Understanding Children's Jail Play in South Korea: Tracing Young Korean Children's Intra-Actions Through Jail Play

• In Event: 43.044 - Considering Guns, Jail, Arrest, Cops, and Robbers Play in Early Childhood and Care Centers

Abstract

This study is about how young Korean children interaction with their peers, teachers, times, spaces, materials, and environments through jail play. When educators and parents encounter young children’s dangerous physical and pretend play such as rough-and-tumble, war, stealing, or jail play, they may feel discomfort about the play themes. Furthermore, children’s aggressive, unsafe, and antisocial behaviors in those play types in early childhood education settings can bring about teachers’ intervention and prohibition of such play. Given this, many scholars have focused on such play’s benefits such as social, cognitive skills (Logue & Detour, 2011), physical movements and children’s engagement (Hart & Tannock, 2013), and social component (Pellegrini & Smith, 1998). However, this study explores children’s jail play with a new and complicated lens, instead of looking into the implications of play for children’s learning and development. What makes them start their jail play? How do they shape and change characteristics of their jail play? What are the meanings of their jail play in their specific local contexts?
Based on Bronwyn Davies (2014)’s concept of diffraction and Michel de Certeau (1984)’s concept of strategies and tactics, this study illustrates how children’s play unfolds and how participants interact with their teachers, peers, times, spaces, and materials in their play, and how meanings of their jail play have shaped and changed as time passes in some South Korean contexts. As a researcher, an assistant teacher, and a co-player, I observed 21 children aged 4–5 years and two teachers in a daycare center in S. Korea, applying ethnographic methods (participant observations and informal interviews) for 5 months. Their jail play activities were recorded in writing and video.
As a place of power struggling with their teacher, the children employed their jail play in the form of imprisoning their teachers, not friends, during outdoor free plays. For 5 months, their emerging jail plays involved activities and meanings more complicated than in rough-and-tumble play. Moreover, their plays have become their power struggling between children and teachers and girl-only play activities for having kinship with teachers. In the process of their play, “jump ropes,” “hula hoops,” and “letters to teachers” served as their not only toys and weapons for imprisoning teachers, but also as means of touching and connecting to teachers. By tracing the entangled movement and co-existing multiplicities (Davies, 2014) of their emerging jail plays, we can understand their ongoing intra-active productions of children’s meanings, peer culture, and power dynamics in S. Korea contexts.

Author

• Pool Ip Dong