Mischief-making of one kind/and another: unruliness and resistance in rural preschoolers' free play

Abstract

While many contemporary popular cultural discourses in the USA recognise and commodify children as distinct persons engaging in the middle-class project of expressive individuation, much public and early educational policy has simultaneously intensified the control and regulation of children, children’s culture and children’s bodies and emotions in early education settings. Prout suggests that late modern schooling might be characterised by ‘practices directed at greater surveillance, control and regulation of children’ (304). This ethnographic study of a group of three-, four- and five-year-old children in a rural New England community preschool setting explores rural children’s lived experiences resisting control and navigating contradiction through unruly, mischievous games and free play. This unruliness is situated in the context of escalating academic demands in early childhood education and resistant rural community culture(s).

Keywords:

• early childhood
• preschool
• children’s play
• rural children
• misbehaviour

Acknowledgement

The author wishes to thank Dr M. Beth Graue, Dr Kate Reynolds and Dr Travis Wright for their helpful and insightful comments on early drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. All names are pseudonyms.

2. This is a US term for the common practice of parents’ delaying the start of formal schooling for their age-eligible children for the purpose of giving the child the advantage of being older, larger and ‘ahead of’ their peers. The term is borrowed from competitive athletics.

3. Pseudonym.