ERIC Number: EJ1385873
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2023-Jun
Pages: 24
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1338-2144
EISSN: EISSN-2719-5651
Self-Organized Communities of Children
Bernstorff, Benedicte
Journal of Pedagogy, v14 n1 p79-102 Jun 2023
From a child-centered perspective, this article explores the practices of children's self-organized play-communities in institutional everyday life in Danish early childhood education and care (ECEC) settings, based on a phenomenological non-participant-observational study with a duration of 16 months involving two kindergartens (Bernstorff, 2021). Drawing on Bourdieu's reflexive sociology and praxeology, children's self-organized play-communities are analyzed as a social space, being a field for relations, fights, negotiations with specific admission requirements emerging as accepted values shared by the specific field. The analysis demonstrates that self-organized play-communities are a social space with its own practices of "being together" expressed through "the social language in play" linked to and guided by an "institutional choreography." Besides, the analysis demonstrates three kinds of different communities of children in self-organized play, viz. the categories: "Relational play-communities," "Community-oriented play-communities," and "Conflictual play-communities," which categories may, however, also overlap into blended categories. The article argues that children's self-organized play-communities risk being under pressure in the institutional choreography, which in turn affects children's opportunities for having uninterrupted periods of time and space to self-organized play in their institutional everyday life.
Descriptors: Foreign Countries, Childrens Attitudes, Play, Group Activities, Early Childhood Education, Sense of Community, Interaction, Interpersonal Communication, Affective Behavior, Caring, Well Being, Peer Relationship, Kindergarten
Sciendo, a company of De Gruyter Poland. 32 Zuga Street, 01-811 Warsaw, Poland. Tel: +48-22-701-5015; e-mail: info@sciendo.com; Web site: https://www.sciendo.com
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Early Childhood Education; Elementary Education; Kindergarten; Primary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Denmark
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A