Play in adult-child interaction: Institutional multi-party interaction and pedagogical practice in a toddler classroom

Abstract

Abstract This paper considers the ways in which adults' active participation in play has the potential to manage and manipulate participation frameworks in adult-child joint activities, drawing on a dataset of 150 h of video-recorded, naturally occurring adult-child-group interactions from one Finnish early childhood education and care (ECEC) institution for children under the age of three. A total of 47 instances of multi-party make-believe play were located from the dataset and subjected to multimodal conversation analysis. The data-driven microanalysis revealed that adult role in play is more complex and multidimensional than prior research has shown. Playing can be understood as a shared communicative project, a form of mutual understanding, between adults and children. In adult-child interaction play has the capacity to simultaneously invoke two different institutional frames: that of playing and that of caring or educating (e.g., soothing or including). In a multi-party context, adults' playful stance taking can serve different kinds of institutional tasks and balance asymmetries of participation among children and between adults and children. The results contribute to theoretical and pedagogical discussion of adult roles in children's play and facilitate early childhood education practitioners' pedagogical reflection and imagination.