Enculturation into inclusion, protecting what ‘is’, and changed acting: Exploring children's break-time table tennis playing

• The children were the co-producers of a multi-motive driven break-time practice.
• Enculturation concerns children's coping with the mismatch between demands and motives.
• The children motive reoriented, changed practices, and protected what ‘is’.
• Enculturation concerned collectividual processes of becoming.
• The children were enculturated into inclusion, tolerance and respect.

School day breaks are time–space pockets in between organized, scheduled lessons during the school day. This study analyzed what a group of 16 children, aged 10 and 11 years, in a Swedish school class, did in the outdoor table tennis area of their schoolyard during breaks. The observational data was produced during eight consecutive school days, including 19 breaks, and analyzed through the lens of cultural historical activity theory (Vygotskij, 1978; Leontiev, 1978) emphasizing the dynamics of the demands and motives in this particular activity setting. The children were the co-producers of a multi-motive oriented break-time practice. They were enculturated into inclusion, tolerance and respect through a process of becoming, which involved their engagement into microgenetic movements as a coping with the mismatch between demands and motives using certain abilities—the ability to change practices, the ability to protect what ‘is’ and the ability to quit certain actions by motive reorientation—as tools for change and for non-change. This conceptualizing of “learning cultural competence” (van Oers, 2010) enables us to adopt a more nuanced view of collectividual enculturation processes in a certain activity setting. Such understandings enrich the discussion on how to support for a play even more inclusive.