In education settings for very young children, both theoretically and empirically, adults’ institutional role and pedagogical practice in relation to children’s play is traditionally tied to education and caring, such as maintaining classroom order or providing emotional availability and con?ict resolution. Most of these institutional roles are positioned outside the actual play frame. Thus, detailed empirical descriptions of the adult as an equal co-player in a multi-party peer context are scarce. This chapter examines play in adult-child interaction. The role of the adult in initiating and maintaining playful encounters with very young children in a multi-party context is of particular interest. The pedagogical contribution of the chapter is to facilitate early childhood education practitioners’ use of playful encounters in relation to emotional education. Three empirical extracts reveal how adult conduct can shape opportunities for multi-party, emotionally heightened playful encounters in toddler classrooms. Overall, the chapter shows how conversation analysis can encourage dialogue with theory and practice by providing a more detailed picture of practices that are described in professional stocks of interactional knowledge such as curricula and frameworks in early childhood education.

In this chapter we explore the moral interactional work that preschool teachers and children accomplish in everyday preschool practices. We explore how teachers solicit accounts in assisting the children to remedy a problematic conduct of excluding a child from play. It will be shown how the children justify their actions to avoid being blamed for faulty conduct. In their response the preschool teachers use hypothetical scenarios to avoid blaming and instead modeling the children’s actions and feelings to experience the hurt feeling by a peer. The study shows how an EMCA approach can provide insights into how childhood educators socialize children into accountability and compassion while maintaining a democratic ethos.