Helen Breathnach

‘Let's see if you can see me': making connections with Google Earth™ in a preschool classroom

Bringing a social interaction approach to childrens geographies to investigate how children accomplish place in everyday lives, we draw on ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approaches that recognize childrens competence to manipulate their social and digital worlds. An investigation of preschool-aged children engaged with Google Earth™ shows how they both claimed and displayed technological understandings and practices such as manoeuvring the mouse and screen, and referenced place through relationships with local landmarks and familiar settings such as their school. At times, the childrens competing agendas required orientation to each others ideas, and shared negotiation to come to resolution. A focus on childrens use of digital technologies as they make meaning of the world around them makes possible new understandings of place within the geographies of childhood and education.

‘Are you working or playing?’ Investigating young children’s perspectives of classroom activities

ABSTRACT Play is valued conceptually and pedagogically, although its place in early years settings is under increasing pressure. Framed by the sociology of childhood and understandings of children’s agency, this article reports on an ethnographic study with children aged five years in the first year of primary school in Australia. The study investigated childrens understandings of play in classroom activities involving different periods of teacher-framed and child-selected activities. Drawing on children’s accounts and video-recorded observations, the study found that children’s participation was influenced by teacher-framed agendas, and the agency afforded to them to engage in self-chosen activities and to design and negotiate their play spaces. For instance, children generally were unenthusiastic about writing activities and called these activities ‘work’ if they were directed by the teacher, and yet they consistently chose to engage in writing activities during periods of freely chosen activities. The findings raise questions about what counts as ‘play’ and ‘work’ for children, and the important function of play and free choice to mobilise participation in foundational academic activities such as writing. These understandings generate opportunities for educators to reflect upon ways to enhance children’s participation in everyday play activities in the classroom as supporting foundational academic activities.

Becoming a member of the classroom: supporting children’s participation as informants in research

ABSTRACT Engaging with children as research informants and supporting their participation in research is increasingly recognised as valuing children’s views on matters that affect them. Less attention, however, is given to the ways in which children co-construct and manage their participation in child–researcher interactions. Drawing on sociology of childhood understandings, such as the social competence of young children, this ethnographic study investigated the co-production of child–researcher interactions with children aged five years in their first year of primary schooling in Australia. Findings show how child participants oriented to and managed the researcher’s disruption of the everyday generational order of child–adult relations. In so doing, interactional space was created for the co-production of children as expert informants who then oriented to a social order of membership inclusion produced in child–researcher interactions. Creating interactional spaces provides enhanced opportunities for children’s participation as informants in research, and in child–adult interactions across social structures.

‘We're doing a wedding’: producing peer cultures in pretend play

ABSTRACT Play is valued pedagogically and conceptually as supporting children’s imaginative capabilities and social development. In this article, we focus in particular on pretend play as a type of play activity in which children engage in the creative production and performance of peer cultures. In pretend play, new peer cultures are produced as children actively and creatively appropriate information from the adult world. Drawing on sociology of childhood understandings of children as agentic social actors, this ethnographic study with children aged five years in their first year of school in Queensland, Australia, explored children’s production of peer cultures in their classroom play. We present here an extended pretend play episode in which children plan and perform a wedding framed in pretence and reality. Observations reveal the complexities of children’s peer cultures, and ways in which they negotiate peer and adult agendas within the social structure of the classroom.