Diorama play is useful in understanding children’s ecological cognition and the role of Native American culture and expertise in play behaviorMuch of the research of how children understand nature has come from European American children living in suburban or urban communities. More recently, research indicates that children’s knowledge of living things emanates from their cultural and environmental contexts where they are brought up. This study uses a three-dimensional forest diorama to elicit children’s interactions with living things via open-ended play.
Four-year old children from three populations: 24 rural Native American Menominee children, 16 urban Native American children, and 21 urban non-Native American children were recruited for community-based science education. Researchers partnered with each community during the design and analysis of the study. An open diorama forest scene with realistic vegetation and some real rocks and sticks was used along with some moveable animals. The children played with the dioramas and the researchers observed their interactions, and occasionally asked questions.
All three groups of children demonstrated engagement with the dioramas, enacted realistic (can happen in real life) and imaginary (can't happen in real life) play, and showed their knowledge of ecological relationships and habitats, with the rural Native American children exhibiting the greatest engagement in both action and talk than the urban children. Rural and urban Native American children were twice as likely to take the perspective of the animals in their play than non-Native children. Native American children talked as much as or more than the non-Native American children, providing a counternarrative to typical characterizations of Native American children as less talkative and as having smaller vocabularies. The authors suggest that when activities are reflective of community cultural contexts, Native American children can be quite verbal.
The authors note that dioramas seem to be a helpful tool in assessing young children's biological knowledge and that encouraging realistic ecological play in early childhood, such as through dioramas, could be an important science education innovation in the early childhood period. Finally, the authors suggest that further exploration into parent-children dyads exploring the dioramas would be interesting, as would including human beings and human artifacts in the forest diorama.
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