Parent-child Discourse in Outdoor Inquiry: Understanding Autonomy, Risk, and Failure during Learning

The Covid-19 pandemic has led young children and their parents to spend more time together engaged in unstructured play, including in outdoor settings. Decades of research documents the value of these experiences, and yet little research focuses on the texture of parent-child conversations in these settings, in particular qualitative, discourse analyses that can richly inform parenting practices around children’s autonomous inquiry, healthy risk-taking, and productive failure. This project aims to gain a foundational understanding of the social nature of these play-based experiences. A key outcome will be actionable knowledge and resources for parents and teachers around supporting child-driven, outdoors inquiry.