Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2026

DOI

10.1007/s10643-026-02169-w

Publication Title

Early Childhood Education Journal

Volume

Advance online publication

Pages

13 pp.

Abstract

Children's play in schools is often tightly controlled, shaped by adult beliefs and concerns about safety and appropriateness. Play in school settings can reflect expected school norms and follow rules set by adults, but free play also allows for rough, risky, mischievous, and subversive actions. This research, guided by an affordance framework, examines spontaneous, child-initiated outdoor free play to understand how children navigate and reinterpret the boundaries of play. Using critical naturalistic inquiry and participatory methods, the study data includes children's videography that captures dynamic interactions and shifts in agency among peers, go along interviews that track boundary negotiations in real-time, and detailed researcher field notes documenting the nuances of play interactions. Findings show that children actively construct, co-construct, and deconstruct knowledge, culture, and actions that demonstrate agency, adjusting their play based on the presence or absence of adults and uninvited onlookers. Children's videography further reveals their ongoing renegotiation of established play norms and the complex ways they form play identities. These insights underscore the need to critically examine how educators frame and support children's play cultures within play spaces, especially when considering the inherent tensions between school norms and children's play cultures.

Rights

© The Authors 2026.

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

ORCID

0000-0003-0794-3311 (Eckhoff)

Original Publication Citation

Eckhoff, A. (2026). Participatory approaches to understanding collaborative, child-initiated play: Children's agency, social negotiation, and identity construction on the playground. Early Childhood Education Journal. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-026-02169-w

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