ABSTRACT
This chapter examines literacy research that looks beyond print to recognize the action texts in young children's media production and to better understand the mutually constitutive relationships among play and making in contemporary childhoods. It draws upon contemporary research on imagination and literacies as social action, looking at the nexus of play and making as site of collective meaning-making and cultural production that contests and reinscribes boundaries in digital cultures, resonates and ruptures dominant discourses, and mobilizes youth and materials. The chapter surveys emerging theories and research that show the impact on children's learning and participation in classrooms of playful literacies and practices of making within collective imaginaries that circulate in and through childhoods. Theories of spatialized literacies enable analysis of complexity of socio-material construction of space that laminates a there-and-then fantasy world onto a here-and-now classroom place, folding together layers of experienced and imagined space-times, as wrinkled as the paper Beast Quest map that carpeted the classroom floor.
