Playing with possibilities: multilingual elementary students (Un)composing digital-sticker roles

Linguistically diverse children often engage in digital play, which includes rich literacy practices and emergent meaning-making, yet these practices are frequently exclude from classrooms. Research is needed to discover how digital play might be incorporated into classrooms and how multilingual children (de)construct roles through movement and experimentation during this play, yielding emergent meaning-making. This study explores a two-week, multimodal writing unit in one second-grade classroom, asking: <i>How did multilingual children play and experiment to (un)compose roles in digital-sticker composing?</i> Students created eBook stories with digital-stickers: their digitized hand-drawn paper characters pasted into eBooks. Drawing on a posthuman view of literacies and play, we explore how this composing functioned as role-play or imitation, representing a form of embodiment where students, though absent from the physical playframe, inhabited digital-sticker versions of themselves. Qualitative analyses reveal that students created the following roles through digital sticker play: (1) linguistic, (2) socio-relational, (3) problem-relational, (4) authorial. Post-qualitative vignettes demonstrate the movement and experimentation children played across the screen. Together, these analyses demonstrate a need for a more fluid definition of literacy where play matters and children create possibilities for their own literacy becoming.