Creating a Play-Friendly Community with Children in Whitecraig: An opportunity to research play!
Silvia Veiga-Seijo is an occupational therapist from A Coruña, Spain. A PhD student in Occupational Science at Queen Margaret University and University College Cork, within the P4PLAY Programme. Her research project is focused on “Creating a Play-Friendly Community with Children in Whitecraig”. This research is supervised by Dr. Sarah Kantartzis (Senior lecturer at Queen Margaret University, Scotland) and Professor Jeanne Jackson (University College Cork, Ireland) and supported by Theresa Casey from the East Lothian Play Association (ELPA, Scotland).
The East Lothian Courier published the following article this week on Silvia’s work: Project for a new ‘play friendly’ Whitecraig community | East Lothian Courier
From the article:
“The purpose is to know the perspectives of children about their play activities, what supports or limits their play in the community and what are their priorities and ideas to create a play-friendly community. Children will be the protagonists in this because their perspectives are essential to make Whitecraig a better place to play.
“Play is a right of children and an essential activity in their lives. It is through play that children understand their world.
“We know that play is very important for the development, health and happiness of children but it is also fundamental for the wellbeing of the community where children live.
“In a group, we will create a big map of the community to talk about their play and children will have the opportunity to decide how we want to research their play.
“Each child will do a tour with me of their play activities, take photographs of their play, make videos, drawings or using arts/crafts. I will also observe children in their play activities and will play with them in their play. So, we will research play playing.”
Anyone interested in finding out more should contact Silvia at SVeigaSeijo@qmu.ac.uk, on 07354 473082 or Facebook Creating a Play-Friendly Community with Children in Whitecraig – Home | Facebook where details of further meetings will be announced.”
