A study of the role of fixed play equipment on relationships between five-and six-year-olds in an international school playground in Ethiopia

Hughes, Catherine Ann (2023) A study of the role of fixed play equipment on relationships between five-and six-year-olds in an international school playground in Ethiopia. Doctoral thesis (EdD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

Lingering on the material aspects of the playground, this thesis examines the entangled relationships of the fixed play equipment with a group of Year One children. It draws on ethnographic observations and small-scale descriptions of interactions between the children and the material world of the playground. The research was carried out within an international school playground in Addis Ababa at the school the researcher was teaching. It addresses the question: • What kinds of relationships emerge from the entangled play between children and fixed playground equipment? Drawing on the fields of education, childhood studies, children’s geographies and new materialism with an awareness of studies of childhood in the Global South, this thesis seeks to reflect on how the intra-actions of the equipment impact the children’s relationships with other things. The thesis adopts a new materialist approach and builds on aspects of the agency of objects by authors such as Änggård (2016); Hackett and Rautio (2019); Knight (2016); Kraftl et al. (2021); Pitsikali and Parnell (2020) and others. The three data chapters focus on the bars, the sandpit and the tricky trail as three distinct pieces of equipment found in a school playground. Each chapter contains a review of prior research; observations of the equipment inter-acting with Year One children; and pieces of writing that use Bogost’s Object Orientated Ontology (OOO) in order to speculate what it would be like to be the equipment and suggest a new way to approach what is happening in the playground. This thesis aims to contribute to the body of knowledge in the fields of education, childhood studies, children’s geographies and new materialism (with specific reference to playground equipment) and is written in a way that is designed to encourage speculation and the engagement of the reader with the playground equipment in a different way. It uses the setting of a playground in an international school to explore the agency of things and ends with some practical suggestions for schools on improving their play areas.