Layers of Discourse in Preschool Block Play: An Examination of Children’s Social Interactions

Abstract

Mikhail Bakhtin’s philosophical orientation concerning dialogism offers a challenge to contemporary play theory. This study demonstrates the benefits of a Bakhtinian analysis of double voicing in early childhood programs. Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism, specifically Bakhtin’s ideas on genre and utterance, has received less attention in the analysis of play. Bakhtin’s conceptualization extends the notion of genre to all spoken utterances in play activities. The purpose of the present study was to examine the existence of Bakhtin’s typology of double voicing with preschool children as they talked and built structures with unit blocks. Bakhtin identified three basic varieties of double voice discourse: (a) unidirectional, (b) vari-directional, and (c) active discourse. The investigation took place in a preschool classroom that encourages a playful curriculum. Drawing on videotaped preschool classroom examples, preschoolers’ use of double voicing in the context of block play was analyzed. The data found the two types of passive double voicing: (a) unidirectional and (b) vari-directional, as well as active categories of hidden dialogicality, parody, and skaz. Bakhtin’s view of language acquisition is discussed by only a handful of early childhood play scholars, and this article suggests early childhood professionals use Mikhail Bakhtin’s double voicing typologies in classroom as a contemporary view for framing early childhood socialization and discourse.