‘We're doing a wedding’: producing peer cultures in pretend play

ABSTRACT

Play is valued pedagogically and conceptually as supporting children’s imaginative capabilities and social development. In this article, we focus in particular on pretend play as a type of play activity in which children engage in the creative production and performance of peer cultures. In pretend play, new peer cultures are produced as children actively and creatively appropriate information from the adult world. Drawing on sociology of childhood understandings of children as agentic social actors, this ethnographic study with children aged five years in their first year of school in Queensland, Australia, explored children’s production of peer cultures in their classroom play. We present here an extended pretend play episode in which children plan and perform a wedding framed in pretence and reality. Observations reveal the complexities of children’s peer cultures, and ways in which they negotiate peer and adult agendas within the social structure of the classroom.

KEYWORDS:

• Children
• pretend play
• peer culture
• interpretive reproduction
• early childhood education
• performance

Acknowledgements

We thank the teacher and children for their participation in the study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Helen Breathnach is a Senior Research Assistant in the School of Early Childhood and Inclusive Education at Queensland University of Technology. Her ethnographic research has investigated children’s perspectives and experiences in the early years. In particular, she is interested in the ways in which children’s agency and participation in their practices can be supported.

Susan Danby is a professor in the School of Early Childhood and Inclusive Education at Queensland University of Technology. Her research applies ethnomethodological and conversation analysis perspectives to investigate social interaction in children’s peer groups as well as between children and adults in institutional settings such as classrooms and helplines.

Lyndal O’Gorman is a senior lecturer in the School of Early Childhood and Inclusive Education at Queensland University of Technology. Her research has applied phenomenography to explore parents’ views of the Preparatory Year. Lyndal’s current research topics include early childhood arts education, education for sustainability, play pedagogies, and early childhood leadership.

ORCID

Helen Breathnach http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9445-481X

Susan Danby http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1944-7043

Lyndal O’Gorman http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6860-6784