nonhumanist ways of knowing/being/doing literacy, while simultaneously acknowledging the potential dangers of reinscribing whiteness. We propose that retheorizing affect in relation to blackness is necessary for literacy education, research, and ultimately, collective healing and justice.

This is the editorial introduction for the special issue “Unsettling Traditions: Reimagining the Craft of Phenomenological and Hermeneutic Inquiry.”

This article presents a data story that illustrates unruly placemaking from an event that unfolded during a six-year research enquiry exploring the out-of-school literacies of young people in an informal neighbourhood making space. Specifically, I analyse the happenings between a four-year-old boy and a red marker through theories of critical posthumanism and companion species to illustrate how the white space of paper and the marks made on that space are acts of placemaking, and thus political in nature, and I suggest that noticing the unruliness of such bodily acts can help us disrupt the embodied literacies of hyper-capitalist structures underpinning traditional understandings of everyday childhood practices.

The importance of community has been widely recognised in the field of early childhood education, however the various ways it has been conceived, together with taken-for-granted notions of education, have made it difficult to actualise the processes involved in contextually meaningful ways. This article draws on cultural models theory to explore educational leaders’ re-imagining and re-designing of early childhood educational learning communities in a range of diverse settings. The examination of processes and artefacts used to promote democratic identities and agency highlights the significance of establishing shared principles, sociality, and challenging power relations to engaging in processes of communing that are contextually meaningful, sustainable and democratic. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

In this article, we invite the concept of digression into methodological endeavors through the phenomenological tradition of postintentional phenomenology. Using five modes of inquiry—unsettle, unrest, untether, unearth, unfold—and the premise that “(m)ail art is a catalyst,” we invite readers to reconsider methodologies as joyfully and generatively digressive, while also unearthing possibilities to abandon the confines of hypercapitalism found within academia.

In this article, the authors (re)think writing as an ethical endeavor to explore and to cultivate more inclusive orientations for writing research and teaching. Situated in posthumanist scholarship on intra-activity, trans-corporeality, and translingual assemblages, they provide data–theory encounters that resist the privileging of alphabetic print, standardized written English approaches to writing pedagogies that have detached writers from the contextual doing/being/feeling demanded of composing-with-all-bodies. Data in the article are drawn from three separate research projects. Diffractively reading data through posthumanist theoretical concepts, the authors highlight the tensions and insights produced from their analysis to provoke an ethico-onto-epistemological shift in writing studies and classroom pedagogies, and to enliven the ethical work of exploring and cultivating more inclusive orientations to writing research and teaching.

Drawing on our documentation of transforming an informal learning centre (the Playhouse) in a multilingual, working-class neighbourhood, this paper presents significant and deliberate material-discursive changes at the Playhouse that produced unpredictable shifts in belongings among young children. More specifically, this paper entwines our place-making experiences with theories of feminist new materialism, to explore the object as a material-discursive apparatus in the production of literacies, particularly literacies of race and class. Implications for careful analysis of the racialized and classed literacies produced through the materiality of educational spaces suggest that when we entangle ourselves with material-discursive apparatuses, through play and otherwise, we acquire such literacies and that issues of accessibility always involve the more than human.

The purpose of this article is to re-conceptualize Schon’s call for a phenomenology of practice – moving away from reflection and towards post-reflexion – by explicitly drawing on philosophical and methodological tenets of phenomenology, specifically some of Vagle’s theorizing of a post-intentional phenomenology. Finally, we use this conception of post-reflexion to articulate a set of three concrete post-reflexive pedagogies of teacher education – An Affective Pedagogy; A Post-Reflexive Entangled Pedagogy; and An Interrogated “Assumptions of Normality” Pedagogy.

Digital practices and online spaces are wrought with political, social, and economic entanglements producing both what is known as traditional literacies and embodied literacies. As such, literacies of social class are embedded in digital practices and materially discursively produced through online spaces just as much as they are cultivated in other geographical places (i.e., communities, classrooms). Digital spaces have been used to shame poor and working-class people through stereotypical images, politically divisive rhetoric, and aesthetically charged platforms that produce class stratification. Perhaps less visible by many, digital spaces have also been used to cultivate literacies of class consciousness, solidarity, collectivity, and grossly inequitable distribution of wealth and resources. While “limited access” to online spaces might mean limited digital mobility, it might also mean limited exposure to the normalization of privilege and hatred curated in online spaces about working-class and working-poor people. And in a smaller way, it might mean limited exposure to discourses of class solidarity and power in the working class. In this chapter, we will explore some ways digital practices create literacies of social class and imagine the implications for youth and families identifying as working class or poor.

This post-qualitative research analyzes the spatialized practices of young people within a working-class community and how those guided the opening and facilitating of a local community center. Seeing place-making as a social and political act, the authors were inspired by Heath’s classic study and argument that children’s education might be better served if educators understood and built on their community-based language practices. Writing through theories of new materialism, spatiality, and children’s geographies, we build an argument for spatial justice by considering the ways educational scholars and educators might understand and build on children’s community-based spatial practices.

Drawing from the theories of feminist new materialism, this article looks closely at the ways children and things, particularly fabric remnants, work together to coconstruct stories. The data presented are part of a yearlong ethnographic study in the multimodal literacy play work of three early childhood aged children from working poor families. The data were collected during summer enrichment and an after-school program at a community center in the Southeastern United States located in the children’s neighborhood. Findings argue that children are more deeply and intellectually engaged when given access to a broader range of materials and opportunities to perform and participate in literacy practices.

In the Burton, T., dir. [2010. Alice in Wonderland (Film). Burbank: Walt Disney Pictures] cinematographic reimagining of Alice in Wonderland, there is a moment when the Mad Hatter looks sincerely at Alice and tells her that inside her, something is missing – that she used to be much more muchier – that she has somehow lost her muchness. Seeing middle-class upward mobility within academia as a precarious space in which I must negotiate my own muchness, I explore and theorise the phenomenon of muchness through an autoethnographic lens that focuses on events in my and my mother's lives and analyse these events through theories of new materialism.

In this article, I theorize a specific pedagogical moment as a teacher educator by taking up a particular aspect of phenomenological philosophy – the phenomenological reduction – and a particular conception of pedagogy informed by Bourdieu’s philosophies – nomos and habitus – in order to put them in closer dialog with one another. I also bring the theoretical and conceptual work of other critical and poststructural thinkers – hooks and Boler – to bear on a nagging pedagogical concern I experienced as a teacher educator when one of my students made me painfully aware of something I had missed, creating a landscape for how each may be imagined as not only exercises of teaching but as larger commitments to practice and theory, relationship with learners, as well as relationship with self. This concern became a phenomenological pedagogical moment of self-discovery and defined possibility in the classroom where I learned to shift and suspend pedagogical practices and step back to take a moment to see what had ...