Children as explorers: a cultural-historical study of children’s activities on the kindergarten playground in China and Norway

Project summary

The main goal is to investigate and discuss the understanding of children’s play as exploration. We want to describe and discuss children’s activities during playtime on playground, to understand how conditions and artefacts creates conditions for young children’s explorative activities and conditions for children’s play, learning and development in kindergartens in China and Norway. Children are active agents, participating in their own cultural formation through the activities, they engage in, in their everyday life in kindergarten.

-Research questions

-What characterizes the conditions for children’s activities on the playground in Chinese and in Norwegian kindergartens?

-How can children’s activities on playground be conceptualized as exploration?

The methodological approach is inspired by Mariane Hedegaard and Marilyn Fleer’s dialectical-interactive methodological approach, which is characterized by including children’s perspectives, cultural and historical practices, and the researcher’s motives and goals for the study (Hedegaard and Fleer, 2008, p. 3)Our empirical work will be carried out in one Norwegian and one Chinese kindergarten.