Digging with/in the spectacular: Child-dirt storied worlds

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.