Wayfaring through and beyond the picturebook: An ethical overlaying approach to early years playful literacies

This research contributes to early childhood education, research, and practice by offering a new approach that intentionally invites interruptions and disruptions to the reading process to engage imagination within co-created story playworlds. In this paper we define our place-based approach to playful literacies, examining the mediating effect of book-as-thing as we journey through and beyond the reading encounter. Drawing from the ongoing, longitudinal study Reading with Children, which has worked with over 70 children over a four-year period, we outline an ethical approach for researchers and professionals working with children to engage in a playful literacies-based approach to readerly encounters. Our work contributes to knowledge of how children engage with reading through imaginative, place-based, embodied play and we present here our theoretical approach for the combined multi-layered model of book-as-thing and the co-constructed playworlds. Our ethical overlaying approach is theoretically grounded in bringing the playworld to the forefront and making it present. Through presenting ethically overlayed stories, images, and transcripts, we stack these as layers of analysis of the reading events themselves understanding these as lines into a meshwork (Ingold, 2011) that offer multiple pathways of interpretation and understanding whilst respecting the children’s agencies. In our model of playful literacies, Ingold’s wayfaring (2007) offers an attunement to place, people and objects. The findings in this paper are framed as a retelling of a reading session, that builds on Nelson’s work on play and literacies (2022) and Smith’s work on enchantment and storytelling (2024), that is sensitive to the post-human, the ethical realities of representing children in research, and pays attention to the journeying of material properties of the things, places, and humans present.