Using Walter Benjamin to rethink children's non-participation in play activities

Abstract

In this article, the authors reflect on examples they have recorded of children spending time on the thresholds of their classmates’ activities during activity-area times. They use these examples to reconceptualize some commonplace understandings of the places and practices of everyday life in contemporary preschools. They do so by drawing on three related concepts of Walter Benjamin: the arcades (akin to the contemporary shopping mall), the threshold, and the flâneur (who observes the sites and crowds of the city without joining in). They draw parallels between Benjamin's writings on the flâneurs who occupied the thresholds of the 19th-century Paris arcades and the young children who look on without entering the learning and play areas of the contemporary progressive preschool classroom. Following Benjamin, it is suggested that children may remain on the thresholds of activities not just because of shyness or bewilderment but also to experience the pleasures of anticipation and, in some cases, as acts of quiet resistance. Although Benjamin's writings have been rarely applied to the field of early childhood education, they can stimulate new understandings of children's lives in preschool and provoke implications for rethinking aspects of preschool teaching practice.