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Exploring land, language and culture through playworld translanguaging: one child’s meaning-making practices
Journal article   Open access

Exploring land, language and culture through playworld translanguaging: one child’s meaning-making practices

Carly Steele, Toni Dobinson, Sender Dovchin, Christine Robinson, Grace Oakley, Wendy Cumming-Potvin, Graeme Gower, Katie Grace and Samina Manado
Language Culture and Curriculum
2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/07908318.2026.2666552
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Exploring land1.56 MBDownloadView
Open Access CC BY-NC-ND V4.0

Abstract

Aboriginal education Bardi Jawi language playworld translanguaging semiotics early years education critical participatory action research
Foregrounded in the work of Elizabeth Povinelli and drawing on semiotic theory, translanguaging and play-based learning pedagogies, this article presents findings from a critical participatory action research project conducted in an early years classroom in a remote Aboriginal community school in Western Australia. It describes how two educators, from both non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal backgrounds, collaborated to create spaces for the children in their classroom to engage deeply with their land, language and culture through intentional, purposeful and planned play, specifically Playworld Translanguaging. Findings are presented as a narrative account of one child’s meaning-making practices in collaboration with their teachers and peers, focusing on how they co-created shared spaces for play, co-developed semiotic resources through their play and engaged in symbolic play through the transformation of the meaning of objects in the local environment. Following our analysis of the narrative account, we draw out and discuss the centrality of land to knowing, being and doing in Aboriginal contexts, and the connections to language and culture. We conclude by explaining how, through Playworld Translanguaging, educators can combat cultural, linguistic and geographical dispossession and reductive educative expectations caused by colonialism and enacted through education systems.

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