Things and children in play – improvisation with language and matter

Abstract

Based on the authors' studies of material-discursively approached lives of children, this paper addresses the educational relevance of playing, through re-entangling and complicating divided, purpose-directed and individualistic conceptualisations of play. The unhelpful binary of conceiving playing as an end (‘free play’) as distinct from playing as means (‘guided play’) is argued to render children as subjects of education who do not yet know, rather than ones who are capable of also producing knowledge and challenging ways of knowing and being. The empirical anchoring of this paper is a study in which 12 Finnish children, aged four to seven, gathered once a week for a total of 11 times to assist an adult researcher in studying ‘things, objects and beings’. Based on insights from this study, an approach to playing as intra-active and comprising improvisation with language and matter, is suggested to provide spaces for producing and contesting as well as acquiring knowledge.

Keywords:

• play
• children
• materiality
• intra-action
• language
• discourses
• wordplay

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by funding from the Academy of Finland (Grant number 255432).

Notes

1. For the distinction between ‘interactive’ (i.e. two independent entities taking turns in affecting each other) and ‘intra-active’ (i.e. two interdependent entities co-emerging through simultaneous activity), see especially Karen Barad (2007).

2. Distinction between participant observation and observant participation needs to be accounted here: in the former the researcher takes turns in engaged participating and distant observing, whereas in the latter, in the observation of participation, the focus is on the relations and interactions of all of the people involved, researcher included and with his/her everyday social and professional skills employed as an inseparable part of the research (e.g. Cottle, 1977; Tedlock, 1992).

3. These are taken from just a few lines of one poem ‘That nature is a Heraclitean fire and of the comfort of the resurrection’. See Selected Poems of G.M. Hopkins, James Reeves (Ed.), 1967, London: Heinemann.

4. All names are pseudonyms.

5. While all of the excerpts in this paper are of boys' activities, and even typically so: identified as acting upon material products to compete with other children (see Blaise, 2005), a gendered discussion remains outside of the scope of this paper at present.