Playground objects (Bateman & Church, 2017)

Bateman, A. and Church, A. (2017) Children’s use of objects in an early years playground, European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 25(1), 55-71. 

In this paper, Amanda Bateman and Amelia Church show how young children use resources available in the local environment to navigate and manage their social interactions. From videorecordings of 4-year-old children in the playground at a primary school in Wales, we see the children use a range of immediate objects – snacks, a coin and a sticker – to attempt group entry, to assert status, and to exclude other children. This data and analysis shows us that children’s relationships are local-constructed, both context dependent and context renewing, and dynamically talked (and shown) into being.