Making, remaking, and reimagining the everyday: Play, creativity, and popular media

Abstract

This chapter critically reviews literacy research on play and creativity, with a focus on work in New Literacy Studies (Gee, 1996; Street, 1995) that redefine • play as collaborative and embodied semiotic practice • creativity as practices of cultural production (Pahl, 2007; Sefton-Green & Sinker, 2012) and imagination as a social practice (Appadurai, 1996).

The chapter’s framing draws upon de Certeau’s (1984) view of creativity as small acts of improvisation using the stuff of daily living in ordinary places. Children live, play, and create within scapes (Appadurai, 1996) that flow into every aspect of everyday life where they engage texts in a range of commercial messages and global products that include clothing, household goods, school supplies, films, video games, and toys (Pugh, 2009). Cook (2008) points out that in commercialized societies we are born into ‘regimes of consumption’ where opting out of consumption is impossible. While children at play often reproduce stereotypical identities as they pretend to be adults engaged in typical practices in everyday activities, they can also use pretense to collectively challenge, disrupt, or reimagine accustomed ways of doing things. Play encourages social actors to collaborate and negotiate within a shared imaginary text, to try on alternate identities, and to make malleable the meanings of everyday artifacts, practices, and contexts, in ways that often prompt negotiation, improvisation or revision. Through pretense, players create collaborative cultural imaginaries (Medina & Wohlwend, 2014) where they mediate their lived realities by “making do” within a set of given constraints, by reimagining together what seems possible, and by pretending alternatives in order to remake contexts to fit their purposes. Play engages creativity to imagine otherwise: to expand the cultural practices of their worlds, improvising to “make do” with the available resources, negotiating to reimagine constraints into possibilities, and remaking to transform immediate contexts into alternatives.