ABSTRACT
The configuration and size of built environments interact dynamically with teachers’ and children’s conceptions of space, influencing children’s agency, mobility, and social interactions. This chapter argues that this interplay of factors also influences children’s creation of spaces where they act ‘in care of themselves’. Using Lefebvre’s (1991) notion of the spatial triad, data from an ethnographic, multiple case study of 2- to 5-year-old children’s lived experiences in four spatially diverse New Zealand early childhood centres were analysed to foreground children’s experiences of the spaces they inhabited. The results point to differences in the ways that toddlers and older children produced ‘spaces of care’ with their peers. Older children utilised the affordances of complex built environments to create secluded spaces of care together. In contrast, 2-year-old children showed a preference for the affordances of open built environments which enabled them to maintain visual connection with their highly mobile peers as they created spaces of care together.
