Session Information
25 SES 06, Participation and Self-Expression
Paper Session
Contribution
This presentation highlights children’s social and discursive practice in Swedish leisure-time centres. A leisure-time centre provides activities, before, during and after school, directed to children between six and twelve years old. This institution is closely connected to primary school, staffed with university-educated pedagogues and is, among other things, supposed to contribute to children’s development and to offer a meaningful leisure. Research concerning leisure-time centres is, however, insufficient. How and in what way leisure-time centres really contribute to children’s development is not well studied and what meaningful leisure comprises is not clearly defined in the Swedish curriculum. Knowledge won from research concerning leisure-time pedagogues and children’s construction of meaningful leisure and their everyday lives in the leisure-time centre could contribute to make children’s voice heard, initiate change and to develop the social practice within this institution. This point of departure is closely linked to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the presented study drag attention to children’s opportunities to be active participants in the production of data.
Our theoretical point of departure origins from a social constructionist perspective, which emphasizes that reality is constructed by people who interact. Within this theoretical perspective a meaningful leisure in leisure-time centres is mutually constructed by staff and children in their everyday practice. This means that the social practice at leisure-time centres is a consequence of human conceptions and attempts to structure and categorize the activities. The participants, in this case leisure-time pedagogues and children, are producing and reproducing the everyday social practice by mutual negotiations. They learn to handle the activities that are included and settle the meaning of the activities through these interactions.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Berger, P. & Luckmann, T. (1966). The Social Construction of Reality. New York: Doubleday. Burr, V. (2003) Social Constructionism. (2nd Edition). London: Routledge. Chouliarki, L. & Fairclough, N. (1999) Discourse in the late modernity: Rethinking critical discourse analysis. Edinburgh: University Press. Christensen, P. & James, A. (eds.) (2008). Research with Children: Perspectives and Practices, London: Routledge. Fairclough, N. (2003) Analysing Discourse. Textual Analysis for Social Research. Routledge: London. Fairclough, N. & Wodak, R. (1997) Critical Discourse Analysis. I T. van Dijk (red.), Discourse as Social Interaction. Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction. Volume 2. London: SAGE Publications Ltd. Haglund, B. & Anderson, S. (2009) Afterschool Programs and Leisure-Time Centres: Arenas for Learning and Leisure. In World Leisure Journal 51(2), 116-129. Haudrup Christensen, P. (2006) Children’s participation in ethnografic research. Issues of power and representation. Children and Society, v. 18(2), 165-176. Hill, M. (2005) Ethical Considerations in Researching Children's Experiences, pp 61-86. In S. Green, and D. Hogan (eds) Researching Children's Experience: Methods and Approaches. London: Sage. Klerfelt, A. (2006) Cyberage narratives – creative computing in after school centres. Childhood, (13)2, 175-203. Mischler, E.G. (1986) Research Interviewing: Context and Narrative. Harvard Cambridge: University Press. Ochs, E. & Capps, L. (2001) Living narrative. Creating lives in everyday storytelling. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.