A new report from the Play Observatory project, led by Professor John Potter, illuminates the power of play to boost children’s agency, resilience and mental health, while helping them navigate disruption to their lives during the Covid-19 lockdowns.
The findings highlight the act of “placemaking”: children’s ability to create mediated third spaces in homes and neighbourhoods or hybrid, digital spaces. This indicates the extent of children’s resourcefulness and playfulness in response to the restrictions of the pandemic, when access to the wider world was limited.
The research, led by IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society, suggests that the act of placemaking was a safe and agentive way to explore concepts like separation and distance by physically making and inhabiting their own safe spaces – repurposing the domestic sphere.
This also created a collaborative environment, where children and their carers became designers of spaces in the changed circumstances of the pandemic, enabling a form of play that transformed hierarchies and gave children agency through placemaking.
