Learning with padawans: Assemblages of nature play, playful media literacies and popular culture

The experience of playful nature-based contexts allows children to immerse themselves in the imaginary while connecting to the realities of the environment around them. The intra-actions between the environment and children’s everyday experiences of digital media, while potentially a challenging notion for adults, is aligned with children’s lived experience in a postdigital world. In Australia, there are growing numbers of nature-based, early childhood education and care (ECEC) contexts being applied as part of regular preschool programs. Australian nature-based ECEC approaches, often styled ‘bush kinder’, have been adapted from European forest kindergarten approach and sessions involve three- and four-year-old children spending 1 day a week in nature, to learn through self-directed nature play. Often, children’s discovery-based, nature play incorporates popular culture; what children see, hear and read forms part of the playful learning which can be enacted as children play in nature-based spaces. This paper draws upon an ethnographic study of bush kinders. Children’s play is described using vignettes to understand the experience of playful media literacies that develop as children encounter the entanglement of bush kinder, digital media and popular culture – as children engage in socio-dramatic play based on film franchises such as Star Wars , Jurassic Park and Peter Pan in bush kinder settings. Through analysing research in ECEC nature-based media literacy learning through a sociomaterial lens, we propose that nature-based contexts are important sites that afford opportunities for children to deepen their understanding of aspects of literacy through play that is connected to their lived digital experiences.