Unfolding joy in young children’s literacy practices in a Finnish early years classroom

Alexandra Nordström,Kristiina Kumpulainen,Antti Rajala

doi:10.1177/14687984211038662

Alexandra Nordström, Kristiina Kumpulainen + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.1177/14687984211038662

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This article examines the unfolding joy in young children’s literacy practices in a Finnish early years classroom. We focus on the unfolding of joy in intra-action among children, adults and materials during literacy learning endeavours by thinking with new materialist theories, and the data from an early years multiliteracies project named The Storybook. Our goal is to draw attention to the material and relational dimensions of young children’s joy in its moment-to-moment unfoldings by examining how joy unfolds unexpectedly in a moment when children, adults, Storybooks and other material resources intra-act.

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Affect and emotion play a pivotal role in young children’s literacy practices and in literacy learning and teaching (Burnett and Merchant, 2018)
By drawing on a new materialist perspective, we attend to joy as extensively entangled with children, materiality and early literacy learning and teaching
We argue that an understanding of the nuances of affective intensities and their entanglement with literacy practices is essential for unpacking the complexity of literacy learning and for creating fruitful conditions for joy in early years classrooms

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Affect and emotion play a pivotal role in young children’s literacy practices and in literacy learning and teaching (Burnett and Merchant, 2018). We are interested in the emergence and unfolding of positive affect, i.e., joy, in young children’s literacy activities, as it is known to be an important part of children’s literacy learning and wellbeing (Burnett and Merchant, 2018; Murray and Palaiologou, 2018). In this study we adopted a new materialist perspective to investigate the unfolding of joy in children’s literacy practices in a Finnish early years classroom. By drawing on a new materialist perspective, we attend to joy as extensively entangled with children, materiality and early literacy learning and teaching. We hold that a new materialist perspective can widen our understanding of joy as something relational and collective, as vitally related to a multitude of others (human and material) (see Braidotti, 2018)

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