The youngest preschool children: Community in play

Abstract

The aim of this study is to shed light on young children’s perspectives on their social interactions in play situations in preschool. Participants in the study were a group of twenty children, with ages ranging from fourteen months to two years and five months old. The children attended preschool in Iceland. Four adults, including two preschool teachers who worked with the children, also participated. The study is based on the phenomenological approaches emphasizing human bodily existence put forth by French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962, 1994), whose concept of the life world describes the intertwined relations between human beings and the environment. The body is the foundation for the existence of the child. The child is viewed as an active body that is already engaged with its physical and social environment and in the process of making sense out of the experience (Johansson, 1999; Merleau-Ponty, 1962, 1994). The life world is the meaningful context that helps people understand and interpret their environment. Children’s play has roots in movement of the body (Åm, 1989; Hangaard Rasmussen, 2001), and intersubjectivity between partners is an important part of the process that occurs when children mutually create their communities in play situations. The study was conducted over a five month period, and qualitative methods were employed, including participant observations, video recordings, and field notes. The focus was on children’s communication when they started play, how they continued the play, and how they tried to gain access to play that had already started. In approaching and interpreting children’s perspectives it is necessary to gain access to children’s actions in their own life worlds. The resulting portrait of children’s perspectives is connected to the ontological stance of the researcher and how he understands, interprets, and presents the data gathered. The objective of this study is to understand children’s actions, their intentions and views, as well as to interpret their experience and expression in light of their social interaction in play situations. The patterns that occur in children’s communication are considered to reveal their perspectives. Children’s bodily expressions, gestures, and gazes are considered as representations of how they experience meaning and which phenomena are meaningful. The findings show that children communicate with, relate to, and influence their environments in various ways. Children’s actions are built upon intersubjective processes, a foundational component of development that involves taking part in the worlds of others. Children are active participants in their life worlds within play situations, constructing meaning and context with their actions. The play demanded that children communicate in certain contexts. Body movements, gestures, and gazes were important elements of children’s interaction when they tried to relate to each other and create a mutual ground for the start of play. Some of the children participated directly within the play context while others participated from the sideline, i.e. watched the play and imitated the actions later. The findings also show that play requires children to respond to and to eliminate motivation from the outside, which could be experienced as a threat to the ongoing interaction. Children’s social communities are built upon their interactions in which their self-construction and participation in each other’s worlds emerge. When children try to present themselves to others they have to know different codes of play, a requirement that both demands that the children adapt their own intentions and also recognise those of others. The ambiguity of children’s life worlds appeared in their expressions of competence as well vulnerability within the play situations. The children cared for each other and also used their social and physical positions to influence who was included in the play and who was excluded. Position within the group seemed to be connected to children’s age and size. Children’s actions in play situations gave the appearance that they were participating simultaneously in their own worlds and in others’ worlds, an intertwining of the individual and the social that follows the theory proposed by Merleau-Ponty (1962, 1994)