Journal of Early Childhood Literacy最新文献

{"title":"Playing outside of the lines: Exploring young Children’s emergent writing as practices of joy","authors":"Jaye Johnson Thiel","doi":"10.1177/14687984261489393","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14687984261489393","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores young children’s writing as an embodied, affective practice that extends beyond traditional pen-to-paper approaches. Using a qualitative data story from a summer writing camp, it examines how one child moves across building, drawing, play, and emergent letter formation over the course of a week. The analysis highlights writing as embodied, affective, and materially grounded, challenging developmental models that position literacy as a linear progression toward becoming literate. Instead, the paper frames writing as an expansive, joyful practice that is already present in young children’s everyday engagements with the world.","PeriodicalId":47033,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Early Childhood Literacy","volume":"19 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2026-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149124043","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Playful literacies in early childhood: Toddlers’ embodied engagements with interactive board books in kindergarten","authors":"Monica Gjelsten","doi":"10.1177/14687984261491031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14687984261491031","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines how toddlers aged one to three engage with interactive board books as part of playful and embodied literacy practices in everyday early childhood education contexts. While shared reading with young children has been widely studied, less attention has been directed towards how toddlers participate in literacy events through bodily and sensory interaction with books. Drawing on a small-scale ethnographic study conducted in a Norwegian kindergarten, the article explores shared reading encounters involving interactive board books featuring tactile and sensory elements such as textures, flaps, and finger puppets. The empirical material consists of participant observations, field notes, and interviews with early childhood educators collected over a seven-week period. Through vignette-based analysis, the study demonstrates how toddlers engage with books through movement, touch, imitation, repetition, and shared attention rather than through linear progression through verbal text. Interactive book features function as material anchors that organise participation and sustain engagement, enabling children to explore books through sensory and affective interaction. The findings further show how educators support these literacy events through attuned participation, adjusting tempo and following children’s initiatives rather than directing the activity. By foregrounding toddlers’ embodied encounters with interactive books, the study extends the concept of playful literacies to children under the age of three and highlights the role of materiality and embodiment in early literacy participation.","PeriodicalId":47033,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Early Childhood Literacy","volume":"54 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2026-09-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149124046","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The playful entanglements of very young children’s intergenerational video calls across cultures and languages: More-than-human perspectives","authors":"Rosie Flewitt, Sandra El Gemayel, Lorna Arnott, Julia Gillen, Janet Goodall, Karen Winter, Andrew Dalziell, Min-Chen Liu, Sabina Savadova, Sarah Timmins","doi":"10.1177/14687984261487537","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14687984261487537","url":null,"abstract":"The United Kingdom is home to a culturally and linguistically diverse population of young children living in families where digital technologies offer unprecedented opportunities to develop multiliteracies across languages. Many babies and toddlers born into multilingual families take part in online video calls, often on smart phones or tablets, to connect with distant family and to engage in culturally and linguistically diverse intergenerational play practices. Exploring the phenomenon of young children’s intergenerational video calls through the findings of the recent ESRC-funded Toddlers, Tech and Talk study, in this paper we consider the potential of digital media to support children’s emergent multilingual play and culturally rich multiliteracies learning. Despite an increase in research about young children’s digital lives, very few studies have considered the impact of this phenomenon on multilingual children aged under 3 years. Drawing on a sample of 40 co-conducted case studies with diverse families at home in the UK, we present novel insights into how intergenerational video calls enabled emergent multilingual children aged from birth to 36 months to forge and maintain affective bonds with distant loved ones and to learn about culturally significant stories and artefacts from their multilingual heritage. We adopt more-than-human perspectives to explore how affect, place, space, materiality and the sensory richness of children’s bodies were integral to how they built their multiliteracies and multilingual confidence. We suggest that thinking with more-than-human theory makes visible the nuances and complexity of online communication that characterise contemporary communicative practices.","PeriodicalId":47033,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Early Childhood Literacy","volume":"22 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2026-09-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148993721","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Touch, trouble, trace: Found poetry and living literacies through material play","authors":"Jamie Leach, Melissa Bishop, Sarah Reddington","doi":"10.1177/14687984261487659","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14687984261487659","url":null,"abstract":"This study explores playful literacies as relational, embodied, and materially entangled forms of meaning-making in early childhood contexts. Grounded in living literacies scholarship ( <jats:xref ref-type=\"bibr\">Pahl and Rowsell, 2020</jats:xref> ) and relational perspectives on literacy ( <jats:xref ref-type=\"bibr\">Lysaker, 2018</jats:xref> ), the research explores how playful literacies emerge not through reading and writing but rather through situated encounters with materials. Data were generated through a multimodal approach, inviting children aged four to five to engage with two distinct material configurations: loose parts (e.g., cardboard boxes, bubble wrap) and physical education equipment (e.g., tunnel, pylons). Using found poetry as a form of analysis, the study attends to the situated gestures, sound rhythm, movements, and emergent material interactions as forms of literary/literacy expression, exceeding conventional language-centred frameworks. Findings are organized through the poetic movements of Touch, Trouble, and Trace (e.g., Touch representing initial material contact; Trouble: spaces of transformation, rupture, and imagination; Trace: observing children’s engagement with objects as they exceeded their physical boundaries), illustrating how literacy emerges through situated encounters and material transformation. The findings demonstrate that literacy is not an individual skill possessed by children, but an ongoing and distributed process continually made and remade through multimodal relations among bodies, objects, and space. Materials function as active participants in meaning-making, shaping possibilities for movement, collaboration, inclusion, exclusion, and imaginative becoming. The study contributes to reconceptualizations of early childhood literacy by foregrounding literacy as multimodal, affective, spatial, and materially mediated, while also highlighting the value of multimodal methodologies for engaging in the complexity of children’s playful-meaning-making.","PeriodicalId":47033,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Early Childhood Literacy","volume":"47 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2026-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148993720","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“I am the only one doing anything at all here”: Sponsored, shared, and felt unplugged videogame play in Nordic Early Childhood Education and Care classrooms","authors":"Kenneth Pettersen, Jennifer Rowsell","doi":"10.1177/14687984261488157","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14687984261488157","url":null,"abstract":"Young children create broader playscapes by moving fluidly between devices and surrounding artefacts and invoking screens and nondigital interfaces—enacting playful literacies of unruly affect and patterned discourse. We present findings from a video-ethnographic case study of three play sessions with four children, ages 3–5 with varied gaming experiences, in a Norwegian Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) classroom. Using an elevated stage, blocks, wooden stair structures, and printed Super Mario imagery, they assemble and enact an “unplugged videogame.” Shared Social Practices (SSP), Collaborative Affective Attunement (CAA), and sponsors of literacy were primary analytical concepts, referring respectively to routinized ways of engaging in literacies, unpredictable atmospheres and intensities which propel literacies in action, and structuring agents carrying the ideological freight of literacies. Our research questions were: in our case of unplugged videogame play in a Nordic ECEC classroom, how do SSP and CAA emerge through young children’s playful literacies, and; how are SSP and CAA of young children’s playful literacies sponsored? Our findings show that discursive–affective features of play, sponsored by Super Mario, such as composing their course in adherence with Super Mario lore or invoking shared felt histories with Super Mario, could propel relational moments of unpredictability. However, one child’s vigor in establishing and maintaining SSP of and evoking shared felt histories with Super Mario, constrained the emergence of CAA and SSP, because of the diverse sets of familiarities with Super Mario. Other sponsors of literacy, such as ECEC ideologies, also intervened. When playing out a scaled-down version of Super Mario lore, children with diverse sets of familiarities with Super Mario exhibited more coordination and attunement in their play. Structuring agents, such as sponsors of literacy, must be considered in relation to both affective and discursive dimensions in analyses of young children’s messy and unpredictable play beyond-the-digital.","PeriodicalId":47033,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Early Childhood Literacy","volume":"7 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2026-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148993722","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Playworld Translanguaging: A place-based approach for translanguaging play pedagogy in early childhood","authors":"Christine Robinson, Carly Steele, Toni Dobinson, Grace Oakley, Samina Manado, Katie Grace, Graeme Gower","doi":"10.1177/14687984261488127","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14687984261488127","url":null,"abstract":"Conceptualised from a vision to honour children’s languages, agency and cultural ways of knowing, this research presents findings from a place-based translanguaging play pedagogy for early childhood called Playworld Translanguaging. In the remote Kimberley of Western Australia, researchers collaborated with educators in a Kindergarten/Primary/Yr 1 class of mostly Aboriginal children who have Bardi Jawi as their ancestral language, co-designing ways to revitalise this language through play pedagogy in ways intimately connected to place. Our Playworld Translanguaging approach reimagined Conceptual PlayWorlds (Fleer, 2018) with the intention of integrating pedagogical translanguaging. Following Indigenist research principles, critical participatory action research (CPAR) was the selected methodology, drawing on Rigney’s (2020) epistemic view of the Aboriginal child as a knowledge producer and recognising language and culture embodied in place as assets for learning. Of significance, Playworld Translanguaging provided an authentic affordance of a playful literacy approach that encompassed place-based pedagogy for language and literacy learning. The approach enabled participating children to draw on their cultural and linguistic funds of knowledge, and identity, to inform the co-construction of play, offering the potential to challenge thinking on how educators can authentically draw on, and build upon, children’s language in educational settings to investigate both who they are and what they know.","PeriodicalId":47033,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Early Childhood Literacy","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2026-09-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148946850","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"She is so cute. I love her.\u0000 — Exploring ecological literacy through acts of spontaneous anthropomorphism in kindergarten","authors":"Lisa Annika Brandt,Soern Finn Menning,Merete Lund Fasting","doi":"10.1177/14687984261487658","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14687984261487658","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores three examples of kindergarten children spontaneously anthropomorphizing more-than-humans while outdoors, and the kindergarten staff’s reaction to this. The examples derive from an ethnographic study on kindergarten children who travel by boat 3 days a week to the unpopulated island of Bragdøya in Kristiansand, Norway. Mobilizing Maclure’s interpretation of Massumi’s exemplary method, we use these examples to contribute to discussions of ecological literacy by exploring how spontaneous anthropomorphism may shape the development of care and knowledge in children’s encounters with the more-than-human world. Our analysis points to spontaneous anthropomorphism being a relevant arena for helping children balance intuitive care for and knowledge about more-than-human entities. This balance might be achieved through staff members softly guiding the children toward a form of enlightened anthropomorphism, even though not all situations are suitable for such an undertaking. Furthermore, reflecting on one’s own relation to more-than-humans as a basis for supporting children in their development of care toward these entities appears to be a relevant area of reflection among pedagogical staff. Overall, acts of spontaneous anthropomorphism may constitute important pedagogical moments through which ecological literacy is negotiated and developed.","PeriodicalId":47033,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Early Childhood Literacy","volume":"73 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2026-09-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148933985","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Animating families’ playful idiocultures through parental co-design and participatory analysis: examining how caregivers promote young children’s rightful presence","authors":"Jon M Wargo","doi":"10.1177/14687984261488137","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14687984261488137","url":null,"abstract":"In early literacy research, recognizing play as literacy is relatively commonplace. From examining child-produced artifacts to untangling the knots of new imaginative universes, scholars have examined early learners’ playtexts as unique and consequential products of inquiry. Despite this surplus of literature focused on the objects of play, there is a relative dearth of research examining how families might read and analyze the relational aspects of children’s play. Seeking to contribute to this nascent conversation, in this article, I draw on qualitative data generated through a 6-week ethnographic inquiry across an integrative science–literacy unit. Through sustained participant observation, annotated memoirs, instructional artifacts, design interviews, and take-home extension activities, I foreground family idiocultures, the lived repertoires and communicative dynamics intrinsic to caregivers and their children. With codesign and co-analysis as my primary objects of analysis, two research questions guided this study: (1) How are families’ playful idiocultures animated through participatory codesign and co-analysis? (2) How do children actively (re-)create moments of inquiry and learning via early authorship practices? By privileging participatory design and subject–subject relationality, the findings presented herein affirm children’s and families’ rightful presence in school and challenge dichotomies between home and formal education. In animating the relational, innovative, and sometimes underestimated aspects of playful literacies, this article demonstrates how playful early (co)authoring fosters community, memory, and meaningful partnerships among teachers, families, and young writers.","PeriodicalId":47033,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Early Childhood Literacy","volume":"78 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2026-09-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148933980","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Digging with/in the spectacular: Child-dirt storied worlds","authors":"Kim Lenters, Ronna Mosher","doi":"10.1177/14687984261479415","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14687984261479415","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper, we explore the narrative play, or what we are calling storied play, of a group of first-grade children over the course of a year in their suburban schoolyard, with particular attention to how the lively assemblages in which activities of digging in and with the dust/mud/snow of a well-trodden piece of land animate storied worlds and relational ontologies. Our purpose is twofold: to think with and about the unlikely spaces in which children’s playful literacies erupt, unfold, coalesce, break apart, and re/connect; and to explore small moments in children’s play that work in generative ways to not only increase their capacity for storying but also to open up opportunity for ethical relationality with each other and with their landscape. Thinking with a critical posthuman understanding of life lived in social and material assemblage, and a reconceptualization of the “spectacular,” we share three troubled stories replete with possibility and contradiction associated that emerge with/in the children’s playful, storied digging. The bare earth of their play space was, for the adult eye, a visually bleak site; yet it was a space that teemed with possibility for the children. The troubled stories that emerge in this expanse animate the way the spectacular can erupt from the mundane in the quotidian contact zone of imagination and landscape of children’s play. They also highlight the relational and literate possibilities that emerge when storied play is given space to germinate and flourish in early learning settings.","PeriodicalId":47033,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Early Childhood Literacy","volume":"10 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2026-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148810007","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Learning with padawans: Assemblages of nature play, playful media literacies and popular culture","authors":"Amanda Levido, Christopher Speldewinde","doi":"10.1177/14687984261480475","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14687984261480475","url":null,"abstract":"The experience of playful nature-based contexts allows children to immerse themselves in the imaginary while connecting to the realities of the environment around them. The intra-actions between the environment and children’s everyday experiences of digital media, while potentially a challenging notion for adults, is aligned with children’s lived experience in a postdigital world. In Australia, there are growing numbers of nature-based, early childhood education and care (ECEC) contexts being applied as part of regular preschool programs. Australian nature-based ECEC approaches, often styled ‘bush kinder’, have been adapted from European forest kindergarten approach and sessions involve three- and four-year-old children spending 1 day a week in nature, to learn through self-directed nature play. Often, children’s discovery-based, nature play incorporates popular culture; what children see, hear and read forms part of the playful learning which can be enacted as children play in nature-based spaces. This paper draws upon an ethnographic study of bush kinders. Children’s play is described using vignettes to understand the experience of playful media literacies that develop as children encounter the entanglement of bush kinder, digital media and popular culture – as children engage in socio-dramatic play based on film franchises such as <jats:italic toggle=\"yes\">Star Wars</jats:italic> , <jats:italic toggle=\"yes\">Jurassic Park</jats:italic> and <jats:italic toggle=\"yes\">Peter Pan</jats:italic> in bush kinder settings. Through analysing research in ECEC nature-based media literacy learning through a sociomaterial lens, we propose that nature-based contexts are important sites that afford opportunities for children to deepen their understanding of aspects of literacy through play that is connected to their lived digital experiences.","PeriodicalId":47033,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Early Childhood Literacy","volume":"9 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2026-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148809950","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}