The Play Observatory and Children’s Friendships
About this episode
In this eighth episode Dr Caron Carter talks to Professor John Potter, who led the ESRC funded project, The Play Observatory. Here we explore John’s research using media in Education to chronicle children’s stories and the links to children’s friendships. We reflect on children’s experiences at school, being online during Covid-19 andplayground play and the Opie archive.
Guest speaker
John Potter is Professor of Media in Education at University College London at the IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education & Society. His research, teaching and publications are in the fields of new literacies, media education, play on and offscreen, curation and agency in social media, and the changing nature of learning in the context of digital media. He is co-editor of the journal Learning, Media and Technology. He is the Director of ReMAP (Researching Education, Media, Arts and Play), a research collaborative based in the Department of Culture, Communication and Media at the UCL Knowledge Lab, and at UCL East. John worked as a co-investigator on Playing the Archive and then as Principal Investigator on the Play Observatory, an exploration of children’s play during the pandemic, a collaboration between UCL IOE, Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) and the University of Sheffield School of Education.
Publications and resources
Potter, J. (2024) ‘Theory-building in the social, material and postdigital worlds of play: Participatory research and multimodal discourse analysis’. Multimodality and Society. [Online First, March 2024] https://doi.org/10.1177/263497952412413
Potter, J., Olusoga, Y., & Signorelli, V. (2024). The ‘pandemic play’ themed issue of global studies of childhood: An editorial. Global Studies of Childhood. https://doi.org/10.1177/20436106241234031 [Editorial]
Potter, J., Cannon, M., & Cowan, K. (2024). Children’s production of place and (third) space during Covid 19: Den building, filmmaking and the postdigital in the Play Observatory. Global Studies of Childhood, 14(1), 9-25.
https://doi.org/10.1177/20436106241231810
Cannon, M. Potter, J, Olusoga, Y. & Cowan, K. (2023) ‘Lessons from the Play Observatory: re-imagining learning through film-making and transludic practices in children’s pandemic play’, Education 3-13 https://doi.org/10.1080/03004279.2023.2186970
Websites
Online Exhibition (best viewed on a laptop or desktop in Chrome. This was jointly curated with the Young V&A) – https://playinthepandemic.play-observatory.com/
Play Observatory – https://play-observatory.com/about/about
Playing the Archive – https://playingthearchive.net/
John’s University Profile – https://profiles.ucl.ac.uk/48706-john-potter