Morality at play

Abstract

The concept of 'play' is notoriously ambiguous, but we do know that when children engage in make-believe play the activity provides benefits for psychological development, holistic health, and building knowledge and relationships. This article discusses how a group of four-year-old children in New Zealand engage in pretend play by embodying the characters of mud-monsters and possums to avoid the rules around being respectful to their cultural heritage while playing in a protected bush reserve. The data were generated through a project investigating teaching and learning in everyday conversations between preschool teachers and children aged 2½-5 years old. Ten hours of video footage were gathered, of which one hour and forty minutes were in rural bushland. The analysis of the footage here uses an ethnomethodological framework, discussing the work of Sacks and Garfinkel to reveal the sequential organization of moral conduct in situ. The children's multimodal ways of embodying chosen destructive characters through predicated actions reveal how they attempt to evade negative consequences of breaking promises through pretend play. The article concludes with connections to moral philosophy, and by discussing how the turns of talk and gesture co-produce complex learning of culturally and morally appropriate behaviours in situ.

Early Childhood Teachers’ Support of Children’s Play in Nature-Based Outdoor Spaces—A Systematic Review

“…Two papers explored perspectives on risky play [55,65]. Other objectives included characteristics of forest sites [51], different ways in which children and teachers perceive and utilize the affordances offered by the environment [50], children's participation [58], and practical procedures of observable moral work [49]. The four papers from Australia were based on a longitudinal project titled 'Bush kinders: Locating the Science', depicting bush kinders from the same shire in the country's southeastern part [61][62][63][64].…”

“…Eleven of the papers explicitly framed the study within ethnography and used terms such as ethnography [62,64], ethnographic approach [57,63], ethnographic methodology [52], small-scale ethnographic study [54], ethnographic design [61], sensory ethnography [53], ethnomethodological framework [49], ethnography-inspired method [51], and interpretivist ethnographic case study [50]. Data collection in these studies varied, with field observations, photographs, video and audio recordings, and conversations and interviews as main features.…”

“…ECEC settings that organize outings to protected bush reserves and weekly visits to the 'wild woods' [49,50] Denmark (n = 1) Forest kindergarten (n = 1) ECEC settings that are often outdoors and frequently use forest sites [51] The descriptions of the nature-based outdoor spaces varied, but they all had features of rugged terrain and natural materials, mostly related to places in woodlands and forests, within walking distance from the ECEC settings, and with a lack of fences. Features of the woodland and forest environments included native pinewoods and broad-leaf forests [52], snow, mud, plants, stones [53], sticks, branches, leaves [42,54], grass, rock formations, and fire pits [50].…”

“…Some papers included seasons and weather conditions as relevant factors in using nature-based outdoor spaces [50][51][52][53]. In some papers, cultural features were attributed to the descriptions, e.g., relating natural environments to Nordic traditions and values [56,57,59], and cultural heritage in relation to indigenous Māori protocols [49]. Trips to and sessions in the forest and woodland appeared to be regular.…”

“…Some papers understood play as children's self-governing activities, such as free play [50,51,57,58], and unstructured play [42,62]. Other papers understood play as social and symbolic and included terms such as fantasy play [58], pretend play [49,57], imaginative play [42], and creative play [54]. Some papers used the term closely related to adult-child communication and learning experiences and applied terms such as playful reasoning [59] and play-based learning [61,64].…”