Politicizing Children’s Play: A Community Photovoice Process to Transform a School Playground
Bibliographic record
Abstract
IMPORTANCE: Contextual elements at school playgrounds compromise the right to play. An occupation-based social transformation project to foster occupational justice in play at a school playground was conducted. OBJECTIVE: To better understand barriers to and facilitators of children's participation in occupations at the school playground to co-create actions that enable play. Design: A participatory methodology-Photovoice-was used. The research consisted of four phases: involving the community in the research design, community-led data generation and analysis, discussion of findings to increase the community's awareness, and a community agenda for changing the playground. SETTING: Public primary school playground in northwest Spain. PARTICIPANTS: All children (n = 450, ages 3-12 yr), families (n = 12), and teachers (n = 15) participated. A thematic analysis of visual, textual, and oral material was conducted, including member checking. Results: The study revealed several barriers to play, including the short recess duration, poor floor (surface) conditions, jail-like atmosphere, and violence. However, participants identified an ad hoc lending games system and playground murals advocating for children's rights as facilitators. These findings have direct implications for improving the play environment. CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE: Conflicting priorities between children's and adults' desires and needs for the playground were unveiled, displaying the relevance of invisible contexts (i.e., social or institutional contexts) in shaping play opportunities. A critical occupational stance combined with a participatory and playful methodology generated space to unveil these conflicting priorities, reconcile agendas, raise awareness, and propose collective actions to transform the playground. Plain-Language Summary: Playing is fundamental to children's development and inclusion. This study focused on making school playgrounds better places for kids to play. Researchers found that things such as short playtimes, bad playground conditions, and violence made it tough for kids to enjoy playing, but they also discovered some good things, such as a system for borrowing games and colorful murals promoting children' rights. These findings show that changing the playground's physical and social environment can make a big difference for kids. By listening to kids and working together, adults and children can create playgrounds where all kids can play meaningfully and safely. Occupational therapists can promote such processes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".