Moments of togetherness: humour and playful interactions in the toddler peer group

Toddlers often use humour to engage their peers in acts of playful interactions as they build a sense of togetherness through a ‘mutual we’. In this paper, we discuss the findings of a study where the aim was to examine the embodied strategies toddlers use to engage their peers in interactions that are playful and full of humour. The study is an ethnomethodological study using conversation analysis (EMCA) to examine interactions that were video recorded over a nine-month period in an childhood education and care (ECEC) setting in Iceland. The findings explore how toddlers use humour connected to their available environmental resources to recruit other children into their play and explore social conventions and rules within their setting. These findings contribute to the growing body of early childhood research that positions this young age group as competent and imaginative in co-creating moments of togetherness, building the ‘mutual we’ within their peer group.