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Early Years An International Research Journal

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Who gets to play? Access, popular media and participatory literacies

Karen E. Wohlwend

To cite this article: Karen E. Wohlwend (2017) Who gets to play? Access, popular media and participatory literacies, Early Years, 37:1, 62-76, DOI: 10.1080/09575146.2016.1219699

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09575146.2016.1219699

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Early yEars, 2017 VOl. 37, NO. 1, 62–76 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09575146.2016.1219699

Who gets to play? Access, popular media and participatory literacies

Karen E. Wohlwend

literacy, Culture, & language Education, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, Usa

ABSTRACT Early literacy is often over-simplified as a set of skills for beginning reading, an approach which overlooks the ways that children play their way into cultures, using play as a literacy that accesses popular media as rich literary repertoires of characters and storylines. This article examines how children’s play reveals their participatory literacies in preschool classrooms where teachers provide play- based media literacy curricula. Participatory literacies are ways of interpreting, making, sharing and belonging in increasingly globally and digitally mediated cultures. Data are excerpted from a five-year study of literacy play in classrooms that provide a space for children to draw upon popular media repertoires as cultural capital and resources for literacy development. Mediated discourse analysis of classroom video located and analyzed children’s play for use of creative and collaborative dimensions of participatory literacies. Results showed that young children drew on their media knowledge during play to fluidly improvise dialogue and story action in ways that enriched and sustained play themes and friendships over time but also allowed isolated children to gain access to play groups.

To keep up with expanding literacies in rapidly changing globalized socio-economic worlds (Sefton-Green et al. 2016), we need relevant curricula that develop the literacy practices that young children use in everyday life. This means thinking beyond print-intensive reading/ writing workshops to envision playful and digital early childhood curricula that support participatory literacies in converging media – popular media, digital media and social media – that make up modern cultural repertoires for communicating and living. Participatory lit- eracies are ways of interpreting, making, sharing and belonging in increasingly globally and digitally mediated cultures across multiple media platforms. For example, in transmedia storytelling (Jenkins et al. 2006), characters and narratives move across films, television, books, blogs, video games, toys, food and consumer goods. To examine how children engage powerful and dense media imaginaries (Medina and Wohlwend 2014) to mediate their class- room peer cultures, this article focuses on pretend play with popular media, rather than on exploratory play with sensory materials or physical play at recess. For young children, play is a key participatory literacy that moves across multimedia platforms, commercial sites and

© 2016 TaCTyC

KEYWORDS Early childhood; play; popular media; peer cultures; digital literacies

ARTICLE HISTORY received 20 February 2016 accepted 29 July 2016

CONTACT Karen E. Wohlwend [email protected]

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toy franchises that enables access to popular media as rich literary repertoires of characters, genres and story ideas.

Unfortunately in US early childhood classrooms, literacy curriculum is too often over- simplified as a set of cognitive and ‘constrained skills’ for beginning reading: easily measured tasks ‘such as learning the letters of the alphabet, [that] are constrained to small sets of knowledge that are mastered in relatively brief periods of development’ (Paris 2005, 185). When a print-centric emphasis on constrained skills combines with an all-work-and-no-play approach, the result is a narrow curriculum that limits the ways children can play their way into literacy learning and childhood cultures. Reduced play opportunities in the early years classroom distance children from important literacy resources (Dyson 2006) and their cultural funds of knowledge (Moll et al. 1992). When opportunities to play in school vanish, or are limited by a well-intentioned commercial-free ban, children lose the chance to tap into their community experiences, family interests and cultural expertise as familiar literacy resources.

When play leaves the classroom, it also takes with it an important cohesive element for building peer cultures and friendships (Corsaro 2003). My previous research has shown that as children pretend together, they mediate their social histories and shared norms for belong- ing, using commercial media toys and child-made artifacts to pivot (Vygotsky [1935] 1978) among play worlds and classroom cultures to access more powerful identities and practices (Wohlwend 2011). This has substantial impact for children on the fringes of peer cultures, who can trade upon the cultural capital of trendy popular media to gain access to play groups. Popular media expertise can mitigate a child’s outsider social status, which negatively affects academic achievement and classroom participation in incorrigible cycles of exclusion (Christian and Bloome 2004; McDermott 1985; Mehan 1979). Thus, who gets to play becomes an issue of social justice when some children are denied an important pathway to increased participation in school and peer cultures.

In this article, I examine how children who played alone were able to gain access to play groups and to create play texts with peers through their use of popular media, digital media and participatory literacies to answer the research questions:

• Who gets to play? How do children get access to play groups? • Which practices seem routine (natural and/or expected) and necessary for participation

in this playgroup? • How are artifacts used for making and remaking of imagined and immediate identities

for toys and players (e.g. characters, player roles and/or cooperating friends)?

The research in this article is excerpted from a five-year ethnographic study on literacy playshops (Wohlwend 2013), teacher-created media literacy curricula designed to provide a space for young children to produce digital videos by playing with popular media themes and toys, using new technologies and popular media repertoires as cultural capital and resources for literacy development. The term playshop intentionally twists the more familiar workshop. Playshop reverses the top-down modeling in teacher-led apprenticeships and print-oriented tasks of reading/writing workshop. Playshops complement workshops by privileging learner-led media-rich play as sources of child expertise and cultural resources. In literacy playshop research studies, young children played and collaborated to make films using themes they chose, including popular media themes and toys from their favorite media passions, to record their own stories with iPads or digital Flip cameras. They also used digital animation apps on iPads to make puppet shows with avatars they created from digital

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photographs of friends, media characters or favorite classroom toys. In this article, close analysis of excerpts of video data from two preschool playshops reveals a space where children with few friends could access their popular media knowledge as literacy resources, explore digital storytelling and participate more fully in peer play groups. In the first pre- school, teachers decided to reverse their ‘commercial-free’ stance that banned popular media toys, and to bring in Disney Princess dolls as part of a film-making center. In the second classroom, teachers provided iPads so children could make digital films with their own toys. Mediated discourse analysis (MDa) of classroom video located and analyzed children’s play for moments of creative and collaborative participatory literacies. Results showed that young children who typically did not join in group play drew on their media passions during play to fluidly improvise dialogue and story actions in ways that sustained collaborative pretense and entertained peers but also allowed isolated children to gain access to play groups.

Background

Playing with multiple media in preschool

Play is a long-time staple of early childhood education, widely recognized as a developmen- tally appropriate (Bredekamp and Copple 1997) approach to learning that allows children to pretend their understandings of the world around them (Göncü 1999). Early literacy edu- cators have used play to drive inquiry (Dewey [1915] 2000), inspire storytelling (Paley 2004), enrich writing (Dyson 2003; Ray and Glover 2008) and infuse literacy curricula with children’s funds of knowledge (Moll et al. 1992). In recent decades, dramatic play opportunities allowed children to access their cultural expertise with language, literacies, knowledge and social practices gained through everyday living (e.g. Gregory, long, and Volk 2004). But after dec- ades of accountability, standardization, pushed-down curricula and high-stakes testing in US public schools, mandated by successive waves of reformist legislation at the federal and state levels, play is dwindling (Dyson and Genishi 2014). Even in the formerly safe haven of preschool, a growing pressure to achieve is ‘crushing’ children (Christakis 2016).

Moreover, an all-work-and-no-play approach to early learning is much more likely to be enforced in schools in high-poverty locations where children are already marginalized, in comparison to wealthier suburban or progressive private schools that provide learner-led constructivist interest-driven curriculum in which play is viewed as a necessary tool for early learning development (Colegrove and adair 2014). Making time for play may seem risky in watch-list schools under state scrutiny where teachers are assessed on their implementation of scripted curricula (allington and Pearson 2011). In this way, play is becoming a perquisite of affluence, a privilege for those who can afford to attend schools that enjoy the freedom to adopt creative and innovative curriculum.

However, it is important not to romanticise play (Grieshaber and Mcardle 2010; Roskos and Christie 2001; Sutton-Smith 1997) but to also address its problematic aspects. young children wield play as a social practice for their own purposes, making and enforcing cultural boundaries in ways that can hurt, bully and exclude, or otherwise make adults uncomfortable (Boldt 1996; Grace and Tobin 1997; Thiel 2014; Wohlwend 2007, 2012). For example, the friendship-building potential of play can be a vehicle for both inclusion and exclusion, cre- ating insiders and outsiders in play groups and children’s peer cultures (Corsaro 2003; löfdahl 2014). additionally, affinity groups (Gee 1996) form around play materials (e.g. media dolls

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and action figures), valued as cultural capital by local peer cultures (Fernie, Madrid, and Kantor 2011) creating entry vehicles that help children gain access to peer groups. Finally, children’s media toys are objects of affection and infection, satisfying emotional attachments and spreading mass media stereotypes (Jones et al. 2012) often with substantial impact on children’s social worlds (Pugh 2009).

School policies and teacher attitudes towards media themes and toys can produce dis- parity when some kinds of play are discouraged at school while others are encouraged, privileging those players who are most familiar with school-preferred toys, which are often natural or generic materials rather than commercial action figures, trading cards or video games that have significant appeal in peer cultures. Teacher preferences often reflect mid- dle-class tastes and nostalgia for more agrarian times that disdain mass market products and advanced technologies (Marsh and Millard 2006). When access to media toys is limited, low-income children are most likely to be disadvantaged by middle-class taste (Pompe 1996; Seiter 1993), when class distinctions are materialized through commercial-free bias towards generic toys. In some programs, prohibitions on popular media aim to protect children from overly violent or sexual media themes in pervasive media. For example, teachers may shut down play that seems too risky for school, deemed overly sexual or violent (Thiel 2014). at other times, teachers choose to bring in popular media as inducements for literacy tasks, such as writing and drawing. When opportunities to play in school are limited by a well-in- tentioned ban on perceived inappropriate themes (Thiel 2014) or are removed altogether, some children lose the chance to tap into their knowledge of popular media as literacy resources and cultural capital in peer cultures (Dyson 2003; Pugh 2009).

Finally, play in the twenty-first century is often intertwined with digital technologies, giving it renewed relevance as a participatory literacy that allows children to explore the core digital literacy practices and ways of belonging on social networks where we produce, collaborate and share multimedia with family, friends and followers.

Literacy playshop curriculum

In this study, early childhood teachers in practitioner inquiry study groups worked with researchers to develop digital literacy and play-based media literacy playshop curriculum. literacy playshops are situated, unique to each setting, and learners’ interests inform teacher mediation at three levels: learner explorations, material mediators and teacher-guided engagements.

• Learner explorations: The largest, most frequent blocks of time are devoted to learner explorations, recognising that children bring media and technology knowledge and passion into their play (Wohlwend 2009b). These open-ended explorations enable chil- dren to explore bits of song lyrics and movie dialogues or try out a sound effect on an iPad, leading to new discoveries, proliferating the pathways into literacy by providing a risk-free learning environment and encouraging a broader range of participation. Through playwatching, teachers look for opportunities to extend and respond to chil- dren’s current media understandings and literacy practices by ensuring that children have access to material mediators that emerge during explorations.

• Material mediators: Materials accrue shared meanings through their histories of use so that a doll or toy anchors a set of meanings that authorise an expected character,

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media narrative and a role for its player. Mediators such as books, cameras and toys anchor children’s negotiated rules for the ‘who’s-being-what’ in pretend scenarios as well as turn-taking or equipment handling. Mediators save meanings in some way (via cameras, pencils and/or iPads) or make meanings easier to communicate or understand (via storyboards, subtitles and/or narration). Teachers also mediate when they join in as co-players to support play frames in character to clarify play or to help children resolve a conflict.

• Teacher-guided engagements: occasionally, teachers gather children to share a discovery or demonstrate new literacies or technologies. These whole class activities also allow teachers to quickly provide children with enough experience in storytelling, collabora- tion or equipment handling to work independently or in small groups with peer support.

These three levels of mediation intersect with four overlapping sets of practices for mean- ing-making and participation:

• Play is a ‘printless’ literacy that creates action texts (Wohlwend 2011), stories enacted with bodies, toys, props and scenery rather than written with print on paper. Players cooperate and agree to a set of pretend scenarios or ‘as if ’ worlds that can change the immediate real classroom into a castle, spaceship or car. Play produces a pretend context that helps emergent literacy users learn how, where, when and why to use particular ways of communicating printless texts. all these components must be closely examined and reinterpreted to fit the emergent understandings, strengths and needs of early childhood learners and this work is ongoing (Vasquez and Felderman 2012; Wohlwend 2013).

• Collaboration enables the emergent meanings in multi-player pretense, live-action dramas or films that are constantly subject to the next players’ action that triggers renegotiation of the pretended meaning under construction. In playshops, collaborative structures provide opportunities for seeing others’ perspectives and to develop the shared decision-making needed to pool ideas and create a shared story.

• Storying turns players’ attention to literary structures such as character, plot, setting and theme. Films have their own conventions such as ways of framing shots that create genre features in film genres. The term storying rather than storytelling focuses on the multiple modes in digital film-making and embodied drama.

• Media Production: Digital technologies for media production have become highly child-friendly, with phones that are just the right size for small fingers and apps with minimal print that can be operated primarily through icons. Important for play, these advancements enable much more student autonomy and peer collaboration, far dif- ferent from the first study of a kindergarten playshop (Wohlwend 2011) where Sony Handycams were only occasionally handled by children, and required the presence of a hovering adult to assist with operation and any accidents. Flip cams (unfortunately now discontinued) were an affordable and sturdy option that allowed children to create films independently. In preschools, teachers’ phones are the most common tool for capturing student play, but teachers are understandably reluctant to hand over their personal phones to children (Wartella et al. 2013). However, with recent one-to-one iPad initiatives in early and elementary education, classrooms are increasingly equipped with some hand-held technology.

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Theoretical framework: play, peer cultures and popular media

Play and peer cultures

Children play their way into cultures, pretending to be ‘a head taller’ (Vygotsky [1935] 1978) while approximating the everyday practices that they see adults doing. Play is participatory literacy: a social practice for making and communicating meanings, and for learning and joining in cultural practices (Göncü 1999; Sutton-Smith 1997). Important to issues of equi- table participation, play has transformative power to reframe contexts (Bateson 1956; Goffman 1974), changing a confining reality into an alternative, malleable imaginary (Medina and Wohlwend 2014) or ‘as if ’ world (Holland et al. 1998) where identities and relationships can be reshaped. These transformations have particular importance in the peer cultures that children produce themselves in response to surrounding adult expectations.

…Children are always participating in and are part of two cultures – their own and adults’ – and these cultures are intricately interwoven…

Further, children interpret – and contribute to – adult culture through their collective actions in the peer cultures they create throughout their childhoods. I define children’s peer cultures as the stable sets of routines, artifacts, values, and concerns that children produce and share with each other. (Corsaro 2012, 489)

In the twenty-first century, play happens in spaces where the lines between global and local, material and immaterial, online and offline space and bodies and tools are already blurred (Burnett et al. 2014; Marsh 2014). The fluid nature of this convergence is captured by the metaphor of flickering (Fleer 2014) to characterize the small mercurial moves young children make between collective and individual imagined spaces, in and out of imaginary scenarios in physical realities and virtual representations with digital technologies. For exam- ple, during play, fighting children navigate pretend and actual bodies and individual and collective actions as they remain physically aware of concrete consequences while pretend- ing an imagined fight (Fleer 2014).

Permeable playshops and popular media

‘[I]f teachers take play seriously, that is, as a way to learn more about children and their lit- eracies, they may come to treat it as a valuable resource for child and teacher learning’ (Kontovourki and Siegel 2009, 37). What appears to teachers as a conflict between peer culture passion for popular media and school culture concerns for appropriate content can be a productive opportunity for innovative practices and pedagogies (Fernie, Madrid, and Kantor 2011; Galbraith 2011).

Permeable curriculum (Dyson 1993) describes pedagogy that is open to children’s cul- tures, interests and desires, where curriculum is negotiated with children, rather than done to them. In early childhood classrooms with a literacy curriculum permeable to media, chil- dren draw upon media to carry out literacy practices in school cultures but also to belong in peer cultures (Dyson 2003; Wohlwend 2011). Teachers can use permeable curriculum to work with, rather than against, peer cultures. For example, Galbraith (2011) found that when teachers reversed their opposition to superhero play and instead offered responsive medi- ation, children invented new superhero narratives that allowed more players to join in and honored one another’s contributions in ways that strengthened children’s friendships. Similarly, my playshop studies show that thoughtful teacher mediation that considered

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children’s expertise and motives in media play enabled more inclusion for multilingual play- ers (Wohlwend 2011, 2015) and supported children’s revision of gender stereotypes in media narratives (Wohlwend 2009a, 2012).

Methods: studying participatory literacies through media discourse analysis

Research context: two preschool playshops

The classroom examples in this article are excerpted from a five-year study of young children’s play literacies in early childhood classrooms where teachers developed and implemented literacy playshop curriculum using popular media and digital film-making. This article focuses on two preschool classrooms (each classroom had two lead teachers and about 20 three- to five-year-old children) in university childcare centers serving families of faculty, graduate students and community members in a small town in the US Midwest. We visited each classroom during two-hour play sessions, one to two days per week for one academic year. It is important to note that our research focus required classrooms that provided learner-led play and this led us to the university preschools, privileged spaces with progressive curricula where teachers have the flexibility to follow learners’ interests. By contrast, local childcare centers and preschools reduced time for play or offered teacher-structured activities to meet academic goals.

The childcare centers provided an emergent play-based, learner-led curriculum. Based on observed children’s interests, teachers added materials for exploratory and playful activ- ities in open-ended learning centers: a house with wooden kitchen furniture, dress-up cos- tumes and baby dolls; large and small blocks; reading corner with books, pillows and sofas; sensory tables for water, sand, etc.; an art table for painting, printing and playdough sculpt- ing; a science table with insect specimens; a wooden dollhouse; and other miniature playsets, baskets of trains and cars. Daily schedules included several large blocks of play as children moved freely from center to center around the room.

Mediated discourse analysis

MDa (Scollon 2001; Scollon and Scollon 2004) makes expected ways of belonging visible and identifies how participation in school and peer cultures is mediated through artifacts such as media toys and digital technologies. MDa of children’s physical actions with toys and iPads within play events looked closely at turn-taking and toy handling to identify prac- tices of belonging.

During classroom visits, three or more cameras captured children’s dramatic play, storying and film-making activities, including a long view of the classroom, to capture children’s movement in and out of groups, and cameras placed at two play centers to enable close analysis of children’s interactions with materials and one another. Data sources included child-produced films, classroom play and film-making activity.

The focus in MDa on materials and activity, rather than on spoken language, guided close analysis of video-recorded actions and inspected the multimodal meanings embedded in bodies, toys and tools. The two classrooms were selected to contrast teachers’ opposing approaches to popular media toys; one class banned popular media toys at school while the other allowed children to play with toys from home as they wished. Video analysis

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software (i.e. StudioCode) facilitated examination of situated activity in each play centre location in both classrooms, how frequently groups chose to play together and groups’ choice of play themes and materials. a four-step filtering process in MDa located

(1) classroom locations and their persistent play groups and materials; (2) within these locations, intersections of key play practices (i.e. play, collaboration,

storying and/or media production); (3) within these nexus, transformational moments where children used toys and digital

tools to make and remake shared meanings that they co-constructed together and that also substantially changed their social participation in the playgroup (e.g. where isolated children joined a group and took on a leadership role);

4) within these instances, micro-interactional analysis (i.e. tracking meaning nego- tiation and social conflict where children’s play sustained and challenged ways of belonging) identified instance sequences that show how children wielded toys and media knowledge as literacy resources and social organising tools. In the following section, I share an instance from a transformational moment from each classroom and two highly popular media franchises: Disney Princesses and The avengers. Pseudonyms are used for all participants.

Findings: media and technologies come to preschool

Bringing popular media toys into a commercial-free playshop

In the first childcare center, rules governed how often children could bring their ‘home’ toys to school to discourage children from ‘showing off ’ displays of wealth that might highlight disparate socio-economic status. The preschool teachers actively worked against inequitable displays in the classroom by limiting the number of toys children could bring for sharing time. Teachers also wanted to be sensitive to the wishes of families who tried to maintain a ‘commercial-free’ atmosphere by limiting children’s contact with popular culture or mass media. They also hoped to prevent lost or broken possessions or conflicts over coveted toys. However, after reading research by Jackie Marsh and Vivian Vasquez in our study group sessions, the teachers conducted a popular culture audit to tally the popular media charac- ters that decorated children’s backpacks, clothing and school supplies. The audit showed that children were interested in Transformers, Star Wars and Disney Princess media, but the teachers felt that parents would find these popular media toys too violent or gendered. Instead, they decided on an approach they viewed as a compromise: they would provide a set of popular media toys but from a film they thought parents would find innocuous: Toy Story 3. However, because children had no connection to the film, they lost interest in the film-making materials after the first day (Medina and Wohlwend 2014).

Following this experience, two preschool teachers decided to provide Disney Princess dolls in the film-making center. They decided to bring in eight dolls and to provide these themselves to ensure that all children would have equal access, whether or not a child per- sonally owned a princess doll.

on the first day that the princess dolls came to school, twelve girls in the class crowded around the filmmaking center table, holding and stroking hair and gowns of the Barbie-sized dolls. Grace picked up ariel, the little Mermaid, and began a conversation with one of the teachers.

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Grace: … I’m gonna bring my doll.

Teacher: your doll? What is your doll?

Grace: My doll is… I’m gonna bring Sleeping Beauty. Her have a skirt. I’m gonna bring her. [twirling doll in her hands as she speaks].

Teacher: you’re gonna share her?

Grace: yeah.

Teacher: on Monday?

Grace: yeah…. [head down, looking at doll] I think I’m gonna take her. I want you to go to my house.

Teacher: you want me to go to your house?

Grace: you need to, you need, you didn’t see my room.

Teacher: I haven’t seen your room yet. you’re right.

Grace: on [Monday], you might go to my house.

Teacher: Maybe you can take pictures and show us pictures.

Grace: ok. I’m gonna take the whole class there!

Teacher: oh, wow. The whole class

Grace’s desire to bring her doll to school was framed by her teacher as an opportunity to bring the doll not as a toy for play but as an object for Sharing Time, an oral language devel- opment activity. a common practice in early childhood classrooms, daily show-and-tell sessions give children a chance to bring their possessions from home to ‘share’, that is, to stand in front of the class, show a featured object and talk about it. The practice of ‘sharing’ – or more accurately showing – toys to other preschoolers was valued as an important way of belonging: aligning with school culture and teachers’ goals of modelling language and eliciting children’s verbal expression and with peer culture goals as a means to interest and engage friends through attractive toys. on another level, sharing time is an identity-building site where teachers shape children’s narratives to fit school norms (Gee 1996) or verbal expectations for displays of appropriate femininities (Kamler 1999). In this classroom, teach- ers sought to downplay displays of material wealth by encouraging children to bring natural materials. However, children seemed much more eager to share beloved toys that also elic- ited an enthusiastic response from peers.

In this classroom, social benefits sometimes extended beyond the official class sharing time when children’s talk about toys evolved into invitations to their homes so friends could see and play with these toys. In Grace’s case, her excitement and conversation about the princess dolls opened an immediate avenue for more social participation by playing with the other girls in this playgroup, something Grace seldom chose to do and a matter of con- cern to the teachers.

a few minutes later, Grace used her media knowledge of princess names to negotiate a complex moment of play among a small group of girls.

Grace [holding the mermaid doll and in-character as ariel]: and I’m ariel

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allison [holding Sleeping Beauty doll, in-character as new character]: and mine is Minishawn [a name she’s invented]

Grace [picking up a second doll, Snow White and stepping out of character to reject allison’s invented name and substitute an authorized commercial princess name]: no, her name is

Cinderella.

Melanie [as player holding Cinderella doll, objects]: My name is Cinderella!

allison [as player holding Sleeping Beauty doll, accepts doll’s commercial name]: This is Sleeping Beauty!

Grace [higher pitch signals she is stepping back into character as Snow White; affirms allison’s claim]: ‘and this is my friend Sleeping Beauty. Hello!’ [allison accepting Grace’s play bid to restart play, responds to Snow White’s introduction, and silently bounces Sleeping Beauty across the tabletop to meet Grace’s Snow White doll.]

Grace [In character as ariel]: ‘and this is your friend Snow White.’

By including allison and reinstating the commercial names of all the dolls, Grace adeptly resolved the conflict, while in character and animating two dolls. While working to uphold the ‘real’ or authorized names of characters in the media narratives she knew, she moved fluidly in and out of play in flickers of collaboration with other players as they agreed upon character names, in quick renegotiations that allowed children to work through their con- flicting ideas. These negotiations let children demonstrate their media knowledge and their fan affiliation as they challenged and upheld the proper names of the princess characters. In this short excerpt, Grace transformed from an isolated child to a storyteller and play leader by bringing all players back into the scenario and moving the play forward. For Grace, this moment of collaboration with other girls was transformative, mediating both the emergent story in the play narrative and the friendship norms in peer culture that allowed her to par- ticipate more actively.

In revising media narratives, children considered the authorized storylines and also play- ers’ desires, friendship bonds and play goals. Players stepped in and out of pretense in their revisions of commercial narratives and character relationships in order to make room for meaningful roles for friends or to draw upon their shared understandings of filmic worlds and routines of family living. In one playgroup, girls turned the Belle princess doll into Sleeping Beauty’s mother, merging the two fairytales and also changing a fantasy narrative into a sociodramatic family story. across classrooms, children played the stories they knew best, drawing upon scenes and scripts from family life for collaborative play. In preschool, the typically brief stories involved lots of physical movement of toys, simple greetings and labelling and extended physical manipulation and exploration of the dolls, dresses and materials.

Bringing digital technologies into a media-permeable playshop

In the second childcare center in this article, teachers took a different tack. Center policy already allowed children to bring and play with their own media toys in the classroom and the teachers frequently used their cell phones as a means of capturing children’s play for sharing with parents. However, there was little digital technology available for children to use. During teacher study groups, the teachers in this center became interested in seeing

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what children would create when given opportunities to play with iPads and record their own movies.

In this classroom, children typically played in fairly stable groups of two or three, mostly with friends of the same gender. Play themes reflected children’s friendships and their desire to play together as well as their friendship bonds, shared cultural knowledge and popular media interests. For example, two play groups of boys chose to wear superhero capes as they jumped from climbing structures or raced miniature cars while playing media themes such as DC Comic’s Batman or Marvel’s The Avengers. In these groups, similar media interests supported group cohesion and shared play histories as children played together day after day and developed a set of shared expectations and pretend meanings. However, these bonding elements also created insiders and outsiders in patterns of inclusion and exclusion that became routine.

The largest playgroup consisted of six girls who regularly played family scenarios in the house, sometimes as princesses or fairies, supported by glittery tiaras, gauzy wings or shiny long gown costumes. another pair of girls played and replayed chase scenes from Disney’s Frozen, repeatedly circling the room and calling out to one another as anna and Elsa. The Frozen media franchise emerged as a unifying element with widespread interest that crossed gender and spanned playgroups. The attraction to the media franchise was almost universal: upon noticing the first snow of the season falling outside the large picture window, a child burst into the film’s iconic song ‘let It Go’, and children around the room dropped what they were doing to join in.

Except Jonah. Jonah played on, alone and intent on a set of miniature cars. Despite teach- ers’ attempts to interest him in group activity, he usually played by himself, with blocks, miniature playsets or art materials, outside established friendship groups. like Grace, a rare moment of connection with peers occurred when Jonah brought his own Transformers to school and other children crowded around him for a chance to handle and play with the toys.

However, Jonah’s pattern of solitary play changed when the digital film-making station was introduced early in the second semester. From the first day, Jonah could almost always be found with an iPad, regularly making films with another child or two.

In part, this was determined by rules at the film-making table. Due to the limited number of tablets (two) and to encourage collaboration, children were expected to share iPads with other children who arrived at the table and wanted to play. Each iPad was loaded with a wordless puppetry app (i.e. PuppetPals) that allowed children to record short cartoons with cut-out characters that were animated by finger touches: tapping, dragging, squeezing or stretching each character’s image. The result was multiplayer film-making with many hands needed to operate the cut-out characters on the touch screen.

at the filmmaking table, Jonah sits next to Jenna who is intently cutting out an avatar on the iPad’s touchscreen by tracing a finger around a photograph of Thor, a superhero in the avengers franchise. across the table, Evelyn bends over the second iPad, scrolling through a page of Google images of another avenger, Ironman.

Jonah walks around the table to watch Jenna move through the page of images and soon asks if he can choose Ironman. Evelyn positions the iPad so he can see the screen. He scrolls and taps an image to select and enlarge the thumbnail of the photo. In the process, he navigates away from the image page. Evelyn reaches over and presses the home button, reopens the browser, and taps the back arrow to return to the image page. Heads together, the two children repeat

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this scrolling and selection process over and over, talking and tapping for almost five minutes as they decide together upon an Ironman photo to use for a cutout puppet.

This instance is packed with the digital literacies necessary for reading and navigating a screen of images (e.g. selecting apps, moving back and forth between screens, scrolling up and down a page and/or opening and closing apps). additionally, the children shared mate- rials, took turns and reached agreement to choose a single image. But this is not to say that the transition from solitary to collaborative play was easy. Children were used to handling phones as individuals and initially resisted others’ attempts to reach in and play along on the touch screen. For example, when others wanted to animate a digital puppet on the iPad, Jonah had brushed their hands away, tugging on the iPad, or moving it out of their reach. But with adult reminders over the course of several sessions, Jonah as well as the other players learned to cooperate on the small touch screens, simultaneously advising one another, moving and animating puppet avatars, and voicing characters.

overall, Jonah created the largest number of films, and children became interested in watching him create fast-moving animations with sound effects and expressive voices. The dialogue was almost unintelligible but this did not seem to diminish children’s enjoyment of the films. a routine activity for several children was to begin playshop sessions by watching a few films created earlier by Jonah and saved on the index page of the app. The appeal of these brief videos puzzled adults, as the videos seemed to lack storylines, often featuring a moving jumble of character cut-outs, bursts of unintelligible speech, squeals and sound effects. But children found the films entertaining, chuckling at the sound effects and size distortions he created with photo cut-outs of characters from Frozen and the avengers, as well as photos of classroom toys such as small plastic zoo animals and dinosaurs. and this is key: insider humour, shared among children and mystifying to adults, is a hallmark of peer culture and an important cohesive element that distinguishes children’s play cultures from the adult world (Corsaro 2003; Fernie, Kantor, and Madrid 2011; Grace and Tobin 1997; Willett et al. 2013).

Conclusion

These preschool media play examples show the flickering transformations in storying and participation that are inherent in participatory literacies. Throughout the projects, when children had opportunities to use their media knowledge, they transformed their participa- tion, their play narratives and themselves, if only for moments. Timely teacher mediation can fan these promising sparks, providing time and materials that allow children to replay favorite themes and develop patterns of participation through repetition.

During play, film-making, making and digital technology explorations in the playshop classrooms, we saw similar examples of children who transformed their social and academic participation from quiet onlookers or reluctant writers when teachers implemented media-permeable curriculum in the playshop classrooms in the study, most dramatic for isolated children like Grace and Jonah. opportunities to play – rather than write, draw or tell a story – made the difference, by providing an opening that allowed more children not only to participate but to lead in literacy play events, through embodied modes that were familiar and comfortable such as dramatic enactments and animated doll play where they held considerable expertise (Medina and Wohlwend 2014).

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More educational research and programming is needed on early childhood media literacy. In the United States, media literacy is still remarkably understudied and rarely acknowledged as a literacy in school education, despite the pervasive influence of media in daily living (Hobbs and Jensen 2009). Even in Europe and Canada where media literacy education is a well-established discipline, significant tensions remain around issues of youth access, pro- tection and empowerment (Sefton-Green et al. 2016). The examples of very young children’s media play in this article illustrate the need for research that acknowledges ‘the role of play, identity, voice and subjectivity in the practices of consuming and creating media’ (Hobbs, forthcoming, 7). The recognition that play with popular media and new technologies is a participatory literacy, both agentic and fraught with power relations, means approaches to research and teaching should consider children’s purposes as well as issues of equity (Marsh 2014; Vasquez and Felderman 2012). The cultural production and transformation shown here suggest the value of sustained play opportunities in preschool classrooms where teach- ers can respond. It also points to the need for teacher education that prepares teachers to mediate popular media and peer culture in ways that develop critical awareness, participa- tory literacies and inclusivity.

Disclosure statement

no potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding

This work was supported by the Maris M. Proffitt and Mary Higgins Proffitt Endowment, and the Institute for advanced Study grant, Indiana University.

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