Responsive play: Creating transformative classroom spaces through play as a reader response

Abstract

This eight-month study, conducted in a first-grade classroom in the southwestern United States, analyzed young children's playful responses to literature. It focuses on framing a theory that underpins play as a form of reader response, which I term ‘responsive play’. It further aims to answer the overarching research question and the sub-question: What are the affordances of play for responding to text in a first-grade classroom? What are the sociocultural resources that children use to respond to and make meaning with text? Findings suggest that the children in this study created a space for learning and understanding, through their responsive play, that allowed them to think through, demonstrate, and share their experiential knowledge, their funds of knowledge, and their intertextual knowledge – as sociocultural resources – and to connect these to their literacy learning as they cooperatively transacted with and responded to various books. These findings suggest that children's play, language, and literacy are complementary, that children's responsive play should be encouraged in the classroom setting, and that children's experiences and funds of knowledge should be valued as additive to the academic learning context. Implications of this study include that responsive play can be viewed as a generative source of academic learning and that the notion of reader response, in research and practice, can be reconceived to include responsive play.