This paper discusses the potential of “mutual experiences” for enhancing understandings of children's bodily play in a natural environment. The concept of mutual experiences highlights how a researcher's sensory experiences during fieldwork may help him or her develop greater insights into children's experiences, perspectives, actions and utterances. Merely observing children's activities and surroundings reveals only a partial understanding of what children are experiencing and thinking. For deeper understandings, the researcher must play and learn with the children. This requires “viewing the children as co-producers of knowledge and the researcher as a co-learner who has an embodied dialectical relationship with them.”
Examples drawn from two different fieldwork studies illustrate the meaning and value of using mutual experiences as a focus in sensory ethnography research, which is defined as “a form of research that attempts to gain a deeper understanding of an informant's sensory experiences”. This approach considers experiences and perceptions of both participant and researcher. The aim of sensory ethnography research is “to understand and describe what it 'feels' like for informants to dwell in certain places in certain situations.” Photo-interviews were used in both fieldwork studies along with mutual experiences to explore how participating children experienced nature. This technique involves using photos taken by the children as a shared reference for discussion during semi-structured interviews. With this approach, the focus of the interview is on what the children versus the researcher consider important.
The first fieldwork study was conducted during a family summer camp experience. Ten children aged six to nine years old produced a total of 598 photos of their experiences during one particular day of camp. These photos were useful in providing information about and children's perspectives on different types of play, social interactions, events and environments not subject to adult observation. Three of the participating children took part in follow-up photo-interviews which provided insights into the meaning of pictures which could “only be revealed through a negotiation between the photographer and the researcher.”
The second fieldwork study was conducted with 19 children attending a preschool with an outdoor education focus. A “mutual experience” example focused on the researcher running with the children in rough and icy terrain. While the researcher experienced some fear of falling, the children, in follow-up interviews, indicated that they were not afraid of falling and felt comfortable playing on the icy ground. This example illustrates how the mutual experience of navigating the challenging environment helped the researcher gain a deeper appreciation of the children's mastery of the icy terrain.
This study illustrates how researchers might use mutual experiences as a strategy for gaining enriched understandings of children's play in a natural environment and how such play can contribute to their development.
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