Out on a limb: Navigating the risky business of climbing

Cynthia Hicban

While CA has been used to examine issues of wellbeing and resilience in risky play in early childhood (Bateman & Waters, 2018), the use of epistemics to study risk-taking in the early years is less prevalent. Young children in early childhood education settings in Australia are encouraged to explore, discover, and investigate within the national play-based framework that ensures children are safe and kept from bodily harm. Outdoor risky play can be part of this learning landscape, and numerous studies have demonstrated that risky play provides multiple developmental and health benefits for children (Sando, Kleppe and Sandseter, 2021). However, when children engage in risky play, educators and children must navigate the treacherous terrain of risk-taking versus protection. How much risk is too much and who decides lies at the crux of this dilemma. This paper looks at how risk and knowledge is negotiated in situ and specifically at how Ryle's (1945/2009) propositional 'knowing-that' orientation of educators works intersubjectively with the procedural 'knowing-how' of young children who climb. Questions that are examined include: what are the characteristics of the language of child agency, risk, and danger? What multimodal resources do early childhood educators use to balance young children's safety and autonomy? How do young children and educators do 'learning to climb' when accessing climbing knowledge is in the doing of risk? The study uses video recordings of educator-child and child-child interactions in an early childhood education setting with children aged 15-mths to 5-years-old in Queensland, Australia. The multimodal transcription is based on Mondada, version 5.0.1, Nov.2019, (www.lorenzamondada.net/multimodal-transcription). The examples are short sequences of children learning to climb in a variety of settings: monkey bars in a playground, small trees in a kindergarten, and large trees at a beach. Findings include how expertise is formulated within the institutional constraints of keeping safe. The paper contributes to the recent work of Arminen and Simonen (2021) into the multidimensionality of epistemics in interaction, and how risk and knowledge cohabit in institutional encounters. Bibliography: Arminen, I., & Simonen, M. (2021). Expertise as a domain in interaction. Discourse Studies, 23(5), 577-596.

Out on a limb: Navigating the risky business of climbing

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