Emergent Literacies in ‘The Land of Do Anything You Want’
Margaret Somerville · Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks · 2015
Charmaine and her sister decided to walk with me to the river as part of our experiment. I had invited them to take part in a research project about their play over a 12 month period and on each occasion they chose the place where this would happen. The most common place for our experiment was the nearby river, although they also frequently chose places in their own backyard. They determined how I would be involved in their play and they knew that I had an iPhone with me to record some of the activities. The experiment was prompted by the analysis of two photographs of young children’s play using the concept of intra-action (Hultman & Lenz-Taguchi, 2010). The researchers compared a typical human-centred approach with a new materialist analysis of a girl playing with sand and another on a climbing frame in an early years learning setting. I became interested in designing a research project based on the concept of intra-action rather than this concept just being used as a lens for analysis. I wondered how one might design a project that begins with this perspective. What might be the best way to record children’s response to such a research design, and what insights could such an experiment offer? This chapter, including the transcript of Charmaine’s play at the river, is part of the process of figuring out the answer to these questions. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.