Open this publication in new window or tab >>2022 (English)In: Education in the North, ISSN 0424-5512, Vol. 29, no 1, p. 84-100Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]
The aim of this article is to investigate how children perceive and experience their opportunities to create meaningful leisure time in Swedish school-age educare. In this study, children’s perspectives on meaningful leisure time are investigated through interviews with 170 children aged 6-11 years in 45 groups. The theory of structuration is used to analyse children’s agency in relation to structure, and the findings are presented as four different practices and themes: Strategic actions in collective practices, Shared meaningful leisure time in normative practices, The struggle for meaning in individual practices, and Lack of affordance in meaningless practices. The results are discussed in relation to children’s agency and the conditions for daily practice, which show that children use both individual and collective strategies as well as resistance to create meaningful leisure time. In addition, the study also shows that in a collective organization, friends are the children´s most important resource in school-age educare. The result is interpreted with help from a dualistic perspective on how meaningfulness is created.
Keywords
School age educare, children's perspectives, meaningful leisure time, strategies, structuration
National Category
Learning Pedagogical Work
Research subject
Child and Youth studies
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:hv:diva-18402 (URN)10.26203/spn0-8f76 (DOI)
Note
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution- License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
2022-05-192022-05-192022-05-19Bibliographically approved