Documenting play through social media: Troubling progress narratives and opening whole worlds of stuff

Observing and documenting play is common practice in early childhood education. Of late, social media has provided a dynamic platform for sharing documentation of play. This chapter ponders what new performativities mobile documentation can offer to postdevelopmental notions of play that problematise linear progress narratives. Through thinking-with documentation of playful learning presented on social media platforms, I invoke posthuman, feminist materialist theories. The play that is presented through social media is full-body, active, resource rich and embraces ‘whole worlds of stuff’. Such materialities provide a sense-making of the material-discursive messiness, space-time and unpredictability of play. Assemblages of play-mobile documentation perform in-between the troubling and reification of progress narratives glimpsed through hashtag/photographs/narrative entanglements. Whilst mobile documentation practices can offer lively digital doings and storying of play that speaks back to every narrowing formalised progress narratives, there are other, messier and complex spacetimematterings to ponder with play’s own dynamic worldings.