Deconstructing Narratives About Children's Play: Addressing Equity Through Complexity

• In Event: 66.057 - Roundtable Session 27
  In Roundtable Session: 66.057-5 - Questioning the "Knowledge to Action" Conduit: Child Development as the Foundation of Early Childhood Education

Abstract

Historically, adults have often assumed the role of informants on children’s lives yet children have a right to participate in the social and cultural life of their communities, to express their opinions, and to have their viewpoints respected, heard, and acted upon whenever possible. The conference theme ‘knowledge into action’ is asking us to consider pathways for achieving equal educational opportunity and whether our methods are capturing the diversity and complexity of circumstances facing children. If we desire to increase children’s human rights by supporting the agency and voice children have in the construction of discourses representing their experiences, we need to critically examine how, if at all, their perspectives are being considered in the discussion and framing of contemporary issues being discussed in our field. The socio-political narrative describing the loss of play for children across the United States is an example of the type of discourse that we can critique to examine whether children’s perspectives about play in their everyday lives have been included and/or the extent to which adults are assuming the role as ‘informants’ driving the narratives representing children’s experiences with play. For example, we can ask whether adults’ assumptions about children’s play--and the discourses circulating about play and its loss in society-- are mirrored in children’s descriptions of their own play and, if not, how these discourses differ and what political consequences ensue when children are missing from this dialogue. Hearing first hand from children can highlight the benefits and drawbacks of limiting our representation of children’s subjective experiences through the lens of adults’ perspectives, as well as the loss of diversity and complexity that may result from doing so.
I report on the the findings from two distinct studies – one where children discuss their own play and another where adults describe play across their lifespan including their perspectives on children’s contemporary play – in order to provoke adults’ thinking about what in Foucault’s (1980) words ‘counts as true’ (p. 131). Our research compares the discourse adults use to discuss children’s play and the language children use as authors of their own experiences to make visible points of alignment and dissension. Our findings highlight tension points and we use them to raise important questions about the politics of representation. Our studies suggest that listening to the children’s voices complicates adult narratives in circulation about children’s play. Specifically, the children’s perspectives strongly challenge the discourse adults use to position them through deficit including language that deflects larger societal problems into person-centred critiques. When the loss of childhood play is positioned through language as internal failings of the children themselves, adults do not have to engage in a more complex examination of the macro- and micro-level mechanisms at the root of these paradigmatic shifts in society. The results of this study remind us why children should be positioned as capable stakeholders whose opinions are taken seriously and incorporated into our methods to diversify our research and dialogues about children to be more equitable.

Author

• Julie M. Nicholson, WestEd Center for Child and Family Studies