Play, Literacy, and the Converging Cultures of Childhood

Abstract

In this chapter, play is examined as an embodied literacy, situated among multiple literacies in the overlapping cultures of modern childhoods: school, home and community, peer, media, digital, and consumer cultures. Key studies within each cultural frame are examined to discover the complex relationships among literacy practices, identities, and artifacts in children’s play in these cultural convergences. Qualitative studies using ethnographic methods clearly indicate the literate potential of play that enables collective imaginings and draws in children’s literacy repertoires: their personal goals, family histories, media passions, and school and peer expectations. Through play, children mediate cultural meanings as they negotiate peer relationships for diverse purposes: to sustain the group’s shared play scenario, for a media fan’s personal satisfaction, to improve one’s social positioning in peer culture, or to uphold prevailing masculinities or femininities. Given this complexity, educators need new approaches for teaching and researching complicated interactions of play and literacies in changing childhood worlds: early childhood teachers should be prepared to mediate the social and cultural tensions in children’s play and researchers need robust theories, multiple lenses, and syncretic research designs to capture the multidirectional relationships among practices, identities, and materials in the flows of play across cultures. Keywords: play, school cultures, home cultures, peer cultures, media cultures, digital cultures, consumer cultures