Research Directions: Play as a Literacy of Possibilities: Expanding Meanings in Practices, Materials, and Spaces

By K. Wohlwend. Language Arts, 2008

105 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This reconceptualization of play as an embodied literacy explores how its multimodal facility for manipulating meanings and contexts powerfully shapes children’s learning and participation in classrooms. Three examples from one focal kindergarten in a three year study of literacy play in early childhood classrooms illustrate how young children emphasize or combine particular modes to strategically amplify their intended meanings as they play 1) to try out social practices, 2) to explore the multimodal potential of material resources, and 3) to construct spaces for peer culture within classrooms. Multimodal literacy research holds promise for convincing administrators and policy-makers to reverse the erosion of play in schools.

Subfields: Education, Literature and Literary Theory

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b14c4d95c12dc88d4c252513a1b53ca6c359f95a

Citations in the corpus

• Parental Mediation Theory for the Digital Age (2011, unknown): “Educators interested in rethinking learning in relation to formal and informal settings advocate considering how children learn through play (see also Gee, 2007; Marsh, 2010a,b; Wohlwend, 2008).”