Writing With Wearables? Young Children’s Intra-Active Authoring and the Sounds of Emplaced Invention

Drawing upon conceptual approaches in sound studies, posthuman literacies, and new materialisms, this article highlights how writing for young learners is always already an emplaced invention of withness. Zeroing in on a diffractive experiment of young children reauthoring Showers’s picture book, The Listening Walk, this study charts how the withness of writing is a communicative project that is all at once elliptical, relational, and coexistent. Reading the literacy desirings and material←→discursive intra-actions of 12 young children writing with wearables, the article illuminates how more-than-human ecologies of literacy amplify composition not as a practice of being, but of becoming. Thinking with Henriques’s conception of rhythmic elements (periodic pulses, reciprocal resonances, and oscillating overtures), findings are presented as strategic sketches. Attuning to writing as a more-than-human assemblage, this article pedagogically amplifies new be(com)ings of writing and literacy-in-action while theoretically resituating research as a process that thinks with.