Playgrounds as literacy spaces in early childhood education: amore-than-human cartography

Abstract

Current conceptualisations of literacy as the expanded ways in whichchildren intra-act with other human and non-human agents havepointed to the possibilities of attending to the role of spaces, bodiesand affects in the understanding of the multiple and unexpected waysin which children make meaning and create worlds. Within this frame,we consider an event in a playground designed as a moment/space forplaying and delve into the emergent intra-actions of the more-than-human agents. Our methodology aims to avoid the researcher/researched divide and proposes a cartography rooted in the authors’diffractive readings of the event, mixing image and text. Thisconstruction of data enables a multilayered analysis of the event,focused on the adult/child divide, the more-than-human agencies, andthe multiple ways in which literacies emerge in the unruly edges of play.As a result, we trouble adult conceptualisations of childhood, play andliteracy, and propose the new materialist reading of playgrounds asliteracy both in and outside educational institutions.