Pre-school as a meeting place : children´s access-strategies and exclusions in play and conversation

Pre-school as a Meeting Place – Children’s Access-strategies and Exclusions in Play and Conversation The research reported in this thesis attempts to understand what happens when children interact with each other in the context of activities in a pre-school setting (here called Daggkåpan) when adults are not involved. By using ethnographically inspired methodology, in combination with conversation-analysis, this project has been analysing everyday interaction between children who are three to five years old. The aim of the project was to understand how children at Daggkåpan create relationships and how they defend and protect their interactional spaces. I have studied how children shape, maintain and interrupt relationships and interactions with one another. I have studied and analysed what kinds of access-strategies the children utilize and create and also how these children exclude one another in play activities and everyday conversations. Sociocultural and interactionistic perspectives have been used. Findings suggest that it is very important for these children to maintain interactions with peers and gain access to play groups. The children of Daggkåpan create and use several different strategies for gaining access. The results also indicate that gaining access to play groups is particularly difficult in preschool settings since young children tend to protect shared spaces and ongoing play activities from children outside the realms of these spaces and activities. Children also co-construct a number of strategies for excluding peers from their interactional spaces. Steering clear from the dominating perspective that categorizes children and focuses on the individual child, I have in contrast focused children during their interaction with one another in peer group activities. In other words I have discussed peer-relations, peer-socialization and peer-perspectives from an interactional view. Studying peer-interactions through microanalysis allows for understanding what is meaningful for children in their peer-culture in preschool