“Everything Is Alive”: Moving and Reading in Excess of American Freedom

Focusing on the minor details of suffering cats, I read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer as an exemplary illustration of the way in which American novels of individual development destabilize around the movement of minor bodies and minor characters. This destabilization allows not only an interrogation of the limits of US citizenship but also an exploration of how narratives may register something in excess of the citizen and the subject. Distinguishing between the antebellum (boy) characters’ violent play with cats and the postbellum narrator’s ludic play as cat, I argue that cats emerge in Tom Sawyer as captive bodies (among many hard-to-see captives). In the constrained but spectacular movements of these captive bodies, the novel troubles the particularly American freedom actualized in Tom’s play and gestures to a fugitive or feral movement that, though necessary to Tom’s development, always leaps beyond and in the way of efforts to produce a free, individual subject.

Observing and assessing young children’s digital play in the early years: Using the Digital Play Framework

Early childhood education settings are characterized by the use of play-based learning and the assessment of children’s play by teachers to promote further learning. A problem with technology use in early childhood settings is that little is known about how children learn to use technologies through play. This lack of knowledge makes it difficult for teachers to observe and assess how young children in their settings are learning to use technologies. In this article, we report on the use of a new framework we have previously developed to help educators observe and assess young children’s learning to use technologies through play. Known as the Digital Play Framework, the framework draws on Vygotsky’s ideas about tool mediation to position technologies as tools that children learn to master according to Hutt’s conceptualization of epistemic and ludic play. We suggest that the Digital Play Framework holds potential for supporting educators to identify children’s learning to use technologies through play and therefore opportunities for extending the provision of play-based technology education in the early years.