Creating Inclusive and Compassionate Spaces through Playce-based Learning

Submitted by: Shelley Stagg Peterson
Abstract: Our recent partnership involved collaborative action research with rural educators in northern Canadian communities to support 3- to 7-year-old students’ oral/written language development. To address the conference sub-theme of language, literature, place, and context, we introduce our theory of language, literacy, identity, power, and culture, we call playce-based learning. Drawing on dominant assumptions from sociocultural theories of language, literacy, and play (e.g., Bodrova & Leong, 2015; Street, 1984; Vygotsky, 1962) and from place-based and place-conscious learning (e.g., Gruenwald, 2003), playce-based learning (Authors, 2022) understands play and oral/written language as social practices contextualized within places. Place is viewed as more than a backdrop to play and young children’s language and literacy learning. Through direct experiences with real-life events and materials within the local environment, children construct identities while engaging in meaning making.

We suggest that a playce-based learning perspective is especially important to teachers and researchers working in the remote northern Canadian communities in which our participants live, work, and learn, whose everyday interactions are situated in social and physical environments that are quite different from the southern urban communities of most language and literacy research. We use a playce-based lens to examine students’ language/literacy learning in a sample of sites from our recent partnership, considering the guiding question, how educators and researchers might create inclusive and compassionate spaces.

We analyzed videos of children engaging in activities related to 10 of the research projects, field notes from meetings with educators, and samples of children’s texts created during the activities, in terms of the interplay between the educators’ and children’s actions and the context in which the activity took place. Our preliminary analysis found educators drew elements from play and place-based education to create activities such as building roads in and creating road signs for the sandbox, and applying for a license, and then ‘fishing’ through a hole in ‘ice’. We suggest these activities transformed dominant assumptions of rurality, rendering them more relevant to the children’s lives and experiences, and scaffolded children’s learning about community and their learning of literacies. Thus, through these activities, educators created inclusive and compassionate spaces for learning.

References

Authors. (2022).
Bodrova, E., & Leong, D. J. (2015). Vygotskian and post-Vygotskian views on children’s play. American Journal of Play, 7(3), 371-388. Retrieved from https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1070266.pdf
Gruenwald, D. A. (2003). Foundations of place: A multidisciplinary framework for place-conscious education. American Educational Research Journal, 40(3), 619-654. https://doi.org/10.3102%2F00028312040003619
Street, B. (1984). Literacy in theory and practice. Cambridge University Press.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1962). Thought and language. MIT.