Ann-Carita Evaldsson

Play and Games

In this chapter particular attention will be given to empirical studies on play and games as social action, with a focus on children’s everyday play and game participation in situated activities across various settings. As will be demonstrated, studies of how children organize play activities in situ provide a special arena for rethinking a set of binarisms that consistently reappear in the literature, such as children’s play as separate from the adult word, play and games as different activities, gender differentiation in play, and the distinctions between play and seriousness, play and work, and so on. Before that, in the first two sections, I will recapitulate how the study of play and games has evolved through several phases within different disciplines that have attributed to play and games an important role in (a) children’s development of cognitive and social skills and (b) the production of a children’s folklore, thereby providing a platform for further studies.

Staging insults and mobilizing categorizations in a multiethnic peer group

This study explores how pre-adolescent boys of immigrant and working-class backgrounds stage insults and, as part of this process, mobilize categorizations. Data are drawn from ethnographic research combined with detailed analysis (conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis) of video records from peer interactions in an elementary school in Sweden. It was found that the boys deploy multiple resources (of syntactic and phonetic shapes) provided by the talk of the prior speaker and the turn structure of different activities (i.e. games, ridiculing, gossiping) and transform this talk (shifting emphasis, substituting insult terms and pronouns, recycling arguments, repeating striking parts, code-crossing) to collaboratively stage a counter to insults. A variety of negative characteristics (concerning linguistic, social and economic standards) are invoked and negotiated in the boys’ insult talk, which both colludes with and transgresses local norms of conduct and institutional discourses. Overall, this study demonstrates the political character of pre-adolescent childrens everyday talk in terms of its orientation towards dominant language ideologies and the place that gender, ethnicity and social class occupy within it.

Play and Games in the Peer Cultures of Preschool and Preadolescent Children : An Interpretative Approach

This article is an ethnographic study of childrens production and participation in play and games in an Italian preschool and an afterschool program in a Swedish elementary school. Most traditional theoretical and empirical work on childrens play and games has focused on the contributions of these activities for childrens development of social, cognitive and communicative skills. Other research has extended this developmental focus by examining play and games as valued activities in childrens production, organization and maintenance of their peer cultures. This article extends this work by examining play and games as part of a process of interpretive reproduction in childrens lives. We demonstrate how children in the production of play and games simultaneously use (as well as refine and develop) a wide range of communicative skills, collectively participate in and extend their peer cultures, and appropriate features of, and develop an orientation to, the wider adult culture.

Throwing Like a Girl? Situating Gender Differences in Physicality Across Game Contexts

This study explores interaction in same-sex and cross-sex foursquare games, and, in particular, how throwing (and talk) are adjusted along with diverse configurations of players. The game was played among girls and boys with immigrant backgrounds (Syrian, Kurdish, Chilean) from low-income families in a multiethnic school setting in Sweden. The study investigates girls’ physicality across various game contexts, finding that as the configuration of players shifts, the forms of bodily actions the girls invoke to construct social identities shift as well. The girls used slams - ways of throwing that require force and muscular strength, physical behaviour that is not conventionally seen as part of femininity. The same girls altered throwing (and language) style, ‘throwing like a girl’, to downplay physical skills with less skilled girls. In cross-sex games, the girls (and the boys) playfully mock challenged gender meanings such as boys’ domination and girls’ subordination. The fact that the girls studied here were not restricted in physicality (or spatiality) indicates that there is considerable variation in female physicality. Overall, the findings underscore that studies of girls’ (and boys’) physicality should be grounded in detailed analyses of interaction in specific game contexts, with attention to cultural and institutional frameworks embedded in the games.

Staging Linguistic Identities and Negotiating Monolingual Norms in Multiethnic School Settings

Abstract This article focuses on childrens language alternation practices in two primary school settings. More specifically we explore how participants (children and teachers) in episodes of language alternation invoke linguistic and social identities, thereby ‘talking into being’ language and educational ideologies. The present study is based on multi-sited ethnography in two multiethnic educational settings where classroom activities are primarily in Swedish. Theoretically, it draws on sequential identity-related approaches to language alternation practices (Gafaranga, 2001). As demonstrated, both children and teachers draw on a range of linguistic varieties, and refrained from involving in polylingual practices. In so doing, they were actively engaged in producing and resisting a range of locally valued identities (i.e. monolingual, bilingual, and polylingual student). Simultaneously a monolingual norm was brought into being and, importantly, the children appropriated and exploited the monolingual norms-in being for organising their social relations. Overall the study highlights the links between social and linguistic identities, language choice, and language and educational ideologies. We argue that an understanding of childrens polylingual practices in multilingual settings is provided by a close analysis of the local processes of identity work located within the wider sociocultural context (e.g. language and educational ideologies).

'You could just ignore me': Situating peer exclusion within the contingencies of girls’ everyday interactional practices

The present article approaches the phenomenon of indirect bullying through detailed analysis of the interactional practices that a group of preadolescent girls make use of as they reconstruct the social organization of their peer group, the effect being that one girl is eventually excluded. The data are drawn from ethnography combined with video recordings of the girls’ peer group interactions in a Swedish elementary school, during one school year. The interactional data cover three different periods of the exclusion process. Overall, the study highlights how processes of social exclusion are situated within the flow of subtle and seemingly innocent actions that are embedded in ordinary everyday interactional peer group practices.

Affordances for Participation: Children's Appropriation of Rules in a Reggio Emilia School

This study explores how young children appropriate school rules and what opportunities for active participation are afforded in a Reggio Emilia elementary classroom with particular interest in the interactional and communicative competences children display in situated practice. An ethnographic and microanalytic approach is used to study how the material environment and multimodal resources are mobilized in the activity. The analysis is based on video-recorded sequences in which 6- to 7-year-old children participate in a school project about rules for the schoolyard. The detailed analysis demonstrates how the children plan, reflect, enact, and discuss how to apply their own co-constructed rules in locally relevant ways in the playground. Overall, the findings shed light on how opportunities for childrens active participation are situated within and also afforded by the particular Reggio Emilia educational practice that is also shaped by the learning process itself.

School Bullying and the Micro-Politics of Girls’ Gossip Disputes

Purpose – In this chapter, we examine an extended gossip dispute event, in which a peer group of 11-year-old girls take action against a girl who has reported about school bullying to the teacher b ...

Doing Being Boys with ADHD: Category Memberships and Differences in SEN Classroom Practices.

This paper builds on sociological assumptions that teachers, schools and schooling may play an important role in the recognition and psychopathologization of particular boys as ‘difficult, disordered and disturbed’. The data draw on ethnographic work combined with video recordings of everyday classroom practices in a special educational needs unit with boys diagnosed with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). Drawing on ethnomethodological work on members’ understanding of social categories (MCA) combined with the related methodology of ‘doing difference’, the focus is on the local social process through which boys’ unruly behaviors are made sense of and treated as the grounds for shifting categorization practices. It is found that both teachers and boys orient to the institutional categories Teacher and Student in teacher–student interactions for the ordering of the classroom . The boys’ conduct is in these instances far from pathological but is meaningful in the sense that it provides local resources to resist teacher authorithy and display agency. Overall, the analysis highlights the complexity of locally accomplished identity practices – in terms of how institutional-, gender- and age-appropriate conduct meshes with diagnostic criteria – in the social identification of boys diagnosed with ADHD.

Language policies in play: Learning ecologies in multilingual preschool interactions among peers and teachers

Abstract In this study we argue that a focus on language learning ecologies, that is, situations for participation in various communicative practices, can shed light on the intricate processes through which minority children develop or are constrained from acquiring cultural and linguistic competencies (here, of a majority language). The analysis draws on a language socialization approach to examine the micro-level contexts of an immigrant child’s preschool interactions with peers and teachers, and the interplay between these and macro-level language and educational policies. It was found that, in contrast to institutional and curricular policy aspirations concerning the positive potentials of children’s play as a site associated with core learning affordances, the language learning ecology created in the multilingual peer group interactions was limited. Social relations in the peer group, the novice’s marginal social position, and the child’s rudimentary knowledge of the lingua franca, Swedish, precluded her from gaining access to shared peer play activities. The current study thus corroborates prior research showing that peer interactions in second language settings may pose a challenge to children who have not already achieved some competence in the majority language and that more support and interactions with the teachers can be useful.