Tinkering toward teacher learning: a case for critical playful literacies in teacher education

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to re-center playfulness as a humanizing approach in teacher education. As teachers navigate the current moment of heightened control, surveillance, and systemic inequity, these proposed moves in teacher education can be transgressive. Rather than play as relegated to childhood or infancy, what does it look like to continue to be “playful” in teaching and teacher education? Design/methodology/approach To examine how teacher educators may design for teachers’ critical playful literacies, the authors offer three “worked examples” (Gee, 2009) of preservice teachers’ playful practices in an English literacies teacher education course. Findings The authors highlight instructional design elements pertinent to co-designing for teachers’ play and playful literacies in teacher education: generative constraints to practice everyday ingenuity, figuring it out to foster teacher agency and debriefs to interrupt the teaching’s perpetual performance. Originality/value The term “playful,” as a descriptor of practice and qualifier of activity appears frequently in educational literature across domains. The relationship of play to critical literacies – and, more specifically, educators’ literacies and learning – is less frequently explored.

Digital writing with AI platforms: the role of fun with/in generative AI

“…the world-building capacities to extend stories beyond the boundaries of page and screen). In the sections that follow, we explore how these interconnected dimensions are capitalized on and operationalized by the CAI platform even as we highlight the potentials for “critical play” (McBride et al , 2023) to support youth theorizing about the nature of generative AI and its impact on digital writing.…”

“…Opportunities for "messing around" with generative AI tools can provide a door to these kinds of critical conversations, as young people are already grappling with myriad ethical issues in their digital writing lives and need opportunities to talk about the full range of experiences, including the ways that they are learning from/with/through their creative experimentation as digital writers. We follow McBride et al (2023) in suggesting that critical play can support people in understanding and grappling with everyday dilemmas around the "digital," providing young people with opportunities to develop as philosophers of technology. An expansive approach to critical sociotechnical and literacy learning might offer opportunities that legitimize experimentation Digital writing with AI platforms with unfamiliar technologies "just for fun" and provide sustained, nuanced engagement with the social issues and questions that young people identify as pressing.…”

“…Following Leont’ev (1981) and other sociocognitive scholars (Griffin and Cole, 1984; Gutiérrez et al , 2019a, 2019b), we understand play as a leading activity capable of catalyzing further learning and development. In one example of the transformative potentials of play across the lifespan, McBride and colleagues (2023) explored how “critical play” opened space for teachers to resist traditional teaching practices by engaging humanizing pedagogies. We are interested in how play with digital technologies (e.g.…”

Embracing linguistic diversity: Global Englishes language teaching for anti-racist education

“…This awareness is especially crucial in lingua franca environments, where speakers bring diverse expectations and experiences to the speech community. McBride et al (2023) conducted a study using humanizing pedagogy, utilizing Google Maps to expose students to various cultures of English users worldwide. This approach highlights the fluid and complex interaction between language and culture in lingua franca encounters, emphasizing the importance of intercultural and racial awareness and the necessity to move away from essentialist conceptualizations.…”

Guest editorial: Artificial intelligence and composing just education futures

“…Across the pieces of this special issue, the authors assert the urgency of complicating, playing with and questioning generative artificial intelligence in ways that humanize the activity of creation with emerging technologies, attending to individual and collective needs, dreams and desires. As the intergenerational authorship team Stornaiuolo et al (this issue) suggest, playful experimentation with AI composition can become a form of "critical play" (McBride et al, 2023) that can engage youth in joyful activity that also supports contemplation of everyday dilemmas around the digital. Thinking as both a writer and writing instructor, Li (this issue) explores creative and emancipatory potential in cyborg composing (Haraway, 1991;Liz arraga, 2023), inviting writers and writing instructors to consider how they might more intentionally resist closure, illusions of objectivity and corpus ideologies.…”