Triggering in play: Opening up dimensions of imagination in adult-child play

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Abstract

In his pioneering research on play (in animals), Gregory Bateson theorized play in terms of (meta)communication. Bateson's line of thinking later became fundamental to play research among children. In the present study, we extend this line of investigation. Building on methodological and theoretical advancements, we empirically study play in-depth as communication and metacommunication through an exemplar of child-adult play. The aim with this investigation is to further the empirically grounded theorization of play as (meta)communication and discuss what the implications are for early childhood education and care (ECEC). More specifically, we address questions concerning play as communication and metacommunication as well as adult participation in and contributions to play, which are matters of foremost importance to ECEC. The theoretical concept of triggering, argued to be more functional than scaffolding for conceptualizing the participation and contributions of more experienced participants in play, is presented and differentiated with the help of empirical observations.

Introduction

A particular strand of research studies play as communication. Fundamental to this line of research are observations and theoretical elaboration made by Gregory Bateson (1972/2000) in the 1970s. Garvey (1977/1990) added to this school of thought, and her contributions are contingent on her shifting from animal play to children playing and, importantly, her access to new technology for documenting play in the form of video. Research that followed (e.g., Björk-Willén, 2012) has provided insights into how children, through employing various meta-markers, indicate that they go in and out of play. These developments, from Garvey onwards, have relied on the shift from studying animals playing to examining children who are playing, the use of new technology (video), and theoretical advancement in communications studies (Linell, 2014; Pramling & Säljö, 2015). In the present study, we further develop this line of research on play as communication, by studying in great detail an example of play jointly developed by a child and parent in a home setting. Extending previous studies, including the ones above, in this study, the research problem we address is how participants make and respond to contributions in joint play and the communicative and metacommunicative practices actualized. Through interaction analysis (Derry et al., 2010; Jordan & Henderson, 1995) of video data, we show how participation is negotiated and what, in the theoretical terms we present and use, is triggered and how; that is, how contributions to developing play are responsively managed by the participants. The findings show a more differentiated and permeable relationship between play and non-play (what we will theoretically conceptualize in terms of as if and as is) and that contributions that take play forward can be of both kinds. The concept of triggering, as further developed here, constitutes an important tool for the analyses of, and discussions on, participation and development of play—matters that are of critical importance to early childhood education and care (ECEC), where play is central.

Section snippets

Theoretical and empirical work on play as communication

In his pioneering work, Gregory Bateson (1972/2000) conceptualized play in terms of communication, on the basis of observations of monkeys in a zoo. From these observations he drew the conclusion that “this phenomenon, play, could only occur if the participant organisms were capable of some degree of metacommunication, i.e., of exchanging signals which would carry the message ‘this is play’” (p. 179). Communication, from this perspective, encompasses a “simple denotative level” and “levels of

Empirical studies

In an empirical study, explicitly building on Bateson's work, Garvey (1977/1990) observed children in pairs in the absence of an adult. The extent to which children interacted with their peers and how they communicated with one another were investigated. Children were paired according to age and sex: each pair consisted of one girl and one boy (2–5 years). The sessions were videotaped through a one-way mirror. Speech was transcribed, and nonverbal behavior was rendered through narrative

Purpose and research questions

Against the background of our theoretical and empirical elaboration, and through an in-depth analysis of a sustained shared play episode, we address two research questions:

  • What is the nature of the mutual play episode as a communicative activity?

  • What is triggered, and how, in responsive actions in the play episode?

On the basis of our findings concerning these two questions, we will discuss the implications for learning in and from play as well as for early childhood education and care (ECEC),

Conceptual resources for analyzing play

In this section, we elaborate on two concepts central to our analysis: triggering (as a development of scaffolding) and narrative. Thereafter, we introduce our analytical approach, which is interaction analysis (IA).

Since its inception (Bruner, 1975), and particularly since the seminal work on the concept (Wood, Bruner, & Ross, 1976), scaffolding has been frequently cited in educational analyses (e.g., Nilholm & Säljö, 1996; Sun & Rao, 2012; van de Pol et al., 2010). However, the construct has

Methodology

Our analysis is based on video-documented play in a home setting. In developmental research, there is a longstanding tradition of researchers studying their own (or colleagues') children at home. Two famous examples are parts of the work by Jean Piaget and the research collated in Narratives from the Crib, edited by Katherine Nelson (1989). The participants in the present study are Johannes (5 years old) and his mother, Cecilia. The background of the activity to be analyzed is that Johannes has

Findings

The play episode is first initiated by Johannes, suggesting that the horses need light, so they (i.e., the playmates) can pretend that the lamp is the sun, while he switches on a lamp in the room. Cecilia takes the initiative to let the play take off, in a way, by letting “the story begin”:

Excerpt 1. Starting to enact the play

  • 36. CECILIA: (takes a horse and moves it) hi hi

  • 37. Johannes: Hi! It’s almost bigger than dad

  • 38. CECILIA: Mm (with a touch of laughter), the mum there is bigger than the dad

Discussion and conclusions

In this paper, we have analyzed a continuous play activity in which a preschool-age child (Johannes, 5 years old) and his mother have participated. We are mainly interested in understanding what the nature of the mutual play episode is, seen as a communicative activity, and what is triggered, and how, in responsive actions in the play episode. Given our interest in how adults (preschool teachers or, as in the present case, one of the child's caregivers) can participate in play with children, we

Acknowledgement

This research work was funded by a grant from the Swedish Institute for Educational Research (Skolfi, 2016/112), which we gratefully acknowledge.

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