Eating Prickly Peas: Sharing Play Worlds During Preschool Meals

Abstract

AbstractPlay has long been understood as an important pedagogical practice, particularly in early childhood education and care settings. Playing with food, however, has typically been overlooked, and very little is known about food play during mealtimes. The apparent dichotomy between rule-following and playfulness at mealtimes has led to a paucity of research on playing while eating. This paper raises the profile of food play and examines instances in which young children initiate pretend play with their food during shared mealtimes. Data are taken from a large corpus of video-recorded lunches in Swedish preschools, and episodes featuring pretend play with food were analysed using multimodal interaction analysis. The results illustrate how play signalling is multimodally achieved, directed first to teachers, often involves other children, and enables the multiactivity of playing and eating. Children invited teachers into their imaginary worlds and teacher’s responses enabled the play narrative to develop and co-exist with the institutional demands of eating lunch together. The paper provides empirical evidence that pretend play with food during meals offers affordances for generating and sharing imaginary worlds with teachers and peers.