Playful Methods

Engaging the Unexpected in Literacy Research

Carmen Liliana Medina, Mia Perry, Karen Wohlwend

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429560729
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

This book introduces three new subjects to the context of literacy research—play, the imaginary, and improvisation—and 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.

Part I The (Play)Ground

DOI: 10.4324/9780429265730-1

A playful process of relating, connecting, and learning through difference describes the process that led us, the three authors, to the completion of this book, as well as our ambition for the process of your engagement with it. The first part, Part I, explores playful methods through what we consider important conceptual and practical structures: Or the playground.

The research encounter as explored in Part I speaks to every research encounter, including that which culminates in this book. The texts work to explain the important disconnections between our authorial voices, inextricable from the differences between ourselves, as well as the synergies and possibilities that these reveal. The research as represented through this book is an illustration of what happens when collaborators move through and with the tensions and possibilities of difference, relation, and the imaginary.

Mia and Carmen met through a common interest in understanding the literacies at work in drama and performance practices in education. Mia had trained and practiced in Ireland, England, and Russia in devising, performing, producing, and teaching theater; Carmen had informally trained and practiced in Puerto Rico in popular and applied theater, including explorations of play as a theater training method, Theatre of the Oppressed, theater anthropology, and Caribbean and Latin American storytelling. Later on Carmen went on to formally study drama-in-education. We each knew, through felt and lived experience, the power and potentials, the politics and the precarities of working with drama for social and educational purposes. But we had almost nothing in common in terms of shared experience of context. Our differences in contextual experience both pulled and pushed our working dynamics. A site of contention and connection became the learning body: the inscribed and inscribing body in arts and literacies education. With this focus, Carmen brought critical literacies theory and structures to practice that Mia perceived through a poststructural and affective lens. The collisions and overlaps that characterized these collaborations ensured a political attention within their work, as well as a non-linear and expansive lens on the material, the discursive, and the more-than-human.

Carmen and Karen began exploring connections between play pedagogy and drama pedagogy in their teaching collaborations around literacy methods classes at Indiana University. From our individual interests in critical literacy and popular media—Carmen’s studies on telenovelas and drama in Puerto Rican schools, Karen’s research on Disney Princesses and play in US Midwest K–1 classrooms—we began to explore areas of commonality and difference. We unpacked episodes of makeover television as an exercise to compare our perspectives, moving recursively between our individual research projects and an emerging vision of how play and performance could combine to explain effects of globalization on media and literacy in children’s lives. Our book Literacy, Play, and Globalization: Converging Imaginaries in Children’s Critical and Cultural Performances was the result of this collaboration.

In our collective work together in this book, we recognize that we each walk very different paths (from each other and from many of you), we come from very different histories, and we go to very different futures. We recognize that we sometimes have different principles, and certainly use different theoretical tools in our different approaches to living through and with play. With that recognition, we find a creative space of possibility by putting some of these differences, as well as our connections together.

In your engagement with the texts, we invite you to reflect on your relationship with your own research, and your partners in research. We invite you to consider your own differences and how you may have felt like an outsider or an insider at different times, and seek the resources that those relations provide, rather than the limitations. Working against political structures that seek agreement and consensus, we invite you into spaces of relation, and the unpredictability, uncertainty, and important insights that it can bring.

The following dialogue positions the topic and authors. We hope that these reflections serve as an invitation to you to find your own starting point within the work that follows.

Carmen

The 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 creativity—the role of creativity, and the unknown in decolonial work—I start making more sense of where Karen’s 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 I’ve been positioned in the past. I’ve been more politically deliberate, intentional. So it’s 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.

Karen

I come from an early childhood education space where play is pedagogy and play is what children do. It’s how they learn and it’s a place where we [adults] stand back and allow children to play. In that play pedagogy, early childhood teachers intervene only sparingly in children’s play because every time we intervene, it’s 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 “smoothing overs” that I would do to resolve conflicts—smoothing things over quickly so children can get back to playing together peacefully.

Carmen

Once I entered the formal classroom, I think a lot changed for me. The pressures of what is expected in a teacher’s 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.

Mia

In 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.

Karen

And I began to see how there’s a space here for adults and children in play, that does not mean adults coming into children’s 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, there’s always uncertainty in children’s 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 there’s a splintering off in that—a disruption that creates a proliferation of possibilities. That was a new way of seeing things for me. There’s a fearlessness to Carmen’s 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.

Mia

And I think it is useful to recognise research as disruption too. Everytime we engage in a research encounter, it’s 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?

Karen

And 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 “play as method” in our collaboration in this book, for me that’s another point where methods began to be unsettled. “Am 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 aren’t studying play?” If you come at data from a more settled space, then you’re not going to see the same kind of results. But I wondered does this power emerge just in play contexts?

Carmen

I 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.

Karen

Play 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.

Mia

Yes, 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 “normal” 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.

Carmen

In co-writing this book, we had a lot to reconcile and to think about, because our experiences were so different. It’s funny because, in many ways, people would think that we come from very similar places. But our experiences are very different: how we’re looking at things theoretically and how we’re taking things in (which is also the reality of this book), how we’re thinking about theory, how we’re 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 didn’t necessarily understand or fully understand with complete clarity. It’s 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 weren’t understanding. It was one of the few ways to survive the production of the work!

These reflections expose perspectives on play as they have occurred through different journeys in different contexts. From childhood play in a playground to an energizer game in a classroom, from a satirical role-play to an icebreaker in a collaborative endeavor—we have learnt and lived through play in different guises. Our collaboration has shone a light on the role of play as inquiry and thereby the criticality and possibility of playful methods in research. Part I includes distinct chapters that explore three fundamental components of playful methods including conceptual and practical tools. Part II builds upon this with more distinct bodies of work that report on and unpack experiences with play. We allow these pieces to sit individually; we do not carv...

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