Children’s Peer Cultures and Playfulness at Mat Time

How do children exercise peer-play and peer-cultures when faced with teacher-imposed rules and pedagogical structures? Video-observations and interviews with children and their teachers from three junior primary classrooms in Aotearoa-New Zealand are used to address this question. Specifically we investigate times when the teachers interact with large groups of children on the mat given that this is likely to be a time characterised by high teacher control. Our study uses symbolic interactionism and peer culture studies as orienting concepts to make sense of the data. In this chapter, we focus particularly on how certain child sub-groups exert pressure to counter teachers’ expectations and demands at mat time. Often, these pressures arise from the children’s peer and play sub-cultures. Moreover, specific children appropriate or resist the teachers’ rules and norms in order to create, reproduce, and sometimes disrupt peer group relations and power dynamics.