Date of Award

8-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Education and Human Development

Committee Chair/Advisor

Lindsey W. Rowe

Committee Member

Amanda Bennett

Committee Member

Sally Brown

Committee Member

Emily Howell

Abstract

In this dissertation, I explore the posthuman play literacies of multilingual makerspaces with four-year-olds, emphasizing the need for such a study while situating my arguments within the existing literature and outlining my methodological approach. Chapter One critiques the public 4-year-old kindergarten systems, arguing institutionalized cultural and linguistic ideologies restrict multilingual learners’ (MLs) opportunities for meaning-making. I draw on the raciolinguistic perspective (Flores & Rosa, 2015) and its intersection with a posthumanist paradigm (Braidotti, 2013), framing my research questions as lines of inquiry to guide the study. Key posthumanist literacies concepts are defined, highlighting the entanglement of literacies, discourses, materials, and humans.

Chapter Two reviews the literature on play literacies, innovative learning environments, and makerspaces while interweaving multilingualism. Chapter Three presents my design-based research (DBR) study, detailing four iterative phases of data collection and three approaches to analysis. I discuss the study context, participant roles, and address issues of trustworthiness and subjectivity. This chapter concludes with qualitative and post-qualitative data collection and analysis strategies, and acknowledgement of the study’s limitations.

Chapter Four describes the qualitative findings of this project, while Chapter Five looks at these data through post-qualitative inquiry. Findings across both chapters reveal how children’s literacies emerged through multimodal play, material entanglements, spatial intra-actions, and unexpected acts of resistance and joy. Materials and tools, such as cameras, scissors, and shelves, acted as co-authors in meaning-making, while documentation became both a pedagogical practice and relational force. Children composed with bodies, languages, and objects in ways that challenged static notions of literacy and participation.

Chapter Six offers a discussion across the two data analysis approaches and implications for theory, method, research, and practitioners. Implications include new ways of designing makerspaces that recognize materials as agents, documentation as inquiry, and literacy as a distributed, relational, and multilingual practice.

Author ORCID Identifier

0000-0002-3278-1476

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