Guest editorial: Playful literacies across ages and contexts: new horizons for pleasure, affect, and living texts

During the COVID-19 pandemic, educators observed increased student stress and disconnection in formal learning environments, whereas young people turned to playing, gaming and collaborative writing to cultivate connections during this upheaval. Using Thiel's previous theoretical work, Woodard and colleagues explore playful dramatizing, multimodal composing and science learning through one fourth-grade girl's video about food chains. [...]Beauchemin and Qin take up affect as relational and performed forces that emerge from the inbetweenness among people, objects and material and discursive contexts. [...]in "Press Play,” community leader Karl André St-Victor describes how playful practices at Chalet Kent, a community youth center in Montréal, sustain strong senses of belonging and companionship among youth and center staff.