Pigs, Planes, and Play-Doh: Children's Perspectives on Play as Revealed through Their Drawings.

IntroductionKNOWN AS AN ELUSIVE CONCEPT with many and varied definitions, play has inspired an extensive literature. Research about it from the child's perspective, however, remains problematic. Some problems relate to the methods scholars often use to study play, such as their relying on reports from parents and practitioners about children's play or basing their conclusions on their own direct observations. These methods are limited because they can account for only what others see of the experience rather than what children think and feel about it (Glenn et al. 2013; Woodhead and Faulkner 2008). The distinction is important because adult conceptualizations of children's activities may not reflect children's actual experiences (Rogers and Evans 2008). To better understand play from a child's point of view, researchers now sometimes turn to child-led methods and adopt a more reflexive approach to understanding children's views and experiences of play (Berinstein and Magalhaes 2009; Glenn et al. 2013). A reflexive approach allows them to reexamine aspects of their scholarly practice, such as how they structure research activities or whether they allow children to share their views. Child-led methods may involve an eclectic array of techniques that give children the freedom and autonomy to choose their own methods of collecting data. For instance, children may use cameras, audio recorders, or iPads to document their own play and its contexts (Arnott, Grogan, and Duncan, forthcoming). Drawing remains consistently popular with researchers (e.g., Driessnack 2005; Hill 1997; Thomson 2008) as a research tool. It is a familiar, easily contextualized way to understand children's perspectives on play, and it is one of children's most frequent activities (Cox 2005). Drawing is also a particularly good way to collect data because it leaves a record that can be used long after its creation (Korzenik 1995). Lindqvist (2001) argues that an underlying narrative gives children's drawings meaning, not the drawing itself. He suggests that researchers need children's descriptions of drawings to understand what appears at first glance to be more unconventional representations of play than they are. Despite these arguments, researchers often analyze children's drawings independently from the actual drawing process. An analysis of children's drawings that does not gather further information about the drawing-such as the stories children tell about their drawings, the conversations they have about them, and the sound effects they make in relation to them, for example-will not reflect the true meaning of the drawings. Researchers, therefore, have a responsibility to develop methods through which they can observe, record, analyze, and interpret the multiplicity of ways children convey meaning through the embodied act of drawing.In this article, I report the findings of a study that explored drawing as a research tool for accessing young children's perspectives on play. The study involved two visits to the homes of eight children aged four during which I invited children to express their perspectives on play through drawing. In the study, I adopted a social-semiotic theoretical framework that understands drawing as a semiotic process children use to create and convey messages through representation and signification.I had had three central research objectives: to develop a principled approach for analyzing and interpreting children's drawings; to create guidelines for the use of drawing as a research tool; and to gather children's perspectives on play by studying their drawings. Here, I focus on the latter objective, considering themes such as children's conceptualizations of play and the significant aspects of play for children. By emphasizing children's own definitions and representations of play, I hope to provide a small but unique contribution to our understanding of young children's perspectives on play.I begin with a brief discussion of how play can be a challenging concept to define and represent, and then I explore children's perspectives on play as revealed by their drawings. …