Participation and responsiveness: children’s rights in play from the perspective of play-responsive early childhood education and care and the UNCRC

ABSTRACT

While children’s rights to play is stated in the UNCRC, this study investigates children’s rights in play through an analysis of narrative play in preschool. Play-responsive early childhood education and care (PRECEC) is a recently developed theory that provides analytical tools for investigating participants’ communicative coordination and reorientation in mutual activities. By empirically trying out four interrelated elements – space, voice, audience, and influence from Lundy’s rights discourse, the aim is to further develop the theory of PRECEC by differentiating the meaning of responsivity. Video-recorded data from an early childhood education and care setting provide the empirical foundation for the study. What we find analytically is how responsiveness in narrative play affords children to express themselves, be heard and be responded to, and what this entails. In the activity, children are included and recognised as contributing participants, having agency to co-narrate the development of the play.

KEYWORDS:

• UNCRC
• PRECEC
• narrative play
• responsiveness
• agency

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

We gratefully acknowledge the funding received from the Swedish Institute for Educational Research [Skolfi 2016/112].

Notes on contributors

Pernilla Lagerlöf

Pernilla Lagerlöf works as Senior Lecturer at the Department of Education, Communication and Learning at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She has a background as a preschool teacher and holds a Master’s Degree in Special Education. Her PhD thesis is entitled, Musical Play: Children interacting with and around Music Technology, and was written within the international project Musical Interaction Relying On Reflection (MIROR; EU FP7-ICT, 2010-2013), with a focus on technology-transformed music learning in childhood. Lagerlöf has a research interest in communication and play interactions within the framework of the various media ecologies in which children participate. She is particularly interested in how early childhood education responds to children’s variety of experiences from digital technologies and popular culture.

Cecilia Wallerstedt

Cecilia Wallerstedt is a Senior Lecturer and Associated Professor in Education at the Department of Education, Communication and Learning at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She is also Head of the Department. Her research interest concerns knowledge, teaching and learning in music, and the interaction between teachers and children/pupils. She has conducted research in close collaboration with teachers in several projects in preschool, primary- and secondary school.

Niklas Pramling

Niklas Pramling is Professor of Education at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He has been and is Director of national research schools for preschool teachers (funded by the Swedish Research Council). His research concerns communication in early childhood education and care settings and beyond.