Preserving the Present: Designing a Child-Centered Qualitative Survey for a National Observatory of Children’s Play

This article considers ways in which toys have featured in children’s play throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Whilst often dismissed as trivial novelties, toys can be seen as a significant aspect of material culture, both reflecting and constructing ideas of childhood. A multimodal social semiotic perspective is used to examine a selection of toys produced between 2020 and 2022 that respond to the pandemic in various ways. The toys feature representations of the virus, of accessories for enacting pandemic practices such as mask-wearing and vaccination, and of pandemic ‘heroes’. In addition to these commercially produced toys, examples of toy play collected by the Play Observatory project from 2020 to 2022 are also analysed. These real-world instances demonstrate toys and everyday objects being used to playfully make sense of, and communicate understandings of, the COVID-19 pandemic. In combination, the examples reveal discourses embedded in the multimodal design of ‘pandemic playthings’ and ways in which toy play demonstrated children’s agentive meaning-making, including awareness and understandings of the pandemic they may not have articulated verbally. In this way, toys and toy play are seen as deeply meaningful, revealing stories about children and childhood in the time of COVID-19.

Section: Methodology and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pandemic playthings: A multimodal perspective on toys and toy play in the time of COVID-19

Cowan,

van Leeuwen,

Selander

2024

“…This had to be both sensitive to children's needs in the present day, uploading their images, videos and associated files as well as accurate and ethical in the recording of the metadata, the consents and permissions for the future. The meticulous concern for these issues and careful design of the online, outward-facing site of the Play Observatory is accounted for in the editorial for the special issue and more detail in other dissemination from the project, alongside accounts of the follow-up case studies and a film workshop (Cowan et al, 2022;Olusoga et al, 2022). We received submissions from the UK and international sources, including in Germany, Australia and Singapore, featuring children and young people from 0 to 18 years.…”

Section: About the Play Observatorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Children’s production of place and (third) space during Covid 19: Den building, filmmaking and the postdigital in the Play Observatory

Potter,

Cannon,

Cowan

2024

The Play Observatory was a COVID-19 rapid response project funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) exploring children’s play experiences during the pandemic through an online survey, case studies and a filmmaking workshop. With access to many of the usual spaces and places of play curtailed during the lockdowns of the pandemic, in this article, we focus on children’s resourceful and playful placemaking during the restrictions, as well as their creation of mediated third spaces in their own homes and neighbourhoods. We discuss Play Observatory survey submissions centring on children’s use of space and place in their play. Images of den-building showed imaginative productions of worlds in the spaces of the home in which children felt secure. Arguably this was to do with the way they used material artefacts to move the locus of control closer to themselves, even as the world seemed out of control for many. In the same way, video clips and films submitted to the Observatory revealed much about everyday life during the pandemic, the third spaces that were enabled and the postdigital worlds of entanglement in which children played. This paper will present and discuss contributions to the Play Observatory’s archive which are revelatory of children’s exploration of time, space and placemaking during restrictions associated with the pandemics. In our explanation of how the pandemic influenced play, we offer insights into young people’s postdigital and collusive creative practices and their playful imbrication of material and cultural resources.

“…1. A national, online multimodal survey (see Olusoga et al, 2022); 2. Online ethnographic interviews with 10 children and their families (see Cowan et al, 2022); and 3.…”

Section: The Play Observatorymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The survey was first and foremost intended to address and privilege the child contributor, whilst recognising that access would be mediated via their parent/ legal guardian. The survey was also attuned to affect and contributors were prompted to report (via text and/or emojis) on their emotional state during and after the play episodes they shared (Olusoga et al, 2022). After a piloting, another prompt was added to capture any further reflections arising during the process of creating and uploading contributions.…”

Section: The Play Observatorymentioning

confidence: 99%

‘I danced on the road to the Macarena song which felt a bit naughty’: Affective entanglements and the wayfaring pandemic child

Olusoga

2024

Self Cite

This paper applies a posthumanist lens, informed by the work of Hollett and Ehret and of Ingold, to consider children’s playful affective entanglements with the human and the more-than-human during fluctuating periods of social distancing in the COVID-19 pandemic. Through this refracting theoretical lens, I (re)examine a selection of play and leisure experiences of an emergent subject – the pandemic child – during the national U.K. lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. Via a national online, qualitative survey, children and families were invited to share examples of their play and leisure experiences during the pandemic to the Play Observatory, a U.K. research project that ran from 2020 to 2022. These survey contributions provide portals through which to (re)consider children’s connection, participation and emergent becomings, attuning analytical attention towards children’s affective place-event entanglements during pandemic times. A posthumanist (re)telling of children’s Play Observatory contributions demonstrates how children were imbricated in constantly emergent affects, meanings, becomings and potentialities, that waxed and waned, intensified and dissipated, transcending the physical locus of lockdown. This paper contributes to the field by unsettling discourses of rupture, loss and deficit that have tended to dominate public and policy discussions of children’s experience of lockdowns. It contributes to ongoing, collective attempts to interrupt policy responses to the pandemic that centre individualising practices of curriculum ‘catch-up’ and fail to invite into the debate consideration of the potential richness of experiences and events encountered by the pandemic child outside of the strictures of normal schooling and curriculum.