Emotional and playful stance taking in joint play between adults and very young children

The purpose of this single case study was to investigate emotional and playful stance taking in adults and very young children as they engage in joint make-believe play activity in a natural Finnish group-care setting. Drawing on the sequential approach of conversation analysis (CA), the study represents an effort to understand play in an early childhood education (ECE) setting from both children's and adults' perspectives at the same time. The results suggest that the interplay of emotional and playful stance taking in make-believe play produces emotional transitions in interaction. These transitions can be understood as interactional accomplishments that offer children and adults the possibility to align and affiliate themselves with their own and each other's emotional experiences and to explore personal reflections of the emotionally heightened real-life trajectories in a shared make-believe play frame. Based on these findings, it is argued that creating and maintaining emotionally heightened joint play with very young children requires adults' emotional involvement and delicately calibrated participation through leading, following and leading by following. Further empirical study is needed to investigate sequences in which playful and emotional stance taking stand in a non-aligning and non-affiliating relationship. Such research could reveal problem-remedy sequences more evidently and provide important further development of ECE theory and practice for children under the age of three.