Remixed Recipes and Mimicked Mentor Texts: Reading Young Children’s Play(Giarism) as Complex Scenes of Early Writing

Abstract

Questioning the common practice of treating texts as property that can be stolen and instead exploring the social and rhetorical dimensions that define what is owned (and what is not), as well as what can be taken and appropriated, I drew on data from a yearlong qualitative investigation of young children writing with technology to interrogate how one young child’s scene of play(giarism) can be rendered as consequential writing. Entering this work from a sociocultural perspective wherein literacy learning is intersubjective, findings highlight the descriptive contexts wherein individuality came to intersect with the politics of social belonging and academic obligation. Realizing individual freedoms through contesting compositional forms, play(giarism) meshes personal ways of being and knowing with the doing of (and sometimes disciplining from) others.