Running Around in the Story: Un/Raveling Compositions of Narrative Play

Abstract

In this article we examine young children's outdoor narrative play as animated by the possibilities of running. Guided by posthuman perspectives, the provocations of sociomateriality, and the capacities of mycelial networks, we consider how stories and storying might occur in and as movement. We draw on interdisciplinary understandings of moving lines to map, analyze, and reimagine the compositional dynamics of two assemblages of outdoor narrative play. Following the compositional lines of these assemblages, we reencounter narrative play as embodied and moving occurrences in the indeterminate, overlaying, and un/raveling movements of a relational world. We come to see stories as other than objects of uniquely human composition, but rather as material, authoring subjects entangled in the unfolding of children's literacies and the dynamics of narrative play. We suggest attention to and engagement in such understandings as part of the living lines though which literacy education might newly tell stories about stories.

Keywords

narrative play story literacy education posthumanism sociomateriality

The foundations of human living are deep, bone-felt stories told and heard across time and into which each life is written, stories that shape the scope of collective and individual vision and memory, and that continue to be written as they are lived out (Kimmerer, 2013). In many ways, lives are both the tell and telling of tales that make possible (to greater and lesser degrees) particular ways of being. As Le Guin (2019) has shown in her reimagining of the heroic narrative of much of the modern, Western, colonial, and overly human world, these foundational stories also shape what story and storying are thought to be. Her example of the Hero whose imperial nature seeks to mold story in his own image, who begins to decree that “the proper shape of the narrative is that of the arrow or spear, starting here and going straight there and THOK! hitting its mark (which drops dead)” (p. 34), is one that speaks to us as women, as literacy educators and researchers, and as inhabitants of the world and the particular places in which we abide.

A multitude of human and more-than-human voices tell the modern Western world it must change its relationship to both particular stories and what it thinks story is, what shape it takes, which voices it elevates, and who it writes in and out of being, if the ecological, political, and spiritual wounds (threatened species, ecosystems, nations, and peoples) currently borne by the world are to mend, and if new forms of relationality might shape the stories told and enacted in educational spaces and practices. The concept of the more-than-human is significant in this work. It resists the continual tendency toward human exceptionalism in the social and material world—accounting for the role of those considered inanimate or insentient in ongoing social and material relations, thereby leveling assumed hierarchies of being, voice, and story. For as Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013) has written (referencing ethnobotanist Gary Nabhan), “we can’t meaningfully proceed with healing, with restoration, without ‘re-story-ation’” (p. 9). And living toward restoration requires hearing and composing stories in reciprocity with those whose lives tell other tales, “neither beginning here and ending there nor vice versa” (Ingold, 2008, p. 1805), but interlacing along lines of relationship, “ravelling here and unravelling there” (p. 1807).

As literacy educators and researchers we are concerned with current overconfidences in fragmented and isolated autonomous skills (Street, 2003) and the accompanying diminishment of play in many educational settings. We are concerned with the ways in which the path to literacy is narrated in the human heroic singular, and often as one of a series of individualistic actions along a linear temporality of mastery. We are moved to participate in un/raveling¹ some of the primary narratives of literacy teaching, and to explore the entangled ethical, ontological, and epistemological possibilities that appear in the sometimes unruly pedagogical encounters and practices in which children play (Hackett, 2022; Jokinin & Murris, 2020; Thiel, 2020). In this article we begin with what might appear as an unruly question, yet one that opens a space of possibility for un/raveling familiar compositions of storied play.

“Can we go run around more in the story?”

This question was posed by an almost-5-year-old at the end of an outdoor play experience in which a group of children, a library play facilitator, a host of materials, and the momentum of stories previously read and played came together in various modes of care, surprise, and pursuit to create a story none of them might have anticipated or authored alone. As the children and play facilitator sat together with chalk and chalkboard remembering, drawing, and putting words to the story they had collectively enacted, the request to “go run around more in the story” seemed a bit out of place but also seemed to sit within, rather than seek an escape from, the discussion of the story's events. It seemed to call for something more within the story's possibilities. As we reflected on this moment and others from our time with the library story play program, we recognized that running and walking had been prevalent in a number of experiences.

Heeding the call of this child's question, and the work of Abigail Hackett and colleagues (Hackett, 2014; Hackett & Rautio, 2019; Hackett & Somerville, 2017) that recognizes children's walking and running “as a key element of their multimodal communicative practices” (Hackett, 2014, p. 5), we bring the idea that children's “walking and running must not be dismissed as the ‘noise’ that happens in between focused engagement and learning…but [should be seen] as a central aspect” of it (Hackett, 2014, p. 20) to our re-story-ation and observations of children's movements within outdoor story play experiences. In this article, we build on established understandings of the interdependent relationships between imaginative play and narrative, including an understanding of story as a text that may be enacted by moving bodies (Nicolopoulou, 2016; Paley, 1990) and a complementary understanding of “play as a literacy that writes with bodies” (Wohlwend, 2019, p. 308), to explore embodied experiences of interpreting and composing stories within children's outdoor play.

In doing so, we are guided by posthuman sociomaterial scholars attuned to the agency ignited when children and materials assemble in play and by a consideration of story itself as a material participant in that assemblage. We engage Tim Ingold's (2016) work on storytelling, writing, and walking as related and relational inscriptive practices, along with his suggestion that stories might be understood as entangled, ever-ramifying lines and through the possibilities of movement they create. We ask how the experiences of children and stories playing-with, composing-with, and running-with one another might open new understandings of story and storied play.

In what follows we offer a brief review of the literature exploring the dynamic relationships between story and play and introduce our theoretical framings. We then describe and interpret two unfolding (and at times disorderly) instances of children and stories moving together amidst complex assemblages of human and more-than-human players. These storied encounters show children being invited into play and narrative possibilities through what is both present and absent in texts, moving into and along existing and emergent storylines, and participating in transformative processes between the traces and threads of narrative (Ingold, 2016). Following the compositional lines of these examples, we newly recognize story as a productive participant in the unfolding of storied play and reencounter storied play as embodied and moving occurrences in the indeterminate, overlaying, and un/raveling movements of a relational world. We suggest such movements as part of the living lines though which literacy education might renarrate its pedagogical engagement with children, play, and stories.

Children and Story Play

Play and Story as Complementary Forms of Narrative

A broad body of research has connected the symbolic actions of play and storytelling and shown how, in and through imaginative play, children enact narrative scenarios, negotiate the social and cultural resources of language and text, and reshape the delights and uncertainties of their daily lives (e.g., Dyson, 2020; Hà, 2022; Nicolopoulou, 2011, 2016, 2017; Wohlwend, 2013, 2019). As a “hot house for trying out ways of combining thought and language and fantasy” (Bruner, 1983, p. 69), imaginative play is seen as an important way in which children interpret and narrate the word, the world, and their social selves. As such, it is seen as a matter of tremendous educational significance. The work of early childhood educator Vivian Paley and sociocultural developmental psychologist Ageliki Nicolopoulou have been highly influential in this regard.

Paley's (1981, 1990, 2004) detailed classroom accounts of developing and using a storytelling and story-acting approach with 3- to 6-year-olds highlight the power of pretend play, storytelling, and collaborative dramatization. Her practices of scribing children's dictated stories and engaging children in enacting these stories under the direction of the child author have inspired teachers and researchers for more than 40 years and have been documented to promote children's narrative awareness, experimentation, and compositional sophistication (Binder, 2014; Cooper, 2009; Cremin et al., 2017; Lee, 2016, 2022; McNamee et al., 1985). Through decades of work focused on the relationships between children's narrative and cognitive development, the role of symbolic play in both, and the sociocultural contexts in which these processes occur, Nicolopoulou (e.g., 2007, 2011, 2018) and colleagues (e.g., Nicolopoulou et al., 2015) have brought empirical and theoretical acuity to many of Paley's insights. In studies examining the use of storytelling and story-acting processes in different environments (often preschool settings), Nicolopoulou and colleagues have documented the role of these processes in advancing a range of children's narrative abilities, emergent literacies, and social capacities. Together, Nicolopoulou's and Paley's work details the complementary multimodal relationships between storytelling as a discursive form of narrative and imaginative play as an enacted form. It enlivens the study of children's play and storytelling with the well-substantiated premise that children's imaginative play is “story in action, just as storytelling is play put into narrative form” (Paley, 1990, p. 4).

Indebted to yet expanding on the sociocultural and developmental legacies in which Nicolopoulou and Paley have formulated their work, a number of literacies researchers are looking beyond the idea of imaginative play as a “uniquely human activity” (Nicolopoulou, 2018, p. 183) to one in which humans play with and amidst the active imaginings of a more-than-human world. In this brief literature review, we now turn to researchers who question the ways play and narrative can be understood as human and more-than-human practices. Their work reexamines play and literacy within broad forms of relationality and recognizes children, materials, and immaterial forces as participants in assemblages of literate being and doing.

Play and Story in a More-Than-Human World

Sociocultural approaches to literacy recognize a wide range of modes, such as “image, writing, gesture, gaze, speech, posture,” as semiotic resources children use as communicative choices (Jewitt, 2011, p. 1). The importance of acknowledging the many modes with which children make meaning cannot be understated, but as Kuby and Crawford (2018) pointed out, the social emphasis in the sociocultural pertains to children doing “with each other” and doing “to materials” (p. 21). From a sociocultural point of view, the humans in the action are the only entities socially engaging with each other. As we discuss in more detail in our description of the theoretical framings of this study, a posthuman sociomaterial approach to childhood literacies considers a sense of the social in which children and materials and other more-than-human entities work with each other in literate engagements. Following from this decentering of the human, posthuman literacies researchers attend to more-than-human materials such as plants, animals, stones, toys, and media, as well as places and immaterial forces such as affect and cultural discourses, along with humans, as participants in literacy practices (e.g., Leander & Boldt, 2013; Thiel & Dernikos, 2020). Elsewhere, one of us (Kim) has argued that the expansions posthumanism offers to educators interested in multimodality can open up spaces for considering the “embodied aspects of meaning making, such as affect, relationship, movement, and place” and can attune us to what students are doing and where they might go with literacy (Lenters, 2018, p. 648).

Studies that attend to play as material-discursive encounters in which children, objects, and places play with and play back with each other (Rautio & Winston, 2015) are particularly informative for our study. This body of research moves considerations of literacy play from a focus on children's development to explorations of its affective and indeterminate dimensions. It maintains a focus on play as a form of live-action text (Lenters, 2016; Wohlwend, 2011) and literacy as enacted and embodied, extending the idea of body to encompass the more-than-human (Hackett & Somerville, 2017, p. 376). It gives new forms of attention to the “with-what of literacy events” (Baroutsis & Woods, 2019, p. 252) and how, in play, materials participate in the formation of texts, meanings, and children's ways of being / being literate / doing literacy.

Working with detailed and often extended observations of children at play, researchers have explored the participatory relationships between materials, places, and children in museums, community spaces, forests, homes, and classrooms. They have explored children's play with vibrant and tangible materials such as “art stuff” (Kuby et al., 2015); fabric and costumes (Thiel, 2015a, 2015b); sticks (Harwood & Collier, 2017); drums, mud, and water (Hackett & Somerville, 2017); and print and digital materials (Baroutsis & Woods, 2019; Burnett & Merchant, 2018; Leander & Boldt, 2013). They have also explored children's meaning-making with the equally vibrant but less tangible materiality of color and line (Murris, 2016) and movement and sound (Hackett & Rautio, 2019; Hackett & Somerville, 2017; MacRae et al., 2018; Wargo, 2018) and have considered language improvisations arising within intra-active play (Rautio & Winston, 2015). These studies have revealed multiple nuances with/in a growing understanding of children's playing with im/materials as “complex, embodied literacy work” (Thiel, 2015a, p. 46) and as a mutually constitutive “playing-with” and “thinking-with” more-than-human others (Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2017).

In this article we draw on elements within this body of research that see “play as responsive, relational, shifting, performative” encounters (Harwood & Collier, 2017, p. 339) in which materials, places, and children learn, communicate, and storytell together (p. 337). We seek to consider how story, as material, can invite children toward and away from particular relationships and influence the dynamics of their collective play and storying. We are interested in how experiences of moving and playing-with story might be reunderstood following Rautio and Winston's (2015) claim that “language is one ‘thing’ that plays with children” (p. 18).

Theoretical Framings

Our study is situated with and within posthuman sociomaterial theories. In it we work with considerations of story as an agentic material that participates in the processes of interpretation and composition. Theoretical perspectives from the anthropological and interdisciplinary work of Tim Ingold (2003, 2008, 2015, 2016) also shape our attention to and interpretation of the empirical materials generated during particular assemblages of outdoor storied play.

Posthumanism Sociomaterial Assemblage

As we consider how children and their literacy practices emerge, we are guided by posthuman assemblage perspectives that understand the human and more-than-human world as existing in nonhierarchical relation to one another (Braidotti, 2013; DeLanda, 2006; Deleuze & Guattari, 2004; Latour, 2005). Within this flattened hierarchy, the more-than-human and the human co-constitute the doings and becomings of the sociomaterial assemblage. By decentering the human, space is opened up for thinking about how members of an assemblage associate and work with each other in a subject–subject relationship, rather than one in which humans are the only beings with capacity to act upon another, a situation invoked through a subject–object relational arrangement. Additionally, the focus in posthuman assemblage perspectives is not one of asking what that assemblage is but rather, what that assemblage and its members can do. In relation to children's literacy learning, this leads to inquiry into the capacities of the more-than-human (such as place, mud, sound, and other lively stuff) and the human (such as children, educators, parents) to collectively engage with each other in communicative meaning-making.

Affect, Agency, and Lines in Assemblage

As members within this meaning-making assemblage engage with each other, affect is generated. Affect is recognized as a force, a stickiness, a resonance generated between members and as such, a key factor in that which attracts, motivates, and/or repels within an assemblage (Leander & Ehret, 2019; Massumi, 2015; Stewart, 2007). Similarly, agency is conceptualized as that which is created between participants in an assemblage as they come together in particular ways rather than as a quality or feeling that resides with or in a particular individual (Lenz Taguchi, 2010). This conceptual expansion from agency-as-possession to agency-as-a-force-in-between matters for literacy pedagogy, curriculum, and instruction, for it opens a focus on agency as that which generates or kindles other ways of being and doing (Lenters, 2022).

Assemblage as a Meshwork of Lines. Critiquing uses of assemblage theory in which the assemblage is utilized as a static container, Ingold (2015) reminded us that these collectives are dynamic and ever-evolving, “puls[ing] with vitality” (p. 6). Like Deleuze and Guattari's (2004) “lines of flight,” Ingold used the concept of lines to explain that the emergence of an assemblage comes from the movement within and overlaying of lines, as well as the lines that escape the collective. Thus, Ingold (2008) conceptualized an assembled social collective as a meshwork, “not as a self-contained object like a ball that can propel itself from place to place, but as an ever-ramifying bundle of lines of growth” (p. 1807). It is these ever-ramifying bundles of lines and their capacities that are of interest to us in the present examination of children's storying.

Mycelial Networking

In our exploration, we employ the concept of mycelia to examine these un/raveling bundles or meshworks of storying lines (Ingold, 2003; Sheldrake, 2020). Mycelia are the fungal networks that run beneath the entirety of the earth's surface, providing structural support to the surface (and its inhabitants), physically, chemically, and microbiologically (Sheldrake, 2020). As Sheldrake (2020) stated, they collectively form the “ecological connective tissue, the living seam by which much of the world is stitched into relation” (p. 46). Used conceptually, this important lifeform enables us to consider the in/visible movements attendant to and with/in children's storied play (see Lenters et al., 2023 for a fuller explication of this).

Mycelia's mechanism of growth informs our present discussion. For rather than growth that emanates from a single source, mycelia propels itself via its branching filaments, known as hyphae. Hyphae are found at the tips of fungal strands and grow, change direction, branch out, and coalesce by extending themselves. They move and grow out from the tip rather than by laying down new layers of cells (as is the case with most plant and animal life). This capacity allows fungal networks to both extend and retract, depending on environmental conditions and the needs of the network, using hyphae to sense, interpret, and respond to the world they encounter. As with the concept of assemblage, mycelia may be better understood for what it does, rather than what it is, for its ways are unpredictable and indeterminate; that is, it is “better thought of not as a thing but as a process: an exploratory, irregular tendency” (Sheldrake, 2020, p. 6). These processual lines of growth, then, can be said to have a life of their own, each in and of itself, with a capacity for ever-emerging self-ramification (Ingold, 2008). As we elaborate next, storied play, when thought of in this way, also has a capacity for exploratory and indeterminate self-propagation along multiple lines of growth.

The Materiality of Story and Text

The provocations of materiality offered by posthuman sociomaterial theorists are themselves entangled in other lines and circulations of thought. Of particular import for this article are the wisdoms of Indigenous onto-epistemologies as brought forward by authors like Thomas King (2003) and Richard Wagamese (2012) and the work of eco-phenomenologists and environmental literacy critics such as David Abram (1996) and Donna Haraway (2004). Individually and collectively, they have surfaced understandings of the world as storied, and matter as storied matter. Their insights have prompted linguists, curriculum scholars, and others for whom language is a compelling aspect of a dialogic and meaningful life to turn their attention to what new understandings might arise in considering language “outside of the usual information-communication model” (de Freitas & Curinga, 2015, p. 250) and its “single-track logic” (Ingold, 2016). A full exploration of this work is beyond the remit of this article, but we wish to draw attention to lines of thought that, like those animated by the material-discursive literacies scholars mentioned earlier, see “material expressiveness as the immediate point of contact between language and materiality” (e.g., Gahrn-Andersen, 2019). We also wish to acknowledge theoretical explorations that envision language as a material process and connect its material aspects to the capacities of texts to include their own “remainders” (Redhead, 2020)—that is, to be both fully present and full of potentiality at the same time. Our theoretical thinking is further enriched by perspectives that see the materiality of texts at play in the way they create meaning as they undo themselves and in how they emerge differently as they move across and among contexts (Shankar & Cavanaugh, 2017, p. 13). Materiality and story appear together as entanglements of expression, movement, and responsive transformation, and in the lively potential of as-yet-unrealized possibilities of composition.

Lines, Storytelling, and Movement

In much of his work, Ingold (2003, 2008, 2015, 2016) detailed a lifeworld conceptualized as an unbounded and entangled meshwork of lines and relationships. At times (e.g., Ingold, 2003), he evoked the ontologies and embodied intelligences of mycelial networks in relation to his conceptualization of lines. As anthropologist Anna Tsing (2015) and mycologist Merlin Sheldrake (2020) have shown, in attending to the sophisticated behaviors of mycelia and their world-making capacities, “some of the vexed hierarchies that underpin modern thought start to soften” (Sheldrake, 2020, p. 160). In Ingold's work, this includes how we might think of “things.”

Ingold (2016) suggested that we collectively “inhabit a world that consists, in the first place, not of things but of lines” (p. 5). He described stories as lines of relationship and the practices of storytelling as a weaving of vibrant lines of experience and encounter. “Walking, weaving, observing, singing, storytelling, drawing and writing,” wrote Ingold (2016), “all proceed along lines of one kind or another” (p. 1), with stories understood both through the lines of their formation and through the possibilities of movement they create for readers.

To tell a story, then, is to relate, in narrative, the occurrences of the past, retracing a path through the world that others, recursively picking up the threads of past lives, can follow in the process of spinning out their own. (Ingold, 2016, p. 93)

Stories are less the fixed linear texts or bounded objects of modern Western thought and many of its practices of schooling and more like lines of becoming in a relational world, ever-ramifying paths of growth and movement. Stories, like places, “do not so much exist as occur” (Ingold, 2008, p. 1808) or issue forth in movement. They form and reform in transformations of their entangled threads into enduring traces and in the dissolution of those traces into newly moving threads.

Through his study of the phenomenology of lines, Ingold (2016) described practices of movement in which a traveler or storyteller can be understood to move along rather than across ontological entanglements and lines of inscriptive practice. He described such a form of movement as one that “couples locomotion and perception” (p. 81) and in which the traveler and the line, or the storyteller and the story, are mutually entailed. Such movement is attentive to the places and relationships in which it might lay a trail, and unlike movement that is predominantly destination-oriented, the line of this movement is one of “continuous gesture” (p. 77). It can return to regenerate the texts and textures of places previously traveled and inhabited. It is a form of movement in which a line may advance from the tip or a story itself might go out for a walk (p. 78).

As we contemplate a restoration/re-story-ation of storied play, we argue for the necessity of unlearning straight-line logics and their hold on movement within and through stories. Attending to how entanglements and enmeshments are navigated, and to how encounters are revealed in paths of movement, can allow deeper participation in the network and bring new meanings of stories into being (MacDonald, 2020, 2022). Ingold offered a way to think of stories as social and mobile, with temporal, relational obligations to the past, the present, and the future, and through his conceptual affinities with the movements of mycelia, a way to understand stories as participating in and moving along lines already in motion, enfolding their histories into new moments of becoming.

Context and Methodology

Outdoor Story Play

The instances of children's storied play that engage and shape our attention in this article are ones of both local, situated practice and broad social-historical discourses that configure possibilities in literacy pedagogies. They are experiences we previously have written with or in close proximity to (Lenters et al., 2023; Lenters & Mosher, 2024) and ones whose entanglements in questions of story, play, literacies, and education continue to generate new possibilities for understanding and enacting storied play and literacy education.

These experiences played out in the preparations, voices, movements, landscape, materials, and relations of an outdoor story play program known as Pop-Up Play Stations (PUPS). The program was offered across two summers by the public library of a large western Canadian city and sought to engage young children, families, and caregivers in playful literacy explorations. Based in community parks within economically, culturally, and linguistically diverse neighborhoods, the drop-in program had a number of goals. One was to support early literacy and school readiness. Another was to engage families in the resources and programs of the library, and a third was to learn from these experiences and interactions through program reflections, iterations, and research. Led by the library's “Play Professor,” the library's term for an employee newly contracted to create welcoming, inclusive, and language-rich programs in and for these neighborhoods, and supported by a small group of librarians and the adults who accompanied the children to the play each day, multiple hopes for children's social and educational flourishing were infused in the program's design and unfolding.

Participants

The PUPS program encompassed a range of participants caught up together in the overall assemblage and the specific occurrences of storied play we describe. Among them were the trees, grass, sun, breezes, flowers, and shrubs that enlivened the play space and its stories, and at times, a harsher wind, wildfire smoke, or rain that prevented many of the other players from gathering. Small crawling and flying creatures, birds, and gophers moved in and out of the play. A paved walking path and an adjacent playground often drew children, families, and curious teens to the program. Typically, there would be three to 10 children (18 months to 8 years of age) and two to five family members or caregivers participating on any given day. Some children came to play just once and some came several times. Their parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and dayhome providers watched, encouraged, and joined in the play. Sometimes one and sometimes two librarians joined the Play Professor in leading the program, and one or more members of our research team (the three authors of this article and an undergraduate research assistant) were also regularly present. Our primary role was as observers, but on occasion the children included us in their play and stories, and we shared observations and questions with the Play Professor and librarians as the program unfolded. Additional participants included a bike trailer full of books and other playthings (some of which will appear in the specific instances of storied play we soon describe).

Empirical Materials

A multitude of empirical materials were generated throughout the study. These include field notes focused on both the events of storied play and the perceived affects and relations among the participants; reflective notes created by the Play Professor; photographs of the before, during, and after of play; email discussions; and recordings and transcripts from interviews with members of the library team and three parents/caregivers. Thinking with assemblage theory, we consider these materials as participants in both the pedagogical assemblage, as it unfolded in the outdoor space, and the research assemblage under examination. The specific instances of storied play featured in this article have been drawn from the researchers’ twice-a-week written and photographed observations and either written or oral reflections from the Play Professor across 8 weeks of one of the Pop-Up Play Stations’ two summers. They are ones in which the children's running and the stories’ composition appeared as deeply entangled.

Latour's Relational Actor Network Approach

For the analysis, we employed Bruno Latour's (2005) three-stage Actor-Network-Theory process, bringing it into conversation with Jackson and Mazzei's (2012) thinking with theory. Employing Latour's three stages, our analysis involved mapping the storied play assemblage, examining the assemblage, and addressing the relevance (the “so what?”) of the mapped findings. Latour asserted that the research must follow the participants, engaging in careful mapping that does not get ahead of participants with preformed hypotheses about what they are or should be doing. Heeding this instruction in stage 1, we spent considerable time mapping the movements of the human and more-than-human, drawing on our multiple sets of empirical materials, before looking for relationships (clusterings of intensity) within that mapping (stage 2). In stages 2 and 3, thinking with theory, we brought the concept of mycelial networking theory into the assemblage to bring clarity to the mapped happenings. These two stages will be found in the two stories immediately following this section. The third stage of the analytical process is presented in the discussion section (Attending to the Moving and Overlaying of Storylines)—where we brought the troubled stories of our data (Tsing, 2015) into conversation with Ingold (2016) and Sheldrake (2020).

Children and Story at Play

The storied play assemblages we relate within this article come from the first summer of the PUPS program. Before the program began, the Play Professor walked and biked through the neighborhoods where the play stations would be offered, seeking to attune to the places and stories with which the children and their families would be familiar. Working across ideas of storytelling, play, and place, she began to envision each play station location as the site of a multistoried quest. The two stories we share here, Storyways and Beaver's Lodge and Running with Beaver, emerged in a location in which a cluster of spruce trees, tucked into a corner of a large greenspace along a busy road, suggested a bit of northern forest in a space otherwise dominated by human/urban constructions. The walkway between the trees and the adjacent playground became a river from which stories of an adventurous trout, an industrious beaver, and other woodland and watery beings might find their way.

Storyways and Beaver's Lodge

On the first day at this site, already populated by the vibrancies and beings at home in the space, and now host to the hopes and intentions of the program, three families came to play. The Play Professor began the quest and the day's story by introducing a large fish made of corrugated plastic and shimmering paint. The fish was an Athabasca trout who had left her little stream to go into the big river. The Play Professor explained to the children that “the trout is very brave and wants to explore the river and see what the world is all about,” but she was also disoriented by loud noises coming from along the banks of the river. The trout needed the children's help to find a path to a neighboring beaver lodge.

The Play Professor brought out some colorful discs, hoops, and stepping stones and offered them as materials the children might use to make a path for the trout. The children and parents had just started on the first steps of the path when she checked that they had the destination in sight, that they could see the beaver lodge. The group's attention quickly shifted as the two oldest children and a slightly younger one spotted a small tent-like structure (the lodge) in the trees and burst away from the larger group to run toward it, triumphantly calling out about their find. As the younger children rushed toward the excitement, eager to help the lodge move to a new location deeper into the trees, the adults pulled them back to the planned narrative. The Play Professor raised the iridescent trout, and called out, “Help, help! I am lost! I can’t find my way to the beaver lodge,” and the parents led the younger children back to the materials and the task of building the now-clear path. Hand in hand and with spirited expressions of enthusiasm, the parents guided the children along, encouraging them to show the trout the way to the lodge. The adults repeatedly called and reached out to lead the children and materials away from the trees and the invitations of their canopied spaces. They expended considerable energy ensuring the children progressed along the story path and toward its destination.

Meanwhile, having burst out ahead of the planned narrative, the older children worked with some bamboo garden stakes from among the Play Professor's supplies and began to extend the lodge. Working together, they focused on the entrance to the beaver lodge and how the trout might get in. Perhaps drawing on some knowledge of beaver lodges and the role of hidden entrances in thwarting the access of predators, or perhaps motivated by some other experiences of hospitality, they created a welcoming entrance for the trout as a new friend. They built a channel that led from the river to the lodge and marked its entrance with an X so the trout would know it had arrived at the right place.

As the narrative of building out the entrance and welcoming the trout unfolded, the Play Professor and the younger children continued to focus on the hoop/disc/step path. With encouragement from the adults, the children spread small stones and flowers (fish food) over the path to entice the trout to swim in the right direction. The Play Professor and the children then picked up the trout and swam it along the route they had created, through the small channel, and inside the beaver lodge. Clapping her hands and calling out, “The end!,” the Play Professor declared the story to have reached its conclusion.

Running With Beaver

This second story is primarily presented through the happenings of a single morning early in September, but we also understand it as an emergence of an assemblage of players and play that cannot be held to a single date. It emerged from the full summer of play experiences and the stories that were created along the way. The morning we describe is the same one in which the question “Can we go run around more in the story?” was posed.

Shortly after the events of Storyways and Beaver's Lodge, one of the library's picture books (The Busy Beaver by Oldland, 2011) became part of the play. In it, Beaver creates trouble for his forest friends by overzealously felling trees and eventually injures himself. Beaver's and the other animals’ injuries and recuperation were the heart of the play for several weeks (see Lenters et al., 2023 for more on those experiences). This particular morning's play also more specifically emerged from a story played and told the week before. That previous week, several of the children continued with the narrative in which Beaver was injured. After one child bumped his head when moving through a large wooden frame, other children repeatedly moved a cardboard Beaver through a smaller picture frame, bumping his head. Two of the children eventually helped Beaver find a new home where he could rest and heal. Then, with injured Beaver reclined on the soil and grass of his new home, the animals and the larger group of children, along with some gifts for those who had been injured, food and water for everyone, and a “candle” for light and warmth, gathered around to wish Beaver well.

In response to the children's fascination with Beaver and seeking to hand more of the story creation over to the children, the Play Professor had begun to enter the play in character, as Beaver. So it was that this new September morning the Play Professor and a cardboard Beaver mask and tail approached the children together. PlayProfessor-Beaver began moving through the space and through the large wooden frame that had previously been part of the children's play, and the children and Beaver began to play with one another. Some followed Beaver through the frame, some sought to engage Beaver in what they were doing, and some continued with other activities.

A new family (a 3-year-old and her father) joined the play, and two of the children who had been part of the play the previous week took the new girl to see Beaver's house. As they did so, the children noticed that the cardboard animals were gathered around the house once again. Later, when one of the children and PlayProfessor-Beaver were alone at Beaver's house, they decided to go for a swim. After they “swam” across the ground for a while, they arrived back at Beaver's house to discover that almost all of the children were there. Like the cardboard animals, they too had reassembled. The congregated energy and attention of children and materials, and their sustained focus on what they were creating together, signaled an affective turning point in the morning and the play.

Back at the new house, PlayProfessor-Beaver declared herself to be hungry, and after “eating” all the food the children offered, pretended to go for a nap. As she lay on the ground, snoring, most of the children, entwined with the characters of the cardboard animals, started to tickle her. She woke up, was surprised by a beaver-child, thought she must be dreaming, and went back to sleep. The children-animals woke PlayProfessor-Beaver up again and they repeated the story cycle several times until a snake-child announced that he wanted to chase Beaver out of the lodge. Following this storyline, PlayProfessor-Beaver started to run back to the forest. All the children-animals followed. They ran across the river, swam, and went back to the house again so Beaver could rest. Starting to feel an uncomfortable intensity in the chase, the Play Professor said to snake-child: “I think it is time for us to become friends.” Snake-child agreed. They all ran once more, then decided to hide behind a tree. Once at the tree, the Play Professor said to the group: “Now it is time for us to tell our story.”

Attending to the Moving and Overlaying of Storylines

The embodied and enacted collaborations of storied play we have described are ones that invite us to “think with” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) posthuman, sociomaterial, and mycelial-informed perspectives. In doing so, we are reminded that such theoretical frameworks are not “applied” to data to “calibrate coherence” (p. xii) but are taken up as thresholds (p. 6), as ways of entering into and exiting from considerations of empirical materials such that something new is produced between them and the theoretical work. As we reenter and remake our way through these particular assemblages of storied play, we are pulled back to them, and to the ideas that have helped us find our way to them, differently. We pick up the threads of these occurrences to follow where they might now lead. In doing so, we consider the ways the stories proceeded as they, other im/materials, and humans played-with one another. We consider their trajectories, entanglements, and ways of playing outside and beyond a straight-line narrative of developmental and determinate progress.

Moving Out From the Tip

At the beginning of Storyways and Beaver's Lodge, we recognize the Play Professor's facilitation of the storied play, like the initiation or expansion of a mycelial network, to have been in exploratory mode, to have identified and responded to a number of possible storylines in the lead-up to that first morning. Her journeys through the neighborhood, the multiple goals of the program, the texts she read in preparation, and her own material explorations of the quest she envisioned (being guided by playthings from the library's store of supplies, working-with the materials of the tent structure, painting and being painted-by the plastic trout) began to feel their way forward as threads of stories yet-to-be.

As the Play Professor offered the initiating narrative of Trout's adventurous spirit, her concern for the noises along the riverbank, and the suggestion that the children might build a path to help Trout find her way, a “swarm of hyphal tips” (Sheldrake, 2020, p. 47) or possible storylines were propelled forward. In the moment it was introduced, Trout's river journey was abundant in its possibilities, in the paths it might take, possibilities the Play Professor sought to encourage with materials that could help bring diverse forms of playful exploration and expressiveness to the compositional process. Then, in asking the question that comes so easily at the start of a journey and in response to educational admonishments to begin with the end in mind—“Do you know where you are going?” or, in this case, “Can you see the beaver lodge?”—the predominant character of the storyline and of the storied play changed.

What had begun as an emergent line growing outward from its tip (Ingold, 2016; Sheldrake, 2020), from the Play Professor's and then the children's/parents’ first tentative explorations with story, space, and materials, was eclipsed by the strength of the set destination (Ingold, 2016). After the initial, seemingly out-of-bounds run toward the discovery of the beaver lodge, the majority of the children were brought back to a line that was no longer growing. The storyline's exploratory, outward growth had been replaced by forces pushing from behind, from the line's point of origin to its terminal position, and by forces pushing in from the side, seeking to keep the children to the straight-line logics of a singular connective path (Ingold, 2016). The story play became less a playing out of possibilities and more a compliant performance of a story already written (Ingold, 2016, p. 11). The story was presented as an object, something the children could layer onto with their particular arrangements of stepping stones and fish food, but something whose material expressiveness was all but sealed over. The line that had been “free to go where it will” (Ingold, 2016, p. 74) now needed to hurry from one point to another, from one “isolated and compact moment” to the next (Ingold, 2016, p. 76). It needed to hurry to an accomplishment of “the end.”

Another line, however, continued to move. Springing forward in the same moment the previous line was constrained, the narrative of Beaver preparing his home for the arrival of someone new became a point of growth, a moving thread amidst the traces of what had become a smoothly surfaced plot. The materiality of the story, its ability to unravel its own surfaces (Shankar & Cavanaugh, 2017) and to offer a new point of departure, together with the expressive materiality of the tent, the garden stakes, and players we may not have recognized, invited the children to play and storytell along a line that itself was out for a walk (Ingold, 2016, p. 78). Playing-with the story, the children and materials re-evoked the image of destination (the X marks the spot and the lodge itself) as a point of encounter rather than completion. In this situation, the embodied rather than verbalized request to run appears as a movement toward what is not yet composed. It appears as a request to play with what remains active in the story—the potential of the story's own remainders (Redhead, 2020)—and to play along a trail not yet laid down.

Overlaying and Unraveling Lines

If, in considering a mycelial conception of stories and play as moving out from the tip, we have emphasized stories moving along a single line, we now shift more toward story as a multitude, or meshwork (Ingold, 2008), of overlaying lines. As a published and bound text, The Busy Beaver (Oldland, 2011) stands as a discrete entity. We recognize and appreciate it as a narrative woven to a point of completion or form of fulfillment. We also recognize that as it played-with the children, the story continued to grow. The journey from reading The Busy Beaver to the occasion of Running with Beaver was not one of a precomposed plot. It did not go straight to a singular destination, from here straight to there (Le Guin, 2019), nor did it conclusively end. Running- and playing-with the children along dynamic and temporal lines (Ingold, 2016, p. 74) animated by the possibilities of speculative affect (Stewart, 2007), the story composed itself in a “continuous gesture” (Ingold, 2016, p. 77) of growth, retraction, and migration (Sheldrake, 2020).

Some of this growth, retraction, and migration can be seen in the play a few weeks after the book's first appearance. The injuries Beaver sustained through his own careless actions and inattention to the implications of living among others were no longer simply the antecedent to a solitary moment of reflection in a tale of having learned one's lesson and making amends. In the processes of the children painting and then nursing wounds on the cardboard animals, Beaver's and the other animals’ injuries revealed something of the affective attraction and repulsion (Leander & Ehret, 2019; Massumi, 2015; Stewart, 2007) generated between the children, the materials, and the story, and became a repeated negotiation between doing and mending harm: an unraveling of the happy ending of accepting forgiveness.

The un/raveled lines of The Busy Beaver extended outward along pressing yet indeterminate paths until the week before Running with Beaver. At that point, many of the un/raveling lines of relationship and story overlaid and intertwined, at least temporarily, when the children, the animals, and other lively materials gathered around Beaver in a storied moment of collective reparation. The storied play gathered its exploratory lines in a thickened connection (Sheldrake, 2020, p. 47) with newly encountered possibilities of empathy and forgiveness. Then, as the children played with the storied entity we might now call Friends Gather Around Beaver again the next week, the complicated experiences of tickling and surprise unraveled the story once more. The play between the story, the children, the materials, and PlayProfessor-Beaver reignited the unsettled and unsettling space between the gestures of caring for, forgiving, and taking from. The story retracted from its own fulfillment and propelled forward again in a running swarm of unhoming Beaver. And in the slippage between running together and running after, it also released an uncomfortable intensity, one that the Play Professor reframed in the moment but recognized as part of the story still to be told, a story that had moved outward from but remained part of the questions of living well together raised in The Busy Beaver.

The child's question, “Can we go run around more in the story?,” is heard here not only as a request to play with what remains unwritten in the story, but also as a call to the story, the place, the materials, and other players as more-than-human coauthoring relations. It is heard as a request to have the story continue to play-with and compose-with the children, and its own as-yet-unstoried remainders (Redhead, 2020) in an indeterminate process of collective, attentive response. In “a world of incessant movement and becoming, one that is never complete but continually under construction, woven from the countless lifelines of its manifold human and non-human constituents” (Ingold, 2011, p. 141), the child's question seeks and proposes to continue becoming and moving together in the overlaying and un/raveling movements of a storied and relational world.

A Question With New Emphasis

As this article began, we asked how the experiences of children and stories playing-with, composing-with, and running-with one another might open new understandings of story and storied play—and, looking back a little further in the article, how those understandings, framed as a posthuman re-story-ation of human-centered hierarchies of being and voice, might help the world (through the world of literacy education) rethink what it thinks story is, what shape stories take, and the stories it tells about stories through its pedagogical practices. We return to those questions now.

The multiple storied movements of Storyways and Beaver's Lodge and the ongoing ramifications of The Busy Beaver and Running with Beaver, read in relation to the moving, intelligent capacities of mycelial networks (Ingold, 2003, 2015; Sheldrake, 2020; Tsing, 2015), open possibilities for seeing a story as both a single, connected entity and a multitude of lines. They also open possibilities for engaging with stories other than as objects of uniquely human authorship and through straight-line, single-track logics (Le Guin, 2019; Ingold, 2016). The familiar path of beginning-middle-end and its confident, successive steps toward narrative resolution and mastery within literacy curricula and instruction appears as one line among many in an ongoing gesture of composing literate possibilities. The material liveliness of Oldland's (2011) The Busy Beaver within the growing, retracting, and migrating assemblages of human and more-than-human play animates story as an authoring subject entangled in the unfolding of children's literate becomings and its own unwritten possibilities. Here, the posthuman reworking of story means that emergent stories (and humans and more-than-human beings storied within the dynamic assemblage) are all participants within the play.

Understanding educators to be enmeshed in these same unfoldings, we remember that the child's question, “Can we go run around more in the story?,” was posed not only to the un/played, un/written narrative but also to the Play Professor. It interrupted the everydayness of doing with a newly emphasized request to decide what might be done, with a pedagogical call to make such storied movement possible. Hearing the question as a pedagogical summons from the child, and from the need to consider what new stories about stories might be told, we now ask ourselves, and those with whom we share responsibilities for children's literacy education, where we might go with the question's provocation. How might we work with the oft-hidden and unpredictable lines, the mycelial-like networks, along which storying runs?

We see a number of entry points to this task, ways in which literacy education might open to stories yet-to-be. One is to leave space for unchoreographed movement and indeterminacy. Another is to attune to the intensities that propel students and materials in playing and composing together. A third is to move with the agency that blossoms in the in-between and encourages collaborative, playful storying along lines other than beginning-middle-end. All are based in pedagogical commitments to agent-ivizing learning assemblages and to storied play as a process of assemblage in which students, stories, and other im/materialities play-with one another through the un/raveling of composition: to having stories, as they are played-with, go out for a walk (Ingold, 2016).

Questioning the stories into which we each are written, the image of story and the world those stories provide, and the ways of being / being literate / doing literacy they author-ize and make visible, “we can work to keep language open, to resist corrosive divisions, to flatten hierarchies, to build a longer table, and a larger tent” (Glenn, 2022, p. 273). In our own efforts to do so, we seek to make room for the ways in which literacy educators and researchers might pedagogically care for the moving and transforming vitality of storied play. We hope to decenter the occupations of literacy as fixed and fragmented ends and unsettle something of its single-path certainties. We seek to hold open a relational space between the possibilities, uncomfortable intensities, and ever-ramifying threads of literacy education's multiple storylines and its curricular role as a teller of stories about stories.

We do not imagine a story of easy resolution but rather a conversation that participates in an endless task of rereading and recomposing the narratives that shape the world of literacy education and the discourses with/in which they are composed. These, we suggest, are movements through which literacy education might renarrate its pedagogical influences and responsibilities. Seeing story in material, expressive, mobile, and relational terms, something open to being played-with, perhaps the narratives that make their way so deeply into the structures and vision of literacy education and those who live and practice with/in them might reopen to an abiding process of disruption, to possibilities newly woven from the lines of their own un/raveled ends.

Supplemental Material

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Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-jlr-10.1177_1086296X251318428 for Running Around in the Story: Un/Raveling Compositions of Narrative Play by Ronna Mosher, Kimberly Lenters, and Jennifer MacDonald in Journal of Literacy Research

Supplemental Material

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Supplemental material, sj-docx-2-jlr-10.1177_1086296X251318428 for Running Around in the Story: Un/Raveling Compositions of Narrative Play by Ronna Mosher, Kimberly Lenters, and Jennifer MacDonald in Journal of Literacy Research

Supplemental Material

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Supplemental material, sj-docx-3-jlr-10.1177_1086296X251318428 for Running Around in the Story: Un/Raveling Compositions of Narrative Play by Ronna Mosher, Kimberly Lenters, and Jennifer MacDonald in Journal of Literacy Research

Supplemental Material

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Supplemental material, sj-docx-4-jlr-10.1177_1086296X251318428 for Running Around in the Story: Un/Raveling Compositions of Narrative Play by Ronna Mosher, Kimberly Lenters, and Jennifer MacDonald in Journal of Literacy Research

Supplemental Material

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Supplemental material, sj-docx-5-jlr-10.1177_1086296X251318428 for Running Around in the Story: Un/Raveling Compositions of Narrative Play by Ronna Mosher, Kimberly Lenters, and Jennifer MacDonald in Journal of Literacy Research

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research for this project was made possible by the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada through an Insight Development Grant (#430-2020-00492) and the Canada Research Chairs program (CRC-2019-00210).

Ethics

The research was conducted in compliance with an ethical review undertaken by the University of Calgary's Conjoint Faculties Ethical Review Board.

ORCID iD

Ronna Mosher

Supplemental Material

The abstracts in languages other than English are available at

Notes

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