Author(iz)ing a Playground Game: “The Arguing Started Once the Rules Were Written Down”

Abstract

Using data from a 4-year longitudinal ethnography, this study moves from a classroom to the playground to examine a multiage community engaged in a deeply revered playground game with a history stretching back nearly a decade. Mediated discourse analysis is leveraged to examine the game’s historical nexus of practice, rooted in embodied and oral modes of transmission, and to understand how the nexus was transformed with the introduction of written transmission in the form of the first official rulebook. Contentious negotiations on the playground and in the classroom emerged regarding questions of textual ownership, authorship, and authority. Findings suggest that written text did not supersede oral transmission but instead prompted more talk as well as more writing. Significantly, making space for these negotiations created opportunities for writing to be(come) significant to children as children as they passionately and critically negotiated how to sustain their own collective brand of literacy.