Playing together: Parents and children reading materials and spaces in a museum playscape

Background

Current literacy play research highlights the need for a better understanding of teaching possibilities for multimodal learning in children's play in immersive environments.

Purpose

To examine how parents respond to young children's reading and playing of action texts communicated by designs in toys in a museum playscape.

Participants

41 children, 1YO-8YO, participated in the study, including 27 girls and 14 boys.

Methods

Children wore chest-mounted GoPro cameras to capture their toy-handling and interactions with caregivers. First-person video data captured children's interactions with exhibit elements and adult guidance. Geosemiotic analysis of exhibit spaces, toy designs, and parent-child interactions located instances of intense toy-handling for multimodal analysis of parents' guided play that helped children enact expected actions with toys.

Results

Semiotic analysis of the designs of materials and space revealed artifactual and spatial action texts that children embodied multimodally through play. Familiar toys enabled free play and independent playing of action texts. Unfamiliar action texts in toys sparked guided play in two ways: 1) parental coaching from the side and 2) co-playing as parents enacted a play role to join the pretense. Parent's guided play connected medical toys to family's health practices to mediate children's recognition and playing of an action text's expected roles and practices.

Conclusion

When adults join children's embodied pretense in immersive play environments, co-playing interactions can flatten adult/child power relations while play coaching can reinscribe expectations for children's compliant direction-following. Further play research is needed in settings and disciplines beyond early childhood, language, and literacy education.