Children’s interests in death and dying
Michelle Hill and Elizabeth Wood
Using children’s interests as a starting point for curriculum planning is a key principle of child-centred approaches in early childhood education. Children’s peer cultures are considered to be a source for and expression of interests, especially in their freely-chosen play activities. But what happens when children’s interests range across themes and concepts that might not typically be considered appropriate or might challenge cherished ideas about ‘childhood innocence’?
Michelle Hill’s research for her EdD thesis provides some challenging insights into children’s freely-chosen play as they collaboratively developed their ‘Dead Forever’ theme, drawing on a wide range of interests, concepts and knowledge.
The children revealed ongoing connections between interests, working theories and funds of knowledge and used complex multi-modal, symbolic and mediational means in their play. In our recent paper (Hill and Wood, 2019) we propose that connecting the concepts of interests, funds of knowledge and working theories may explain what kinds of experiences promote and sustain interests over time; what sources of knowledge are evident in play; how children move funds of knowledge dynamically and strategically across and within contexts, and their metacognitive awareness of the sources of their knowledge.
The focus on children’s interests is important at a time when many countries are developing national policy frameworks for ECE. For example, in England, the Early Years Foundation Stage is moving away from freely-chosen and child-led play activities towards an emphasis on direct teaching with more adult-led play that is planned and purposeful, and therefore more likely to produce specific learning outcomes. However, the EYFS outcomes focus on skills and behaviours that can be observed and recorded as evidence of children’s progress.
In contrast, research shows that children’s interests are rich with conceptual content ranging across, for example,
• Death-rebirth, death and dying
• Good and evil, bad/good, disobedience and punishment
• Tools and equipment
• Gender — what it means to be a boy/girl
• Family roles and relationships
• Babies and being a baby
• Animals and being an animal
• Search and rescue (after natural disasters reported in the media)
• Popular culture
• Myths and legends, Disney, fairy and folk tales
• Power and control — agency, what it means to be a child/adult
• Knowledge and coming to know — sources of knowledge
We argue that connecting interests, funds of knowledge and working theories provides a complex model of learning that reflects children’s motivations to ask questions, seek out new knowledge and understanding, and create meaning from their diverse cultural, material and social worlds.
Hill, M. (2015). Dead forever: Young children building theories in a play-based
classroom. (Unpublished doctoral thesis). University of Sheffield, England.
Hill, M. and Wood, E. (2019) ‘Dead Forever’: an ethnographic study of young children’s interests, funds of knowledge and working theories in free play. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, online first https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lcsi.2019.02.017.
Michelle Hill is a student on the Sheffield EdD programme and Professor Elizabeth Wood is Head of School at The University of Sheffield.
