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Children’s Imaginative Play Environments and Ecological Narrative Inquiry

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Research Handbook on Childhoodnature

Part of the book series: Springer International Handbooks of Education ((SIHE))

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Abstract

The methodological inquiry developed here about the natural environments in which children play extends the theory and practices of narrative inquiry in educational research, in particular, Clandinin and Connelly’s extensive scholarly work in that field. This ecological approach hinges on the inclusion of young children and uses multimodal methods (such as mapping, drawings, and memory boxes) to prompt in children a self-questioning of the stories they told and retold about playing in different environments, the incorporation of a historical/temporal and comparative intergenerational sensibility that demonstrates the complexity of the children’s telling of stories, and, subsequently, an extension of Clandinin and Connelly’s (Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research. San Francisco, CA: Joseey-Bass, 2000) three-dimensional narrative analysis model via the analysis of contextualized re-stories and mind mapping. Of central importance to this ecology of inquiry was a revealing of the ontologically temporal (and spatial) nature of how the children’s stories shifted and deepened over the course of four iterative conversational interviews as the participant-researcher relationship developed. Notably, this temporal process was enabled spatially and geographically through the children’s preferences for playing outside in “naturally” perceived places such as a tree, a clump of bushes, or a creek and being reinterviewed in that ecologically imagined and “played” space. This ecology helped children engage in deepening their ongoing conversations with the researcher in relation to the affordances in nature they preferred to use for their self-constructed imaginative play places. Children’s rich, sensory experiences with these aspects of nature were observed ethnographically during the conversations, which added further depth and meaning to their stories and what that might mean for childhoodnature ecological, pedagogical, and research development.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Arts and Education, School of Education, Deakin University, Burwood, VIC, Australia

    Deborah Moore

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  1. Deborah Moore
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Correspondence to Deborah Moore .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Education, Southern Cross University School of Education, Coolangatta, Queensland, Australia

    Amy Cutter-Mackenzie

  2. Centre for Educational Research, Western Sydney University Centre for Educational Research, Penrith, New South Wales, Australia

    Karen Malone

  3. Department of Education, University of Bath Department of Education, Bath, United Kingdom

    Elisabeth Barratt Hacking

Section Editor information

  1. Science Education, University of Regina, Regina, SK, Canada

    Paul Hart

  2. Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

    Phillip Payne

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Moore, D. (2018). Children’s Imaginative Play Environments and Ecological Narrative Inquiry. In: Cutter-Mackenzie, A., Malone, K., Barratt Hacking, E. (eds) Research Handbook on Childhoodnature . Springer International Handbooks of Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51949-4_23-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51949-4_23-1

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