English Teaching: Practice & Critique: Volume 22 Issue 2

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

Christian Ehret, Tori K. Flint, Jayne Lammers, Alecia Marie Magnifico, Raúl Alberto Mora

Playful pluralities: exploring play and playful literacies across ages, spaces and places

Emily Mannard

Play and playful literacies shape essential spaces for belonging, connection, transformation and joy: from embodied immersions into fantasy worlds, to the creation of interest-led…

(De/re) territorializing writing/composition: becoming with playful objects through maker literacies

Jaye Johnson Thiel

Using a postqualitative inquiry approach, the purpose of this paper is to make sense of playful making events that took place at a community makerspace during an afterschool…

“I. Am. a. Star.”: exploring moments of muchness in children’s digital compositional play and embodied science learning

Rebecca Woodard, Amanda R. Diaz, Nathan C. Phillips, Maria Varelas, Rebecca Kotler, Rachelle Palnick Tsachor, Ronan Rock, Miguel Melchor

The purpose of this study is to examine playful practices in the science video composition of a fourth-grader.

Literary play gone viral: delight, intertextuality, and challenges to normative interpretations through the digital serialization of Dracula

Karis Jones, Scott Storm, Alex Corbitt

This study aims to explore the implications of a recent case in spring 2022 where the novel Dracula went “viral” as tens of thousands of Tumblr users participated in a serialized…

Bilingual teachers and young children co-constructing affect and play in translanguaging read-alouds

Faythe Beauchemin, Kongji Qin

Affect is central to the process of teaching and learning. The recent affective turn in literacy education has further underscored its critical potential as an act of resistance…

Unsettling childhood literacies: contamination as collaboration in transmedia encounters

Kimberly Lenters, Ronna Mosher, Stacey Hanzel

This paper aims to examine unexpected arrivals of adult-oriented digital media in the playful storied environments of Grades 1 and 2 classrooms and the possibilities such…

Tinkering toward teacher learning: a case for critical playful literacies in teacher education

Cherise McBride, Anna Smith, Jeremiah Holden Kalir

The purpose of this paper is to re-center playfulness as a humanizing approach in teacher education. As teachers navigate the current moment of heightened control, surveillance…

Play the game, live the story: pushing narrative boundaries with young adult videogames

Jack Theodoulou, Jen Scott Curwood

Videogames are complex, meaningful and multimodal texts. This study aims to explore how students could learn about narratives from, and be engaged by, playing a videogame and how…

Actually existing vitality rights: resisting neoliberal affects at a video game design camp

Bradley Robinson, William Terrell Wright

The purpose of this study is to demonstrate the power of affective pedagogies and playful literacies to resist neoliberal framings of video game play and design in educational…

Editorial: Press “play”

Karl-André St-Victor