The quality of interaction with children in collective play: Children's agency

Abstract

AbstractThere is a growing body of studies on increasing the quality of infant–toddler education and care. Yet little attention has been directed towards how to bring toddlers' agency and perspective to their personally meaningful learning in collective play. In this paper, we draw on cultural–historical concepts of agency, play and imagination to investigate toddlers' collective play with their teacher. We explain how the teacher can take the toddlers' perspectives and values and acknowledge toddlers' agency in play, to sustain and share toddlers' agentic imagination, thus supporting their play engagement and personally meaningful learning. Herein, we select and analyse one activity in which six toddlers (aged 2–3 years, mean 2.6 years) collectively play with teachers in Melbourne, Australia. We use visual narrative methodology to perform a deep analysis of the dynamic interactions in the collective play. The lens is centred on toddlers' agency and perspectives and the dynamic interactions between them and their teacher in collective play, through which their agentic imagination is sustained. In contrast to previous studies which focus on the teacher's role in play with infants–toddlers to monitor the surrounding dangers, arrange the play space and observe from a distance, the results of this study identify how toddlers' perspectives and agency in play can be valued and acted on by the teacher in collective play, to support toddlers' meaningful learning and improve the quality of play in early childhood education.