“I Would Catch Coronavirus as My Pet”: Exploring Young Children’s Compositional Play Amid Crisis

Context: In moments of social crisis, adults may wonder what to say to the young children in their care. Yet children are often already making meaning of and taking action on their worlds. In this qualitative case study of a virtual writing and art workshop, we sought to listen to young children’s play and composing about the COVID-19 pandemic and intersecting crises. Research Question: Drawing on critical childhood studies and Bakhtin’s carnival, we asked: How do young children in a virtual art/writing workshop use compositional play to make meaning of the pandemic and other intersecting social crises? And through their compositional play, how do these young children take action on and speak back to the crises unfolding around them? Research Design: We present findings from a broader qualitative case study focused on how young children and their families processed the pandemic and intersecting social crises within a virtual writing/art workshop. Between June and December 2020, we designed, facilitated, and documented a series of four-part virtual writing/art workshops for young children and their families. Data generation included: (1) video-recorded participant observation of workshop sessions, including simultaneous breakout groups, and (2) artifact collection (i.e., photographs of writing/art, chat transcripts). We engaged in cycles of qualitative coding, analyzing what children made alongside our annotations, before connecting our coding scheme to literature and theory to construct themes. Conclusions: We found that young children (1) “decrowned” the virus, narrating care amid crisis; (2) confronted the “unspeakable,” disrupting notions of appropriateness; and (3) played with masks through parody, while simultaneously critiquing and “unmasking” adults’ pandemic rituals. We offer a discussion and implications for early childhood educators and researchers, reinforcing the role of play in children’s composing and recognizing even children’s most indiscernible expressions as meaningful, especially in moments of crisis.