Playful Methods
Engaging the Unexpected in Literacy Research
- 156 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
Playful Methods
Engaging the Unexpected in Literacy Research
About This Book
This book introduces three new subjects to the context of literacy researchâplay, the imaginary, and improvisationâand proposes how to incorporate these important concepts into the field as research methods in order to engage people, materials, spaces, and imaginaries that are inherent in every research encounter. Grounded in cutting-edge theory, chapters are structured around lived narratives of research experiences, demonstrating key practices for unsettling and expanding the ways people interact, behave, and construct knowledge. Through an exploration of difference, play, and the imaginary, authors Medina, Perry, and Wohlwend present an active set of practices that acknowledges and attends to the global, fragmented, politicized contexts in literacy research.
This book provides researchers and literacy education scholars with rich and clear theoretical foundations and practical tools to engage in literacy research in ethical, creative, and responsive ways. The authors invite readers to play by exploring the ways in which pedagogical, research, artistic, and other creative contexts can be sites to examine identity, plurality, and difference. Chapters feature innovative elements such as author dialogues that make visible how the authors engage with the ideas they present; guiding questions to prompt reflection and conversation; playful invitations to share possibilities of play in real-world contexts; and stories and practices to ground the conceptual and playful inquiry.
Frequently asked questions
Information
Part I The (Play)Ground
CarmenThe work has prompted me to think about our differences around ideas on play and theater. In particular in considering play as a more fluid space in terms of what counts as a dramatic structure and the ways in which I have been trained, which has been in more drama and theatre practices. And [through our collaboration] I have started letting go of a lot of those structures. And in thinking of playfulness as this in-between space, I can consider what my political goals might be, which are very explicit, particularly in the work of anti-coloniality, but at the same time only with an understanding that I need to let go of structures in order to do my own work. Then, when I read someone like Mignolo, who writes so much about creativityâthe role of creativity, and the unknown in decolonial workâI start making more sense of where Karenâs coming from in her work on play, playful literacies, and the playshop as a place that you just propose and let things roll! Which is not necessarily where Iâve been positioned in the past. Iâve been more politically deliberate, intentional. So itâs been an interesting dance for me to negotiate pedagogically, but also in terms of thinking of developing other ways of doing research that are less about drama structures and more about drama unstructures.KarenI come from an early childhood education space where play is pedagogy and play is what children do. Itâs how they learn and itâs a place where we [adults] stand back and allow children to play. In that play pedagogy, early childhood teachers intervene only sparingly in childrenâs play because every time we intervene, itâs an interruption. So when we started working together, Carmen had all these performative invitations that were so different from what I would think of as play pedagogy! These places where players can imagine and perform and disrupt. And the whole disruption would be on purpose, so different than the âsmoothing oversâ that I would do to resolve conflictsâsmoothing things over quickly so children can get back to playing together peacefully.CarmenOnce I entered the formal classroom, I think a lot changed for me. The pressures of what is expected in a teacherâs performance took over. For example, I shifted from my role as a drama teacher to a literacy educator who used drama to teach literacy. This was a very productive space for literacy work but what dominated my drama practices was dependent on school literacy practices and achievement. In our collaborative work I had to reconsider the purpose of my practices and the kind of contradictions about teaching and learning I was perpetuating.MiaIn my work in literacies of and with arts and cultural practices, play has always been assumed, but as a means to an end. Play has facilitated building relationships, exercising imaginations and energising groups to work creatively. Until working with you both, I had not fully accounted for the inquiry and the development that happens in play, play as an inquiry process in its own right. How to allow or make room for play has become my newer question, rather than how to make use of play to achieve a certain performance or creation.KarenAnd I began to see how thereâs a space here for adults and children in play, that does not mean adults coming into childrenâs play scenarios as leaders, models, or key players, but as disruptors. I learned to become more comfortable with the discomfort and uncertainty that comes with ruptures. Of course, thereâs always uncertainty in childrenâs play and unpredictability but my previous pedagogical approach would regard play as a watchful space for adults: they watch, they step in, they help, they solve and mediate, and then they step back, and play continues on its path. Now I can see how thereâs a splintering off in thatâa disruption that creates a proliferation of possibilities. That was a new way of seeing things for me. Thereâs a fearlessness to Carmenâs work that helped me override that pedagogical impulse. When I talk about fearlessness, what I mean is that openness to disruption and to see what will happen as researchers and practitioners.MiaAnd I think it is useful to recognise research as disruption too. Everytime we engage in a research encounter, itâs like disturbing a calm lake with a stone. Posing a question into a space is a sort of disruption. We can work hard to research in participatory and non-disruptive ways, but is that really possible?KarenAnd this probably gets into an important distinction about how we are looking at our differences as connection, like the difference/connection of Karen Barad: every cut is also a connection. So Mia, when you were encouraging us to see âplay as methodâ in our collaboration in this book, for me thatâs another point where methods began to be unsettled. âAm I really applying a method here, or is this something that only happens just in play? Does this work only when play is the object of the method or does play make this method work? Would this method even work for people who arenât studying play?â If you come at data from a more settled space, then youâre not going to see the same kind of results. But I wondered does this power emerge just in play contexts?CarmenI see it very differently. Play is what we do in life: for me, playfulness and play as a method takes us to something closer to what we do with life, rather than a method that is going to give us data. And it is the reason that, for me, an approach to playfulness brings us closer to how we do things with literacy in real life. It creates powerful content to know and to study and to engage with.KarenPlay as a way of engaging life. That fits with my critical sociocultural theoretical perspective, where play is an expression of and an imagined space for working through everyday life experiences.MiaYes, play is what we do in life! In the introductory chapter, we compare play as a method to the interview as a method; we think an interview is just ânormalâ and unquestionable, as if what we do in life is have prepared conversations one-on-one with people. But you can make an even stronger argument that actually what we do in life is play: Sometimes we have one-on-one conversations with people which we can frame as the interview, but we also play, and so here we are returning play into method.CarmenIn co-writing this book, we had a lot to reconcile and to think about, because our experiences were so different. Itâs funny because, in many ways, people would think that we come from very similar places. But our experiences are very different: how weâre looking at things theoretically and how weâre taking things in (which is also the reality of this book), how weâre thinking about theory, how weâre thinking about methods, how we were thinking about pedagogy has been more different than similar. But there have been certain aspects that have provided some kind of common ground. It was almost like an energy or like something was pushing us to continue the conversation, even with the differences of our conversations. Sometimes I think we were listening to each other, but we didnât necessarily understand or fully understand with complete clarity. Itâs the idea of opacity, that Glissant proposes, that also connects to some of the things that are written about in later chapters on blurriness. We just got over the fear that we werenât understanding. It was one of the few ways to survive the production of the work!
Table of contents
- Cover Page
- Half Title page
- Series Page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Contents
- Series Editor Introduction
- Acknowledgments
- Part I The (Play)Ground
- Part II Playful Methods Across Contexts
- Appendix: Playful Methods
- Index