Self-organized communities of children

From a child-centered perspective, this article explores the practices ofchildren’s self-organized play-communities in institutional everyday life in Danishearly childhood education and care (ECEC) settings, based on a phenomenologi-cal non-participant-observational study with a duration of 16 months involving twokindergartens (Bernstorff, 2021). Drawing on Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology and pra-xeology, children’s self-organized play-communities are analyzed as a social space,being a field for relations, fights, negotiations with specific admission requirementsemerging as accepted values shared by the specific field. The analysis demonstratesthat self-organized play-communities are a social space with its own practices ofbeing together expressed through the social language in play linked to and guidedby an institutional choreography. Besides, the analysis demonstrates three kinds ofdifferent communities of children in self-organized play, viz. the categories: Relati-onal play-communities, Community-oriented play-communities, and Conflictual play--communities, which categories may, however, also overlap into blended categories.The article argues that children’s self-organized play-communities risk being underpressure in the institutional choreography, which in turn affects children’s oppor-tunities for having uninterrupted periods of time and space to self-organized play intheir institutional everyday life