Broadening rules and aligning actions: Children's negotiation while playing hide-and-seek during break time

Abstract

This article explores the emergence of the children's rule negotiation, while they play hide-and-seek during school break times, and how it transforms the playing. Break times refer to the free-time interspaces between organized scheduled lessons during the school day and are settings among others in children's everyday life where they are able to play and explore. Usually, in Swedish primary schools, there is a morning break, lunch break, and shorter pauses between lessons. Usually children are allowed to spend the break times in a schoolyard. The article provides a micro-level insights of a group of 10 and 11 years old children's negotiation process regarding rules to be followed while playing hide-and-seek, in Sweden the game is called “the jar”. Observational data was produced during 11 break periods and was analysed through the lens of cultural historical activity theory (Leontiev, 1978; Vygotsky, 1978). The analysis indicates that the children's negotiation process is a collective embedding of agency. Negotiation concerns children broadening the collective interpretation of rules and making micro-adjustments in their courses of action in order to align them. The negotiation of rules is a collectividual (Stetsenko, 2013) enterprise of producing and using negotiagency in changing the circumstances in play.