Play(ing)
early childhood curriculum. There is also a sense that perturbing a conventional interpretation of her article is a way to open (to) such possibilities. In a contiguous contribution to Semantic Play and Possibility, Doll (2006) discusses ‘a new sense of method’ (p. 87). He notes the importance of ‘inter (or trans) action’ between reader, writer and text as a reflective, creative, flexible, open, complex conversation that disrupts the rigidity of conventional, multiple step approaches to method. To achieve this, students (readers~writers) need to be supported in developing ‘their own personal habits (method) of thought and action’ (p. 87), that is, ‘personal ways of doing things’ (Dewey, 1916/1966, p. 171, cited in Doll, 2006, p. 87, italics added). As with the Deleuzo-Guattarian project, Doll suggests a ‘process of recursive iteration’ whereby a text, for example, ‘is looked at not only in terms of itself, but also in terms of its relationship with…[the philosophy or other reading] from which it emerged, and in terms of that which has yet-to-emerge’ towards exploring ‘the multiple pathways which connect and create’ (p. 88, italics added). This affirms I should indeed find my own way, a personal and creative approach to (re)reading Trueit’s text. But, there is more. In another contribution, Playing with our understandings, Smitherman Pratt (2006) presents Aoki’s considerations of what it means to ‘understand’, namely that understanding ‘is never static, fixed, or rigid; rather understanding is always changing, in flux, continually being renewed’ (p. 93). Reflecting on Smitherman Pratt’s reading of Aoki and reading this alongside Doll and Trueit, affirms that for my reading~writing to become the ‘generative space of possibilities’ that Aoki espouses, I need to enter spaces of ‘tensioned ambiguity’, spaces of both ‘and/not-and’, of ‘conjoining and disrupting’ wherein newness emerges’ (Aoki, 1996/2005, p. 318, cited in Smitherman Pratt, 2006, p. 93). Also, Gough’s (2006b) ‘rhizosemiotic play’, in which he demonstrates ‘the generativity of intertextual readings’ (p. 119), affirms my desire to play with Trueit’s text to find out what might happen by writing around it. He reminds me that Deleuze and Guattari (1987) urge experimenting with rhizome and that, like Richardson (2001), ‘I write because I want to find something out…to learn something that I did not know before I wrote it’ (p. 35)…and… I wonder if I am also experimenting with the writing to uncover what I do ‘know’ but need to ‘see’ written down, to drift with illuminations of the shadows. So, with ideas of how I might move towards generating a multiplicity of understanding ‘play’, I (re)turn to Trueit’s text; Hand (1988) helps explicate the approach I choose to take.
124