Walking with preschool‐aged children to explore their local wellbeing affordances

An increasingly well‐developed body of research uses neighbourhood walks to better understand primary school children's experiences of local environments, yet virtually nothing is known about preschool‐aged children's connections to their neighbourhoods. A reason for this omission is the commonly held view that preschool children lack competency to reflect on lived environments beyond playgrounds, kindergartens, and other confined settings that dominate early childhood. However, preliterate children walk around, use, and create intimate relationships with local environments as shown by 10 children aged 3–5 years from Dunedin in New Zealand during go‐along interviews. We asked each to walk us around their locale, explaining and pointing out favourite and less beloved places and activities. In this article, we advance two arguments: first that preschoolers are knowledgeable meaning makers of place; second that walking with them is a key step to understanding their life worlds and provides a way for preliterate and preverbal children to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of their spatial worlds, including as research participants. We challenge the idea that children of this age lack large‐scale spatial competency and understanding. Walking with them generated an in‐depth appreciation of their experiences of environments and revealed deep connections they had with their locales at varied scales. The work enables us to offer novel insights into spatial competency, sociospatial complexities, and the multiple dimensions of young children's wellbeing affordances in urban environments. Such insights are highly relevant for geographers, planners, and others who shape children's urban environments.     

The place of children among the Guji of southern Ethiopia: school,work and play

This article explores everyday life among Guji children in southern Ethiopia and the place of children in an intergenerational social order. Based on data generated through ethnographic fieldwork among the Guji, we show that work, school and play are significant and intertwined social practices. Local knowledge and skills of importance for sustainable livelihood are acquired through children's participation in these different social practices. Oral tradition represents a key element of local knowledge and social practices in everyday life. However, political and social changes, such as settlement policies and the introduction of schools, affect the dynamic interconnectedness of these practices, as well as relations between different generations. These changes also have implications for local knowledge and local livelihoods.     

Changes in children's nature-based experiences near home: from spontaneous play to adult-controlled,planned and organised activities

A qualitative case study from Brumunddalen, Norway, indicates that children's use of nature areas near their homes have changed substantially from being spontaneous and self-initiated to being part of planned, organised and adult-controlled activities. This study explores the association between changes in outdoor play and wider patterns of change in childhood today, as increasing amounts of play time is spent in institutions and organised activities, or occupied by computer and internet usage. The paper discusses these effects in terms of social relations as well as children's identity formation. The subject was investigated through adults' memories of their own childhood and their observations of children's practices.     

Early parenting and the urban experience: risk,community, play and embodiment in an East London neighbourhood

This article will critically examine theories of risk – referred to in this article as ‘pro-risk’ – as applied to parenting cultures in the UK through a case study of early years parenting, based in Walhamstow, East London. Common to all of these theories is an assertion that children are over-parented – a product of economic, social and cultural changes such as the decline of community as well as theories of child-centred parenting. Through the close examination of two examples where risk and community were contested, the article will argue that missing from these theories is an understanding of the embodiments of early years parenting, which underpin the way that parents handle the tensions between risk and development. Further, that parents sought to militate against isolation and the decline of community through local parenting networks.     

Playing outside the box – on LEGO toys and the changing world of construction play

This article deals with three major instances in the history of the LEGO Company. First, it investigates the transference from wood to plastics as the main material used in creating LEGO toys, and also the innovations in plastic molding machines that influenced the interlocking mechanism of the LEGO bricks. Second, this article deals with a rather unfortunate episode from the LEGO history, namely, the period between the late 1990s and the early twenty‐first century when the LEGO Company felt the need to extend its brand image through diversifying its product range. Unfortunately, this led to a confusing, rather than a strong brand image and resulted in heavy financial losses in 2003 and 2004. Third, this article looks into recent attempts by the LEGO Company to bring the fans into the company in order to revive the LEGO brand and its products. This part focuses on Mindstorms 2.0 and Mindstorms NXT, especially, in order to illustrate the increase in user involvement in LEGO product development.     

Nightscapes of Play: Enjoyment of Architecture and Urban Space through Bicycling

Anti‐automobile, anti‐capitalist, and pro‐environmental worldviews are known to shape bicyclists’ right to the city demands. This research uncovers another layer of their radical engagement with the city: playful enjoyment of architectural structures and urban space, using the case study of Midnight Mystery Ride, a community bicycle ride taking place in the middle of the night once a month in several cities around the world. Through theoretical lenses of play and rhythmanalysis, I argue that bicyclists at night take over spaces built with exchange vale in mind and introduce use value in the same spaces. Interviews with bicyclists demonstrate how their unconventional use of space questions separation from natural rhythms and nature. I demonstrate that their nighttime use of the city is also a critique of how urban space is organised largely for profit and discipline and of how the human and playful potential of urban space are not fully realised.     

Fox Palaces: the playful occupation of a Johannesburg city park

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the playful occupation of an inner-city park in Johannesburg, South Africa, by the Hummingbird Play Association. Playful occupation emerged as a strategy to create and demand spaces for children’s play, demonstrating through practice the possibilities for public play provision. Children’s play is read as a form of folklore, through which children’s and adult’s spatial experiences and imaginings of the city can be viewed. It considers how opportunities for play facilitated with Playwork Principles in mind can co-create safe spaces for children which could act as tools for social transformation and justice in the urban public realm.     

国外儿童独立活动性研究进展与启示

儿童独立活动性是衡量儿童自主活动能力的重要指标,提升儿童独立活动性对于增加儿童体力活动量、减少肥胖几率、促进社会交往等具有积极作用。本文梳理了国外学者对于儿童独立活动性的研究成果,介绍了儿童独立活动性的基本概念,从理论模型与实证研究两方面总结了儿童独立活动性的影响因素与作用机制,整理了其测量指标与具体方法,并归纳了相关实践研究。在此基础上,文章指出了现有研究在影响机制、测度方法以及理论向实践转化方面的不足,并提出了对我国的启示内容,以期为我国提供借鉴。     

Heaney and education

Seamus Heaney inhabited the world of teacher education, as a student, and later as a lecturer, in 1960s Belfast. That world was infused by three ideas: learning as a journey, learning through play, and learning as construction. This article traces correspondences between these and thematic trends in Heaney’s work. It presents the case that Heaney’s writing reflects an informed understanding of children and of learning peculiar to the mind of a great teacher. Moreover, Heaney’s contribution to education is remarkable in that it transcends the school and the academy, and offers a creative vision in which poetry and learning are inextricably linked. As Heaney put it in Among Schoolchildren, the “walls of the world expand” as reader and writer, teacher and learner, poet and child “go beyond our normal cognitive bounds and sense a new element where we are not alien but liberated, more alive to ourselves, more drawn out, more educated”.     

Childhood in the shadow of war: filled with work and play

This study was focused on war-time childhood. The target period covers the war years 1939–1945 and the years of post-war reconstruction. The research was based on memories of 13 participants who lived in the countryside in northern Finland during the Second World War. The purpose of the study was to find out what children's everyday life was like during the war. According to the results, children did play regardless of the war situation. Children also participated in household work actively. By highlighting children's experiences and perspectives, this study provided important information about children's survival during war time. The study also helps understanding the effects of wars from children's point of view.