Outdoor Play and Interaction Skills in Early Childhood Education: Approaching for Measuring Using Social Network Analysis

(ProQuest: denotes formulae omitted.)IntroductionA cooperative learning environment can provide to children the opportunities for sharing ideas and learning how others think and react to problems. "Cooperation is working together to accomplish shared goals. Within cooperative situations, individuals seek outcomes that are beneficial to themselves and beneficial to all other group members" (Sash, Candlin Rose, 2003, p. 181) As creative process, cooperative learning append when children combine materials, ideas and experiences to achieve new effects, "they learn through immediate experience with items and they use their own words to talk about their experience" (Vodopivec, 2011, p.89) Play is, in fact, the most important activity in childhood. Children need to play. Is through play that children experiment, touch, feel, imagine and create, and they can understand dimensions like verbalization, social interaction and conceptual conflict (Spodek Saracho, 1998) During play, when children interact with others, they build cooperative skills and increase their ability to sustain relationships (Wajskop, 1995).The outdoor educational programs, inspired on the idea that children can develop optimally outside through free play, have increasing followers around the world, especially in the last decade (Hygum, 2014) The reasons for that relate to the fact that the surveys indicate a wide range of benefits for children who attend it. Some reports show that outdoor play provides important skills development and health benefits for children (e.g. Bird, 2007; Dillon et al. 2005; Fj0rtoft, 2000, 2001; Martensson et al. 2009; Taylor, Kuo Sullivan, 1998) Multiple studies show that children who participate in outdoor environment develop more varied and elaborated patterns of play (e.g. Martensson et al. 2009; Taylor et al. 1998).Although Scandinavian studies report positive impact from playing in nature on the children's social play, more studies are needed to determine "whether there are specific skills or abilities that are learned better in a natural environment than in other environments" (Fj0rtoft Sageie, 2000, Fj0rtoft, 2004, p.40) It is necessary understand how can outdoor play improve the development of cooperation skills on children. This will involve understanding what approaches, models and methods can be useful to better understand the potential relation between de outdoor play and cooperative skills development in early childhood education. With this article we intend to present a first reflective review of tools and methods that can be potentially useful in the study of cooperative interactions with children during outdoor free play. Taking into account the nature of the context and the data we intend to collect, we try to find possible tools and methods that make possible explore this domain.Collect data during outdoor free playOutdoor play can be recognized as a collective structure, like a team sport with members that work together to achieve a common goal. Like a team sport, during the play can emerge sub groups, but can also emerge, for instance, leaders that compete for the leadership on the group. The play must be analysed because there exists different types of play and some of them don't involve cooperation, as parallel play through which interaction does not occur. Those different possibilities must be analysed to better understand the cooperation process during the free outdoor play, the way it emerges and how it arises. It is necessary to collect a substantial number of recording sessions and categorized the different interactions that can be emerged during them. But, how can it be done? There are several ways to study the peers' interactions. The questionnaires and systematic observation are the two most common types. Nevertheless, it's important to understand what methods can be useful and effective in the specific context to be analyzed for the main goal understand the potentiality of outdoor free play to the development of children's cooperation skills.