Participatory Approaches to Understanding Collaborative, Child-Initiated Play: Children’s Agency, Social Negotiation, and Identity Construction on the Playground

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.