Different Perspectives on ‘Young Children’s Onlooking’: Going Beyond Developmental Stages of Social Play

Abstract

This study attempts at understanding young children’s onlooking behaviors from different perspectives by making connections to and diffracting through theories and concepts, while moving away from stage theories of children’s social play development which are often narrowing and blinding our vision. An entry to this study emerged as we unexpectedly encountered with pink teddy-bear socks which were appearing in the edges of several photos in the process of re-viewing play observation records. We generated data from the past play observation records (journals, photos, video clips), new participant observation records, dialogues with the teacher, researchers’ thinking-with-data~theory and joint affective writings. Through the data of onlooking children who freely chose to enjoy watching over a play for an extended period of time, move around co-existing plays, or jump into an affect-laden play, we learned about their agency and the value of onlooking behaviors as a joyful play itself. Moreover, their onlooking was one of competent play participation strategies to understand ongoing play frameworks and find the right moment to get involved, and also functioned well in those moments to help peers in conflicts or in need. Entanglements of children, teacher, materials, and space-times were witnessed in our data, as the waves of onlooking~playing~learning constantly emerge, overlap, diffract, intra-act in their material-discursive arrangements. We hope that re-configurations of onlooking children may disturb and unsettle adults’ perspectives on young children as not-yet, immature, lacking subjects based on the standardized, universalized developmental stages and, furthermore, help us to reconsider young children’s agency to affect and be affected in the entangled relationality, and generate differences in the world they live.