Moments of Togetherness: Humour and playful interactions in the toddler peer group

Toddler aged children (18 – 36 months) often use humour as a tool to engage their peers in acts of playful interactions as they interact, share attention, and build a sense of togetherness through a ‘mutual we’. In this paper, we discuss one of the findings of a larger PhD study where the aim was to examine the embodied strategies toddlers use to engage their peers in interactions that are often playful and full of humour. The study is an ethnomethodological case study using conversation analysis (EMCA) to examine the interactions that were video recorded over a nine-month period in an ECEC setting in Iceland. The findings discussed here explore how toddlers use humour connected to their immediately available environmental resources to recruit other children into their play and to explore accepted social conventions and rules within their setting. These findings contribute to the growing body of contemporary early childhood research that positions this young age group of toddlers as competent and imaginative in co-creating moments of togetherness and builds the ‘mutual we’ within their peer group.