Playful literacies: children’s designs of play from playground to videogame
Submitted by:
Andrew Burn
Abstract:
Play is central to children’s cultural and social lives. We also know that it respects no boundaries, but incorporates diverse sources and resources, including both traditional games, rhymes and rituals passed down through generations and across peer groups, and the game structures of contemporary media culture, particularly the ludic procedures of videogames. Regardless of adult anxieties that ‘traditional’ play is threatened by digital play, children synthesise their landscapes and narratives of play, from console to playground (Willett et al, 2013; Burn & Richards, 2014).
Furthermore, children do not simply inherit or passively repeat such forms of play. WE know that they adapt and ceaselessly transform them. In some instances, we can observe imaginative devising of new games: children designing play, in effect (Burn, 2014). In addition to the diversity of generative practice in song, socio-drama, dance and other activities on the playground, then, we can add a kind of proto-media literacy: design practices informed by popular cultural narratives and by the procedural patterns of videogame play.
As with other areas of the curriculum, it makes good sense to build on the informal arts curriculum of the playground. The music curriculum is typically less ambitious than young children’s musical play (Marsh, 2008); while the wordplay of playground games is often sophisticated and complex (Widdowson, 2001). The same can be argued of media literacy. If imaginative game design is apparent on the playground, there is a good argument for following this up in educational practice. Such followup would involve an attention to ludic narratives, to popular cultural experience, to children’s early engagement with virtual worlds and avatar-based play (Marsh, 2006). Subsequently, it would involve aspects of media education, including the literal design of children’s own videogames, making connections not only between narrative and game design, but also with the new literacies of coding, a connection demanding that educators challenge definitively the old arts-science divide.
This talk will chart the development from examples of game-play and design in playground cultures to children’s design of animation, machinima and videogame in classrooms. It will draw on a variety of recent research projects which observe and analyse these phenomena in schools and playgrounds. It will argue that the models of literacy we need to apply to such phenomena need to be multimodal, ranging from language and music to embodied modes and code as mode. It will also emphasise the need to connect folkloric, developmental and media-based conceptions of play, not only to promote necessary interdisciplinary inquiry, but to do justice to the border-crossing nature of children’s on communicative and cultural lives.
Burn, A (2014) ‘Role-Playing’. In Wolf, M and Perron, B (eds) The Routledge Companion to Videogame Studies. London: Routledge.
Burn, A and Richards, C (ed) (2014) Children’s games in the new media age: Childlore, Media and the Playground. Farnham: Ashgate
Marsh, J. (2006) Global, local/ public, private: Young children’s engagement in digital literacy practices in the home. In Rowsell, J. and Pahl, K. (eds) Travel Notes from the New Literacy Studies: Case Studies in Practice. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. pp19-38
Marsh, Kathryn. 2008. The Musical Playground: Global Tradition and Change in Children’s Songs and Games. New York: Oxford University Press.
Widdowson, J. D. A. 2001. “Rhythm, Repetition, and Rhetoric: Learning Language in the School Playground.” In Play Today in the Primary School Playground, J. Bishop and M. Curtis, eds., Philadelphia: Open U. Press, pp. 135-51.
Willett, R, Bishop, J, Jackie Marsh, M, Richards, R & Burn, A (2013) Children, Media And Playground Cultures: Ethnographic studies of school playtimes. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.