Touch, trouble, trace: Found poetry and living literacies through material play

Abstract

This study explores playful literacies as relational, embodied, and materially entangled forms of meaning-making in early childhood contexts. Grounded in living literacies scholarship ( Pahl and Rowsell, 2020 ) and relational perspectives on literacy ( Lysaker, 2018 ), the research explores how playful literacies emerge not through reading and writing but rather through situated encounters with materials. Data were generated through a multimodal approach, inviting children aged four to five to engage with two distinct material configurations: loose parts (e.g., cardboard boxes, bubble wrap) and physical education equipment (e.g., tunnel, pylons). Using found poetry as a form of analysis, the study attends to the situated gestures, sound rhythm, movements, and emergent material interactions as forms of literary/literacy expression, exceeding conventional language-centred frameworks. Findings are organized through the poetic movements of Touch, Trouble, and Trace (e.g., Touch representing initial material contact; Trouble: spaces of transformation, rupture, and imagination; Trace: observing children’s engagement with objects as they exceeded their physical boundaries), illustrating how literacy emerges through situated encounters and material transformation. The findings demonstrate that literacy is not an individual skill possessed by children, but an ongoing and distributed process continually made and remade through multimodal relations among bodies, objects, and space. Materials function as active participants in meaning-making, shaping possibilities for movement, collaboration, inclusion, exclusion, and imaginative becoming. The study contributes to reconceptualizations of early childhood literacy by foregrounding literacy as multimodal, affective, spatial, and materially mediated, while also highlighting the value of multimodal methodologies for engaging in the complexity of children’s playful-meaning-making.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 2026 · DOI ↗