Introduction

In recent decades, refugee immigration has had significant impact on educational contexts in Sweden. The country has received large numbers of immigrants from a wide range of countries, including those in conflict zones. They include families with young children and may still experience complex resettling processes, with their inclusion and participation in Swedish society limited and only gradually increasing. Preschools, a regular and accessible form of early childhood education and care (ECEC) for children aged 1–5 in Sweden, have therefore become a primary and highly significant social arena for young immigrant children’s lived experiences in the majority society.Footnote 1

Migration, as a global development, highlights the importance of teachers being able and prepared to construct activities and create social and cultural conditions that facilitate children’s learning and the development of bilingualism, while honing their experiences of inclusion and democratic participation (Skolverket, 2019; see also UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, article 12 on children’s rights to democratic participation and respect for children’s voices). However, although children’s perspectives and their agentive participation are valued and actively sought in early childhood education in various countries (see Skolverket, 2019; Bateman & Cekaite, 2022; Church & Bateman, 2019; Samuelsson & Asplund Carlsson, 2008), less is known about how the participation and perspectives of young children are implemented and taken care of in concrete ways in early childhood pedagogy.

In response to the call to create democratic environments in ECEC, conducive to learning, the present study documents action-based participatory research, which created and explored language and literacy training practices for immigrant children (aged 1–5) in several regular preschools in Sweden.Footnote 2 The children in these preschools came from highly diverse linguistic, social and ethnic backgrounds and had limited exposure to the majority language in social contexts other than during their time spent in the preschool. The empirical data consist of video and audio recordings of teacher-guided play activities, collaboratively developed by researchers and teachers during action-based interventions, focusing on inclusive pedagogies that were mindful of children’s skills, interests and perspectives.

The overall aim was to create rich linguistic and cultural environments that could facilitate children’s learning as well as their agentive, interested and democratic participation. The teachers faced a highly complex task, which required the organization and implementation of child-oriented social and language learning activities that were adapted to children with limited majority language knowledge. These activities and a knowledge of Swedish were at the same time important in ensuring the children’s readiness for and successful participation in the further schooling system (cf. Björk-Willén, Pramling & Simonsson, 2018).

Theoretical Perspectives

The present study adopts a sociocultural perspective, according to which social interaction, and specifically scaffolding interactions with more competent members of the community, is the driving force of learning (Vygotsky, 1978). The study is also informed by an ecological perspective on language learning, which holds that learning requires conditions that combine a high level of access to a rich linguistic environment with personal engagement on the part of the learner (van Lier, 2004, Schwartz & Minkov, 2022, see also Rogoff, 2003 on learning through intent observation). Under these perspectives, the essential features of learning include learners’ agency, motivation and autonomy, in addition to guidance from and interactions with those who are more expert. These approaches also take a critical stance to logocentrism and adopt a broad conceptualisation of semiotic modes that are relevant for meaning-making. Accordingly, in various types of social interaction, multiple semiotic resources—language, prosody, body actions, cultural and material artefacts—contribute to the shaping of human action and to meaning-making by the participants (Goodwin, 2018; Lytra, 2012).

Children’s Play Activities as a Site for Participation, Social Relationships, and Language Learning

Some significant learning and participatory affordances in ECEC settings are located within play situations (Björk-Willén, 2016; Blum-Kulka & Gorbat, 2014; Samuelsson & Asplund Carlsson, 2008, Sawyer, 1997; Skolverket, 2019). Play is a social activity that is intrinsically motivating and entertaining and is an integral part of children’s peer cultures worldwide. It is also associated with learning and developmental potentials (Corsaro, 2015; Pellegrini, 2011). Play is a heterogeneous social activity: children’s peer play can take various forms. Earlier research has directed attention to the variety of play types and their potential for children’s peer group socialization and their linguistic, social and cultural learning (Cekaite & Björk-Willén, 2013; Goodwin, 1990; Sawyer, 1997). For instance, locomotor play is an entertaining activity that relies on physical actions, e.g., chasing, wrestling, rope skipping and others, and can sustain and organize play participation without a need for complex linguistic means. Locomotor play has therefore been suggested as a relevant social framework, where children (including novices such as second language learners) have opportunities to enter and develop social relationships with ease. Such play can therefore be regarded as an important initial steppingstone during immigrant children’s second language (L2) learning within the peer group (Ervin-Tripp, 1986).

Children’s role play or so-called sociodramatic play, where participants take on various social roles within a dynamically changing play script, is considered a key social activity that is conducive to learning and the development of social skills and sociocultural knowledge (Corsaro, 2015; Vygotsky, 1978). Sociodramatic play is a notably complex activity requiring social, linguistic, and communicative skills to be able to participate creatively and on an equal footing (Garvey, 1990; Larsson et al., 2022). According to the Scandinavian pedagogical model, play takes up a large part of the time children spend in preschool, and play activities can be shaped and organized in various ways (Samuelsson & Asplund Carlsson, 2008). The Swedish Curriculum for the Preschool (Skolverket, 2019) highlights play as the foundation for children’s development, learning and well-being: “[P]lay gives children the opportunity to imitate, fantasize and process impressions. This enables them to form an idea of themselves and other people. […] Play stimulates imagination and insight. Play can also challenge and stimulate children’s motor skills, communication, collaboration and problem-solving, as well as the ability to think in terms of images and symbols.” (Skolverket, 2019, p. 8). Accordingly, children have to be provided with opportunities to engage in play both on their own, and with guidance from educators. Preschool activities in Sweden, and in other Scandinavian countries, are therefore characterized by frequent free play periods, i.e., time when children usually socialize with each other, and educators simply monitor children’s conduct. While acknowledging the importance of children’s peer play, several studies have also pointed out that free play activities do not necessarily provide a participatory social and learning environment for children who are relative language novices, when, for instance, the groups are linguistically diverse (Cekaite & Evaldsson, 2017; Puskas & Björk-Willén, 2017). A number of studies on immigrant children attending preschool in Sweden demonstrated that children’s peer group activities constitute both a resource and a potential constraint for social interactions and learning. Children may have limited knowledge of Swedish, that can serve as their lingua franca and contribute productively to children’s development of social relations, as well as their language skills (Cekaite & Björk-Willén, 2013; Cekaite & Evaldsson, 2017; Larsson et al., 2022). Children who still have limited language and social knowledge in the lingua franca (the society’s majority language), or cultural knowledge of play scripts, need to engage in social interactions with teachers/educators who are ready to serve as willing and supportive interactional partners (Blum-Kulka & Gorbat, 2014; Samuelsson, 2020).

Guided Play

In ECEC settings, children’s play can be developed and transformed into an informal learning activity that takes place in social interactions with educators within the semiotically rich environments of an educational institution (Björk-Willén et al., 2018; Röe-Indregård et al., 2022). Teacher-led, or guided, play is an activity where adults, e.g., teachers, take on active roles in guiding children’s actions. Educators can explicitly or implicitly guide children “toward cultural learning while retaining some of the positive characteristics of play behaviour” (Samuelsson, 2020: 12, on immigrant children’s play in preschools in Sweden). Guided play makes it possible to teach educational content in a way that incorporates elements of free play, emotional involvement, and collaborative discovery. Play and playworlds have been shown to provide rich opportunities for engaging children in practising language, as well as discovering and learning child-relevant social and cultural themes and actions (see Samuelsson, 2020). For instance, guided play has been shown to enhance children’s literacy skills. Vardi-Rath et al. (2014) have examined first language child speakers’ pretend play in the wake of a story teachers had just read to them (see also Toub et al., 2018). The study shows that children (using their first language) enacted the story plot and incorporated both material and literacy related props in their play. Children’s story-based play had “the potential to foster discursive literacy skills”, their ability to create entertaining and enticing alternative realities (while also relying on the story), and to enrich their vocabulary (Vardi-Rath et al., 2014: 85). While “in frame”—acting out their play-roles—children engaged in pragmatically appropriate use of spoken language, and used lexical items that were inspired by the storybook language. Children’s “out-of-frame” talk was characterized by explanations and arguments about play. These conversational genres required language that was less context-bound, and therefore potentially conducive to improving children’s discursive literacy skills (Vardi-Rath et al., 2014: 85).

Schwartz and Minkov (2022) have studied teacher-led play during heritage language (HL) teaching in Israel in bilingual (Hebrew and Russian) preschools and described a pedagogical approach that successfully enhanced children’s interest, engagement, and agentive participation in HL learning. The approach involved teacher-led pretend play that drew on a fantasy script, entertaining material props, and discursive strategies that invited children’s initiatives and teacher–child collaborative actions. By relying on these resources and the script routine, teachers were able to sustain children’s interest in the activity, use and solicit “appropriate and diversified vocabulary,” and model the target language. Children’s agentive participation in ECEC can also be implemented in the shape of teachers’ confirmation of children’s initiatives. As demonstrated by Church and Bateman (2019) in their study of 4-year-old children’s daily preschool routine in Australia and New Zealand, teachers’ responsivity and ability to tune in to children’s initiatives, i.e., to “child-initiated sequences of learning,” confirmed and encouraged children’s participation and created affordances for children to volunteer, explore, and assert their own perspectives in learning encounters.

Recently it has also been suggested that guided play activities can be especially relevant for children in educational settings where children’s language knowledge is rather limited and linguistic and cultural heterogeneity is a pervasive characteristic. Guided play can serve as a social arena, where children from various backgrounds “can be simultaneously scaffolded in both language and cultural learning in environments that let children immerse themselves through playful engagement in a new cultural setting” (Samuelsson, 2020: 12). However, as we will demonstrate in this action research study, guided play is a sensitive and fragile activity. The dilemma and educational challenge for teachers is how to sustain entertaining, engaging and imaginative features of play, and at the same time conceive of play situations as conducive to learning and to agentive and democratic participation by children. We will show several ways in which play, teaching and learning can successfully complement each other.

Method

Setting and Participants

Several regular preschools in Sweden, and their teachers, took part together with researchers in a participatory action research project. Because Swedish, the majority language in society, is the language of the educational system, including ECEC and subsequent schooling, competence in Swedish sociocultural and linguistic knowledge is crucial to children’s future life prospects and chances of democratic citizenship in a short-term as well as a long-term perspective. The aim of the action research collaboration was to identify and design teacher-guided activities that could enrich children’s linguistic environment and enhance their agentive participation and engagement with literacy-based and other cultural resources. The study was inspired by the Curriculum for the Preschool (Skolverket, 2019) according to which “[c]hildren should be given the conditions both for play in which they themselves take the initiative and play introduced by someone in the work team. All children should be given the opportunity to participate in shared games based on their conditions and abilities.” (p. 9).

The preschools were located in areas in Sweden of low socioeconomic status. Such areas are characterized by high levels of unemployment and a dense immigrant population. Children’s families face many challenges, including a low level of education, some illiteracy, limited knowledge of Swedish, reduced access to the labour market, and rather limited opportunities to engage actively in the majority society. The majority of children (aged 1–5) were learners of Swedish as a second language. Their first languages included Tigrinya, Arabic dialects, Somalian, Kurdish dialects, Romani, Serbian, Russian, Spanish, and others. Only a small number of children had Swedish as their native language.Footnote 3

Developing Pedagogical Activities

Work Procedure

The initial mapping of children’s linguistic ecology while at preschool revealed that free play usually took up a considerable amount of time, and that there were few teacher–child conversations during these activities. Children frequently engaged in locomotor play (e.g., chasing) and sociodramatic play in peer groups was rare. When teachers were present in play activities, often sitting on the floor and building something together with children, there was still little verbal communication between them. Their talk included a limited range of topics and discursive acts: teachers relied on known-answer questions, comparisons, and Yes–No questions).

To create educational situations that were inclusive and took their point of departure in children’s interests and perspectives, various guided play activities were designed. The aims were to create play activities that were conducive to language use both with the teacher and between the children, and to boost children’s active participation in play. The teachers, in collaboration with researchers, planned, implemented, observed and analyzed these activities. Repeated play episodes over time (several months) and teachers’ reflections were recorded. Collaborative reflection and re-evaluation of teachers’ and children’s participation made it possible to critically assess and identify difficulties and constraints in practice, to try out, and to find new solutions (Schwartz & Minkov, 2022).

Analytical Procedure

Multimodal Conversation Analysis (Goodwin, 2018) was used to provide detail of social interactions during play sessions, paying attention to multimodal semiotic means (verbal, prosodic and embodied). Children’s and teachers’ actions were analyzed in relation to their functions, i.e., initiating, ignoring, rejecting, or aligning with the play script; extending and elaborating the initiatives of others; or engaging in independent play. The content and linguistic and interactional features of teachers’ and children’s talk were similarly noted in detail. In addition, the characteristics and affordances of objects and props in the play spaces were noted in relation to the play script. The present study illuminates the development of guided play, including the use of various scaffolding resources and participatory practices, by presenting analytical categories that evolved inductively during collaborative work within the action research group.

Findings

Teacher-guided play was used in a pedagogical way to create affordances and scaffolding for children’s agentive and curiosity-driven actions and learning. At the same time it was socializing the children to act with interest and respect for each other’s contributions, and thus in concrete, practical ways echoing the emphasis given to democratic citizenship in the Curriculum for the Preschool (Skolverket, 2019). Teachers engaged in literacy-based play preparation, reading or telling/visualizing stories and choreographing children’s play participation by exploiting a broad range of social, cultural, linguistic, and material scaffolding strategies. They: i) created material and cultural affordances according to the play-frame; ii) invited and boosted children’s curiosity and interest; iii) used social strategies to respond to children’s play initiatives; iv) guided and encouraged children’s play participation by taking on the role of a play co-participant, who acted on a (more or less) equal footing to the children. Teachers used inclusive pronouns (“we”) when formulating action and play proposals; asked questions about the progress of the play; refrained from explicit teaching; waited for children’s responses and play-moves; and assisted children’s play negotiations in the peer group. They relied on story-relevant vocabulary, engaged children in linguistically complex exchanges and assisted children who had rather limited knowledge of the lingua franca/L2/Swedish.

As demonstrated by the action-project trajectory, successful play evolved gradually, across multiple guided play sessions. Successful play is here defined as being characterized by children’s active participation and their ability to continue and develop the play, while relying on the play script and relevant lexical and discursive moves. The teachers’ fine-tuned and increasingly multifaceted linguistic, embodied, and material scaffolding actions facilitated this development.

Preparing for Play by Telling and Visualizing the Story

Preparations for literacy-based play involved teachers reading or telling a story and using visual information to support the child audience’s meaning-making. The children were also given opportunities to reflect and comment on the story. In Extract 1, the teacher reads the story of Goldilocks by using a projector to display images from the book to everybody, establishing a broad and multimodal reading arena where children can rely on several semiotic modalities. All the children (six 3–4-year-olds, boys and girls, speakers of Tigrinya and Somali) are able to follow the visual representation of the story.

Extract 1

1

Teacher

The girl is called Goldilocks

2

Aatifa

Goldilocks

3

Yussuf

Goldilocks

4

Teacher

Yes, Goldilocks was walking in the forest

5

Yussuf

Goldilocks, Goldilocks, her house go inside

6

Teacher

You think that Goldilocks is entering the house? Shall we look?

7

Aatifa

Ye::s

8

Teacher

Goldilocks got very curious, what is this house?

9

Yussuf

Go in, go in. She came in

Yussuf (4-year-old boy, Somali speaker) volunteers his verbal characterization of what he sees in the image and expresses his ideas about what will happen in the story (“Goldilocks, Goldilocks her house go inside”, line 5). The teacher interprets the boy’s suggestion by combining his talk into a complete sentence and asking a question that develops the story according to the child’s perspective (line 6). The teacher asks: “You think Goldilocks is entering the house (…), shall we look?”. This is a collective invitation (typical of a book reading activity) that aims to intensify and secure the child audience’s interest, and it is also a feature that characterizes democratic conversation in preschool (Skolverket, 2019). The teacher waits and gives Aatifa (3-year-old girl, Tigrinya speaker) an opportunity to respond before she continues the story (lines 7–8). Yussuf yet again enthusiastically volunteers his comment about the next image “Go in, go in. She came in” (line 9).

This table shows that a mundane literacy activity is conducive to language and participation (or, in other words, exhibits scaffolding features) in various ways. The story is visualized and projected on the wall, it is accessible to all the children who can reflect on what they hear and see. The teacher invites the children to comment and ask questions about the story, and she helps the children to describe events, and share their ideas. Children both hear a varied language and have opportunities to use it.

Unsuccessful Guided Play

Although the children were interested in the story, initial play sessions were unsuccessful despite the teacher’s attempts to ask educational exploratory questions or to recruit the children by suggesting pretend roles. These difficulties indicated that the children needed time and multiple occasions to hear the story, to understand the plot, and to play under the guidance of the teacher. Extract 2 shows how the teacher’s attempts to initiate a guided play in the wake of storytelling are unsuccessful. Instead, the children start several parallel play trajectories. They use materials/props and toys in the room (dolls, a “care centre”) that are not related to the Goldilocks story and ignore the teacher’s attempts to engage them in shared play, and to adopt the play script.

Extract 2 Participants: Teacher, four girls and two boys. Two children have Somali, three Tigrinya and one child Arabic as their native language

1

Teacher

Hm. Do you also have the little bear? ((refers to a baby doll))

2

Jamila

No, a baby

3

Teacher

A baby, a baby bear then? Shall we pretend that this is a baby bear?

4

Jamila

No, baby!

5

Teacher

Well then, maybe you are one from the fairy tale

6

Jamila

No, I baby

The teacher tries different ways to attract the children’s interest in playing the Goldilocks story (lines 1, 3 & 5). She asks Jamila (3-year-old girl, Tigrinya speaker) who is holding a doll-baby if the doll is Little Bear. However, the girl rejects the teacher’s leading question and is determined that it is a baby. Then the teacher tries to persuade the child to pretend that the doll is a baby bear, partially aligning with the child’s course of action and trying to invite her to play in a way that is based on the story (lines 3, 5). The link between the baby (doll) and Little Bear is probably a rather tenuous one and the girl continues to insist that the doll is a baby, thus playing what is a common parallel play in this peer group, a care center visit (lines 4, 6). Although the teacher takes the lead, expands on the child’s basic verbal contributions, and uses quite complex language herself, the expected play activity does not take off, most likely because the children are not sufficiently familiar with the story yet. They have not yet appropriated relevant lexical items, and the props and materials in the room invite a play script that the children are used to, i.e. “health visit care centre”. In their agentive actions the children thus display their autonomous play choices.

Teachers’ Successful Strategies in Guided Play: Initiating an Exciting Joint Play

Because the expected play did not take off, the teachers used multiple occasions to read and to play with the children. They also reshaped the material conditions of the playroom, changing it to a playworld that was relevant to the story (thereby building up a scaffolding structure for the children’s participation). They removed objects that invited other types of role play and added things (chairs and crockery in different sizes) that were part of the story. A new sociomaterial playworld was created that made it possible to build up children’s play expectations and add to their excitement. The teachers deployed various ways to arouse children’s interest when they initiated play sessions. They invited the children to play, asked open-ended “wondering,” “excited” questions, used inclusive pronouns such as “we,” as well as prosodic cues, such as playful intonation or a whispery voice to dramatize different roles (Aronsson, 2012; Cekaite & Björk-Willén, 2018). The teachers added to the children’s motivation by making suggestions for collaborative actions within the play-frame (cf. Schwartz & Minkov, 2022). When the children became more familiar with the story, their participation in the guided play changed and their emotional involvement helped their increasing alignment with the teachers’ scaffolding actions.

We will now illustrate the development and changes in the children’s participation across several play sessions. In Extract 3, the teacher initiates a guided play session when she brings the children’s attention to the sign on the door to the playroom. The sign says: “The house of the bears.” Before they all together step into the room, the teacher uses various ways to bring the children’s curiosity to a peak.

Extract 3 Participants: teacher, and three boys and girls (3–4-year-olds), native language Tigrinya

1

Teacher

Do you see what it says here? Shall I read, I can read, shall I read? It says: “The house of the bears”

2

Aatifa

The house of the bears?

3

Teacher

Do you know any bears?

4

Winta

Ye:s

5

Aatifa

Ye:s

6

Winta

Yes, Goldilocks

7

Aatifa

Goldilocks and three bears

8

Teacher

Yeah, but what do you think this means then? What’s on the door? It says: “The house of the bears”

9

Winta

”House of the bears”

10

Teacher

Could it be in here that they live? Shall we go there? What shall we pretend? Shall we pretend to be Goldilocks? ((whispers, opens the door carefully))

11

Winta

Yes. ((whispering))

When the teacher reads the sign "The house of the bears" on the door, the child repeats her reading with curiosity (line 2). The teacher listens in and follows up immediately with a question that expands on the sign’s meaning. Implicitly she guides the children toward the characters in the story and the play-frame. The children respond enthusiastically, and based on the story, they associate bears with Goldilocks (lines 4–7). In line 8, the teacher both confirms, and challenges the children’s responses by guiding them to expand on the meaning and (play) significance of the sign placed on the door (line 8). The teacher then, by asking several questions that further expand on the exciting play aspects, invites them together to enter the world of imagination (notice the use of inclusive “we”) (line 10). In all, the teacher augments the children’s play participation by pitching into children’s actions and initiatives (cf. Church & Bateman, 2019) and exploiting the “bears and Goldilocks” frame to guide their excitement about collaborative play. Positive affect, curiosity and the emotional involvement contribute to children’s active participation (Cekaite & Björk-Willén, 2018).

Negotiation of Play-Roles in Out-of-Frame Talk

As the children became more familiar with the story, their interest in participating in guided play together with a teacher increased. They readily accepted the play-frame, and displayed their knowledge of the play-roles, their features, and characteristic actions. Their enthusiastic approach to play manifested itself as play initiatives, and a willingness to adopt and negotiate the roles in a collaborative play endeavor (cf. Extract 1, children’s earlier parallel play activities). Negotiations about play-roles evolved as out-of-frame talk, capable of contributing to the children’s discursive literacy (Vardi-Rath et al., 2014; Zadunaisky Erlich & Blum-Kulka, 2014).

We will next describe how the children reshape and negotiate new plans for play-roles as they enter the playroom, i.e., the material playworld, and notice various props. Although they have already decided to act as Goldilocks, they immediately start reasoning about which bear roles they want to adopt instead.

Extract 4

1

Aatifa

You are small. Maybe I want to be a mother

2

Salma

No, I want to be mother

3

Aatifa

No, you're a bit small. Winta is bigger than you. Small. ((raises from her chair and goes to Salma, then measures and compares their sizes by holding her hand over her head and moving it forward))

4

Teach

What do you eat? ((to Salma))

5

Aatifa

((sits back on the chair she was sitting on before))

6

Salma

Porridge

Aatifa (4-year-old girl, Tigrinya speaker) negotiates the role she wishes to play by referring to her size and comparing sizes with Salma (3-year-old girl, Tigrinya speaker, line 1). However, Salma perseveres and claims in Swedish that she wants to keep her role as mother (line 2). Aatifa then elaborates on her argument, saying that the smaller child (Salma) should not take on the role of mother and should instead act as Little Bear. Aatifa gets up and walks up to Salma, measures, holds her hand to her head as publicly visible ways to support and clarify her verbal argument (line 3). What is notable here is that Aatifa acts as an active driving force in play negotiations, although during previous guided play sessions, she played silently by herself, sitting next to the other children. Her current actions—verbal out-of-frame arguments and negotiations— illustrate the importance of learning through “intent observation” (Rogoff, 2003): the child is more familiar with the story and has a clear opinion about how the story should be played, i.e., different bears have different sizes. The teacher guides and scaffolds the children’s play by supporting peer negotiations and providing space for participatory initiatives, actualised in concrete discursive and sociomaterial practices (cf. Church & Bateman, 2019).

Guiding Affordances of the Material Features of the Playworld

The teachers’ construction of exciting spatial-material playworlds (Samuelsson, 2020) (by using objects that were evocative of the play script) was significant in scaffolding and forming children’s play and language use (cf. Bylund, 2017; Simonsson, 2015). The visual characteristics and tangibility of the objects facilitated the development of the play script and the use of novel vocabulary that was related to the descriptive characteristics of the play objects and play-role negotiations.

Extract 5 shows how the materials in the playroom spur the children’s extended negotiations, comparisons, and various categorizing actions. With some support and guidance from the teacher, the children talk, and sort plates, spoons and chairs based on their size, comparing them in relation to the play characters, i.e., the bears.

Extract 5

1

Aatifa

That's big chair and the big plate, that's the small plate. ((shows that a little plate is in front of a big chair, replaces the plate, trading it with Winta))

2

Salma

May I have it? ((when Aatifa trades plate with Winta, Salma asks for the small plate))

3

Aatifa

Yes, you there and you there. ((gives Salma a small plate))

4

Salma

Yes, have a baby seat. ((tells Aatifa to change chairs from mid-sized to the small one))

5

Aatifa

Okay

6

Salma

You are the big. ((confirms that Aatifa is bigger and should have the middle seat at the table))

7

Teach

Ohh, you can, I think Salma means that if you have that bowl. Do you want to change seats?

8

Salma

Yes, I have little. ((Salma and Aatifa swap chairs with each other))

The children negotiate the play-roles—who will be the little bear and the big bear—by comparing sizes of chairs to sizes of plates; they try to decide if chairs and plates match according to the roles taken (lines 1–6). The teacher here supports the children’s comparisons, explanations and negotiations and assists them in developing joint play. She engages verbally, helping when Salma’s and Aatifa’s contributions in Swedish are somewhat limited (lines 7). Mostly, however, the children are able to negotiate play-roles and move the play forward by themselves. The conclusion is that the teacher is engaged in play on the children’s terms. By adopting a supportive, “listening” role, she displays her sensitivity to the children’s participatory initiatives and lets them take control and steer the conversation.

Children Guide Teachers

The children repeatedly played in the room that was adapted to the story, starting their play sessions by themselves. They also participated agentively in play with the teachers, including and directing teacher actions within the play-frame. As the children’s play involvement grew, the teachers guided play implicitly: they closely followed the children’s actions and responded to their initiatives, using these opportunities to enrich the linguistic environment, and to pose gradual challenges that required more elaborate actions by the children. As is demonstrated in Extract 6, in spite of using somewhat simple Swedish, the child is able to guide the teacher’s play actions while playing out the play script.

Extract 6

1

Shemira

Is too cold? ((feeds teacher with a spoon))

2

Teacher

No, it was just right

3

Shemira

Now you say “it too cold” ((shows with her body ’cold’))

4

Teacher

Eat, oh well, it's too cold! You can heat it up a little more

The teacher participates by taking on the play-role of a bear. She uses verbal and bodily actions that align with the play script (lines 2, 4). In line 3, Shemira (3-year-old girl, Tigrinya speaker) steps out of her bear role and through out-of-frame conversation instructs the teacher about how to continue the play, namely, that she has to pretend that the porridge is too cold. The teacher follows the instructions, and then uses an opportunity to enrich the language of the in-role dialogue: she asks the child to heat the porridge because it is too cold (line 4). The teacher expands on the suggested play-role utterance (“no it was just right,” line 2) by using an embedded repair of the child’s play-role utterance and using play vocabulary (“heat up”). The collaborative, guided play develops and can continue as the teacher not only responds to what the child initiates, but also gives the child new challenges and play directions, thus scaffolding play participation in ways that are sensitive to the children’s growing play and linguistic competencies.

Conclusions

The present study has explored how guided play, developed in collaboration between preschool teachers and researchers during an action research project, was conducive to and scaffolded immigrant children’s agentive participation, bilingualism, and social, literacy and cultural learning. Guided play worked as a child-oriented approach, i.e., an informal educational activity that evoked and fostered young children’s creativity and initiatives, interest, and respect for the other, thus paving the way for their experience of democratic citizenship (Skolverket, 2019).

The teachers, in collaboration with the researchers, designed and reflected upon successful and not successful guided play. They implemented guided play sessions, striving to sustain playful interactions with the children, and to model children’s informal learning through play. Children’s stories, fairytales and other cultural scripts, material props and spatial-material arrangements were used to create enchanting playworlds that stimulated the children’s interest and provided a guiding structure for collaborative play between children and teachers (cf. Vardi-Rath, 2014; Toub et al., 2018). Play sessions were directed by teachers implicitly and explicitly. The scaffolding conditions included pretend-play-roles, cultural routines, and language-focused strategies (e.g., play-related vocabulary, lexical repairs, and clarifications). Teachers provided assistance to immigrant children who had few linguistic resources for understanding the ongoing action and taking an active role in play. Material affordances, such as toys and play-related objects were of crucial importance for the smooth emergence of play as an “enchanting” activity (Bylund, 2017; Cekaite & Björk-Willén, 2018): they were important for boosting children’s play enthusiasm, and for steering children’s talk and actions. The fantasy stories and the pretend world constituted a common ground (Goodwin, 2018) for children’s agentive participation when playing, interacting, and learning together.

Importantly, the children’s immediate active and interested participation in story-based play was not a given. Rather, as revealed through evaluation and collaborative reflection, the children’s interest and play competences needed to be gradually developed over multiple teacher-led play and reading sessions. It took a while for the children to become interested in playing and confident in adopting play-roles, and for them to execute autonomy and creativity while progressing within and elaborating the play-frame. Notably, the teachers’ leading/scaffolding role in guided play was necessarily imbued with sensitivity to the children’s initiatives, enthusiasm, and interest in engaging and sustaining play (Church & Bateman, 2019). Immigrant children were provided with discursive space to exercise their autonomy when resolving negotiations about play in their out-of-frame conversations. They were able to exercise mundane democratic participation where both their own, and their peers’ opinions and wishes mattered. Teachers asking open-ended, rather than known-information questions, listening in and showing respect for immigrant children’s perspectives, building up curiosity and dramatizing events, were all parts of a child-oriented approach that was supportive of children’s agency and opportunities for equal participation in informal learning situations. As argued, sociodramatic play is a complex activity and to be able to act as an equal and active participant requires social and communicative skills: it is therefore highly demanding for children who are language and/or culture novices. As we argue, the educational implications of the study involve the analytically supported understanding that guided play can serve as an excellent scaffolding, and learning mediating tool in ECEC, since guided play allows teacher support and teaching while creating conditions for child-driven exploration and play. Respect for and interest in immigrant children’s initiatives, and in their voices during guided play practices, can serve as mundane and accessible ways of providing children with concrete experiences of agency and democratic citizenship.