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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.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, educators observed increased student stress and disconnection in formal learning environments, whereas young people turned to playing, gaming and collaborative writing to cultivate connections during this upheaval. Digital cultures as spaces to (re)imagine playful literacies in schools Conventionally, when people hear "video games", they often overlook their potential within classrooms and teacher education. [Extracted from the article]

This study took place in Habana, Cuba over approximately 1 year, wherein the researcher collaborated with Reggaeton artists. While scholarship in multimodality has explored its potentials for literacy pedagogy, developing new literacies, and expanding identity possibilities, less research has focused on the creation of the spaces, tools, and resources required for composing multimodal products and on the liberatory dimensions of multimodality. This study highlights the backstories of these production processes, including the innovative use(s) of spaces and tools, the resources leveraged in order to construct and distribute multimodal media, and the ways artists made meaning together. The findings elucidate the ways the artists leveraged their ingenuity, collaboratively developed digital literacy practices, and produced multimodal texts to create new possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]