Tools
Tools
Richards, Helen (2023) How do two-year-olds construct outdoor play as part of the two-year-olds offer? A multimodal ethnographic study of an inner London nursery during the global pandemic. Doctoral thesis, London Metropolitan University.
This research employed a multimodal, ethnographic approach to explore how a group of two-year-olds, who received ‘the two-year-olds offer’, experienced outdoor play in a London nursery playground during the pandemic. The two-year-olds offer is an education policy initiative in England, introduced in 2013, in order to provide ‘free childcare for the most disadvantaged 2-year-olds’ (DfE, 2013). While some important aspects of the introduction of the two-year-old offer have been given considerable attention in research, (e.g. assessment of the policy’s take-up by providers and families, and its impact on early years outcomes), there is little research evidence documenting the experiences of the two-year olds who are the subject of this policy.
To explore young children’s outdoor play experiences at the nursery, the study draws on multimodal social semiotic theory, which challenges the common assumption that meaning is primarily made through speech and focuses on all the resources which people use to make meanings through interaction. Using a multimodal frame enabled me to take notice of young children’s complex, motivated and transformative orchestrations of semiotic resources, including their bodies, the objects and spaces that were (made) available for the purposes of engaging in playful communication and forming relationships with peers (Potter and Cowan, 2020). Combining multimodal social semiotics with the ‘new social studies of childhood’ (James and Prout, 2015), created a hybrid interpretative lens through which to problematise developmental and attainment discourses currently dominating much of early years policy rhetoric. The study’s methodology combined multimodal semiotics and ethnography (Dicks et al, 2011; Sidiropoulou, 2015), using video-recordings of young children’s interactions in their everyday setting along with photos, field notes, maps and informal conversations with staff.
The findings suggest that free outside play offers unique affordances for children’s meaning making while interacting with their peers and that this is a key way in which the young children co-constructed learning at nursery. The ‘disadvantaged’ two-year-olds were revealed as capable, agentic, multimodal meaning makers contrary to dominant policy discourses that conceptualise them as ‘deficient’ or attribute their perceived failure to families and teachers. This finding resonates with other literature which challenges such discourses (Cameron and Moss 2020; Williams, 2022).
The findings are important to policy and practice because they provide a distinctive insight into how two-year-olds learn through outside play. The multimodal analysis also suggests ways in which the organisation of the nursery enhances very young children’s learning. It describes ways of recognising signs of learning, which are seldom recognised in nurseries (Cowan and Flewitt 2020). The research promotes democratic education (Moate et al., 2017; Cameron and Moss, 2020) by arguing that children and families, from marginalised groups, have strengths and value, and that their voices should be listened to. In addition, the analysis counters popular discourses about ‘learning loss’ by revealing this group of children’s complex ways of playing and learning during the pandemic.
 |
View Item |