Producing Cultural Imaginaries in the Playshop

Abstract

In this chapter, we consider play and drama as more than pleasurable pastimes or enrichment activities but as core literacies for critical cultural production that enable children to explore who they are expected to be in a global world. Using this lens, we examine how play enables children to engage in cultural imaginaries in the multiple spaces they encounter at home, at school, on television, in the mall, on the Internet, on the phone, or across international communities. We use the term cultural imaginaries (Medina & Wohlwend, 2014) to describe collective visions of idealized communities, constructed through shared imagination rather than located in a specifi c physical geographical location (Anderson, 1991 ; Appardurai, 1996 ). Within these imaginaries, we write and play ways of being through the stories we tell, the fi lms we watch, and the books we read, but also, through the media we play and the products we use. For example, media imaginaries circulate scripts for fantasy worlds in animated fi lms or for melodramas in television programs that are distributed globally and replayed locally among children who enact and embody those worlds. But cultural imaginaries are not limited to media portrayals of fi ctional scripts; they include our idealized models of real places, whether schools, neighborhoods, communities, or countries. In our literacy research in early childhood and elementary classrooms, we found children playing in transnational imaginaries, trying out cultural repertoires handed down across generations and continents as they pretended to be in distant places where children had never lived but that they knew through family stories, picture books, photo albums and television texts.