Emotional and playful stance taking in joint play between adults and very young children

Abstract

The purpose of this single case study was to investigate emotional and playful stance taking in adults and very young children as they engage in joint make-believe play activity in a natural Finnish group-care setting. Drawing on the sequential approach of conversation analysis (CA), the study represents an effort to understand play in an early childhood education (ECE) setting from both children's and adults' perspectives at the same time. The results suggest that the interplay of emotional and playful stance taking in make-believe play produces emotional transitions in interaction. These transitions can be understood as interactional accomplishments that offer children and adults the possibility to align and affiliate themselves with their own and each other's emotional experiences and to explore personal reflections of the emotionally heightened real-life trajectories in a shared makebelieve play frame. Based on these findings, it is argued that creating and maintaining emotionally heightened joint play with very young children requires adults' emotional involvement and delicately calibrated participation through leading, following and leading by following. Further empirical study is needed to investigate sequences in which playful and emotional stance taking stand in a non-aligning and non-affiliating relationship. Such research could reveal problem-remedy sequences more evidently and provide important further development of ECE theory and practice for children under the age of three.

Play

“…(4) Through their facial expressions, gestures, body movements, and tone of voice, the adult involved in play displays vibrancy and warmth, building heightened emotive involvement in the children's play activities (Pursi, Lipponen & Sajaniemi, 2018;Kalliala, 2014).…”

Creating and Maintaining Play Connection in a Toddler Peer Group

“…Studies have demonstrated that adults also use this kind of interactional calibration in order to build sustained co-participation with toddlers in joint play (Pursi, Lipponen & Sajaniemi, 2018). The core features of interactional calibration in play seems to be the flexible and situational modulation of one's participation between stance leading (new play contributions), stance following (careful alignment and affiliation with others' play actions) and leading by following (building on others' play actions).…”

Shall the twain meet? Prospects for a playfully play-full Scottish education

“…Third, behaviour management strategies that have been introduced in educational settings, such as golden time and circle time (Watt and Higgins 1999) use play to achieve their goals. Many of the end of the week rewards for good behaviour during the school week are play-based (Howe 2016), while circle time invokes a playful approach to opening discussion of sensitive topics and to learn the principles and mechanics of respectful debate (Pursi et al 2018).…”