Participation and responsiveness: children’s rights in play from the perspective of play-responsive early childhood education and care and the UNCRC

ABSTRACT While children’s rights to play is stated in the UNCRC, this study investigates children’s rights in play through an analysis of narrative play in preschool. Play-responsive early childhood education and care (PRECEC) is a recently developed theory that provides analytical tools for investigating participants’ communicative coordination and reorientation in mutual activities. By empirically trying out four interrelated elements – space, voice, audience, and influence from Lundy’s rights discourse, the aim is to further develop the theory of PRECEC by differentiating the meaning of responsivity. Video-recorded data from an early childhood education and care setting provide the empirical foundation for the study. What we find analytically is how responsiveness in narrative play affords children to express themselves, be heard and be responded to, and what this entails. In the activity, children are included and recognised as contributing participants, having agency to co-narrate the development of the play.