Kernan examined children's outdoor play experiences at four early childhood education and care settings in Dublin, Ireland that represent a diversity of care settings and outdoor environments. The context for the study began with her observation, growing over time, that “children's access to the outdoors appeared to be curtailed or denied by adults and the adult world.” The overall purpose of the study was to explore the children's experience of the outdoors from both the children's and adults' perspectives. She examined children's experiences in terms of the availability and level of outdoor affordances the environment offered children in three different parts of each care setting: the indoor-outdoor interface, the enclosed outdoor space, and the wider outdoors in the surrounding neighborhood.
To examine children's experiences, Kernan observed children and conducted interviews and informal discussions with children and practitioners and managers at the care settings. Her field visits to each site each took one week, on two different occasions, followed up by a third visit four months later. Her data-gathering included field notes from her observations, digital photography, and semi-structured and informal discussions with both children and adults at each of the settings. Importantly, she also considered the interactions between children and between children and adults. For each of the care settings, Kernan detailed the outdoor affordances available to children in the three different locations.
For example, in one of the child care centers Kernan found that many of the affordances in the wider outdoors were not experienced by children because of the limited view of the outdoors from the inside of the facility, the limited time children had outdoors, and the fact that the youngest children largely remained in strollers when outside. She offers powerful anecdotes and insights in her documentation of her findings at all four locations.
This study provides a potentially new framework for examining children's experiences at early childhood education and care settings. The author recommends consideration by “all adults who are directly or indirectly involved in pedagogical work with young children in early childhood education and care, e.g., early years practitioners, parents, trainers, regulatory authorities, architects, town planners, researchers, and policy makers.” She suggests that using this framework can help guide planning services for young children “that will preserve children's need and right to play and be actively involved with the world outdoors.”
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