Playing the story: Learning with young Children’s in/visible composing collaborations in outdoor narrative play

Abstract

In this article, we examine young children’s narrative play as posthuman, collaborative composing assemblages. Thinking with Tsing (2015), we re/consider collaboration as that which benefits from contamination and unruly edges as lively and generative places can help educators to notice and nurture that which easily goes unnoticed. We are guided by the question of what could be learned about generating literacy learning opportunities for young children in an outdoor program focused on setting up conditions for collaborative, narrative play. Posthuman perspectives deriving from the philosophical work of Deleuze and Guattari, often utilize the concept of the rhizome. However, following the scholarship of posthuman philosopher Anna Tsing and mycologist, Merlin Sheldrake, we turn to another more-than-human lifeform and introduce the construct of mycelial networks for posthuman literacy studies. For this study of children’s collaborative composing, we work with Tsing’s concepts of unruly edges and contamination as collaboration and introduce the concept of the in/visible. Taking up Tsing’s invitation to think differently about the construction of knowledge practices, we map and examine children’s collaborative storying by providing two vignettes, which together, comprise a rush of troubled stories. The troubled stories were part of an awakening for program facilitators, a space of four weeks in which they came to see that by attuning to the liveliness of the children’s movements, their understanding of collaborative narrative play was transformed. As relations between the human children and facilitators and the more-than-human vividly animate in this study, the in/visible moments that erupt along the interface between the domesticated and the wild can guide educators in planning and enacting young children’s literacy learning. To foster children’s collaborative composing, we assert, it is necessary to trust that storying occurs, for many children, in the underground, in/visible spaces that underpin the stories they play.

Gopher Tales: Re/Storying for Re/Worlding

“…The program was facilitated by a contract employee – a position the library titled, the Play Professor – who was assisted by three different children's librarians over the 2 years of the program. As a novel program for the library, its initial gatherings were experimental and provided many learning opportunities for the Play Professor and the librarians (Lenters et al., 2022 online early view).…”

“…We make the case for the mycelial network, rather than the rhizome (which has been the mainstay of much postqualitative educational research over the past two decades or more) as a methodological construct. We have previously put this construct forward as highly useful for sociomaterial literacy studies (see Lenters et al., 2022 online early view; Lenters et al., 2023) without realizing that Tim Ingold (2003) had already begun to make the case. Regarding social relations, Ingold has stated that he views fungal mycelia as preferential to the rhizome in consideration of “the living being, …not as a self‐contained object like a ball that can propel itself from place to place, but as an ever‐ramifying bundle of lines of growth” (Ingold, 2008, p. 1807).…”

“…By the second half of year 1 (2021), the library educators realized that they were directing too much of the narrative play and found new ways to engage the children (see Lenters et al., 2022 online early view). They also realized that their use of loose parts and a variety of art materials was subverting their aims for the outdoor storied play: i.e., focusing attention on toys, gadgets, and other human‐made materials, meant ignoring the potential the outdoor space held for storied play.…”

Unsettling childhood literacies: contamination as collaboration in transmedia encounters

“…While posthuman perspectives often use the concept of the rhizome , here we use the concept of mycelial networks for its theoretical capacities. In addition to underpinning the entirety of Earth’s surface, hidden mycelial networks are in a constant process of growing outward and retracting, continually responding to the conditions that encourage their growth and to those that inhibit (Lenters et al , 2023).…”

“…In other words, we are transformed by contaminating encounters – the good, bad and the ugly. Thinking with Tsing’s work, along with that of mycologist Sheldrake (2020), we have elsewhere proposed (Lenters et al , 2023) that the phenomenon of underground, in/visible mycelial networks, which underpin and support the whole of the earth’s surface, can assist us with considering-otherwise that which seems to contaminate children’s learning spaces.…”