Entangling Play & Literacy Learning
Anchored by the Playful(l) Literacies Project (Lenters & Mosher), this strand of my research examines children’s play as a critical literacy practice in and out-of-school. It seeks to dis/entangle literacy instruction by providing an important counterbalance to the kinds of narrowly defined, lock-step, isolated decoding/encoding skills approach to reading and writing currently being promoted by several curricular bodies throughout Canada. Such an approach fails to recognize the myriad ways children come to be literate and very often places children of diverse linguistic, cultural, social, and economic backgrounds in peril.
The project has involved partnering with the Calgary Public Library (CPL) in children’s outdoor literacy programming, as well as teachers and students in Rocky View School District classrooms. In these endeavours, we have been able a) to assist library and classroom educators with engaging in outdoor explorations that connect literacy learning to outdoor spaces in ways work to disrupt typical (and often colonized) approaches to both children’s literacies and outdoor play; and b) to assist first grade classroom educators in expanding typical pencil and paper approaches to writing instruction, incorporating play (small world, loose parts, drama) as an important element in their practice of writer’s workshop. Our educators have reported that these approaches have helped them examine the bases for their pedagogical approaches, given new life to their literacy pedagogy, and dramatically improved children’s engagement with the process of both storied and informational writing.
Humour in the Classroom
This research strand has also involved working with humour in the elementary school classroom. With the aim of creating and examining innovative and productive spaces for children and youth of diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds to engage in multimodal composition this work has explored the question of how educators, working with educational scholars and experts in the community, might build classroom environments that open up the possibilities for engaging with literacy. The Kids Creating Comedy: Multimodal Literacies through Parody and Satire project (Lenters, 2014-2017; 2018-2020) did just this. In the first phase, we interviewed local professional comedians to gain their insights on how working with comedy might expand children’s language and literacy learning. In the second part of this first phase, we brought one of the comedians into a local school to work with 50 culturally and linguistically diverse 5th-grade students and their teachers. Phase II involved a 6th grade classroom and examined the ways that engaging students in improvisational comedy (improv) served to develop language and literacy learning.
Media
Podcasts
Lenters, K., & Avramenko, J. (forthcoming). The role of humour in the classroom. A podcast episode for the PodClass podcast, a podcast series with host Elizabeth Tingle titled, Conversations on School Health.
Captivate | Spotify | Apple
Brownell, C., Bucholtz, B., Lenters, K., Wohlwend, K., & Yoon, H. (2022, Mar 4). Play literacies. A group interview for the AERA Writing & Literacies SIG Podcast.
Publications
Lenters, K., Mosher, R., & Hanzel, S. (under review). Playing with/in Story Workshop in the Literacy Classroom. The Reading Teacher.
Mosher, R., & Lenters, K. (in press). Boxed In and-and Busting Out: Playing in the Borderlands of Literacy Education. An article for the special issue, “Literacy Teachers Navigating Turbulent Times in Canada”, Language & Literacy.
MacDonald, J., Lenters, K., Mosher, R. (2024). Seeking kinship relationality in a play-based community literacy program. Children’s Geographies. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2024.2352365
Lenters, K., Mosher, R., & Hanzel, S. (2023). Unsettling childhood literacies: Contamination as collaboration in transmedia encounters. An article for the special issue, Playful Literacies across Ages and Contexts, English Teaching: Practice & Critique 22(2), 208-220. https://doi.org/10.1108/ETPC-08-2022-0123
Lenters, K., Mosher, R., MacDonald, J. (December 2022 online early view). Playing the Story: Learning with Young Children’s In/visible Composing Collaborations in Outdoor Narrative Play. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy (JECL). https://doi.org/10.1177/14687984221144231
Mosher, R., Lenters, K., & Boss, H. (2023). Play and literacy learning in grades 1 and 2: An exploratory study of teacher perspectives. Alberta Journal of Educational Research (69)2, 207-232. https://doi.org/10.11575/ajer.v69i2.75043
Lenters, K., & Whitford, A. (2020). Making macaroni: Classroom improv for transformative embodied critical literacy. English Teaching: Practice & Critique (19)4, 463-478.
McDermott, M., & Lenters, K. (2020). Youth reassembling difficult topics through humour as boundary play. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 29(1), 155-172.
Lenters, K., & Smith, C. (2018). Assembling improv and collaborative story building in language arts class. The Reading Teacher, 72(2), 179-189.
Lenters, K., & Whitford, A. (2018). Failing with grace: Kids, improv, and embodied literacies. Literacy, 52(3), 117-127.