The SAGE handbook of play and learning in early childhood / [First edition.] 9781446252451

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This book is dedicated to all our families, friends and colleagues, with thanks for the conversations that continue to inspire a fascination for all things to do with play. Liz Brooker, Mindy Blaise and Susan Edwards

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SAGE Publications Ltd 1 Oliver’s Yard 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP SAGE Publications Inc. 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd B 1/I 1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road New Delhi 110 044 SAGE Publications Asia-Pacific Pte Ltd 3 Church Street #10-04 Samsung Hub Singapore 049483

Editor: Amy Jarrold Assistant editor: Miriam Davey Production editor: Sushant Nailwal Copy editor: Sunrise Setting Proofreader: Michelle Clark Indexer: Caroline Eley Marketing manager: Dilhara Attygalle Cover design: Wendy Scott Typeset by: C&M Digitals (P) Ltd, Chennai, India Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY [for Antony Rowe]

Introduction and editorial arrangement  Liz Brooker, Mindy Blaise and Susan Edwards 2014 Chapter 1  Doris Bergen 2014 Chapter 2  Elena Kravtsova 2014 Chapter 3  Suzanne Gaskins 2014 Chapter 4  Adena B. Meyers and Laura E. Berk 2014 Chapter 5  Bert van Oers 2014 Chapter 6  Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw 2014 Chapter 7  Hillevi Lenz Taguchi 2014 Chapter 8  Sue Saltmarsh 2014 Chapter 9  Susan Grieshaber and Felicity McArdle 2014 Chapter 10  Mindy Blaise 2014 Chapter 11  Liz Jones and Rachel Holmes 2014 Chapter 12  Elizabeth Wood 2014 Chapter 13  Stuart Reifel 2014 Chapter 14  Ingrid Pramling Samuelsson and Niklas Pramling 2014 Chapter 15  James E. Johnson 2014 Chapter 16  Helen Hedges 2014 Chapter 17  Sharon Ryan and Kaitlin Northey-Berg 2014 Chapter 18  Anita A. Wager and Amy Noelle Parks 2014 Chapter 19  Celia Genishi and Anne Haas Dyson 2014 Chapter 20  Pentti Hakkarainen and Milda Bredikyte 2014 Chapter 21  Michelle Tannock 2014 Chapter 22  Margaret Carr 2014 Chapter 23  Daniel Thomas Cook 2014 Chapter 24  Stuart Lester and Wendy Russell 2014 Chapter 25  Jennifer Sumsion and Linda J. Harrison 2014 Chapter 26  Johanna Einarsdottir 2014 Chapter 27  Christine Stephen and Lydia Plowman 2014 Chapter 28  Annica Löfdahl 2014 Chapter 29  Jennifer Keys Adair and Fabienne Doucet 2014 Chapter 30  Rod Parker-Rees 2014 Chapter 31  Maria Evangelou and Mary Wild 2014 Chapter 32  Margaret Kernan 2014 Chapter 33  Jackie Marsh 2014 Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013951176 British Library Cataloguing in Publication data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-4462-5245-1

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Contents About the Editors x Notes on Contributors xi Acknowledgements xxi Editors’ Note on Terminology xxii Introduction 1 Liz Brooker, Mindy Blaise and Susan Edwards PART I THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES ON PLAY AND LEARNING 5 Mindy Blaise, Susan Edwards and Liz Brooker  1 Foundations of Play Theory Doris Bergen

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 2 Play in the Non-classical Psychology of L.S. Vygotsky Elena Kravtsova

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 3 Children’s Play as Cultural Activity Suzanne Gaskins

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 4 Make-believe Play and Self-regulation Adena B. Meyers and Laura E. Berk

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 5 Cultural–historical Perspectives on Play: Central Ideas Bert van Oers

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 6 Postcolonial and Anti-racist Approaches to Understanding Play 67 Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw  7 New Materialisms and Play 79 Hillevi Lenz Taguchi  8 Childhood Studies and Play 91 Sue Saltmarsh  9 Ethical Dimensions and Perspectives on Play 103 Susan Grieshaber and Felicity McArdle 10 Gender Discourses and Play 115 Mindy Blaise 11 Studying Play through New Research Practices 128 Liz Jones and Rachel Holmes

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PART II PLAY AND LEARNING IN PEDAGOGY, CURRICULUM AND ASSESSMENT 141 Susan Edwards, Liz Brooker and Mindy Blaise 12 The Play–pedagogy Interface in Contemporary Debates 145 Elizabeth Wood 13 Developmental Play in the Classroom 157 Stuart Reifel 14 Children’s Play and Learning and Developmental Pedagogy 169 Ingrid Pramling Samuelsson and Niklas Pramling 15 Play Provisions and Pedagogy in Curricular Approaches 180 James E. Johnson 16 Children’s Content Learning in Play Provision: Competing Tensions and Future Possibilities 192 Helen Hedges 17 Professional Preparation for a Pedagogy of Play 204 Sharon Ryan and Kaitlin Northey-Berg 18 Learning Mathematics through Play 216 Anita A. Wager and Amy Noelle Parks 19 Play as the Precursor for Literacy Development 228 Celia Genishi and Anne Haas Dyson 20 Understanding Narrative as a Key Aspect of Play 240 Pentti Hakkarainen and Milda Bredikyte 21 Physical Play and Development 252 Michelle Tannock 22 Play and Playfulness: Issues of Assessment 264 Margaret Carr PART III  CONTEXTS FOR PLAY AND LEARNING 277 Liz Brooker, Mindy Blaise and Susan Edwards 23 Whose Play? Children, Play and Consumption 283 Daniel Thomas Cook 24 Children’s Right to Play 294 Stuart Lester and Wendy Russell 25 Infant and Toddler Play 306 Jennifer Sumsion and Linda J. Harrison

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26 Children’s Perspectives on Play 319 Johanna Einarsdottir 27 Digital Play 330 Christine Stephen and Lydia Plowman 28 Play in Peer Cultures 342 Annica Löfdahl 29 The Impact of Race and Culture on Play in Early Childhood Classrooms 354 Jennifer Keys Adair and Fabienne Doucet 30 Playfulness and the Co-construction of Identity in the First Years 366 Rod Parker-Rees 31 Connecting Home and Educational Play: Interventions that Support Children’s Learning 378 Maria Evangelou and Mary Wild 32 Opportunities and Affordances in Outdoor Play 391 Margaret Kernan 33 Media, Popular Culture and Play Jackie Marsh

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Index 415

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About the Editors Liz Brooker is a Reader in Early Childhood at the Institute of Education, University of London. Liz was an early years’ teacher for many years, and her interest in the home experiences, and transitions to school, of ethnic minority children stemmed from her own work with children and families. Liz has continued to study early transitions, including those of infants and toddlers into their first group-care settings, with a focus on young children’s agency as they engage with new environments. More recently her work has focused on play, using a socio-cultural perspective to describe how the social contexts of children’s play shape their own development and that of the communities they construct with others. Mindy Blaise is an Associate Professor and Co-director of the Centre for Childhood Research and Innovation at the Hong Kong Institute of Education, China, SAR. Mindy’s scholarship relates to working with ‘postdevelopmentalism’ to reconfigure early childhood research, teaching and curriculum. A large part of this work involves ‘grappling with’ feminist practices that are useful for interrupting the notion of the developmental child. Mindy is currently involved in three interdisciplinary international research projects that are examining the situatedness of childhood in the Asia-Pacific region. She is a principal researcher, with Affrica Taylor and Veronica PaciniKetchabaw, in the Common Worlds Childhoods and Pedagogies Research Collective. Susan Edwards is an Associate Professor of Curriculum and Pedagogy in the Faculty of Education at Australian Catholic University. She works as a Principal Research Fellow in the area of early childhood education and specializes in researching aspects of the early childhood curriculum, including play-based learning, teacher thinking, digital technologies and sustainability. Susan is the co-author of Early Childhood Curriculum: Planning Assessment and Implementation, published by Cambridge University Press (2010), and co-editor of Engaging Play, published by Open University Press (2010). She is currently serving as co-editor on the Asia Pacific Journal of Teacher Education.

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Notes on Contributors Jennifer Keys Adair is an Assistant Professor of Early Childhood Education at The University of Texas at Austin. As a cultural anthropologist, she has conducted ethnostudies in early childhood settings across multiple countries and communities. Her current work focuses on how to improve the educational experiences of young children of immigrants. Her work has been published in journals such as Teachers College Record, Harvard Educational Review, Race, Ethnicity and Education, Young Children and Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood. She recently coauthored Children Crossing Borders: Immigrant Parent and Teacher Perspectives on Preschool for Children of Immigrants with Joseph Tobin and Angela Arzubiaga. In 2011, Jennifer was awarded the Outstanding Article of the Year award from the Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education for her article “Confirming Chanclas: What Early Childhood Teacher Educators Can Learn From Immigrant Preschool Teachers” and in 2012 the Emerging Scholar Award from the Critical Perspectives in Early Childhood Education SIG of AERA. Jennifer’s current research looking at culturally-relevant types of agency in early childhood classrooms is currently supported by the Foundation for Child Development and the Spencer Foundation. Doris Bergen is a Distinguished Professor of Educational Psychology Emerita at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. She received her PhD from Michigan State University East Lansing, Michigan. She has taught a range of courses related to learning, human development, assessment, early childhood, and educational psychology. A focus of her research interests has been play theory and humour development, including effects of technology-enhanced toys on play, adult memories of childhood play, and gifted children’s humour. Her most recent research has been focused on investigating the event-related potentials (ERP) elicited when children engage in two types of video game play. She also is a Miami University Distinguished Scholar, having published 11 books and over 60 refereed articles and book chapters, and was co-director of Miami University’s Center for Human Development, Learning, and Technology for many years. The Center was named in her honour after her retirement. Laura E. Berk, PhD, is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology Emerita at Illinois State University, Normal, Illinois. Her empirical studies have focused on the effects of school environments on children’s development, the social origins and functional significance of children’s private speech, and the role of make-believe play in the development of self-regulation. Her books include Private Speech: From Social Interaction to Self-Regulation (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1992), Scaffolding Children’s Learning: Vygotsky and Early Childhood Education (National Association for the Education Young Children, 2002), and Awakening Children’s Minds: How Parents and Teachers Can Make a Difference (Open University Press, 2004). She is co-author of A Mandate for Playful Learning in Preschool: Presenting the Evidence (Oxford University Press, 2008). She has also authored three university-level textbooks in human development: Infants, Children, and Adolescents (Pearson, 2012), and Development Through the Lifespan (Pearson, 2013). She is associate editor of the Journal of Cognitive Education and Psychology and a fellow of the American Psychological Association. Milda Bredikyte has been a Senior Researcher and Lecturer at the Lithuanian University of Educational Sciences, Vilnius, since 2012. She teaches courses on child development and

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narrative learning in play and Vygotskian theory of cultural development in childhood. She is the senior researcher in the Research Laboratory of Play (LUES) and the coordinator of research activities in the research project ‘Development of Self-regulation in Play’. She was responsible for the organization of university courses and research activities at the research laboratory on children’s play (Play Lab ‘Silmu’) from 2002 to 2010 at Kajaani University Consortium, University of Oulu, Finland. Margaret Carr is a Professor of Education in the Early Years Research Centre at the University of Waikato’s Faculty of Education, Hamilton, New Zealand. She was a co-director of a New Zealand national curriculum development project that developed the early childhood curriculum, Te Whāriki, published in 1996, in which ‘play’ is included as a goal. Formerly a kindergarten teacher, she has developed a strong research interest in early childhood pedagogy. Her research with practitioners has often included the role and development of Learning Stories, a narrative assessment practice that is the subject of her 2013 book, Learning Stories: Constructing Learner Identities in Early Education, written with Wendy Lee (Sage, 2012). Before she became a kindergarten teacher she was a potter, and working with clay strengthened her enthusiasm for play and playfulness in all walks of life. Daniel Thomas Cook is an Associate Professor of Childhood Studies and Sociology at Rutgers University, Camden, New Jersey. He examines the rise of children as consumers, presently and historically, exploring ways in which moral tensions between ‘the child’ and ‘the market’ play themselves out in various sites of children’s consumer culture, such as advertising, food, rituals, clothing and media. Cook has written a number of articles and book chapters on consumer society, childhood, leisure and urban culture, including The Commodification of Childhood (Duke University Press, 2004). His edited books include: Children and Armed Conflict (2011, Palgrave Macmillan, co-edited with John Wall); Symbolic Childhood (2002); and The Lived Experiences of Public Consumption (2008). Cook continues to serve as a co-editor of Childhood: A Journal of Global Child Research. He is currently working on a book manuscript, The Moral Project of the Child Consumer, for New York University Press. Fabienne Doucet is an Associate Professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning at the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development and an affiliated faculty member of the NYU Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, New York. Her research program addresses how immigrant and US-born children of colour and their families navigate education in the United States. A critical ethnographer, Doucet studies how taken-for-granted beliefs, practices, and values in the US educational system position children and families who are linguistically, culturally, and socioeconomically diverse at a disadvantage, and her work seeks active solutions for meeting their educational needs. Doucet has a PhD in human development and family studies from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Anne Haas Dyson is a former teacher of young children and, currently, a Professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Among her previous appointments was a longtime professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, where she was a recipient of the campus Distinguished Teaching Award. A fellow of the American Educational Research Association, she has spent over 30 years studying the childhood cultures and literacy learning of young schoolchildren. Among her book publications are Social Worlds of Children Learning to Write in an Urban Primary School (Teachers College Press, 1993), Writing Superheroes (Teachers College Press, 1997), The Brothers and Sisters Learn to Write (Teachers College Press, 2003), and, with Celia Genishi, Children, Language, and Literacy: Diverse

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Learners in Diverse Times (Teachers College Press, 2009); most recently, she has published ReWRITING the Basics: Literacy Learning in Children’s Cultures (Teachers College Press, 2013). Johanna Einarsdottir is a Professor of Early Childhood Education and Dean of the School of Education, University of Iceland. She has extensive experience in the field of early childhood education and early childhood teacher education. Her professional interests include continuity and transition in children’s learning, children’s well-being and learning in preschool, and research with children. She has been involved in several international research projects as a researcher and a consultant in her areas of expertise and published together with international colleagues. Recently she has been conducting research on children’s views on their preschool education, and transition and continuity in early childhood education. Maria Evangelou is a Associate Professor in the Department of Education, University of Oxford. Her research has focused predominantly on the evaluation of early childhood interventions.  She has a strong interest in the areas of parenting education and support, in language and literacy development in the early years and in mixed methods longitudinal designs. She has led many large studies evaluating parenting programmes, including the Birth to School Study (BTSS) and the Evaluation of the Early Learning Partnership Project (ELPP), and she is currently leading the Parenting strand of the National Evaluation of Children’s Centres in England. She also undertook a systematic review on ‘hard-to-reach’ families. During 2009 she led the literature review on children’s cognitive and socio-emotional development that provided part of an evidence base which informed the review of the Early Years Foundation Stage in England. Suzanne Gaskins is a Professor Emerita at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago, Illinois. (Department of Psychology, 1997–2012). She has done fieldwork in a traditional Yucatec Mayan village in Mexico since 1977, integrating psychological and ethnographic approaches to the study of children’s everyday lives and their development. Her research is focused on cultural influences on development and learning in childhood, across a wide range of topics, including childhood learning in context, infant interactions with people and objects, the role of play and work in development across cultures, the developmental evidence for linguistic relativity beginning in middle childhood, and the influence of cultural change on socialization practices. She has co-authored two edited volumes (Play and Development, Psychology Press, 2007, and The Anthropology of Learning in Childhood, AltaMira Press) and written numerous articles and chapters on culture and development. She also studies cultural differences in families’ informal learning activities in museums. Celia Genishi is a Professor Emerita of Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, New York. She is a former secondary Spanish and preschool teacher and taught courses related to early childhood and qualitative research methods in the Department of Curriculum and Teaching at Teachers College. Her books include Ways of Assessing Children and Curriculum (Teachers College Press, 1992) Diversities in Early Childhood Education (with A. Lin Goodwin, Routledge, 2007); and Children, Language, and Literacy: Diverse Learners in Diverse Times (with Anne Haas Dyson, Teachers College Press, 2009). The author of many articles for researchers and practitioners, her research interests include collaborative research and assessment with teachers, childhood bilingualism, and children’s language use, play, and early literacy in classrooms. She is a recipient of an Advocate for Justice Award from the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education and the Distinguished Career Contribution Award from the American Educational Research Association Special Interest Group on Critical Perspectives on Early Childhood Education.

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Susan Grieshaber is Chair Professor and Head of the Department of Early Childhood Education at the Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIEd). The Department has over 60 full-time staff members who provide most of the early childhood teacher education in Hong Kong. Before joining HKIEd, Sue was Professor of Early Years Education in the School of Early Childhood at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. She co-edits the international journal Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood and is on the editorial board of several journals. Her current projects include a sociological study of how the compulsory Australian learning framework for children 0–5 years influences educators’ practice, and an investigation of the professional networks of early childhood educators in Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and Korea. Pentti Hakkarainen is a Professor of Psychology at the Lithuanian University of Educational Sciences, Vilnius, from 2012 and Professor (emeritus) at the University of Oulu, Finland. He is head of the Research Laboratory of Play (LUES) and the scientific leader of the research project Development of Self-regulation in Play. He teaches courses on qualitative research methods and cultural historical psychology for MA students. He is the editor of the Journal of Russian and East European Psychology (M.E. Sharpe, New York) and has taught early education, developmental teaching and research methodology. Linda J. Harrison is a Professor of Early Childhood Education at Charles Sturt University, Australia, and holds an Honorary Fellowship with the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute. Her professional and research background is in developmental psychology and education. Her research focuses on infants’, toddlers’ and preschoolers’ experiences of childcare/early education, quality in centre-based childcare, and children’s socio-emotional, cognitive and speechlanguage development. Linda is particularly interested in the development of innovative methodologies for studying children’s lives, experiences and perspectives as they move into and through early childhood settings and school. She has contributed to the development and design of the 16-year Longitudinal Study of Australian Children and the development and national trial of Belonging, Being and Becoming: The Early Years Learning Framework for Australia. Her most recent book, Lived Spaces of Infant-Toddler Education and Care (coedited with Jennifer Sumsion, Springer, 2014). She is an associate editor for the International Journal of Early Childhood. Helen Hedges is an Associate Professor and the Deputy Head: Research in the School of Curriculum and Pedagogy at the Faculty of Education, University of Auckland, New Zealand. She teaches on graduate and postgraduate programmes, largely in early childhood education. Her research programme explores the interfaces of children’s and teachers’ interests, know­ ledge and learning and ways these connect in early childhood curriculum and pedagogy. She has published widely, including in the Journal of Curriculum Studies, Cambridge Journal of Education, Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice and Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood. She is the principal investigator of a Teaching and Learning Research Initiative (www.tlri.org.nz) that extends her research programme and investigates the notion of children’s ‘working theories’ in collaboration with teacher-researchers. Rachel Holmes has been a teacher for 19 years, working across the fields of Early Years, Key Stage 1, further and (more latterly) higher education. Her research interests lie across the interstices of applied educational research, social science research and arts-based research within cultures of childhood. Rachel is particularly interested in notions of ‘childhood territories’ such as ways childhood becomes imag(in)ed through fictional, documentary and ethnographic film; children’s child(self)hood, identities and objects and ways to (left)field childhood via opening

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up off-centre research methodologies. She works in the Educational and Social Research Institute at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK, as a Reader within the Centre for Cultural Studies of Children and Childhood. James E. Johnson is a Professor of Education and Early Childhood Program Coordinator at the Pennsylvania State University. Before joining Penn State, he held positions in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Child and Family Studies faculty and as a postdoctoral fellow at the Educational Testing Service in Princeton. A past president of the Association for the Study of Play and former Fulbright Senior Researcher in Taiwan, he now serves as Series Editor for Play & Culture Studies and is co-editing two new volumes in progress: (1) International Perspectives on Children’s Play and (2) Handbook of the Study of Play. He is on the editorial board of the International Journal of Play and is USA representative on the Scientific Committee of the International Council for Children’s Play. Liz Jones is a Professor of Early Childhood Education at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. She has over 20 years’ experience of teaching in both mainstream and special education. Her research interests include poststructuralist theory; feminist theory; social constructions and deconstructions of ‘the child’ and ‘childhood’. More recently she has become interested in post humanism. Liz leads the Centre for the Cultural Studies of Children and Childhood, which is affiliated to the Educational and Social Research Institute. Margaret Kernan is a Senior Programme Manager in International Child Development Initiatives, in the Child Rights Home, Leiden, The Netherlands (www.icdi.nl). She has been working internationally in the field of early childhood care and education and primary education as a practitioner, researcher, trainer and consultant. Her specific interests include children’s play indoors and outdoors, rights and diversity issues and policy and curriculum development in early childhood education and care. She is also interested in developing interdisciplinary approaches in researching issues affecting children’s lives. Elena Kravtsova is the Director of the L.S. Vygotsky Institute of Psychology, where she is Head of the Projective Psychology Department. She is one of the authors of the ‘Golden Key’, ‘Master’ and ‘Opening’ educational programmes for children of different psychological ages. Her work involves research into the problems of psychologists’ and cultural-historical psychology specialists’ training. Her research into the periodization of psychic and personal development, the zone of proximal development, and the developmental educational environment are a direct development of the traditions of the cultural-historical approach. She has published widely, in English as well as Russian, across these fields, and has given many international keynote presentations. Hillevi Lenz Taguchi is a Professor of Education and Child and Youth Studies at the Department of Child and Youth Studies, Stockholm University, Sweden. Her present research interests concern methodologies and research practices in material feminist, new empiricisms and postconstructionist research. Her most recent articles are published in Feminist Theory and International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. Her most recently published book in English is Going Beyond the Theory/Practice Divide in Early Childhood Education: Introducing an Intra-Active Pedagogy (Routledge, 2010). Stuart Lester spent many years working on adventure playgrounds and community play projects in the north-west of England and is now Senior Lecturer in postgraduate Professional

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Studies in Children’s Play and undergraduate Play and Playwork programmes at the University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham. His current research interests centre on the nature and value of children’s play, the everyday playful production of time/space and conditions under which playfulness thrives. Publications include Play, Naturally (with Martin Maudsley, National children’s Bureau Enterprises, 2007), Play for a Change: Play, Policy and Practice: A Review of Contemporary Perspectives (National children’s Bureau Enterprises, 2008) and Children’s Right to Play: An Examination of the Importance of Play in the Lives of Children Worldwide (Bernard, van Leer Foundation 2010 both with Wendy Russell). He has also contributed numerous chapters and articles on children’s play and playwork, the most recent of which are ‘Playing in a Deleuzian playground’, in The Philosophy of Play, C. Ryall, W. Russell and M. MacLean (eds, Routledge, 2013), and ‘Rethinking children’s participation in democratic processes: a right to play, in Sociological Studies of children and Youth: Volume 16 Youth Engagement 2013. Annica Löfdahl is a Professor in Educational Work at Karlstad University (KAU), Sweden. She has a background as a preschool teacher and is engaged in the teacher education program at KAU, mainly focusing on education for the youngest children. Besides this, she is chair of the local ethical committee at KAU and has served as a member of the faculty board for several years. Her research interest is in children’s play, peer cultures and social relations among preschool children. Currently she is interested in how the preschool teacher’s profession is changing within increasing demands for documentation as well as how teachers working in afterschool settings handle the new demands for quality and assessments in Swedish schools. Jackie Marsh is a Professor of Education at the University of Sheffield, where she conducts research on young children’s digital literacy practices in homes, communities and Early Years settings. Her most recent publications include Changing Play: Play, Media and Commercial Culture from the 1950s to the Present Day (with Julia Bishop, Open University Press 2014) and Handbook of Early Childhood Literacy (edited with Nigel Hall Larson, and Joanne, Sage, 2013). Jackie is an editor of the Journal of Early Childhood Literacy. Felicity McArdle is an Associate Professor at Charles Stuart University and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at Queensland University of Technology, Australia. She is particularly interested in the early years’ curriculum, the arts, and teachers’ work. She has conducted research enquiries into how teachers teach and the ironies within the discursive fields that shape their decisions and actions. She has an interest in the affordances of the arts as a way of knowing, and how diversity issues can be addressed through the arts as pedagogy, language, learning and research. Adena B. Meyers, PhD, is a Professor of Psychology and member of the school psychology graduate program faculty at Illinois State University, Normal, Illinois. She received her doctorate in clinical community psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and is a licensed clinical psychologist. She is interested in contextual influences on child and adolescent development, with an emphasis on family-, school-, and community-based interventions designed to promote children’s social and emotional functioning. She has served as a consultant to the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), and as a supervisor of mental health consultants in Head Start preschool settings. Her publications have focused on school-based consultation and on adolescent pregnancy, parenthood, and sexual development. Her current work involves evaluation research related to schoolbased preventive interventions.

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Kaitlin Northey-Berg is a doctoral student studying early childhood in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. She has been an art educator in K-12 settings and more recently an early childhood teacher working with children from birth to the age of five. Her research interests include examining the impact of public policy from the perspectives of teachers and children. Bert van Oers is a Professor in Cultural-Historical Theory of Education in the Research and Theory of Education Department at the VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands. In 2004 he was awarded an honorary doctoral degree at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland. His research approach is based on cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) and his main research interest is play as a context for learning (mathematics, literacy, music). He was one of the founders of the Dutch play-based curriculum Developmental Education for primary school. In addition to his publications in Dutch, he has published many articles and book chapters in English. The main book titles are: Developmental Education for Young Children (Springer, 2012), Narratives of Childhood (VU University Press, 2003) and a co-edited book, The Transformation of Learning: Advances in Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2008). He is a member of a number of the editorial boards of English and Russian journals on early childhood education. Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw is a Professor of Childhood Studies in the School of Child and Youth Care at the University of Victoria in Canada, where she is also the Coordinator of the Early Years Specialization. She has worked professionally in the field of early childhood education for over 20 years. Her work focuses on rethinking and reimagining early childhood education from theoretically and philosophically informed standpoints rooted in feminist, postcolonial, anti-racist and posthumanist perspectives. Her current writing project engages with posthumanist and Indigenous ontological perspectives grounded in relationalities to create possibilities for anti-colonial pedagogies. She is editor of Flows, Rhythms and Intensities of Early Childhood Education Curriculum (Peter Lang, 2010) and co-editor of Re-situating Canadian Early Childhood Education (Peter Lang, 2013) and the Canadian Children Journal. Her articles have been published in Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, Gender and Education, and Child and Youth Services, among other journals. Rod Parker-Rees is an Associate Professor (Senior Lecturer) of early childhood studies at Plymouth University, UK. He was a nursery and reception class teacher before joining Plymouth University where he has helped to develop several early childhood studies programmes at undergraduate and masters level. He has particular interests in playfulness (in adulthood as well as in childhood), early (preverbal) communication, the history of childhood and informal learning at university. He has written numerous chapters and articles and has edited Meeting the Child in Steiner Kindergartens: An Exploration of Beliefs, Values and Practices (Routledge, 2011) and co-edited Early Years Education: Major Themes in Education (Routledge, 2005), and Early Childhood Studies: An Introduction to the Study of Children’s Worlds and Children’s Lives (Learning Matter, 2010). He is a co-editor of the journal Early Years: An International Research Journal. Amy Noelle Parks is an Associate Professor of Early Childhood Education at the University of Georgia, USA. She is interested in equity issues in early childhood, particularly when they intersect with mathematics education. Her published work has drawn on long-term ethnographic studies as well as textual analysis. She recently completed a multi-year study following

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a cohort of children as they moved from prekindergarten to Grade 1 in a rural school. She is currently writing a book for teachers about mathematics and play. Lydia Plowman is the Chair in Education and Technology in the Moray House School of Education, University of Edinburgh. She has more than 20 years’ experience of conducting research with children and technologies and is interested in the ways in which digital media are integrated into family life and used for leisure, work and educational purposes in the home. She has led or co-directed eight projects funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and conducted research or consultancy for the Scottish Government, the English Department for Education, the BBC and companies at the leading edge of technological innovation for children’s media. A member of the National Toy Council, she is also Vice-Chair of the ESRC panel for Education, Linguistics and Psychology and a member of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Strategic Advisory Network, with an interest in social, cultural and ethical issues. Niklas Pramling is a Professor of Education at the Department of Education, Communication and Learning, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He works as a supervisor in several graduate schools for preschool teachers. His research interests include how preschool teachers and children communicate about various phenomena. In particular, he is interested in such communication in the context of aesthetic domains such as music and the literary arts. Another interest he is currently pursuing is how children, with and without adults such as preschool teachers, engage with new technologies for making music and stories. Ingrid Pramling Samuelsson is a Professor of Early Childhood Education at the Department of Education, Communication and Learning at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her main research field is young children’s learning and curriculum questions in early years education. Her many research studies of children’s learning and play in the preschool context have led to the development of a didactic approach, labelled developmental pedagogy. One of her most popular books is The Playing Learning Child (originally in Swedish, but also translated into German), which is based on the idea that children are playing–learning individuals, so preschool didactics should integrate play and learning. Her latest research is about children’s possibilities to learn depending on the number of children in the group. She holds a UNESCO Chair in ECE and Sustainable Development and is the World President of the Organisation Mondiale pour l´Èducation Présolaire (OMEP). Stuart Reifel is a Professor Emeritus of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Texas at Austin, Texas where he served as adviser for graduate studies in early childhood education. His scholarly work addresses classroom play and teacher preparation, with research appearing in Early Childhood Research Quarterly, Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education, Journal of Research in Childhood Education, Young Children, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, and other journals and edited books. He served as series editor for Advances in Early Education and Day Care (Elsevier Science) and Play and Culture Studies (Ablex), and has served on editorial boards for a number of journals. A co-author of Play and Child Development, now in its fourth edition (Pearson, 2011), he has lectured internationally on classroom play. He was presented with the 2014 Distinguished Career Award by the American Educational Research Association Early Education/Child Development Special Interest Group. Wendy Russell is a Senior Lecturer in play and playwork at the University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham and a consultant on children’s play and playwork. She has worked in the UK play

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Notes on Contributors

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and playwork sector for over 35 years, first as a playworker on adventure playgrounds, then in development, research, and education and training. Her freelance work has included strategic development, evaluation and research projects for the public, private and voluntary sectors at local, national and international level. Recent publications include The Philosophy of Play (Routledge, 2013), co-edited with Emily Ryall and Malcolm MacLean, and Children’s Right to Play (Bernard Van Leer Foundation, 2010) and Play for a Change (National Children Bureau Enterprise 2008), both co-authored with Stuart Lester. She is on the editorial board of the International Journal of Play. Sharon Ryan is a Professor of Early Childhood Education at the Graduate School of Education and a Research Fellow at the National Institute of Early Education Research, at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. Prior to moving to the United States, she worked in the early childhood field as a preschool teacher, curriculum adviser and special educator in Australia. Dr Ryan uses a range of mixed methods designs to research early childhood curriculum and policy, teacher education and the potential of critical theories for rethinking early childhood practices. She has written a number of articles and chapters on these topics. Sue Saltmarsh is an Associate Professor of Educational Studies at the Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, Australia. Sue’s research interests are broadly interdisciplinary, and her work is informed by poststructuralist theories of power, subjectivity and everyday life. She has undertaken a range of ethnographic, social semiotic and discourse analytic studies across early childhood, primary, secondary and tertiary educational settings, focusing primarily on the connections between economic discourse, cultural practices and subjectivities. Sue serves on the National Executive Committee of the Australian Association of Research in Education, and is Executive Director of the Asia-Pacific Education Research Association, and International Advisor to the Centre for Childhood Research and Innovation at the Hong Kong Institute of Education. She is a founding editor of the journal Global Studies of Childhood, and reviews editor for The Australian Educational Researcher. Christine Stephen is a Research Fellow in the School of Education, University of Stirling, Scotland. The focus of her research and writing is children’s learning in the early years and the ways in which this is supported in preschool settings and at home. She has co-directed three Economic and Social Research Council-funded projects, which have examined young children’s learning with technologies at home and in preschool, and led a number of studies examining the experiences of children as they move from preschool to Primary 1. Her interest in pedagogy includes studying the challenges of learning in Gaelic-immersion preschool settings and the learning opportunities offered to children younger than three years old. Jennifer Sumsion is the Foundation Professor of Early Childhood Education at Charles Sturt University, Australia and Co-director of the Australian Government-funded Excellence in Research in Early Years Education Collaborative Research Network. In 2008–2009, she co-led a national consortium of academics, service providers and practitioners to develop Belonging, Being and Becoming: The Early Years Learning Framework for Australia, Australia’s first national curriculum for children aged from birth to five years. She currently leads two Australian Research Council (ARC)-funded projects. One project is investigating early childhood educators’ practices with respect to play-based learning. The second is exploring how a sense of belonging can be fostered in early childhood settings, especially for babies and their families in marginalised communities. Her recently completed ARC project with CSU colleagues focused on infants’ lived experience of early childhood settings.

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Michelle Tannock is a Lecturer of Early Childhood Education at Thompson Rivers University British Columbia, Canada. She has held posts as a Visiting Professor of Early Childhood Education at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, and as an Associate Professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She has coordinated a series of studies examining the role of rough and tumble play in early childhood settings, the results of which have formed the basis for numerous publications and presentations. In addition to continued research on young children’s rough and tumble play, her current projects include exploration of the form and use of kindness by young children and the effects of guided mentoring on educator practice. Anita A. Wager is an Assistant Professor in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Wisconsin. Her research focus is on broadening notions of teaching mathematics for understanding by incorporating the cultural and socio-political contexts in which children live and learn. She is particularly interested in professional development that supports teachers as they draw on the rich mathematical resources from children’s homes and communities to develop equitable mathematics pedagogy. Her current project is a study of a professional development for culturally relevant and developmentally responsive teaching and learning in preK mathematics. Mary Wild is Head of the School of Education at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford. Her research interests include early childhood literacy, children’s thinking and the use of ICT to support learning. During 2009 she was an author on the literature review on children’s cognitive and socio-emotional development that provided part of the evidence-base which informed the review of the Early Years Foundation Stage in England. Mary is a member of the British Psychological Society and the British Educational Research Association (BERA). She is a Secretary to the Early Childhood Studies Degree Network in the UK and a member of its National Strategy Group. Elizabeth Wood is a Professor of Education at the University of Sheffield, UK. She has worked on a number of collaborative research projects with teachers in early years, primary and secondary schools, based on participatory action research. Her research on play has been influential on national policy documents for early childhood education in several countries. She has authored books and articles based on her research interests in play, young children’s learning, early childhood pedagogy and curriculum, equity and equality, and comparative policy analysis and critique.

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Acknowledgements We wish to thank the editorial and production staff at SAGE Publications for their contribution to this work. In particular, we gratefully acknowledge the support and guidance received from Jude Bowen, Miriam Davey and Amy Jarrold in bringing the handbook to completion. We also wish to thank all our chapter authors, who have patiently answered our repeated queries and have revised their work in response to reviewer and editor comments.

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Editors’ Note on Terminology In this handbook we acknowledge authors’ preferred use of terminology and have not sought consistency of terms across all chapters. However, an author’s choice of terms for certain categories can be construed as having political implications. We draw attention to the following categories here to clarify meanings. 1. In writing about young children and their caregivers and educators in a sex- and gender-neutral way, it is almost impossible to avoid the constant repetition of clumsy ‘he/she’, ‘his or her’, ‘s/he’ constructions. Some authors, in reaction to psychology’s traditional use of ‘he’, have preferred to adopt the convention of writing ‘she’ for ‘the child’. Others, when writing about children’s relationships with mothers and female educators, have preferred to use ‘he’ (the child) to avoid confusion with ‘she’ (the adult) where the caregiver is female. All authors have shown awareness of this difficulty and we have on the whole left their choices intact. 2. Some authors wished to make a specific statement about their use of ‘race’ as a socially constructed category to avoid the implication that it is a biological phenomenon. We have followed authors’ preferences as to whether or not to ‘quote’ this term, but can confirm that in all cases (even when unquoted) it is understood by authors as a social and political construction. 3. Most authors have included some discussion of the different beliefs, practices and experiences found in different regions of the world. There are many ways to refer to these global divisions. Chosen terms include: Minority/Majority worlds; developing and developed worlds; Global North/Global South; Euro-American, Euro-Western, Western-heritage, industrialized, postindustrial and/or affluent. We have in almost every instance left these terms unchanged on the understanding that authors, whatever their preferred usage, are fully aware of global inequalities.

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Introduction L i z B r o o k e r, M i n d y B l a i s e a n d S u s a n E d w a r d s

This is not the first handbook to be produced about play or about learning. Neither is this the first handbook to be written about young children. There are other handbooks that deal in considerable depth with topics including play (Pellegrini, 2011), young children’s learning (Spodek & Saracho, 2006), and the sociological contexts of childhood (Qvortrup, Corsaro & Honig, 2009). What makes the present volume unique is that it is about play and learning in early childhood. Play and learning are commonly described partners in the early years (Grindheim & Ødegaard, 2013), with the term ‘early childhood’ internationally defined as the ages between birth and eight (UNICEF, n.d). It is here that any ideas of simplicity regarding ease of definition about play and learning in early childhood might cease. This is because putting these concepts together opens for consideration a ‘sprawling body’ (Hännikainen, Singer & van Oers, 2013) of literature in which consensus about the definitions of ‘play’ and ‘learning’, and about conceptions of early childhood, is

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never achieved. In all probability the field of early childhood will never reach any consensus on these points, because it continues to be engaged in dialogue with diverse disciplines, theoretical explanations and philosophical positions, all of which have different implications for both research and practice. This means that in considering ‘play’ or ‘learning’ (or play and learning) a reader of early childhood research might well encounter ideas and arguments from philosophy, psychology, history, evolutionary biology, anthropology and sociology. Each of these disciplines follows its own traditions and lines of arguments. They hold varying epistemological and ontological positions, which in turn means they understand and value play and learning in early childhood in sometimes complementary and at other times entirely contrary ways. To grasp an understanding of play and learning in early childhood is to recognise that the breadth and depth of ideas on which the field draws, and to which it contributes, sometimes enables convergence and at other times highlights degrees of difference.

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THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PLAY AND LEARNING IN EARLY CHILDHOOD

What is interesting about understanding play and learning in early childhood in this way is that over time these points of convergence and difference have evolved into concepts and debates that are recognisable as being about the distinctive field of play and learning in early childhood rather than being simply about play, or learning, or early childhood. For example, many an introductory textbook on early childhood would talk about play as the basis for children’s learning (see for example, Morrison, 2011), and provide a historical overview of theories of play as a justification for its claim. Here, the idea that ‘play is a basis for learning’ is recognisable as a construct associated with the field of play and learning in early childhood, while the ideas associated with it are drawn from philosophy and psychology. Again, the debate concerning the relative benefits of free play, or of adult interventions in children’s play, is recognisable as a discussion occurring in play and learning in early childhood. However, the terms of this debate draw on philosophical ideas about the natural goodness of free play and psychological theory regarding the social construction of knowledge. In a further example, traditional assumptions that consider play as a neutral and value-free vehicle for children’s learning are now challenged by the critique that play is vested in socially powerful relationships which can sometimes be unequal. This debate too is recognisably about play and learning in early childhood, while the critiques are located within poststructural arguments regarding the interconnections of power, knowledge, subjectivity and discourse. This handbook is an attempt to map the range of concepts, debates and contemporary concerns associated with this field, while seeking to provide some sense of how they have evolved from, and contributed to, the range of associated disciplines. Given these combined aims, the task assigned to the contributing authors was by no means easy (Qvortrup, Corsaro & Honig, 2009). Authors were asked to provide a historical account of their specific focus in the field, to illustrate

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where possible the alignment or divergence of ideas informing their areas, and to point to future issues and directions of relevance for the next 10 to 15 years. Readers will note that each author approached this task differently. In some cases, authors adopted a largely chronological perspective, stepping the reader through an historical account of key ideas, signalling important points of departure in thinking about play and learning and suggesting future avenues for investigation. Other authors employed a more narrative framework, using specific examples and stories to highlight universal questions of concern and how these have adapted ideas from different disciplines. Other strategies involved comprehensively surveying empirical literature and showing how this literature relates to theories and philosophies of play and learning. We intended that the handbook would be inclusive of a wide range of cultural, geographic and thematic positions. Culturally and geographically we were keen to represent as many international contexts as possible. Whilst we have contributions from Australasia, Europe and North America, we did not succeed in sourcing chapters from a broader region of Asia, or from Africa or South America. It remains the case that the world’s most affluent countries are those best able to support research into young children’s play. The initial list of topics we hoped would be canvassed in the book was also not entirely achieved: we regret that the themes of inclusion, sustainability and second language learning are not represented in separate chapters, although they do appear in chapters across the handbook. We therefore encouraged authors to be as international as possible in their account of the field and, where they were able, to refer to aspects of play and learning specifically associated with inclusion, sustainability and second language learning. The next significant task was to determine the placing of the chapters in a way that provided a conceptual framing for the entire handbook. This presented its own problems

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Introduction

because we recognised that the structural possibilities were as endless as the discussions informing the field, and that no ‘natural’ thematic divisions were evident. In addition, it was apparent that each of our authors was differently situated in relation to their nation or region, disciplinary history, teaching and research experience and intellectual affiliations, and that we needed to take account of this ‘situatedness’ in grouping the chapters. These differences opened up many possibilities for juxtaposing and arranging chapters: we could for instance have placed all the more traditionally developmental chapters together and all the more experimental or postdevelopmental chapters in another group. Instead we sought to place the chapters in ways that recognise the value of their differently situated perspectives. In drawing on ideas of ‘situated know­ ledge’ we are indebted to the thinking of Donna Haraway (1988) who argues that all knowledge, including those ‘knowledges’ associated with play and learning in early childhood, comes from somewhere (1988: 590). In the case of the knowledge contributed to this collection, that somewhere includes not only the temporal and spatial circumstances of the knowledge production but also the complex lifetime experiences of authors, including their affiliations to diverse theories, discourses and practices. And just as their approach to play and early learning, and even to children and to childhood itself, has been shaped by these circumstances, so we know that our readers’ reception of the ideas and evidence presented here will be shaped by their own contexts and history. Haraway’s ideas are productive for considering knowledge production because they enable us to think about how knowledge practices are enacted across the broad field of early childhood, without hierarchising one approach over others. Instead of thinking about the 33 chapters as evidence of 33 different and even contradictory perspectives, we follow Haraway in viewing all such positions as ‘partial views and halting voices’ (1988: 590) which can help towards developing a

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‘collective subject position’ (1988: 590) through dialogue. This makes it possible to consider the field of early childhood play and learning scholarship not as a collection of isolated individuals but, rather, as a community composed of rich and diverse voices. One of Haraway’s most important contributions to debates about knowledge production lies in her interest in making room for ‘the more’ – in being inclusive of new as well as old ideas, even when these may appear to conflict, and in welcoming contradictions and differences. From this perspective, we have tried to see our own role as creating ‘the more’ through the presentation and placing of these knowledges, in all their diversity – to present a community of scholars in dialogue across the field. In drawing upon Haraway’s ideas we also hoped to move beyond the hierarchical and binary thinking which has previously characterised the field, where so much debate has centred on oppositions (of play and work, adult and child, formal and informal, childinitiated and adult-directed). In respecting and valuing the ‘partial’ perspectives that all the authors bring to their chapters we invite readers to work with these partial perspectives. Instead of thinking about different and even conflicting perspectives as problematic, we encourage readers to view them as positive and productive. We hope that the different perspectives presented here can be understood as in dialogue with one another, collectively generating points of reference that do not simply rely on the old binary stances, but acknowledge and gain from a recognition of difference. In this perspective, it follows that how play and learning is understood, enacted, and researched across the field of early childhood cannot be disconnected from how it is situated within the micro and macro politics of teaching, learning, curriculum, and childhoods, both locally and globally. The chapters which follow are conceptually situated within various social and cultural contexts, including the authors’ values and beliefs about play, research, childhood, teaching, and learning;

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THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PLAY AND LEARNING IN EARLY CHILDHOOD

our own values and beliefs as co-editors; the values and beliefs of the publishing world; and, not least, our readers’ expectations of the purpose and composition of a handbook. Our aims for the handbook were, we determined, best served by a three-part framing of the field. Each part contains a self-standing introduction detailing the contributions of the chapters to the broad section themes in which they are located. The three sections of the handbook focus in turn on: 1) Theoretical perspectives on play and learning; 2) Play and learning in pedagogy, curriculum and assessment; and 3) Contexts for play and learning. While individual chapters are grouped under these three themes, it will be clear to many readers that the chapters in Parts II and III are as much ‘about theory’ as they are about curriculum, pedagogy, assessment and contexts for play. Similarly the chapters in the first part of the handbook, while located in the ‘theoretical’ section clearly draw on research and practice in their discussions of play and learning in early childhood. The distinction between them is a matter of emphasis. Thus chapters in Part I draw out a theoretical framework from experience; Part II shows how theories of play and learning are implicated in classroom pedagogies and curricula; and Part III encompasses a much wider range of contexts and relationships in young children’s play and learning.

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The emphasis of the handbook overall is, as suggested, on promoting an understanding of play and learning in early childhood. It will, we hope, enable readers to enter the debate characterising the field, and join in making its ‘collective subject position’.

REFERENCES Grindheim, L., & Ødegaard, E. (2013). What is the state of play? International Journal of Play, 2(1), 4–6. Hännikainen, M., Singer, E., & van Oers, B. (2013). Promoting play for a better future. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 21(2), 172–184. Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspectives. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. Morrison, G. (2011). Fundamentals of Early Childhood Education. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson. Spodek, B., & Saracho, O. (2006). Handbook of Research on the Education of Young Children. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum. Pellegrini, A. (2011). The Oxford Handbook of the Development of Play. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Qvortrup, J., Corsaro, W., & Honig, M. (2009). The Palgrave Handbook on Childhood Studies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (n.d). ‘Early childhood development: The key to a full and productive life’. Available at: www.unicef. org/dprk/ecd.pdf

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PART I

Theoretical Perspectives on Play and Learning Mindy Blaise, Susan Edwards and Liz Brooker

This section is focused on theoretical ideas about play and learning that are of both historical importance and contemporary interest to the field. Its chapters range from a broad account of foundational ideas to discussions of contemporary postdevelopmental theories, and include the consideration of socio-cultural, cultural–historical, psychological and anthropological perspectives. The section commences with a chapter by Doris Bergen which introduces some of the foundations of play theory, including the work of psychologists such as Freud, Erikson, Piaget and Vygotsky and educators such as Hall and Dewey. The chapter explains how each of these theorists describes the relationship between play, development and learning in early childhood. Bergen introduces her historical survey with the declaration that play is ‘a pervasive phenomenon seen in animal species, a common behaviour of human children, and an observable behaviour in the lives of human adults’. From this starting-point

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she refers to ancient, medieval and Renaissance writers to show how their ideas influenced understandings of play in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and identifies new directions for future research. Chapter 4, by Adena Meyers and Laura Berk, demonstrates the strength and rigour of the experimental approach to research on pretend play, which is often viewed as the most characteristic, and the most significant, form of play in early childhood. Meyers and Berk take the reader through a series of key claims for the developmental impact of pretend play on young children, making a convincing case that – even if a causal relation cannot be established beyond doubt – evidence for the outcomes of pretend play, and especially of executive function, self-regulation and emotional control, has been described in numerous studies of children’s development. The argument here draws on a number of important psychological constructs which have been the basis for extensive correlational studies.

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The theoretical contribution of Vygotsky resonates through many chapters, but is the particular focus of Chapters 2 (Elena Kravtsova) and 5 (Bert van Oers). Both Kravtsova and van Oers argue the case for the relationship between play and learning from a cultural-historical perspective. Both engage closely not only with Vygotsky’s own published works but also with those of his colleagues, collaborators and followers in the former Soviet Union. Drawing upon Vygotsky’s non-classical psychological understanding of play, Kravtsova argues for the powerful enabling role of play in development and learning, framing play as a self-valuable activity which helps children to express what they know and see in their lives. Van Oers’ work proposes a new cultural-historical activity theory that is capable of reformulating some of Vygotsky’s original concepts, arguing that play is not a discrete activity but a mode of acting in the world which requires certain degrees of freedom for its existence. Suzanne Gaskins, in Chapter 3, offers a very different description of the relationship between play and learning from an anthropological perspective. Gaskins also draws on foundational theorists such as Piaget and Vygotsky to trace the history of ideas, but situates her own argument within crosscultural research, which demonstrates the role of social, economic and cultural circumstances in shaping how children acquire the knowledge and skills valued in their communities. Her typology of societies shows that young children’s play may be cultivated, accepted or curtailed, and that their learning may, in many societies, be mediated through non-play routes. Gaskins reminds researchers in the field that ‘Data from one very specialized cultural ecology, where play is highly cultivated, is not sufficient to answer questions about play’s unique contribution to children’s development and learning in all environments’ (p. 40). She cautions researchers about the pitfalls of relying on a single form of cultural knowledge in their efforts to understand play – a timely reminder of the

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limited usefulness of play research from White, Western and middle-class contexts. Play research located in widely varied geopolitical locations and with different groups of children and families may therefore be seen as offering the valuable ‘partial views’ adumbrated by Haraway (1988: 590). Chapter 9, by Susan Grieshaber and Felicity McArdle, reviews literature about the ethics of young children’s play and learning, including in classroom contexts. In addition to reviewing traditional theories of ethics, in which children acquire ethical ideas from the modelling and instructive work of adults, the chapter argues that play may be an effective site for fostering young children’s own ethical understanding and behaviour. The chapter includes an examination of curriculum documents from various countries (Sweden, Norway, Hong Kong, Australia, and England), which allows readers to consider how ideologies about play, childhood and teaching are enacted across the globe. A strong theme of equity, social justice and transformation runs through Chapters 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10. These chapters highlight strong links between social justice and play, where play is understood as a political space where inequities may be constituted and perpetuated. They draw on theories that are of increasing contemporary significance to the field to show how postcolonial, poststructural, feminist, queer, posthuman, girlhood and masculinity studies, and new materialisms, may be used to challenge takenfor-granted understandings of gender, (hetero) sexuality, ‘race’ and social class. What these chapters have in common is the articulation of theoretical concepts that view children as active and creative agents who contribute to cultural production and change. Play is not positioned as ‘innocent’, but is seen rather as a potential site of equitable and transformative social engagement. The ‘situated knowledge’ (Haraway, 1988) produced by these scholars, and the research they review, derives from a crossdisciplinary and cross-national discourse. The authors, far from being co-located,

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THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES ON PLAY AND LEARNING

received their own education and training in their home countries: Australia, Canada, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. New ideas, as this demonstrates, travel around the globe as international communication becomes available at the touch of a screen. For example, Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, in Chapter 6, discusses postdevelopmental critiques with a particular emphasis on post­ colonial theory, which shows how powerfully individuals and groups can be subjugated through classroom activities, including play. Her chapter shows how the intersections of racism and colonialism have been identified in research in early childhood settings around the world. Hillevi Lenz Taguchi, in Chapter 7, describes the ‘material turn’ which has recently emerged in the social sciences, and shows how this idea has been taken up in research into young children’s play and learning. Her chapter uses a single incident of a child’s play with sand to offer an alternative, posthumanist and materialist interpretation, in which non-human elements are credited with agency in their intra-actions with humans. This emerging line of research is presented through a review of recent studies employing these theoretical concepts, showing that they have quite specific epistemological, ontological, methodological and ethical consequences for understanding play and learning in early childhood. Readers will note too the requirement for a new ‘language’ which tries to express the meanings which are being ‘thought’ and ‘said’ for the first time. Sue Saltmarsh, in Chapter 8, offers a crossdisciplinary theoretical approach to the study of play from a childhood studies/sociology of childhood perspective. Her representation of young children’s play is grounded in historical accounts of childhood, as well as in contemporary understandings of the status of the child in society and the political nature of adult–child and child–child relationships. The many disciplinary perspectives employed in this chapter offer a range of insights into the ambiguities and complexities of children’s socially constructed position in society and

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the material facts of their everyday lives and play experiences. Grieshaber and McArdle’s discussion of the ethics of play in Chapter 9 reiterates many of the postdevelopmental themes raised in these chapters. An array of different postdevelopmental theoretical perspectives is surveyed by Mindy Blaise in Chapter 10. Her chapter provides an account of the ways in which discourses of gender, sex and sexuality can be differently construed from the various theoretical standpoints to have emerged from feminist scholarship, including that of postConfucianism. Each of the six theoretical positions discussed here makes visible, in different ways, how ideas about gender, sex and sexuality are constructed and enacted in early childhood classrooms. Discussion of recent play research employing these approaches prompts a rethinking of the roles of educators as well as researchers in challenging the inequalities which are produced when young children play together. The final chapter in this section, written by Liz Jones and Rachel Holmes, clearly exemplifies Haraway’s (1988) concept of situated knowledge, which is highlighted above. It considers the consequences of research and knowledge production where various theoretical paradigms are used as starting points to define and position play. This chapter, like Chapter 7, uses a single observation of classroom play to explore the meanings and interpretations which emerge when different theoretical and methodological lenses – modernism, postmodernism and posthumanism – are applied to the play. It concludes that non-traditional concepts, such as embodiment and affect, offer opportunities for new understandings of play’s meaning for children. Readers, regardless of their own theoretical orientation, are likely to find this chapter challenging. Jones and Holmes argue that ‘methodological multiplicity and complexity, taken in order to move ourselves as researchers towards conceptual, analytical and interpretive spaces that can meet the needs of ever-changing educational practices’ (p. 134).

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Part I of the handbook canvasses an array of theoretical and methodological insights and possibilities, encouraging an appreciation of the historical evolution of key ideas and a recognition of the force of postdevelopmental theories.

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REFERENCE Haraway, D. (1988) Situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspectives, Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–99.

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1 Foundations of Play Theory Doris Bergen

INTRODUCTION Although play has existed as a part of human experience since early times, theories regarding its definition and cause, purpose, value, meaning, nature, effects and influence have been diverse and often controversial. Some theorists have focused on only one of the manifestations of play while others have focused on many different aspects. Playfulness, in its varied forms, is a pervasive phenomenon seen in animal species, a common behaviour of human children and an observable behaviour in the lives of human adults. According to Gordon (2009), the nature of play has been described differently by theorists in various disciplines, and they have ‘come to different conclusions about the nature of play’ (3). Göncü and Gaskins (2007) assert that because play is such a complex phenomenon, it has often been difficult to ‘integrate its multiple perspectives’ (4). Play theory, therefore, is a wide-ranging topic, with some theorists giving definitions of the term ‘play’ and describing its purposes narrowly, others focusing on describing one

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manifestation of play, such as animal physical play or children’s fantasy play, and others trying to probe the underlying meanings of all types of play with broad definitional theories. Four major strands of play theory have influenced present views of the theoretical meaning of play: 1) defining the characteristics of the behaviour called play; 2) examining aspects of animal play and its meaning; 3) examining the role of play as a sociocultural phenomenon and adaptive life quality throughout the lifespan; and 4) focusing on the role of various types of play in fostering children’s development and education. This chapter provides an overview of the foundations of play theory, giving attention to all of these theoretical perspectives.

EARLY THEORIES OF PLAY Plato, in his book of Laws (643 bce), was one of the first to make the phenomenon of play a subject of theoretical interest. He suggested that children’s play (paidia) had theoretical

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significance as a venue for learning and for developing basic habits of character (paideia). According to Morris (1998), Plato believed that ‘play is a medium of activity in which the player’s natural underlying dispositions are revealed… and… (is)… the ideal medium of a child’s paideia; that is, learning is most effective when play is its medium’ (1998:114). Plato suggested that the correct way to educate children (both boys and girls) was to allow them to engage in play that promoted growth of their abilities, and that this would result in adults who were able to use their abilities effectively. Thus, the theoretical idea of play as an educational venue can be traced back to these early times.

Locke (1693), who saw children as tabulae rasae (blank slates) at birth, suggested that children should be taught through positive playful experiences to promote rational and individual needs, rather than by methods that made them fearful. He recommended indoor block play, however, rather than rowdy outdoor play. While play began to be viewed by these theorists as having a positive role in children’s development and education, they did not really make explicit what might be the specific qualities of play that made it an important influence on children’s development. However, their influence was a factor in later theoretical views of play as a facilitator of children’s development and education.

RENAISSANCE/ENLIGHTENMENT THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES ON PLAY

LATE NINETEENTH-AND EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY THEORIES OF PLAY

Specifically stated theoretical positions regarding the role of play and its value as a means for assisting children’s development and learning began to be more evident during the Renaissance. For example, Comenius (1632, 1657) emphasized the view that children’s playful activity had educational meaning. He wrote two books advising that children’s learning would be fostered by interesting and playful activities. His books were so popular at that time that they were translated into 40 languages. In the period of the Enlightenment, the influence of Rousseau’s book Emile (published in 1762) emphasized the role of playful activity in children’s lives. Rousseau believed that children were born innately good and thus, instead of having adults rigidly controlling their behaviour, should have the freedom to develop in their own natural ways. Since playing is a natural activity of children when they are allowed to control their own activities, Rousseau asserted that their development would be positive in this condition. Thus, his perspective is one that promoted an appreciation of the play of children at that time. Even

Although these earlier theories continued to have influence during later centuries, theoretical ideas concerning play as a particularly meaningful factor that promoted children’s development and education began to be made more explicit during this time period.

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Theories Defining Characteristics and Purposes of Play Theorists such as Spencer (1873), Schiller (1875), Lazarus (1883) and Seashore (1913) were interested in the meaning of play, and they provided some of the definitions of play that have continued to be influential. These theorists addressed play’s origin and hypothesized about its purpose. For example, Seashore stated that play was free selfexpression and its purpose was the pleasure gained by self-expression; Schiller theorized that children had excess energy and play was a means to expend this exuberant energy; Spencer viewed play as activity performed for immediate gratification without thought of long-term benefit; and Lazarus defined play as a free, aimless and diverting activity

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without purpose. (See Mitchell and Mason, 1948, for more details on these early definitions of play.) The idea of defining play – that is, identifying its essential characteristics – has continued to be of theoretical interest.

Theories Derived from Observing Animal Play Theorists during this period also speculated about the meanings of animal play and the implications for human play theory. For example, Groos (1898, 1901) discussed both animal and human play and thought that play was instinctive practice behaviour that assisted in preparing individuals for later use of the skills that were needed in adulthood (for both animals and humans), but also that for adult humans, play provided relief from the stresses of life. He proposed a ‘recreation theory’ of play that explained why adults often took refuge in play when they had lives that were consumed by work and anxieties. Mitchell (1912) and Kohler (1931) studied the play of animals and concluded that play served a purpose of socialization as well as assisting young animals to develop behaviours needed by adults of the species. Theoretical insights about the socialization meanings of animal play, gained from focused study of animal play, have enriched hypotheses about the meaning of play for humans (see Pellis and Iwaniuk, 2004).

Theories Focused on Play in Education and Child Development European theorists Froebel (1887), Pestalozzi (1894) and Montessori (1914) all stressed the importance of playful activity as a means of educating children. Pestalozzi designed an educative system that drew on Rousseau’s theoretical ideas. He suggested that children be free to explore aspects of their environment through their play and that the teacher’s role was to observe and reflect on how to help them learn in that way. Froebel and Montessori both designed educational environments that

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built upon children’s natural play abilities. Froebel, the designer of the kindergarten (‘children’s garden’), provided a set of toys (gifts) for children that were supposed to extend their learning as the children played through a set of activities that these toys promoted, and Montessori set up Children’s Houses, which provided activities that were initially close to children’s existing play behaviours but then provided ordered/ sequenced materials (work!) to enhance those behaviours. Their views of structured play environments as ideal starting points for children’s education continue to be supported by many present-day play theorists (see Elkind, 1983; Bryant and Clifford, 1992). The American psychological theorists who influenced how play was viewed during this time period were Hall and Dewey, leaders in the child development movement. Hall (1920, 1924) is viewed as the founder of the field of child development. His theoretical perspective on play was influenced by Darwin and thus he believed children went through stages in their play that demonstrated the stages of human evolution. At an early age in play they manipulate objects; later they replicate simple adult activities in pretence, and their games reflect skills needed in more advanced civilization. Thus, to have a well-developed adult, there must first be a well-played child. While this theory is not accepted as accurate today, it did contribute to the idea that children’s play was an essential part of their early development and that play experiences enabled them to be more effective in adulthood. Although Dewey (1910, 1916) was influenced by Darwin and Hall, his theoretical orientation focused on applying theory to practice, and thus he drew on Rousseau, Froebel and other theorists who saw play as a venue for childhood education. He believed that the educative environment for children required their active involvement in selfchosen, playful experiences, because these would lead to child learning, and he demonstrated his ideas at the University of Chicago laboratory school. In play, children find

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problems to solve, and since Dewey (1938) believed finding problems was the essential first step in problem-solving, he supported children’s play as a means of helping them discover and solve problems. Research on children’s play activities was common at university laboratory preschools during this time period. One early researcher was Parten (1932), who derived a schema of social play stages, including solitary, parallel, associative and cooperative, from her observational research. Adaptations of the schema have been used in many play studies conducted in more recent times (see Coplan, Rubin, and Findlay, 2006).

MID- TO LATE TWENTIETH-CENTURY THEORIES OF PLAY During the mid-twentieth century, play became a greater focus both of empirical and theoretical study by biologists, sociologists, ethologists and anthropologists, as well as educators and psychologists.

Theories Defining Characteristics and Purposes of Play An influential piece of work by Huizinga (1950) emphasized the idea of play as a pervasive cultural experience that is tied to human survival. Huizinga believed that play was such an integral behaviour in the human species that he called humans Homo Ludens (‘man, the player’). He outlined a number of the characteristics of play: it is voluntary; separated from real life; occurs within a frame or boundary; is ordered (has rules); and involves private spaces. Henricks (2002) states that although there have been many critiques and revisions of Huizinga’s view, ‘modern scholars stand on the shoulders of Johan Huizinga’ (23). Huizinga’s view of the evolutionary importance of play has been supported by Ellis (1998). For instance, Ellis (1998) believes that play has been a means for humans to survive the many uncertainties they have faced since ancient times, because

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the most playful humans were the ones who had the greatest range of adaptive behaviours that they could use when environmental or social conditions changed. Ellis stated that play was ‘necessary for our evolution’ (1998: 29) because it is ‘a biological system for promoting rapid adaptation to threats to survival that cannot be predicted’ (30). Another influential definition of play was that of Bateson (1956), who explored the paradoxical nature of play, suggesting that it is a form of metacommunication. He stated that in play, animals and humans operate within a ‘play frame’, in which behavioural and verbal signals do not convey the same message as they would if used outside that play frame. Instead, players send the message ‘this is play’ and thus the message conveyed by their play behaviour is different from the meaning of that behaviour when displayed outside the play frame. He described the signals and understandings that occur among players so that they can communicate meaningfully within the play frame. Hutt (1971) theorized about the difference between ludic activity (play) and epistemic activity (exploration), which have some similar qualities. She stated that in exploration children find out objects’ characteristics but in play they find out what they can do with objects. That is, in play the object may be used in elaborated ways. Neumann (1971) theorized that since play is a voluntary activity, certain dimensions within the individual and external to the individual could be evaluated in determining if an activity could be called play. The dimensions she identified involved how much internal control the person had over the activity, what level of internal reality was present and if there was internal motivation to engage in the activity. She stated that most playful actions have children in control, making up their own reality and doing the activity because they want to do it. Rubin, Fein, and Vandenberg (1983) theorized that the definition of play must include active engagement, non-instrumental actions, focus on means not ends, internal motivation, internal rules and

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internal locus of control. Bergen (1988) defined play as a ‘medium’ in which learning and development are fostered, and Barnett (1998) outlined the characteristics of ‘playfulness’. There have been many expansions and critiques of these definitions in recent times (see Gordon, 2009). There is evidence that children also have theories about play’s characteristics. For example, King (1979, 1982) found that kinder­ garten children used criteria such as if an activity was imposed by the teacher and if it was enjoyable to define whether or not it was play, and at later ages, they had an ‘inbetween’ category that identified some required activity as having playful characteristics but not really being play. Fein and Wiltz (1998) reported that when children talk about their pretence, they mention activities done at home or in the neighbourhood but not at school, because school activities are ‘not the play children describe with relish and delight many years later’ (47).

Theories Derived from Observing Animal Play In studies of animals, biologists, ethologists and psychologists have noted that certain conditions elicited playful behaviour in animals that they were studying, both in laboratories and at field sites, and have speculated on the meanings of such behaviours. For example, Suomi and Harlow (1972) found that rhesus monkeys raised in social isolation in a laboratory appeared to have deficits in play behaviours, but if they were then allowed to play with younger monkeys, they recovered social behaviours. Harlow and colleagues (1950) also observed that when monkeys were given puzzles to manipulate, they did not need food reinforcements, and concluded that there was a ‘manipulation drive’ that is as primary as are more basic homeostatic drives. They did not identify this behaviour as play, however. Suomi and Harlow (1976) did speculate that play served two purposes in monkeys: enabling them to practise adult social functioning

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routines and to learn how to master aggressive impulses by using those behaviours in controlled, playful ways. In studies of chimpanzees in the wild, Van Lawick-Goodall (1968) found all mother chimpanzees engaged in some play with their infants, although there were different levels of such play, and hypothesized that its purpose was social bonding. Lorenz (1971) indicated that, for many animal species, the curiosity exhibited in young animal play is an essential characteristic, enabling expression of new behaviours in varied settings. He commented that the curiosity evident in childhood play is exhibited in humans throughout life, and compared the play of children to the research of adult scientists. Recent research has studied how the ‘playful brain’ evolved in animal and human species (Iwaniuk et al, 2001; Pellis and Iwaniuk, 2004).

Theories of Play as a Sociocultural Phenomenon Sociologists and anthropologists have also theorized about the meanings of the play behaviours they observed in varied sociocultural settings. For example, Leacock (1976) described the play of African village children and theorized that it was ‘a rehearsal for adult roles’ (467). Whiting and Pope Edwards (1988), after conducting a crosscultural study of children’s social activity and play, concluded that, while children played in all cultures, the types of play were malleable under social pressure, accounting for differences among boys’ and girls’ play and the types of play in various cultures. That is, play reflects the cultural meanings of the society in which it occurs (Gaskins, this volume). Documentation of the social–cultural meanings of play has continued to be of theoretical interest (see Roopnarine and Krishnakumar, 2006). Opie and Opie (1969) gave an exhaustive account of English children’s play in the streets and schoolyards and concluded that there was a culture of childhood that perpetuated

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these games. They theorized that the function of the game was primarily a social one because it was not that important to win and in some ways these were ‘ceremonial’ activities, in that following the rituals of the game were important. Smith (1978, 1982) extensively examined the evolutionary and functional qualities of children’s play as well as the longitudinal aspects of social play development, and Sutton-Smith and Rosenberg (1961) documented the changing nature of informal games over a 60-year period. Both Smith and Sutton-Smith have continued to elaborate on their theoretical perspectives in recent years. Blurton-Jones (1972) charted categories of children’s play in various world areas and compared rough-and-tumble play of preschool children to that of other young animals. He theorized that this behaviour served a social function and might occur in a critical period. Recent work on this play phenomenon by Pellegrini (2002, 2009) suggests that the purpose of this play in childhood differs from its purpose in adolescence. The rich database drawn from such studies has provided theoretical insights into the role of play as an enculturation medium.

Theories Focused on Play in Education and Child Development Ideas of play as a phenomenon fostering development and education were furthered by the theoretical giants of the era, who focused on play’s role in promoting socioemotional or cognitive benefits.

Freudian theory Freud (1917/1956, 1938, 1960), within his theory of psychosexual development, discussed aspects of children’s play and adult playful thought. He saw the early childhood period as one in which the child at play creates a world in which he can feel in control, stating that the child ‘behaves like an imaginative writer, in that he creates a world of his own or, more

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truly, he rearranges the things of his world and orders it in a new way’ (1917/1956: 123). Freud believed that the child’s playful activity was later transformed into adult playful thought. He suggested that adults create fantasy (much of it internal) rather than continuing to play as children do. Freud discussed how the joking behaviour of adults emerges from children’s play by describing how children’s playful activity is often the earliest form of humour expression, marked by exuberance and nonsensical qualities. He saw joking as a form of playful thought in later childhood and adulthood, and he asserted that ‘the pleasure in a joke is derived from play with words or from the liberation of nonsense’ (1960: 287). Freud’s youngest daughter, Anna, expanded understandings of the role of play in helping children face reality. In her work with children who had experienced the trauma of war and parental separation, she developed a ‘therapeutic’ play environment in which children could play out their emotions caused by traumatic stress. She stated that play therapy helps the child develop a secret world, using imagination and fantasy, and it is free from external demands (Freud, 1989). Other contemporary and later theorists expanded on these views regarding the emotional purposes that play serves (e.g. Klein, 1932; Isaacs, 1933; Lowenfeld, 1935). This theoretical view has led to further work in the field of play therapy. Winnicott (1953) extended the psychoanalytic play therapy tradition and Axline (1969) and Moustakas (1974) laid foundations for ‘nondirective’ play therapy, which envisions play as being powerful enough to heal emotional trauma without active therapist intervention. Although methodologies and treatment models have continued to advance, the use of play in the treatment of childhood trauma is still based on the foundation provided by early theorists (see Wilson and Ryan, 2005).

Eriksonian theory Erikson (1963, 1977) expanded on the theoretical meaning of play and its enormous

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power in children’s lives. He described how children use both pretence and construction play to gain control over their emotional lives and asserted that the feelings of power over their life events that children gain from pretence allows both expression of emotions and practice in controlling emotions responsibly. He theorized that this occurs during the ‘Play Age’ (three–six), which sets the direction of adult life. Erikson described children’s creation of block construction ‘worlds’, which allowed them to deal with emotional and behavioural ‘real-world’ dilemmas. He asserted that, by taking on the role of a supercharacter (e.g. Spiderman) or an adult who is powerful in their lives (e.g. the doctor), children experience the leadership and power position of those individuals. He suggested that if they gain this ability to take initiative during this period of life, they will be able to assume roles of power and leadership and to imagine possibilities. Thus, they develop the strength of ‘Purpose’ and can allow ‘the dreams of early childhood to be attached to the goals of an active adult life’ (1963: 20). Erikson believed that the play rituals of childhood continue to be expressed throughout life because these experiences provide ‘the training ground for the experience of a leeway of imaginative choices within an existence governed and guided by roles and visions’ (1977: 78). He stated (1966) that children’s play is transformed into ritualizations (e.g. weddings, parades), which have a paradoxical quality because they are both playful and formal, familiar and surprising, and affirming and ambivalent.

Piagetian theory Piaget’s contribution to play theory (1945, 1965) was of great interest in the mid to late twentieth century. From his observations of his own children’s play in infancy (1945) and his study of older boys’ marble game play (1965), he both proposed stages of play development and theorized about their meaning as developmental constructs. Piaget differentiated play from imitation, indicating

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that play is primarily an assimilation process while imitation is primarily an accommodation process. He believed that children used play to construct their knowledge of the world by trying to relate their new experiences to their existing cognitive schema. Piaget stated that adults could gain great insight into children’s thinking by watching children’s play, and he explained how various stages of play corresponded with levels of the child’s developing thought processes. In the infant–toddler age period, the most prominent type of play is practice play, which involves repeating similar play actions on toys or other objects to master their use, with gradual elaboration of these actions. Piaget noted that one crucial aspect of practice play is that, rather than being a routine repetition of the same actions, as actions are mastered the child changes the play activity by making it more difficult or adding new elements. Practice play is seen in later childhood and adulthood when new routines of behaviour need to be mastered in the service of a larger goal. Piaget noted that pretence becomes a major play mode during the age period of four–seven. Early pretence is often facilitated by adults but extends into elaborate social pretence activities with peers, such as socio-dramatic or fantasy play, during preschool and early years. Piaget’s view that pretence is a means of furthering knowledge construction has led to much research on cognitive processes. Because, in pretence, children create worlds that make sense to them, Piaget believed that observers of play could learn much about children’s understandings and misunderstandings. Pretence continues to be a major type of play during early and later years, although it may then involve small-scale replica figures or computer video sites (Bergen and Davis, 2011). Piaget identified games with rules as the common play type for young children, although one-rule games such as peek-aboo occur at earlier ages (Bruner and Sherwood, 1976). Piaget believed that in

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games, children create rules that change as they negotiate to make the game enjoyable for a range of players with varied skill levels. Time is spent in discussion of rules, making them ‘fair’ and adapting them to make the game more ‘fun’. Piaget asserted that peer play in games fosters children’s moral development as children resolve cognitive disequilibrium related to issues of fairness and equity in peer play. Piaget’s theoretical ideas about children’s play continue to be a catalyst for generating play theory. Numerous contemporary theorists have speculated about its influence on role and perspective-taking, social comparisons, language narration, social script knowledge and academic learning. For example, Bruner (1961) suggested that ‘discovery learning’ should be the mode for learning mathematics, Elkind (1976) adapted Piagetian perspectives to early childhood education, Fein (1981) and Bretherton (1984) discussed the role of pretence in cognitive development and the Singers (1990) examined its role in creativity and imaginative thinking.

Vygotskian theory The influence of Vygotsky’s theoretical ideas (1967, 1978) became prominent more recently. Vygotsky and his colleagues saw children’s play as important but the adult’s role also as important in helping children use objects symbolically (El’konin, 1966). Vygotsky described the age period from 2 to 8 as the time in which children learned the language of their culture and stated that this learning was evident in their play. At preschool age, children begin to use running monologues (i.e. ‘private’ speech) that accompany their play activities and this fosters the development of ‘spontaneous’ concepts. Vygotsky observed that in block play children’s initial categorizations were unorganized but by late preschool age, their concept development is evident in their problem-solving with blocks. However, he thought that pretence, especially pretend role-taking, in which the child

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must follow cultural scripts, was an especially important aspect of play because it enabled children to learn self-regulation and to develop a range of spontaneous concepts (1967). Vygotsky stated: ‘there is no such thing as play without rules. The imaginary situation of any form of play already contains rules of behavior’ (1978: 74). He asserted that play enabled thought to be separated from objects and actions, thus promoting ideas to control the play. As children grow older and their language becomes internalized private speech, these abilities continue to develop until individuals achieve mastery of their own behaviour by using symbolic means (Vygotsky and Luria, 1994). Although much of this imaginative play occurs in the company of other people, Vygotsky also discussed ‘director’s play’ that occurs when a child is alone (Kravstova, in this volume). Then the child develops the scripts, builds the settings, and gives all characters voice. Older children often do this with smallscale objects and create their own ‘worlds’, which also have cultural meaning (Bodrova and Leong, 2011). Vygotsky stressed the role of pretend play as a means of organizing thought through verbal mediation, enabling self-regulation to develop. This latter strand of his theory has continued to be fruitful regarding the role of fantasy and the relationship of play to cognitive skills such as literacy. His former student El’konin (2005) has continued to make his theoretical views on play explicit. Other theorists have promoted the use of playful techniques to support the growth of selfregulation (see Bodrova and Leong, 2011; Meyers and Berk, this volume) and to advance literacy development (see Christie and Roskos, 2000).

INFLUENCE OF FOUNDATIONAL THEORIES ON PRESENT-DAY PLAY THEORY In contemporary scholarship the four strands of play theory discussed above are still in

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evidence, although they have been refined and challenged as researchers have continued to test their premises. A number of recent books have focused on defining socio-cultural aspects of play (Sutton-Smith, 2001), explaining animal play (Bekoff and Byers, 1998) and examining developmental, educational and therapeutic aspects of play (O’Connor and Braveman, 2009; Pelligrini, 2009). These works all build on the theoretical foundation provided by earlier theorists, which continues to influence research and theoretical ideas. One newer theoretical approach, however, has arisen from dynamic systems theory, and this may provide a new foundational component that will guide research and practice.

Play as a Dynamic System The most recent theoretical perspective on play draws on dynamic systems theory and posits the view that one reason why theories of play have been so diverse is that play is a complex dynamic system that has characteristics of all such systems (see Thelen and Smith, 1994; Van Geert, 2000). For example, play is a self-organizing system that may appear chaotic but in which complex patterns of behaviour move towards order. The play state also shows disequilibrium, because it is always capable of change; its attractor states may be long or short, and it involves sensitive dependence on initial conditions because small inputs into play situations may cause disparate results. There are control parameters, which include differences in play patterns due to the age and skill of players; limitations on experience and types of settings available for play; interdependence, because all levels of play are interrelated; and soft assembly, with both stable and dynamic alternating periods. Vanderven has described play from this theoretical perspective (Vanderven, 1998), which will probably influence both play theory and research in the future.

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CONCLUSION Many theories of play have served as foundations for present play theory. They have added to the richness of definitions of play, its evidence in many species, its role in expressing cultural meanings and its importance as a venue for children’s development and learning. Theorists will continue to build on these foundations to expand both the meanings and the mysteries of play.

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and K. Sylva (eds), Play: Its Role in Development and Evolution. New York: Basic Books. pp. 277–285. Bryant, D. M. and Clifford, R. M. (1992) ‘150 years of kindergarten’, Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 7(2): 147–154. Christie, J. and Roskos, K. (eds) (2000) Literacy and Play in the Early Years: Cognitive, Ecological, and Sociocultural Perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Comenius, J. A. (1632/1907) Didactic Magna. London: A. & C. Black. Comenius, J. A. (1657/1967) Orbis Pictus. London: Oxford University Press. Coplan, R. J., Rubin, K. H. and Findlay, L. C. (2006) ‘Social and nonsocial play’, in D. P. Fromberg and D. Bergen (eds), Play from Birth to Twelve: Contexts, Perspectives, and Meanings. (2nd ed.) New York: Routledge. pp. 75–86. Dewey, J. (1910/1997) How We Think. Toronto: Dover. Dewey, J. (1916) Democracy and Education. New York: Macmillan. Dewey, J. (1938) Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. New York: Holt. Elkind, D. (1976) Child Development and Education: A Piagetian Perspective. New York: Oxford University Press. Elkind, D. (1983) ‘Montessori education: Abiding contributions and contemporary challenges’, Young Children, 38(2): 3–10. El’konin, D. (1966) ‘Symbolics and its functions in the play of children’, Soviet Education, 8(7): 35–41. El’konin, D. (2005) ‘On the historical origin of role play’, Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, 43(1): 11–21 (originally published 1978). Ellis, M. J. (1998) ‘Play and the origin of the species’, in D. Bergen (ed.), Readings from Play as a Learning Medium. Olney, MD: ACEI. pp. 29–31. Erikson, E. H. (1963) Childhood and Society. (2nd ed.) New York: Norton. Erikson, E. H. (1966) ‘Ontogeny of ritualization in man’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 251(772): 337–349. Erikson, E. H. (1977) Toys and Reason. New York: Norton. Fein, G. (1981) ‘Pretend play in childhood: An integrative review’, Child Development, 52(4): 1095– 1118. Fein, G. G. and Wiltz, N. W. (1998) ‘Play as children see it’, in D. P. Fromberg and D. Bergen (eds), Play from Birth to Twelve and Beyond: Contexts, Perspectives, and Meanings. New York: Garland Press. pp. 37–49. Froebel, F. (1887) The Education of Man. New York: Appleton-Century.

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Freud, A. (1989) ‘Child analysis as the study of mental growth (normal and abnormal)’, in S. I. Greenspan and G. H. Pollock (eds), The Course of Life: Volume 1: Infancy. Madison, CT: International Universities Press. pp. 1–14. Freud, S. (1917/1956) Delusion and Dream. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Freud, S. (1938) The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud (A. A. Brill, trans.) New York: Random House. Freud, S. (1960) Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. New York: Norton. Göncü, A. and Gaskins, S. (2007) Play and Development: Evolutionary, Sociocultural, and Functional Perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Gordon, G. (2009) ‘What is play? In search of a definition’, in D. Kushner (ed.), From Children to Red Hatters: Diverse Images and Issues of Play, Play and Culture Studies, Volume 8. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. pp. 1–13. Groos, K. (1898) The Play of Animals. New York: Appleton. Groos, K. (1901) The Play of Man. New York: Heinemann. Hall, G. S. (1920) Youth. New York: Appleton-Century. Hall, G. S. (1924) Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education. New York: D. Appleton. Harlow, H., Harlow, M. K. and Meyer, D. R. (1950) ‘Learning motivated by a manipulation drive’, Journal of Experimental Psychology, 40(2): 229–234. Henricks, T. (2002) ‘Huizinga’s contribution to play studies: A reappraisal’, in J. L. Roopnarine (ed.), Conceptual, Social-Cognitive, and Contextual Issues in the Fields of Play, Play and Culture Studies, Volume 8. Westport, CT: Ablex. pp. 23–52. Huizinga, J. (1950) Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. New York: Harper & Row. Hutt, C. (1971) ‘Exploration and play in children’, in R. E. Herron and B. Sutton-Smith (eds), Child’s Play. New York: Wiley. pp. 231–252. Isaacs, S. (1933) Social Development in Young Children. New York: Schocken. Iwaniuk, A. N., Nelson, J. E. and Pellis, S. M. (2001) ‘Do big-brained animals play more? Comparative analysis of play and relative brain size in mammals’, Journal of Comparative Psychology, 115(1): 29–41. King, N. (1979) ‘Play: The kindergarteners’ perspective’, Elementary School Journal, 80(2): 81–87. King, N. (1982) ‘Work and play in the classroom’, Social Education, 46(2): 110–113. Klein, M. (1932) The Psycho-Analysis of Children. London: Hogarth Press. Kohler, W. (1931) The Mentality of Apes. (2nd ed.) New York: Harcourt Brace.

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Foundations of Play Theory

Lazarus, M. (1883) Über Die Reize des Spiels. Berlin: F. Dummler. Leacock, E. (1976) ‘At play in African villages’, in J. Bruner, A. Jolly and K. Sylva (eds), Play: Its Role in Development and Evolution. New York: Basic Books. pp. 466–473. Locke, J. (1693/1910) ‘Some thoughts concerning education’, in C. W. Eliot (ed.), English Philosophers: Volume 37. New York: Villier. Lorenz, K. (1971) Studies in Animal and Human Behavior. New York: Methuen. Lowenfeld, M. (1935/1991) Play in Childhood. London: Mac Keith Press. Mitchell, C. P. (1912) The Childhood of Animals. New York: F. A. Stokes. Mitchell, E. D. and Mason, B. S. (1948) The Theory of Play. New York: A. S. Barnes and Company. Montessori, M. (1914/1965) Dr. Montessori’s Own Handbook. New York: Schocken. Morris, S. R. (1998) ‘No learning by coercion: Paidia and Paideia in Platonic philosophy’, in D. P. Fromberg and D. Bergen (eds), Play from Birth to Twelve and Beyond: Contexts, Perspectives, and Meanings. New York: Garland. pp. 109–118. Moustakas, C. (1974) Children in Play Therapy. Oxford: Ballantine Books. Neumann, E. A. (1971) The Elements of Play. New York: Blackwell. O’Connor, K. J. and Braveman, L. D. (2009) Play Therapy Theory and Practice. (2nd ed.) Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Opie, I. and Opie, P. (1969) Children’s Play in Streets and Playgrounds. London: Clarendon Press. Parten, M. (1932) ‘Social participation among preschool children’, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 28: 136–147. Pellis, S. M. and Iwaniuk, A. N. (2004) ‘Evolving a playful brain: A levels of control approach’, International Journal of Comparative Psychology, 17: 92–118. Pelligrini, A. D. (2002) ‘The development and possible functions of rough-and-tumble play’, in C. H. Hart and P. K. Smith (eds), Handbook of Social Development. Oxford: Blackwell pp. 438–454. Pellegrini, A. D. (2009) The Role of Play in Human Development. New York: Oxford University Press. Pestalozzi, J. H. (1894) How Gertrude Teaches Her Children. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Piaget, J. (1945) Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood. London: Heinemann. Piaget, J. (1965) The Moral Judgement of the Child. New York: Norton. Roopnarine, J. I. and Krishnakumar, A. (2006) ‘Parentchild and child–child play in diverse cultural contexts’,

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in D. P. Fromberg and D. Bergen (eds), Play from Birth to Twelve: Contexts, Perspectives, and Meanings. (2nd ed.) New York: Routledge. pp. 275–288. Rousseau, J. J. (1762/1911) Emile. New York: E. P. Dutton. Rubin, K. N., Fein, G. G. and Vandenberg, B. (1983) ‘Play’, in E. M. Heterhington (ed.) and P. H. Mussen (series ed.), Handbook of Child Psychology, Volume 4. Socialization, Personality, and Social Development. New York: Wiley. pp. 698–774. Seashore, C. E. (1913) Psychology of Daily Life. New York: D. Appleton. Schiller, F. (1875) Essays: Aesthetical and Philosophical. London: George Bell & Sons. Singer, D. G. and Singer, J. L. (1990) The House of Makebelieve: Children’s Play and the Developing Imagi­ nation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Smith, P. K. (1978) ‘A longitudinal study of social participation in preschool children: Solitary and parallel play reexamined’, Developmental Psychology, 14(5): 517–523. Smith, P. K. (1982) ‘Does play matter? Functional and evolutionary aspects of animal and human play’, Behavioral and Brain Science, 8: 139–184. Spencer, H. (1873) Principles of Psychology. New York: D. Appleton. Suomi, S. J. and Harlow, H. F. (1972) ‘Social rehabilitation of isolate-reared monkeys’, Developmental Psychology, 6(3): 487–496. Suomi, S. J. and Harlow, H. F. (1976) ‘Monkeys without play’, in J. Bruner, A. Jolly and K. Sylva (eds), Play – Its Role in Development and Evolution. New York: Basic Books. pp. 490–495. Sutton-Smith, B. (2001) The Ambiguity of Play. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sutton-Smith, B. and Rosenberg, B. G. (1961) ‘Sixty years of historical change in the game preferences of American children’, in R. E. Herron and B. SuttonSmith (eds), Child’s Play. New York: Wiley & Sons. Thelen, E. and Smith, L. B. (1994) A Dynamic Systems Approach to the Development of Cognition and Action. Boston, MA: MIT Press. Vanderven, K. (1998) ‘Play, proteus, and paradox: Education for a chaotic and supersymmetric world’, in D. P. Fromberg and D. Bergen (eds), Play from Birth to Twelve and Beyond: Contexts, Perspectives, and Meanings. New York: Garland. pp. 119–132. Van Lawick-Goodall, J. (1968/1976) ‘Mother chimpanzees play with their infants’, in J. Bruner, A. Jolly and K. Sylva (eds), Play: Its Role in Development and Evolution. New York: Basic Books. pp. 262–267. Van Geert, P (2000) ‘The dynamics of general developmental mechanisms: From Piaget and

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Vygotsky to dynamic systems models’, Current Directions in Psychological Science, 9: 64–88. Vygotsky, L. S. (1967) ‘Play and its role in the mental development of the child’, Soviet Psychology, 5: 6–18. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978) Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vygotsky, L. S. and Luria, A. R. (1994) ‘Tool and symbol in child development’, in R. van der Veer and

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J. Valsiner (eds), The Vygotsky Reader. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. pp. 99–174. Whiting, B. and Pope Edwards, C. (1988) Children of Different Worlds: The Formation of Social Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wilson, K. and Ryan, V. (2005) Play Therapy: A NonDirective Approach for Children and Adolescents. Edinburgh: Elsevier. Winnicott, D. W. (1953) ‘Psychosis and child care’, British Journal of Medical Psychology, 26(1): 68–74.

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2 Play in the Non-classical Psychology of L.S. Vygotsky Elena Kravtsova (translation by Anton Maximov)

INTRODUCTION L.S. Vygotsky did not write a great deal about play. However, we believe that his approach to the activity of play allows us not only to understand the essential characteristics of the cultural–historical approach but also to single out specific traits and features of non-classical psychology. The approach to understanding play from the perspective of classical science has helped us to identify important data about the developmental patterns of play and its role in the development of preschool-aged children. At the same time, the classical approach has left four global questions about play that require further attention. First of all, a clear differentiation in classical science between the adult experimenter and the child respondent has led us to note that one of the most difficult problems in classical science is the problem of teaching how to play. Not only do children play less and with potentially lower quality now than in the past (Smirnova, 2006; Tullis, 2011; Tandon, Zhou and Cristakis, 2012) but

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also, many adults also do not have a grasp of the activity of play (Maximov, 2009). Another question that was not covered by classical science is the question of using play as an auxiliary tool, in other words as a means to an end. This question is most important in education. There is even a special play type that relates to education, known as didactic play. Didactic play is an educational game. However, when researching the features of didactic play, V.V. Davydov (1986) has shown that play can lose its essential play characteristics, and in yet another case, can also lose the auxiliary function of working as a means to an end. The third problem, which has not attracted much attention in classical science, is that play replaces object-manipulative activity in children’s development, and later play itself is also replaced in turn by learning activity. In other words, classical psychology has not been able to explain the mechanisms and patterns of transition from one age period to another, including the transition from play as a leading activity to learning activity as a

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leading activity. Тhis question is not entirely theoretical. However, without even a hypothetical answer, it is impossible either to create a system for teaching children how to play, or to use play to create psychological readiness for school education. The last and most important question not covered by the classical psychology of play is a question of the criteria of play. That is, the basis of play or the difference between play and non-play. By the basis of play we mean a certain unit of play activity that, according to L.S. Vygotsky, should have all the characteristics and features of a whole. In understanding the basis of play it is important, firstly, to settle the problem of the interconnection between play and the imagination. This is because many authors, such as Elkonin (1978), Davydov (1986), Kudriavtsev (1997), denote the close interconnection between play and imagination, but it is still unclear if imagination is formed by play or if it acts as a basis for play activity. It is also important to identify criteria which can be found not only in all types of children’s play but also in the variety of adult games, as a way to understand the connection between imagination and play. If we define the features of play in nonclassical psychology we can see that play must be described from the perspective that types of communication are realized in play. For example, modern psychology has twice attempted to define play from the point of view of communication between players. A.P. Usova (1981) spoke of two types of relationships between players: play relationships and real relationships. In addition, according to L.S. Vygotsky’s ideas, a child who is playing at being ill and in hospital ‘is crying as a patient and at the same time is rejoicing as a player’ (1978: 290). A child has two types of communication in play, that concerning the play and that as a player. Play relationships and real relationships, despite their outward similarity, actually differ greatly from each other. The main difference is related to the fact that in Usova’s (1981) definition, play is considered in terms of classical psychology and as an activity

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approach. Without denying the presence of real relations and play relations in play, we need also to notice that this feature is not exactly specific to play. These two types of relationships also take place in terms, for example, of education or in the process of professional activity. While studying play according to the idea that in play a child is at the same time inside it (i.e. crying like a patient) and outside it (i.e. rejoicing as a player) allows us to speak of the features of play and its difference from other types of activity, it also helps us to mark out its criteria and signs.

THE IMAGINARY SITUATION: A CRITERION OF PLAY According to L.S. Vygotsky (1993), the basic criterion of play is the imaginary situation. The imaginary situation is the space between two ‘fields’, known as the real (or optical) field and the sense (or imaginary) field. To create the imaginary situation (i.e. the space between the optical and sense fields), a player must be at the same time inside and outside of the play. This explains why understanding and researching play is possible only through the simultaneous realization of these two positions. At the same time this also makes the study of play difficult for classical psychology, because the researcher may study play from the position of ‘patient’ or from the position of ‘player’. In non-classical psychology a person is at the same time ‘in the situation’ and ‘above the situation’. Being in-situation and abovesituation allows a person to realize the imaginary situation (i.e. the space determined by the real and sense fields). Accordingly, play includes play relations that are related to the logic of the play plot and real relations that are formed in the process of the player’s real-life activity. In some cases, ‘logic plot’ relations and real relations do not coincide. For example, a small child might be playing the role of an adult who is helping and taking care of a youngster. The ‘youngster’ in

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reality is an adult playing with the child. The logic plot and the real relations are different. In other cases the relationship between the ‘logic plot’ and the real relations not only coincides but also forms the content of the play. James Sully (2000) provides an example of two siblings who were playing (logic plot relations) at being sisters and who were in fact sisters (real relations). However, it does not matter whether or not the logic plot and the real relations coincide. What matters is that if a person who is playing is at the same time inside and outside the activity, then he or she is realizing play activity. For example, during play, a child might represent a kitten. She says, ‘Mother, I want to drink’ or ‘Mother, I’m scared’. But later she changes her voice timbre, her gait and her attitude towards the adult. She says, ‘Mother, I will go to get a drink and after that we will play again’. So we can see that the child is at the same time inside the play (when she is the kitten) and outside the play (when she tells her mother she will drink and return to the play). Being inside and outside the play simultaneously is a form of double-subjectivity for the player. Double-subjectivity as a criterion for play helps us to understand the problem of the basis of play in a new way. This is because according to L.S. Vygotsky (1991), imagination appears in the arena of psychic development when a child becomes independent from his or her own perception (436–54). For example, when a child who saw that a doll was sitting was asked to say that the doll was standing, it turned out that the child could only state that the doll was standing if he or she realized him or herself as the subject of his or her own speech. Recognizing oneself as the subject of one’s own speech realizes ‘imagination’ as a new psychic function. It is imagination that allows a child to control the space of his or her own perception. In other words, as a result of the crisis at three years children begin to treat themselves as a subject of speech, and with the help of speech they change the space of their optical field. They are easily able to

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repeat after an adult that a doll is standing or a doll is sitting, no matter what the doll is doing in reality. According to Vygotsky, personal development occurs through the change of lytic [stable] and critical periods. There are several critical periods in the child’s ontogenesis – often referred to as the crisis of one year, crisis of three years, crisis of seven years, etc. A child who has successfully passed the crisis of three years begins to be conscious of him or herself as a subject of his or her own activity. The central new formations of this crisis are the so-called ‘I am’ consciousness and the child’s relation to his or her actions as personal actions (for more about ‘I am’ consciousness and personal actions, see Kravtsova, 2006). These first displays of imagination seem like the appearance and realization of play actions but they do not lead to real play. For example, a baby might be sitting and hitting a chair with a spoon. The mother says: ‘What a good child. You are hammering in a nail just like your father does’. If the child has a basic level of imagination and understands the meaning of ‘father hammering in a nail’, then psychologically the character of his or her actions will change. Now he or she will not simply be hitting a chair with a spoon, but will be like the father and hammering in a nail. During these displays the child realizes one position, and that is why we could say that many actions that look like play are not play at all.

THE ORIGINS OF PLAY L.S. Vygotsky (1993), in his description of play development, uses the following formulae, which represent experience in the form of fractions: action/sense becomes sense/action and thing/sense becomes sense/thing. This representation describes the origin of play from object activity or play actions. Describing action/sense and thing/sense as fractions does not as a matter of fact create a model of play. It is only a model of the psychological succession of play and object

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activity. Also, the sense in the first and second fraction as a rule belongs to the perspective of the adult. In play, according to L.S. Vygotsky (1966), a child from the very beginning acts from a sense, from intent. This means that the appearance of imagination may be considered as a psychological basis, which later gives rise to play. The appearance of play is related to the fact that a child from the very beginning is able to act from intent and, with the help of intent, the child’s perception space changes. The meanings of things and actions with them begins to depend not on real perception, but from the intent that is initially suggested by an adult and after that is constructed by the child independently. The psychological succession of play and object activity means that a child is able to perceive a certain object differently and act with it according to the sense that is given to this object and its actions by an adult (Elkonin, 1978). From this moment, the psychological succession of play and object activity differs qualitatively from what is called psychological readiness for play activity. According to Razina (2002) and Gurova (2006), psychological readiness for children’s play is connected with special situational forms of communication between the child and the adult, and also with the origin of key actions with objects. Key actions refer to the main function of the object. For example, a chair is for sitting and a bed is for sleeping. Key actions allow the adult, and consequently the child, to change the item’s meaning. For instance, ‘if I’m sleeping on something, then this something has become a bed’, or ‘if I’m sitting on something, then this something is a chair, no matter that it may be a step or a block of wood’. On the one hand, the child knows perfectly well that an item becomes a bed or a chair. But, on the other, he or she can change the meaning of the object. Initially a child can only change the meaning of the object with an adult’s help. This is where situational forms of communication are needed. Later a child will be able to change the sense of an item on his or her own.

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The same process occurs with play when play as a leading activity is replaced by learning activity. Research shows that play provides a special context for the volitional forms of a child’s communication with others (Razina, 2002; Gurova, 2006) and that these forms of communication in total provide the psychological readiness for a child’s school education. At the same time, inside play different situations appear where a child is not as conditional in his or her play as he or she was previously. For example, in football play the child actually scores a goal and so wins over a rival, and in building or construction play, the child takes real measurements. However, although this play loses its imagined character, the play still remains play. For example, in the case of winning or losing, a child easily goes along with the result, thinking that the result is not his personal achievement but only a transient problem. Moreover, in some cases children are able to take action to do better in the next game. It is important that during these exercises children encounter a model for future learning activity. This activity is directed towards what D.B. El’konin (1994) described as the transformation of one’s own self from unknowing to knowledgeable and from unskilled to skilled. Approaching play from the position of double-subjectivity has allowed us to create a certain periodization of play activity in the child’s ontogenesis, and also to define the role of each type of play in the development of play and in psychic development. These types of play include: 1) director’s play; 2) image play; 3) plot role play; 4) games with rules; 5) literature play; 6) theatre play; and 7) I-image play. 1. Director’s play: provides both the ability for plot creation and the opportunity to control the play situation (that is, to take the above-situational position). 2. Image play: ensures the ability for identification and transformation. 3. Plot role play: originates from director’s play and image play and helps to realize the imagined plot through the roles used in the play, as well as

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providing different types of communication and collective activity during the play. 4. Games with rules: are genetically connected to plot role play; ensure the willing submission of players to the rules and provide the psychological foundation of volition. 5. Literature play: allows the reflection of relationships with others across different contexts. Provides the opportunity for conscious empathy and the analysis of one’s own problems from various positions. 6. Theatre play: helps to create the stable ‘I-image’ and becomes the basis of the formation of professional self-consciousness. 7. ‘I-image’ play: is the basis of a fully fledged ‘I-concept’ and provides the stable personal position.

Double-subjectivity in play allows players to orient both towards their own selves and towards the character they are playing. In addition, double-subjectivity allows the player to reveal the features of the character and so to change his or her own behaviour, activity and facial expressions so that they resemble the represented character. At the same time, players should be conscious of their own characteristics and how they are distinguished from the features of their roles. Accordingly, play from the perspective of double-subjectivity allows from one perspective the realization of self-cognition, and from another perspective cognition of the surrounding world. The presence of double-subjectivity during play helps players to control themselves in the process of realizing a certain role inside the play situation, but also to change their own real characteristics. In total these two sides of play – the player’s consciousness of himself as a player and at the same time as a non-player – represent the subject of play. It means that a person is able to control his or her play volitionally. These two sides of play form the basis of play and actually differ greatly from each other at the beginning of the development of play itself. As a rule, children begin to accept the role or to act with objects when they have no such opportunity in reality. That is why in

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the child’s first or earliest games, the playing subject differs qualitatively from the one which is determined by his or her personal position. At the same time, according to the analysis of children’s early games (Fradkina, 1946; El’konin, 1994), the two sides of the play coexist and develop fairly independently from each other. An example from practice is that of a young boy playing ‘families’ with his mother. The boy says that he will be the mother and the mother will be the son. He is not at all confused by the clear discrepancy between his age and his mother’s real age and the discrepancy between their roles and genders as players. In the process of play the situation is transformed, and it turns out that the mother is to remain a mother, but the boy has become a fox cub. When his mother suggests to him that maybe she is not a mother any more, but also a fox, the child insists: ‘you are just mother and that’s all’. Here the child can accept the role of being a fox cub although he has no opportunity to take this role in reality.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF PLAY During the process of role-play development (and the introduction of a greater number of participants in play), the correlation between playing and the real sides of the subject of play activity changes. Here it emerges that the child’s playing of ‘I’ has a significant influence on the development of his or her personality. For example, it may be that playing as a strong and courageous hero can help shy and bashful children to become less shy and fearful (Zaharov, 2004). However, they constantly need reminding, or even exposure to the continued impersonation of that hero, to overcome their fears in reality. These features of the play can be called the first developmental stage of the subject of play. It is known that at the end of the preschool period there are substantial changes in the development of play (Vygotsky, 1966). During this time the rules of play come to the forefront and the imaginative situation moves

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towards the sidelines. This movement reveals itself in the origin of games with rules. After the appearance of games with rules, all the previous play types begin to change. Now, when children are playing plot role play or director’s play, they qualitatively change the form and content of the play. From one perspective children’s play becomes more compressed verbally, and from the other the content of the play often becomes related to real life and real events. This shift represents the second developmental stage of play. For example, in the play of children within the second stage of play development, it is very hard to find a situation where one child is playing at being an adult and another child is playing at being a child. If in the course of the play they need this differentiation, second-stage players will most likely ask another smaller child to play with them, or will just use a doll to represent the ‘child’ in the play. With the end of primary school, children do not stop playing. However, their games begin to differ qualitatively from previous stages. The content of primary school-age games once again begins to differ from reality, but reality also contributes greatly to the plot. This can be seen in teenagers’ games, which are often informed by media and literature. The teenagers are fighting with each other as usual, but not as themselves; more like the heroes they read about or saw in television or in a movie. This means that the ‘real I’ influences the ‘playing I’, which is the third stage of the development of play The conditioned influence of the subject’s ‘real I’ on his or her ‘playing I’ is related to the fact that only from this time may children take part in performances, and so transform themselves consciously. In other words, he or she should really feel him or herself as the character. At the same time, he or she is not fully becoming a particular character; rather he or she learns to adjust the features (i.e. bravery or modesty) of the characters to his or her own self. This capacity is very important for the child’s personal development as well as for the child’s performance. Here the two sides of the subject of play activity do

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not merge together but coexist in the space of the child’s personality. We can illustrate this thought using the heroine Julia Lambert from W.S. Maugham’s (2001) novel Theatre, who once found herself in a situation where her playing (acting on stage) and real position (in her off-stage life) coincided in terms of content. In real life, Julia was jilted by her lover and the same situation took place in her performances on stage. As a result, she transferred her real suffering to the stage. She thought that she had never acted with such brilliance; however it turned out that her performance was no good at all. In this example, we have on the one side the influence of the ‘non-playing’ (the ‘real I’) on the playing or the ‘imagined I’. However, from the other side it turns out that both these sides of Julia’s playing activity subject were merged into one. This is proved first by the transfer of the ‘imagined I’ into her real life. For example, at the beginning of the novel Julia appeals to her son with a passionate speech, but in the next moment she remembers that she is speaking just like one of the heroines from a play. If in the theatre the coincidence between the ‘playing I’ and the ‘real I’ leads to poor acting in a play, in the field of personal development such coincidence can have a destructive influence. A person who does not distinguish for him or herself between the ‘playing I’ and the ‘real I’ is likely to become immoral and emotionally emasculated. If we analyse these changes we could say that in older teenagers and younger adolescents, the playing and non-playing aspects of play activity again coexist in parallel and influence each other equally. We could also say that they once again become of equal value, and that when this occurs the development of play has reached the fourth stage. At the end of this stage, the subject’s ‘real I’ includes all the play activity of the previous stages. The fundamental difference in adult play is that there is a clear distinction between the playing and the non-playing I. In adult play there is only one real subject with an interiorized subject of play activity based on the

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previous stages. This helps adults to voluntarily and consciously use play in different situations.

PLAY AS A LEADING ACTIVITY The next important idea of L.S. Vygotsky (1933) concerning play is the idea that in the preschool years, play is a leading but not predominant activity. The concept of play as a leading activity helps us to make several important practical conclusions about play. One is that play as a leading activity determines development. However, to influence development, play itself must also develop. Only at the end of the preschool period, when a child has mastered the main types of play, may play become the predominant activity – in other words, an activity that takes a greater part in a child’s life. This theoretical position allows an understanding of a whole number of problems that are related to play realization in practice. First of all, a great number of children at the end of the preschool period have not fully developed play activity. This is expressed in low levels of psychological readiness for formal school education. Second, many children of preschool age get ‘stuck’ in their play. In this situation their play does not develop, so instead of helping with their education and development, the play they have begins to prevent development and education. Third, a lack of appropriate conditions for the realization of play in later ages leads to their continuing to play in school instead of studying (Kravtsova, 1991).

PLAY AS AN AUXILIARY TOOL The study of play according to the ideas of L.S. Vygotsky (1933, 1991, 1966) helps us reach three important conclusions about using play as an auxiliary tool. The first conclusion is that in the area of psychic development, play acts in two ways. At the beginning, play is a selfvaluable and independent activity. During this

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period a child or an adult is mastering a certain type of play. This becomes apparent, first, in the fact that he or she needs to create special conditions for the realization of play, or even have some help from outside his or her play. Second, at the same time, at this stage of play there is a lot of object activity, which we have shown to be the basis for play. After play starts as a self-valuable activity, it becomes a form of life-activity. Play is expressed in the verbalization of its objective part. For example, a child will not knock at the door and walk away in reality, but he or she will say that they are knocking in pretence, or even say ‘after I knocked’. The same process occurs with literature play. When play has become a form such as in literature play, the outward equivalence between a person and his or her image in play is not so important. Besides, the player will not imitate ‘fighting’ or their wish to ‘hide’, but they will talk about it and include it in their communication with their play partners. The second conclusion refers to the inclusion of play in other types of life-activity. The most popular of these life-activities are education and therapy. The results of research show that play cannot be used in any activity as far as it acts as a self-valuable activity (Kravtsov, 2001; Novikova, 2006). This also touches on the genetic development of play. To the extent that a child (or adult) has not mastered play, he or she can only play in a certain type of play. At this time play is a leading activity for him or her, and so is not a predominant activity that can be used in support of life-activity. When play acts as a form of life-activity, on the one hand, it stops being a leading activity, while on the other it may be used in any other type of activity. At the same time, that growth which will appear by using play as an auxiliary tool may also be rightly called play education or play therapy. The two stages in play development, including 1) self-valuable activity and 2) form of life-activity, are connected to all play types. In other words, so far as role play or play with the ‘I-image’ has not passed the stage of self-valuable activity, it cannot be

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used as an auxiliary tool for education or therapy. This is why in every age period, as a rule, one type of play acts as a self-valuable independent activity, while the other types of play may be used in other types of activity. As a person becomes older he or she uses different play types in his or her life-activity. Finally, a third conclusion about play as a leading and predominant activity is related to the features of play inclusion in other activity types, or to using play in a person’s life-activity. The study of play’s genesis allows us to mark out the essential characteristics of certain types of play. For example, director’s play may be created in conditions where a child is offered opportunities to unite different objects (such as words or characteristics) by sense. If a child takes different toys, pictures, words and so on and is able not to unite them in classes, but is able to create a certain plot, then this will be both an imagined situation and at the same time play, according to Vygotsky (1978). Take the following example. We offer a child a typical set of items for classification, such as a plate, a spoon, a fork and a doll, and the child is able to use these objects (or pictures of these objects) to make a story about a doll who first ate soup and then was offered a rissole, which she did not like. Then, in the story, instead of eating the rissole, she secretly drank compote, and so on. This would be the child’s imagined situation, in which the child is realizing at the same time both the real position (by looking at pictures or objects, by touching them and so on) and the imagined position (what lies on the plates, what the doll liked, what the doll did not like, the doll’s name, etc.). What is in the imagined situation is the result of the child’s imagination. At the same time, these aspects of the imagination constitute a feature of director’s play. If such an act of play functions as a selfvaluable activity in a child’s life, then he or she will be just playing in it, but if it has become a form of life-activity we could use it for teaching subjects such as mathematics or first and second languages. We could ask

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a child to count the number of flowers painted on a plate and on a cup and to tell us which has more flowers. Besides, we could, together with a child, make a menu which features not simply soup but also the full name of a particular soup; we could teach children what kinds of food we should put in this soup, and so on. In image play, the conditions for the creation of the imagined situation change. Now the image is essential for the play. The image should be thoroughly familiar to a child who will play or who will use play. At the same time, the person should have strong emotions attached to the image. Research by Russian scientists shows that modern children have stopped playing at ‘hospitals’ or ‘doctors’ in spite of their wide experiences of communication and interaction with others (Abramenkova, 2000; Dresvyanskaya, 2012). This could be because they do not have strong emotions attached to the image of these professionals. Plot role play and its imagined situation are determined by two roles with differing content, for example a doctor and a patient, a teacher and a student, a driver and passengers, and so on. In plot role play a child reveals his or her role not through special movements or by mimicking, but through communication with the other play partners. The opportunity to change roles during the process of play helps a player to consider different situations from different positions. One of the most favoured childhood games used to teach children how to read is playing post office. The person playing a post-person reads the addresses and brings the letters to the correct recipient, and this person in turn carries out tasks described in the letter or replies to the sender. If children and/or adults have poorly developed plot role play, then all of their actions are made in the imagined plane. For example, the recipient of a letter does not read it but instead invents the text (as if he or she was reading) and so on. At the same time, when plot role play becomes a form of life-activity, then the reading of letters, carrying out of

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Play in the Non-classical Psychology of L.S. Vygotsky

tasks and writing of replies to the sender becomes real. The imagined situation of ‘games with rules’ is determined by a rule. If a rule dictates how a player should walk or speak, or how to play with a ball, then there is a situation where a rule has its roots in reality. However, the comprehension of the rule is made in the child’s imagination. This ‘double-subjectivity’ supports play with rules. Once again, it is play and the inclusion of any specific content leads to its suppression. But if it acts as a form of life-activity then this play helps to realize and carry out various forms of activity. On a large scale, all learning activity of primary school children is play with rules. A study has been conducted in which children using play with rules were taught functional thinking. After many years (the children were taught in fourth grade), it turned out that these school graduates had the best knowledge of how to use mathematical concepts in their daily functions (Kravtsov, 1995).

CONCLUSION The last question we want to discuss is that of conclusions about play and the study of play in non-classical psychology. In other words, is it possible to consider play as a unit of non-classical psychology? According to L.S. Vygotsky’s theory, this question may be stated as follows: is it possible to consider play and its development features as a unit of non-classical psychology? Will play have all the characteristics of psychology not evident in the classical model? From one side, play may be understood as a model of a person’s life. In play we simulate real relationships and real situations. From the other side, the mechanism of transitioning from natural psychic functions to higher functions is not active in play. Any psychic function initially appears as a real relationship in a group, so it is collective per se, and play is initially an individual activity (Kravtsova, 1996). Further, if we imagine a collective activity where one participant

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creates an imagined situation, another formulates its rules and a third plays the roles, this will not be play at all. If a child or adult does not have the experience of individual play, he or she may collectively interact with other people, but in this process he or she will realize some activity other than the collectivedistributed activity. Also, even if a person has an individual play experience, in collective play each participant will still realize play. Without this realization, he or she cannot understand the general sense of play or his or her partner’s play positions, or the logic and features of his or her own play behaviour. Thus play, in spite of its different components, characteristics and developmental stages, is principally holistic. This very unity is inherent in a person, in his or her personality, and cannot be comprehended, imagined, developed and corrected on the basis of the sum of his psychic functions, processes, activities, behaviour and so on. This is the main difference between classical and nonclassical psychology – to separate, to dissect, to study in isolation or to construct, to create and to design. This conclusion fully coincides with the thought of L.S. Vygotsky that the old classical psychology was not able even to approach the study of personality, because it did not know the history of the development of higher psychic functions (more commonly known as ‘higher mental functions’ in the Western literature) that had become, in his opinion, the basis of nonclassical psychology. Our conclusions about play therefore align with the purpose of nonclassical psychology.

REFERENCES Abramenkova, V.V. (2000). Social psychology of childhood: development of child’s relationships in child subculture. Moscow Psychological-Social Institute: Moscow. Davydov, V. (1986). The problems of developmental education. Pedagogika: Moscow. Dresvyanskaya, G.V. (2012). Features of primary school children’s play. Siberian Federal University: Krasnoyarsk.

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El’konin, D.B. (1978). Psychology of play. Pedagogika: Moscow. El’konin, D.B. (1994). Introduction to the psychology of development. Trivola: Moscow. Fradkina, F.I. (1946). Psychology of play in early childhood: Genetic roots of role play. Doctoral dissertation. Leningrad (St Petersburg) University: Moscow. Gurova, O.V. (2006). Psychological readiness for play activity. Doctoral dissertation. L.S. Vygotsky Institute of psychology RSUH: Moscow. Kravtsov, G.G. (1995). The formation of personality in the educational process: preschool and primary school age. Doctoral dissertation. Psychological Institute of Russian Academy of Education: Moscow. Kravtsov, G.G. (2001). Psychological problems of person-oriented education. Smysl: Moscow. Kravtsova, E. (1991). Psychological problems of children’s readiness for school education. Pedagogika: Moscow. Kravtsova, E. (1996). Release a wizard in a child. Prosveschenie: Moscow. Kravtsova, E. (2006). The concept of age-specific new psychological formations in contemporary develop­ mental psychology. Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, 44(6), 6–18. Kudriavtsev V.T. (1997). The sense of human childhood and mental development of children. URAO: Moscow. Maugham, W.S. (2001). Theatre. Vintage Books: London. Maximov, A.A. (2009). Personal features of computer games’ addicts. dissertation Doctoral. Moscow. Novikova T.S. (2006). Psychological meaning of plot role play in personal ontogenesis. dissertation Doctoral. Moscow.

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Razina, N.Z. (2002). Psychological content of crisis of 3 years. Doctoral dissertation. L.S. Vygotsky Institute of psychology RSUH: Moscow. Smirnova, E.O. (2006). Preschool child in the modern world. Drofa: Moscow. Sully, J. (2000). Studies of childhood. Free Association Books: London. Tandon P., Zhou C. and Christakis D.A. (2012). Frequency of parent-supervised outdoor play of US preschool-aged children. Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, 166(8), 707–12. Tullis, P. (2011). The death of preschool. Scientific American Mind, 22, 36–41. Usova, A.P. (1981). Education in kindergarten. Prosveschenie: Moscow. Vygotsky, L.S. (1933). Play and its role in the psychic development of a child. Shorthand record of the lecture conducted at the Herzen State Pedagogical University. (www.dob.1september.ru/articlef.php?ID= 200500510 (in Russian)) Vygotsky, L.S. (1966). Play and its role in the mental development of the child. Questions of Psychology, (12) 6, 62–7. Vygotsky, L.S. (1978). Summary of lectures on the psychology of preschool age children. In D.B. El’konin (ed.), Psychology of play. Pedagogika: Moscow. Vygotsky, L.S. (1991). Imagination and its development in childhood. Prosveschenie: Moscow. Wilde, O. (1998). The picture of Dorian Grey. Modern Library: New York. Zaharov, A.I. (2004). Child’s day and night fears. Soyuz: St Petersburg.

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3 Children’s Play as Cultural Activity Suzanne Gaskins

INTRODUCTION Early childhood educators and play scholars in many Western societies argue that children’s play is in decline and under attack (Crain, 2003; Elkind, 2007; Gray, 2013). Their concern stems from initiatives by schools to increase the amount of time focused on structured learning for young children while decreasing the time spent in unstructured play, in parallel with attempts to improve children’s test scores and to address inequities in educational outcomes across cultural groups and social classes (Russ and Dillon, 2011). Parents in such societies, especially middle-class parents, have reduced free play time even further by seeking more structured after-school activities for their children, including enrichment classes, organized sports and academic tutoring (Hofferth and Sandberg, 2001; Lareau, 2003). Further reducing children’s ‘traditional’ play time are choices by the children themselves regarding how to spend what leisure time they have, with the introduction

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of television, video games, computers and online communities into children’s lives (Buckingham and Willet, 2006; Willett, Robinson and Marsh, 2011). In the face of such competition, play proponents make a passionate case for the unique value of children’s free play for their development and learning (e.g. Singer, Golinkoff and HirshPasek, 2006). What is missing from these arguments is a recognition of the culturally and historically specific importance of such play in Europe, Canada, Australia and the United States (Brooker, 2010; Fleer, 2010a). When one considers the role of play in children’s lives in other times and places, it becomes clear that while play may serve a unique role in some children’s lives today, it may have assumed a greater centrality in their lives because of changes in both economic practices (with adult work taking place outside the home) (Mintz, 2006; Lancy, 2008) and culturally specific understandings of childhood (focusing on the child as precious and needing to be protected) (Zelizer, 1985; Prout, 2005).

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Much of what has been claimed as the unique characteristics and advantages of play – and used in its defence against encroaching formal instruction – in fact may not necessarily be unique for all times and cultures (Fleer, 2005; Edwards, 2006). For contemporary children growing up in worlds where play is a primary way of spending their time, their cognitive, social and emotional development may indeed be influenced by the types of play they engage in. For children growing up in worlds where play is only one of many ways of spending their time, play may have a much less central impact on development and learning. Although play has often been assumed to be the universal primary way in which children engage in the world outside of formal schooling, this has not been the case across the centuries and across the globe. This chapter provides support for this claim by looking at the complex ways in which culture organizes the parameters of children’s everyday lives, demonstrating how children are regularly engaged in meaningful activities other than play and how play is experienced differently across cultures. Building on those insights, the chapter concludes by exploring the implications for theory and application of viewing play from a culturally comparative perspective, and proposes some critical research questions still needing to be answered.

CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES ON CHILDREN’S EVERYDAY ACTIVITIES AND PLAY Play is a cross-disciplinary area of research with a strong contingent of scholars found in the fields of education, psychology, sociology, history and anthropology. Unfortunately, these disciplines’ differences in both theory and methods lead to a lack of cross-disciplinary engagement, leading many play scholars to be unaware of each other’s research. This chapter will present the extensive anthropological record of children’s everyday play in

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a form designed to engage scholars from other disciplines. Anthropologists who study children frequently focus on issues of socialization and enculturation (Lancy, 2008; Montgomery, 2009). Much of the early ethnographic work focused on describing children’s everyday activities reported that play was an important, and arguably universal, activity because it served as a medium of socialization (Schwartzman, 1979). While the specific content of play might vary across cultures, the process of play looked similar enough across cultures – in spite of large differences in the resources available for it – for anthropologists to argue that play should be considered a universal characteristic of children (Schwartzman, 1979). More recent anthropological work has focused on differences in meaning more than similarities of form. It describes 1) how cultural understandings influence the process of play as experienced by children in their everyday lives (Gaskins, Haight and Lancy, 2007) and 2) how children become committed to culturally organized play practices through everyday activity patterns (e.g. Lancy, 1996; Göncü, Mistry and Mosier, 2000). In contrast to earlier work, it suggests that play varies in important ways across cultures, both in cultural meaning and in its contribution to the patterns of children’s everyday experiences that form the basis of socialization. It is possible to see very different pictures if one chooses to focus on the cultural similarities of play or the cultural differences. In the end, it is important to do both. This chapter will focus on a number of differences, not to dismiss the claims about similarities in play across cultures or its universality as a feature of childhood, but rather to provide a counterweight to them.

The Relationship of Work and Education to Play Perhaps the most significant difference across cultures that provides structure to children’s

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lives is the range of roles assigned to them. Children have varying amounts of opportunity to participate in adult productive activities according to the economic system of their culture. Children have many more legitimate roles in the everyday sustenance activities of their household in hunter-gatherer and agrarian societies than in industrial and postindustrial societies (Lancy, 2008). Much of the work being done by adults is organized at the level of family or home and there are roles that children productively fulfil, even before they reach full adult competency, through legitimate peripheral participation (Lave and Wenger, 1991). In industrial and postindustrial societies, adult work is traditionally organized primarily outside the home, and is often more specialized. This means there are minimal work roles for children, and children may not see much of the work done by adults. A second major difference that sorts societies into the same two groups is the centrality of formal education. In hunter-gatherer and agrarian societies, much of a child’s education is typically informal, taking place within the family and within the context of participating in adult work. While more structured forms of education exist in some of these societies, such as formal apprenticeship (Lancy, 2012), religious instruction (Moore, 2006) and initiations (Schlegel, 1995), observational learning in situ is a dominant and intentional strategy for preparing children to assume adult roles (Gaskins and Paradise, 2010), allowing them to construct shared meanings about cultural institutions and practices (Rogoff, Paradise, Mejía-Arauz, Correa-Chávez and Angelillo, 2003). In contrast, in industrial and postindustrial societies, education has moved to take place primarily in formal, specialized institutions that operate in isolation from adult work (Rogoff et al., 2003). Observational learning – that is, learning by watching other people and events – is described as a central mechanism for learning in the earliest ethnographic studies of children (e.g. Fortes, 1976 [1938]). While observational learning is found in all cultures,

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in those cultures where children learn primarily through participation in family work it is not only strongly encouraged and supported but also culturally amplified (Rogoff et al., 2003; Gaskins and Paradise, 2010). Children become experts at extracting information from ongoing activities and constructing meaning from that information. Their efforts are rewarded when their increased competence leads to more responsibility and inclusion in family work. Interestingly, observational learning shares two very important characteristics with play – intrinsic motivation and child-directedness. In addition, learning through observation can be invisible and unintentional, as in play, through repeated exposure to everyday events (Gaskins and Paradise, 2010). Taken together, these two differences in everyday environments for children (child v. adult-centric daily activities and informal v. formal learning environments) produce patterns of experience that differ greatly. Children who are denied roles as regular legitimate participants in adult work, and who are educated in segregated settings such as schools, spend most of their time in childcentred, adult-mediated, age-segregated environments, with most of their activities having little resemblance to those of adults and being free of real-world consequences. Children who regularly engage in family work and learn primarily through observation and engagement spend most of their time involved in productive activity, embedded in a social world of family, with limited leisure time. It is not hard to see how play takes on different meanings under these different sets of circumstances. In a society that organizes and values child-oriented activities, play becomes a primary resource centred on social engagement, escape and expression of personal sentiment. In a society that supports and values children’s contributions to adultoriented activities, play becomes a less central resource used for knowledge practice and leisure. In both cases, play can serve as an opportunity to explore meanings with few

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real-world consequences, but the nature of that exploration differs dramatically.

Beliefs about Children and Play A second significant difference across cultures is caregiver beliefs about the nature and value of play, which are inextricably tied to more general beliefs about mechanisms for children’s learning and development. There is abundant evidence that cultures differ in their beliefs about how children grow up and become competent members of their society (Lancy, 2008; Montgomery, 2009). Some folk theories about the nature of children place more emphasis on maturation as a mechanism for development, while others place more emphasis on environmental shaping through experience (Lancy, Bock and Gaskins, 2010). Some cultures emphasize the importance of teaching children through intentional, verbal lessons, while others think children learn primarily by watching and participating in family activities (Rogoff et al., 2003). Gaskins, Haight and Lancy (2007) have argued that such differences in beliefs yield three major cultural perspectives on play that can be extracted from the ethnographic record: play may be cultivated, accepted or curtailed. Middle-class parents in the United States and China, for instance, value children’s play as an important medium for learning and development and cultivate play by providing abundant resources. In contrast, Kpelle parents in Liberia accept play as a dominant behaviour of childhood but place less emphasis on play as a medium for learning and development, and therefore offer many fewer play resources. The Yucatec Maya of Mexico curtail play to some degree because they expect children to contribute to household work (and children curtail their own play by seeking more involvement in adult activities). One of the more influential play resources that can be provided by adults is their own participation in children’s play. In societies where play is cultivated, parents often actively sustain or even extend the children’s

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play (Haight and Miller, 1993; Lancy, 2007). In fact, it may be through early modelling that parents are able to amplify the level of importance that children come to place on play, especially fantasy pretence (Gaskins, 2013).1 In cultures where play is accepted, and especially where it is curtailed, significant adult mediation of, support of and participation in children’s play is the exception rather than the rule, since play is considered to be an activity limited to and organized by children. Ethnographic research from all parts of the world describes how children construct their own toys, organize their play agenda, find their own play partners, resolve social disputes, take physical risks and socialize younger children into games and routines, while adults stay at the periphery (or beyond) (Lancy, 2008).

SOCIAL WORLDS IN PLAY There are many different configurations of children’s social worlds across cultures. Twentieth-century research on children’s development has tended to assume that children are living in small, nuclear families and that if both parents work outside the home, infants and preschool children are often placed in groups of non-related children of similar ages for the purposes of childcare, prefiguring the kind of social environment they will find when they enter school. However, cross-cultural research shows that many children spend the majority of their time in larger, more complex family and community structures. Thus, although traditional research on play has assumed that playmates are same-aged, supervised friends, it is important to recognize the kinds of variation in social worlds that exist, and not limit our understanding of play to only one kind of social structure (Göncü and Gaskins, 2011). Playing with siblings or friends, playing with children the same age or of varied ages and playing with or without adult supervision – each of these differences has an impact on the nature of children’s play.

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Friends v. Siblings One of the most significant differences across cultures is whom children have as their regular play partners. In some contemporary societies, especially in the middle class, children spend their time primarily split between their nuclear families on the one hand (where there might be only one or two other children) and same-aged peers on the other, often while directly supervised by adults in formal settings (Lareau, 2003). In other societies, such as the Kpelle of Liberia (Lancy, 1996) and the Gusii of Kenya (LeVine et al., 1994), children might spend the majority of their time away from home in mixed-age groups of children, who may or may not be relatives, with little adult supervision. In still others, like the Yucatec Maya, children may stay close to home and spend their time with their multi-generational and extended families, playing primarily with siblings and other child relatives (Gaskins, 2006). Among peers, there is some evidence that coplaying is always a negotiated and fragile event (Corsaro, 1985; Löfdahl, 2010). Play among siblings and other relatives can minimize this dynamic because of the recognition that today’s playmate will be tomorrow’s playmate and that the relationship extends beyond the play activity (Gaskins, 2006).

Same-age v. Mixed-age Play Partners Children who play in mixed-age groups inhabit a much more hierarchical environment than children who play in same-age groups. Children in mixed age groups come to the play activity with acknowledged and uncontested differences in knowledge, skills, strength and power. There may be cultural expectations that the older children will entertain or take care of the younger ones, as for the Yucatec Maya (Gaskins, 2006), or there may be few constraints on their exercise of control over using their superior position to dominate others, as for the Kpelle of Liberia (Lancy, 1996). In either case, older

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children usually conceptualize, organize and direct the play, and thus opportunities for younger children to use play as personal expression may be limited. Negotiations over control of the play agenda are very different in same-age play groups, where children must negotiate or assert their superiority rather than having it be tacitly accepted by all (Corsaro, 1985).

Supervision v. Independence Adult supervision tempers many less positive aspects of children’s play, including their experiences of exclusion, dominance, teasing and punishment by others. This effect is present whether the play is among friends or relatives, in mixed-age or same-age groups. Cultures differ widely in relation to how closely they think children’s play needs to be monitored. Some cultures see value in protecting children from each other, while others believe that within the play group, important socialization occurs that adults should not interfere with (Tobin, Wu and Davidson, 1991). Unmonitored play has the potential for being more child-driven, but potentially distressing for those who are excluded or mistreated.

Play as Integrated or Specialized Activity Many kinds of play have been identified by researchers and theorists. While there is no definitive, exhaustive list, many classification systems include the following types: physical play, including rough and tumble; construction and object play; language play; pretend play; and games with rules (Smith, 2009). While these types of play may be combined and are at times hard to categorize, it is usually not difficult to identify when children are playing because their play is isolated from other cultural activities. However, in some societies, the line between play and other activities is not so clear. In cultures where children are engaged

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in daily chores and work beside adults in the production of food, they often bring a playful approach to their work. Thus, ‘down time’ during cattle herding is filled by building pretend corrals filled with pretend cattle (LeVine et al., 1994). Chasing birds in a field becomes informal racing (Fortes, 1976 [1938]). And returning home with meat purchased for the family meal becomes a chance to pretend to be a truck (Katz, 2004). The extent to which the children are working or playing is unclear in their seamless stream of behaviour. Little is known about how such interwoven playful work differs from the ‘purer’ play of non-working children that has been more closely studied. Children also bring a work-focused tone to their play when they practise real-world skills within the play frame, whether it is through pretend play, competitive games or other types of play. For children who live in societies where they are expected to contribute to adult work, such practice play is directly motivated by a desire to become more competent at practical skills in order to be included in adult activities (Bock and Johnson, 2004). Examples abound in the ethnographic literature of children’s play used to learn such skills as how to use a bow and arrow, to navigate a canoe, to prepare food or to take care of babies (Lancy, 2008). Such practice is often undertaken quite seriously and tenaciously. So while it is playful in the sense that it does not have direct consequences in the real world, the activity is not motivated primarily by fun (although fun may indeed be had). It is self-imposed learning through purposeful trial and error.

PLAY AS INVENTIVE V. INTERPRETIVE BEHAVIOUR One of the most central claims about play from European and American perspectives is that it allows children to explore and express their own feelings and understandings about the world (Gaskins and Miller, 2009). It is in this sense that play is thought to be therapeutic

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(e.g., Clark, 2003) and to promote creativity and imagination (Singer and Singer, 1992). While many kinds of play can allow such self-expression, pretend play and the production of narratives is thought to be the epicentre of such activity (Paley, 2004). The primary use of play for children’s selfexpression may not apply in all cultures. For instance, young Yucatecan Mayan children who are playing with older children do not have control of the narratives pursued in play (Gaskins, 2006) and may not feel a strong need to ‘rewrite’ their experiences through pretend play (Gaskins and Miller, 2009). However, there is a more central argument to be made about cultural differences in pretend play – namely that pretend play can focus either on narratives that invent unrealistic roles and events (such as going on an adventure to upside-down land or being pirates) or on narratives that interpret realistic ones (such as having breakfast or going to school) (Gaskins, 2013). (Obviously, some narratives incorporate both kinds of play.) These two kinds of pretend play have different emotional and social affordances. In contrast to inventive pretend play, the goal of interpretive pretend play is not self-expression or creativity – the goal is to understand reality better through enactment. In many cultures, especially those in which children share adult work, children engage in pretend play, but their pretending is primarily limited to interpretive play, enacting events and roles that are within their experience (Gaskins, 2013). Under these conditions pretend play can be thought of as trying on roles, relationships and activities in anticipation of their real lives when they are older. The pleasure is in accomplishing a credible re-enactment, which may involve social critique or irony (e.g. pretending to be a drunk does not imply that the child wants to grow up to be a drunk). The more extensive the child’s knowledge base about the world, the more elaborate, complex and accurate the pretend play can be. In order to engage together in interpretive play, children must share the same knowledge base.

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Yucatec Mayan children’s play falls squarely in the category of interpretive play (Gaskins, 2013). It is conducted in a mixedage group of relatives who play together on a regular basis. Not only do these children share knowledge of the everyday world, they also share previous enactments of this world in their play, since most play groups have a limited repertoire of scripts they enact repeatedly. The older children choose the script for the play session, assign the roles and direct the unfolding of the activity. Younger children follow directions and do their best to give credible performances based on their more limited understanding of activities and relationships. If youngsters prove incompetent at performing a role, they are given appropriate lines to repeat by the older children. If the script demands exceed their capacity altogether, the younger ones choose to drop out and engage in solitary object play nearby. Older children (six–eight years) actually spend more time in pretend play than younger children (three–five years), because as their understanding of the everyday world increases, re-enacting it becomes increasingly complex and interesting (Gaskins, 2000). Interpretive pretend play shares many elements with inventive pretend play. A play frame is established and maintained, props are recruited and used to symbolize objects, roles are performed and dialogue is spontaneously created. However, all of this is constrained by what the children know to be true about the real world. By participating in interpretive play, children are expanding their understanding of the world and internalizing it as constructed cultural meaning, as Vygotsky (1967) proposed. Such learning is less central during inventive play, when children are not constrained in script production by their real world. Likewise, the emotional catharsis that can occur in inventive play, when children construct unrealistic scripts that better match their desires or address their fears, is less central during interpretive play. Traditionally, interpretive pretend play and inventive pretend play are not distinguished in the literature on pretend play and its role

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in development and learning (e.g. Paley, 2004; Singer, Golinkoff and Hirsch-Pasek 2006). Rather, the entirety of pretend play is considered together as a single type of play, including both internalization of the ‘what is’ and expressive release through the ‘what if’. It is only through the description of pretend play in other cultures – where inventive play is not typically present – that the stark differences between the two become clear.

THE IMPACT OF CONCEPTUALIZING PLAY AS CULTURAL ACTIVITY What is gained by seeing children’s play as an outgrowth of their culturally organized everyday activities? The most fundamental impact is on our conceptualization of play as an innate and spontaneous universal behaviour in children, which must be refined. On the one hand, the fact that children in such disparate environments show an inclination to play supports the idea that play is a basic predisposition of children. However, this chapter has presented significant cultural differences in children’s play that have important implications for play theory and its applications in support of children’s development and learning.

Basic Theoretical Claims about Play from the Perspective of Cultural Diversity There are five major theorists whose work provides the backbone for how play is conceived of today: Freud, Piaget, Vygotsky, Mead and Bateson. None of these theorists worked from an anthropological perspective per se, but some of their ideas support the data and conclusions drawn in this chapter. Note that all but one of these theorists focuses on pretend play. While they appear to be working on a common problem, these theorists fall into two distinct groups once the distinction between inventive and interpretive play is made.

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Freud (1920), a psychologist who dealt primarily with clinical populations, argues that the motivations for and enactments of pretending come from the individual child’s unrealized desires, frustrations and creative expression. It is primarily because of Freud’s interpretation of play that we think of play as emotionally cathartic and potentially healing (see also Erikson 1950 and Peller 1971). Piaget (1945) conceptualized play as a predominance of assimilation over accommodation in his theory of adaptation. For him, play emerges from the desire to make sense of lived experiences – not necessarily traumatic ones. In Piaget’s terms, symbolic play is a form of representational assimilation – children represent the world according to their understandings and preferences. Both Freud and Piaget view play as being important for its ability to give children a way to cope with the confusion and frustration that arises in everyday life because of their immaturity. They conceive of individual children constructing pretend scripts that intentionally deviate from reality as a way of dealing with frustrations from everyday life (Piaget) and fears caused by traumatic events (Freud). As such, they consider play as a form of individual expression of feelings and ideas about past experience, thus focusing on inventive pretend play more than interpretive pretend play. Vygotsky and Mead, however argued that play is an act of representation that is more socially grounded and future-oriented even as it derives from past experience. Like Piaget, Vygotsky (1967) believed that children are led into the world of symbolic play by tendencies that cannot be realized in the world of non-play. He argued that pretend play leads to generalized tension reduction and wish-fulfilment. However, he attributed greater significance to the developmental outcomes of play than did Piaget. Vygotsky considered play as the leading activity of early childhood, placing children in the Zone of Proximal Development where their behaviours in play (alone or with others) would

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support the development of more complex cognitive understanding (Vygotsky, 1967). For him, children enacting specific roles in play must use abstract social rules that they cannot yet formulate outside of play; through their enactments, they become more conscious of them (Fleer, 2010b). Likewise, Mead (1934) provides a theory of the development of self through assuming other identities in pretend play, thereby mirroring the self in the process of contrasting the child with others. Vygotsky and Mead are talking about groups of children using pretend scripts as a ‘reality check’ on their understanding of the world and their place in it. While Vygotsky’s theory emphasizes play as a medium for supporting the child’s developing understanding of the social organization and Mead’s emphasizes it as a support for the child’s developing understanding of self, these positions are in fact two sides of the same coin. And by being grounded in social experience, both processes are most clearly present in interpretive pretend play rather than in inventive pretend play. Unlike the other theorists, Bateson (1955) focuses specifically on group play and the social mechanisms needed to sustain it through interaction. He provides a theory about how pretend play is co-constructed and sustained by children, as they inhabit two communicative frames simultaneously. To produce pretend scripts together, they must recognize the ‘play frame’, embracing shared pretend meanings that exist only through symbolic relationships with real objects and people, while at the same time they never fully give up their position in the real world. He argues that part of the work of pretend play is to coordinate navigation between these two worlds and clearly signal when one is entering the play frame by sending a message to other players that ‘this is play’ (Bateson, 1956). Bateson’s theory of metacommunication is relevant for both kinds of pretend play, inventive and interpretive, so long as the play is social. Interpretive play, in which shared social practices and meanings

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are explored through play, is carried out most successfully with play partners who have similar knowledge about the real world. It is, perhaps, more complicated to achieve intersubjectivity (Göncü, 1993) in inventive play, because personal meanings are being explored; this can be done successfully only when there is also a shared understanding with play partners of the affective and symbolic meanings involved (and also makes adults more satisfying play partners). By emphasizing the social nature of play, Bateson lays the groundwork for recognizing the cultural organization of children’s social worlds as an important part of understanding how they coordinate their actions through intersubjectivity (Göncü and Gaskins, 2011). The insights into the cultural organization of play illuminate the importance of some of the theoretical distinctions made by these theorists: is play fundamentally individual or social? Is it expressive or rule-based? Is it an escape from reality or a commitment to it? These distinctions help clarify how the theorists are at odds with each other in terms of their claims about motivations for play, supportive social environments in play and the potential outcomes of play (Göncü and Gaskins, 2011).

Applying Play to Learning from a Cultural Perspective How does understanding more about cultural differences in children’s play change the way play is conceptualized as a support for children’s learning? Reading most textbooks or popular books on play, one would conclude that play is a central activity for children’s development, uniquely promoting their problem-solving abilities, their theory of mind, their creativity, their social skills, their language and communication skills and their discovery and consolidation of knowledge. This chapter has demonstrated that play is not necessarily uniform and unique. Perhaps play researchers have attributed such advancements to play because the children they have studied do not have many opportunities to

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learn through other activities. Children who spend more time working than playing, assuming they do so in a social group, may in fact be learning problem-solving skills, theory of mind or social skills as well as, if not better than, they would through play. By looking at the development of children’s skills and abilities across a wide range of cultures that differ in their commitment to play, the unique contributions of play to development could be disentangled from those that are shared with other everyday experiences. For some areas of development, play may serve a very important role when it is the primary activity of children, yet serve a less important role when it coexists with other activities. In other areas of development, it may be that play indeed has a unique and important role independent of other experiences, so that children who play more demonstrate more strength in those areas. Research sorting through these possibilities has not yet been carried out and, until it is, we cannot know if play has a unique role in development and learning. But it should be clear that imagining all children learn the same things from play is overly simplistic.

CONCLUSION The anthropological study of play provides compelling evidence that play is a robust and universal behaviour in childhood, observed in some form or another in every culture where children’s everyday lives have been studied. At the same time, those studies suggest that there are many important ways in which culture shapes the contours of children’s play: what other activities children are allowed or encouraged to do (especially work and school), shared beliefs about the nature of play and its role in children’s lives, how children’s social worlds are organized, whether play occurs as an independent activity or is integrated into other activities and whether the goal of play is inventive selfexpression or interpretive internalization of cultural meaning. The significant variation in

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the play experience that results from the cultural organization of these contours of everyday life suggests the consensus that play is universal, intrinsic and uniquely important for maximizing children’s development and learning may not be fully justified. The goal of future research should be to clarify how a universal behaviour like play is also shaped by cultural understandings and practices, leading it to be expressed in a variety of forms. A significant theoretical issue that arises from considering cultural variation is how play derives its meaning for children through individual expression of needs and wants and frustrations (inventive play), or alternatively through exploration with others of the meaning of social roles and relationships (interpretive play). This question not only has implications for various theories about the role of play in children’s development but also identifies two distinct categories of pretence that have not been distinguished from one another. On a more practical level, considering cultural variation in play leads to questions about the generalizability of claims about play’s role in development and learning. Data from one very specialized cultural ecology, where play is highly cultivated, is not sufficient to answer questions about play’s unique contribution to children’s development and learning in all environments.

NOTE 1. A corollary practice in middle-class American families arises from the intersection of two beliefs – the power of play for learning and the importance of adult participation in children’s play. Here, adults ‘hijack’ children’s play for more specific educational purposes, such as introducing play conversations peppered with school-like questions (looking for right and wrong answers) or promoting activities around educational toys, with adults sustaining and guiding the child’s engagement (Haight and Miller, 1993). Such adult-directed play is in conflict with the general notion of play being spontaneous and intrinsically motivated (Rogers, 2010), but the conflict may go unnoticed by its proponents – whether they be parents or educators (e.g. Bodrova and Leong, 1995) – even when

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the children do not share the adults’ understanding of the activity (Brooker, 2010; Fleer, 2010).

REFERENCES Bateson, G. (1955) ‘A theory of play and fantasy’, in J. S. Bruner, A. Jolly and K. Sylva (eds), Play: Its Role in Development and Evolution. New York, NY: Penguin Books. pp. 119–129. Bateson, G. (1956) ‘The message “This is play”’, in B. Schaffner (ed.), Group Processes. New York: Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation. pp. 145–151. Bock, J. and Johnson, S. E. (2004) ‘Subsistence ecology and play among the Okavango Delta peoples of Botswana’, Human Nature, 15(1): 63–81. Bodrova, E. and Leong, D. J. (2007) Tools of the Mind: The Vygotskian Approach to Early Childhood Education. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Brooker, L. (2010) ‘Learning to play, or playing to learn? Children’s participation in the cultures of homes and schools’, in L. Brooker and S. Edwards (eds), Engaging Play. Maidenhead: Open University Press. pp. 39–53. Buckingham, D. and Willet, R. (2006) Digital Generations: Children, Young People, and New Media. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Clark, C. D. (2003) In Sickness and in Play: Children Coping with Chronic Illness. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Corsaro, W. (1985) Friendship and Peer Culture in the Early Years. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing. Crain, W. (2003) Reclaiming Childhood. New York: Holt. Edwards, S. (2006) ‘”Stop talking about culture as geography”: Early childhood educators’ conceptions of sociocultural theory as an informant to curriculum’, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 7(3): 238–252. Elkind, D. (2007) The Power of Play. Philadelphia, PA: Da Capo. Erikson, E. (1950) Childhood and Society. New York: W.W. Norton. Fleer, M. (2005) ‘Developmental fossils – unearthing the artefacts of early childhood education: the reification of “child development”’, Australian Journal of Early Childhood, 30(2): 2–7. Fleer, M. (2010a) Early Learning and Development: Cultural-historical Concepts in Play. New York: Cambridge University Press. Fleer, M. (2010b) ‘Conceptual and contextual intersubjectivity for affording concept formation in children’s play’, in L. Brooker and S. Edwards (eds), Engaging Play. Maidenhead: Open University Press. pp. 67–79.

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Fortes, M. (1976 [1938]) ‘Social and psychological aspects of education in Taleland’, in J. S. Bruner, A. Jolly and K. Sylva (eds), Play: Its Role in Development and Evolution. New York: Penguin Books. pp. 474–483. Freud, S. (1920) Beyond the Pleasure Principle (J. Strachey, trans.). New York: W.W. Norton. Gaskins, S. (2000) ‘Children’s daily activities in a Mayan village: A culturally grounded description’, Journal of Cross-cultural Research, 34: 375–389. Gaskins, S. (2006) ‘The cultural organization of Yucatec Mayan children’s social interactions’, in X. Chen, D. C. French and B. H. Schneider (eds), Peer Relationships in Cultural Context. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 283–309. Gaskins, S. (2013) ‘Pretend play as culturally constructed activity’, in M. Taylor (ed.), Oxford Handbook on The Development of the Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 224–251. Gaskins, S. and Miller, P. J. (2009) ‘The cultural roles of emotions in pretend play’, in C. D. Clark (ed.), Transactions at Play. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. pp. 5–21. Gaskins, S. and Paradise, R. (2010) ‘Learning through observation’, in D. F. Lancy, J. Bock and S. Gaskins (eds), The Anthropology of Learning in Childhood. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press. pp. 85–117. Gaskins, S., Haight, W. and Lancy, D. F. (2007) ‘The cultural construction of play’, in A. Göncü and S. Gaskins (eds), Play and Development: Evolutionary, Sociocultural and Functional Perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. pp. 179–202. Göncü, A. (1993) ‘Development of intersubjectivity in the social pretend play of young children’, Human Development, 36: 185–198. Göncü, A. and Gaskins, S. (2011) ‘Comparing and extending Piaget’s and Vygotsky’s understandings of play: symbolic play as individual, sociocultural, and educational interpretation’, in A. D. Pellegrini (ed.), Oxford Handbook of the Development of Play. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 48–57. Göncü, A., Mistry, J. and Mosier, C. (2000) ‘Cultural variations in the play of toddlers’, International Journal of Behavioral Development, 24: 321–329. Gray, P. (2013) Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play will Make our Children Happier, More Self-reliant, and Better Students for Life. New York: Basic Books. Haight, W. and Miller, P. J. (1993) Pretending at Home: Early Development in Sociocultural Context. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Hofferth, S. L. and Sandberg, J. F. (2001) ‘How American children spend their time’,  Journal of Marriage and Family, 63(2): 295–308.

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Katz, C. (2004) Growing up Global: Economic Restructuring and Children’s Everyday Lives. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Lancy, D. F. (1996) Playing on the Mother Ground: Cultural Routines for Children’s Development. New York: Guilford Press. Lancy, D. F. (2007) ‘Accounting for variability in mother– child play’, American Anthropologist, 109: 273–284. Lancy, D. F. (2008) The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lancy, D. F. (2012) ‘“First you must master pain”: The nature and purpose of apprenticeship’, Anthropology of Work Review, 33(2): 113–126. Lancy, D. F., Bock, J. and Gaskins, S. (eds) (2010) The Anthropology of Learning in Childhood. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press. Lareau, A. (2003) Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life. Berkeley, CA: California University Press. Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991) Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. New York: Cambridge University Press. LeVine, Robert A., Dixon, S., LeVine, S., Richman, A., Leiderman, P. H., Keefer, C. H. and Berry Brazelton, T. (1994) Child Care and Culture: Lessons from Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Löfdahl, A. (2010) ‘Who gets to play? Peer groups, power, and play in early childhood settings’, in L. Brooker and S. Edwards (eds), Engaging Play. Maidenhead: Open University Press. pp. 122–135. Mead, G. H. (1934) Mind, Self and Society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Mintz, S. (2006) Huck’s Raft. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Montgomery, H. (2009) An Introduction to Childhood: Anthropological Perspectives on Children’s Lives. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Moore, L. C. (2006) ‘Learning by heart in Qur’anic and public schools in Northern Cameroon’, Social Analysis, 50(3): 109–126. Paley, V. G. (2004) A Child’s Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Peller, L. E. (1971) ‘Models of Children’s Play’, in R. E. Herron and B. Sutton-Smith (eds), Child’s Play. New York: John Wiley, pp. 110–125. Piaget, J. (1945) Play, Dreams and Imitation. New York: W. W. Norton. Prout, A. (2005) The Future of Childhood. Abingdon: Routledge. Rogers, S. (2010) ‘Powerful pedagogies and playful resistance: Role play in the early childhood classroom’, in L. Brooker and S. Edwards (eds),

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Engaging Play. Maidenhead: Open University Press. pp. 152–165. Rogoff, B., Paradise, R., Mejía-Arauz, R., CorreaChávez, M. and Angelillo, C. (2003) ‘Firsthand learning through intent participation’, Annual Review of Psychology, 54(1): 175–203. Russ, S. W. and Dillon, J. K. (2011) ‘Changes in children’s pretend play over two decades’, Creativity Research Journal, 23(4): 330–338. Schlegel, A. (1995) ‘A cross-cultural approach to adolescence’, Ethos, 23: 15–32. Schwartzman, H. B. (1979) Transformations. New York: Plenum Press. Singer, D. G. and Singer, J. L. (1992) The House of MakeBelieve: Children’s Play and the Developing Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Singer, D. G., Golinkoff, R. M. and Hirsh-Pasek, K. (eds) (2006) Play = Learning: How Play Motivates and Enhances Children’s Cognitive and Social-Emotional Growth. New York: Oxford University Press. Smith, P. K. (2009) Children and Play: Understanding Children’s Worlds. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. Tobin, J. J., Wu, D. Y. H and Davidson, D. H. (1991) Preschool in Three Cultures. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (1967) ‘Play and its role in the mental development of the child’, Soviet Psychology, 5(3): 6–18. Willett, R., Robinson, M. and Marsh, J. (2009) Play, Creativity, and Digital Cultures. New York: Routledge. Zelizer, V. (1985) Pricing the Priceless Child. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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4 Make-believe Play and Self-regulation Adena B. Meyers and Laura E. Berk

INTRODUCTION Early childhood is a vital time for laying the foundations of self-regulation, a set of capacities (often termed executive function in contemporary research) that enable children to engage in self-initiated, purposeful behavior in relatively challenging situations. By age five–six, the well-regulated child can wait for a turn, resist the temptation to grab a desired object from another child, spontaneously share a toy with a classmate, follow classroom routines (clean up independently after a play period), and willingly help an adult or peer with a task (Bronson, 2001; Blair, 2002; Berk, Mann and Ogan, 2006). Furthermore, when faced with a demanding activity – writing one’s name, riding a bike, working a complicated puzzle, or controlling negative emotion – self-regulated children exert intentional effort, even when they would prefer to do something else. Young children who exhibit the capacities just mentioned have made substantial progress in gaining control over their thoughts,

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emotions, and behavior. The mental operations and strategies required to do so include sustaining attention, inhibiting impulses, and flexibly redirecting thinking and behavior (Welsh, 2002; Welsh, Friedman and Spieker, 2008). Attainment of these executive processes in early childhood positively predicts academic achievement and social maturity, from kindergarten through secondary school (Blair and Razza, 2007; Duncan et al., 2007; Blair and Diamond, 2008; Rhoades, Greenberg and Domitrovich, 2009; Pagani et al., 2010; Romano et al., 2010). While self-regulation is burgeoning, young children exhibit major transformations in imaginative play. From the middle of the second year through ages four–five, makebelieve evolves from simple imitation of adults’ actions (pretending to drink from a cup) to complex, cooperative creation of imaginary scenes with peers enacting a spaceship launch. (Rakoczy, Tomasello and Striano, 2005; Kavanaugh, 2006). This coincident development raises the possibility that make-believe play and self-regulation

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are interrelated. In this chapter, we review major twentieth-century theories addressing the contribution of pretense to young children’s advancing mastery over their own thinking, emotions, and behavior, followed by a critical analysis of relevant evidence. We conclude with twenty-first-century challenges for research.

THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES Freud’s psychoanalytic theory first called attention to the emotion-regulating function of make-believe. In his view, pretense is a form of pleasurable wish fulfillment through which young children act out doubts, anxieties, and desired outcomes in nonthreatening contexts and, thus, learn to manage intense emotion. In make-believe play, children relive anxiety-provoking experiences (parental discipline, a dental visit) but reverse roles (the child becomes the doctor rather than the patient). As a result, the child exerts control over, and thereby surmounts, unpleasant experiences (Freud, 1961). Erikson (1950) expanded Freud’s vision, proposing that fantasy play enables young children to explore potential roles in their social world. As children enact roles in sociodramatic play, they participate in a miniature social organization in which they must cooperate, regulating their behavior to realize joint play goals. Moreover, through emulating admired adults in play, young children internalize social norms, gain a sense of their future, and are motivated to follow those norms. Piaget (1962) also accepted the emotionregulating function of make-believe and its contribution to children’s knowledge of social role possibilities, but otherwise stressed that make-believe is one among several symbolic capacities that develop rapidly in early childhood. Through it, young children practice and, consequently, strengthen their capacity to mentally represent their experiences. Although mental representation is crucial for self-regulation, Piaget (1966) believed that symbolic play contributes little

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to children’s advancing cognition. Rather, in play children merely exercise and solidify symbols acquired in other contexts. Vygotsky (1978), in contrast, regarded make-believe as powerfully influential in children’s learning and, especially, in their advancing self-regulation. Rejecting Freud’s wish fulfillment and Piaget’s symbolic practice perspectives, Vygotsky proposed that pretense has two unique features that clarify its profound contribution to self-regulatory development. First, the creation of imaginary scenes using substitute objects aids young children in distinguishing internal ideas from concrete reality. When children use a block for a telephone or a TinkerToy for a lollypop, they change an object’s usual meaning, thereby detaching mental symbols from the real objects and actions to which they refer. Through playful opportunities to ‘act independently of what they see’ (p. 97), children increasingly use thought to overcome impulses and choose deliberately among alternative courses of action. Second, for Vygotsky (1967), an inherent property of pretense is following social rules. the child pretending to go to sleep conforms to the rules of bedtime behavior; the child imagining herself to be a mother follows the rules of parental behavior. Young children immersed in play continually face conflicts between social rules and what they would do if they behaved impulsively, and almost always opt in favor of the rules. Fantasy play is the first context in which young children willingly place constraints on their own actions. In pretense, rule-governed behavior becomes a new form of desire that responds to the child’s need to become an accepted member of his or her culture. In sum, for Vygotsky, in separating mental symbols from reality, children strengthen their internal capacity to become socially responsible; in engaging in rule-based play, they respond to external pressures to act in socially desirable ways. Vygotsky concluded that among all activities, pretense affords young children their greatest opportunity to become self-regulated and responsible.

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CONTEMPORARY ISSUES Although questions remain, initial findings from experimental and observational studies lend credence to the idea that sociodramatic play and self-regulation are developmentally linked. Research supports several of Vygotsky’s ideas about the mechanisms through which pretend play facilitates development of self-regulatory abilities. In addition, a number of studies have established connections between pretend play and specific self-regulatory skills, including inhibitory control, socially responsible behavior, and the ability to manage intense emotions.

Pretense as a Zone of Proximal Development According to Vygotsky, self-regulation develops in the context of supportive interactions between children and more experienced members of the community, including adults and more competent peers. When a child and adult (or older peer) engage in cooperative interchanges, they create a Zone of Proximal Development – an appropriately challenging context in which the child acquires understandings and competencies that would be out of reach without such support (Vygotsky, 1978). The term scaffolding has been used to describe the support that adults (or older peers) provide as children develop skills within their Zone of Proximal Development (Wood, 1989). Consistent with this notion, observational and ethnographic studies indicate that early sociodramatic play is scaffolded by adults and – more often in village cultures – by older siblings as a means of socially transferring cooperative, prosocial habits to children. Anthropological research reveals that adult involvement in children’s pretense varies as a function of the value placed on play in different cultures (Gosso, 2009; Gaskins, this volume). In urban, industrialized, middleclass contexts, play is ‘culturally cultivated’

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by adults who value it as a developmentally beneficial activity and frequently play with their children (Gaskins, Haight and Lancy, 2007). Haight and Miller’s (1993) ethnographic study of pretense among middle-class European American children supports this interpretation. They conducted extensive in-home observations of make-believe, following nine children from 12 to 48 months of age. Although quantity of pretense increased over time, play was predominantly social (as opposed to solitary) at every age, with mothers serving as the primary play partners for children aged 12–36 months. Developmental changes in maternal–child pretense suggested that mothers initially support children’s make-believe through modeling, later through reciprocal play, and eventually by providing opportunities for play with peers. In contrast, in non-industrial and rural societies and among low-income families, play is ‘culturally accepted’ – valued as a way to occupy children while adults work (Gaskins et al., 2007; Gosso, 2009). Children tend to play together in mixed age groups in which older children (siblings, cousins, and neighbors) supervise and support younger children’s play. Although adults and children generally do not play together, they spend time in close proximity, with children observing and assisting as parents engage in subsistence tasks. Children’s pretense often involves imitating adults’ household activities, hunting, or community celebrations. Make-believe thus appears to serve an important socializing function, even in societies where adults may not directly cultivate it. However, considerable cultural variation exists in the quantity of time devoted to makebelieve, and in some societies play appears to be ‘culturally curtailed’ (Gaskins et al., 2007). For example, Gosso (2009) described research on the Yucatan Maya people, among whom fiction and make-believe are not valued, falsehood is frowned upon, and children seldom engage in pretense. Instead, they spend most of their time with adults, and socialization occurs through children’s participation in work at an

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early age. Thus pretense appears not to be universally prominent in early childhood, suggesting that its influence on self-regulation is limited to cultures in which the social worlds of adults and children are largely distinct.

Pretense and Private Speech According to Vygotsky, self-regulation involves the use of thought to overcome impulses. Private, or self-directed, speech is one mechanism through which Vygotsky believed children acquire self-regulatory skills. Between the ages of 2 and 6, children frequently engage in audible private speech, with 20–60 percent of their spontaneous utterances being self-directed (Berk, 1992). As children develop, private speech is internalized as silent, self-regulating thought. Research suggests that private speech contributes to self-regulation and other cognitive abilities (Bivens and Berk, 1990; Berk and Spuhl, 1995). Children produce more private speech when engaged in challenging tasks within their Zone of Proximal Development (neither too easy nor too difficult). Supporting Vygotsky’s views about the connection between imaginary play and self-regulation, evidence suggests that pretense functions as a source of self-regulating private speech (Krafft and Berk, 1998) and as a context for the development of impulse control (Cemore and Herwig, 2005; Kelly and Hammond, 2011) and socially responsible behavior (Elias and Berk, 2002). Krafft and Berk (1998) examined the association between private speech and make-believe play among 59 three- and fouryear-olds in two preschools. One was a Montessori preschool where activities were highly structured and pretense was discouraged, the other a traditional preschool where sociodramatic play was encouraged. Observing each child for four ten-minute periods during the least structured part of the day, researchers unaware of the study’s purpose coded play behavior (functional, constructive, fantasy, unoccupied onlooker, or transition), activity type (open-ended with

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no correct goal or solution v. closed-ended with one correct goal or solution), speech (self-directed v. other-directed), and level of adult and peer involvement. Although peer involvement was equivalent in both settings, the traditional preschool children engaged in more open-ended activities and fantasy play, less constructive play, and fewer closed-ended tasks compared to the Montessori children. In addition, more self-directed speech occurred among children in the traditional preschool than in the Montessori preschool, with higher levels specifically of fantasy-related private speech, self-guidance, and inaudible muttering (partially internalized private speech). After controlling for verbal ability and age, total private speech was associated with fantasy play, other open-ended activities, and associative peer involvement. Both self-guidance and fantasy-related private speech were related to make-believe and associative peer involvement, suggesting that children used private speech to develop imaginary scenarios and guide their own behavior during sociodramatic play. Closed-ended activities, constructive play, and transition were negatively associated with private speech, as was direct teacher involvement. This latter finding suggests scaffolding of children’s play is most effective when adults participate as observers and helpers rather than assuming a directive role. These results are consistent with an earlier cross-sectional study of 30 children aged 2–6, each of whom was videotaped for 9 minutes of play in a lab (Gillingham and Berk, 1995). Findings indicated that complex pretense increased with age but private speech remained high (averaging 2.3 speech utterances per minute), rather than decreasing with age as it typically does in other contexts. Since private speech is correlated with task difficulty, the authors interpreted the high levels of private speech among older participants as evidence that children create increasing challenges for themselves, which they attempt to surmount in the context of play. In sum, evidence suggests that make-believe

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creates a Zone of Proximal Development in which children develop and practice selfregulatory skills.

Pretense and Inhibitory Control The mental abilities that facilitate selfregulatory behavior include such executive function (EF) tasks as inhibiting impulses, controlling attention, and planning. As noted previously, Vygotsky believed that pretense provides a context in which children willingly subordinate their immediate desires to follow the social rules embedded in play scenarios. Consistent with this notion, two studies provide preliminary evidence of an association between imaginary play and inhibitory control among 3- to 7-year-olds (Cemore and Herwig, 2005; Kelly and Hammond, 2011). Cemore and Herwig (2005) used a delayof-gratification paradigm to assess inhibitory control among 37 three- to five-year-olds. Researchers observed children after telling them they could have one treat imme­ diately or two treats after a waiting period. Length of delay was significantly correlated with children’s interview responses about their imaginary play behavior at home. Unfortunately, researchers interviewed children about their play after administering the delay task, leaving open the possibility that experimenter bias influenced child interview responses. Other measures of play behavior (including videotaped observations at school and maternal and teacher reports) were not significantly associated with delay of gratification. However, the correlation for teacher report of play at school was modest (r = .29) and approached significance (p < .10) – a potentially important finding given the small sample size. Additional modest support for a pretense– inhibitory control relationship comes from a study by Kelly and Hammond (2011). They measured inhibitory control among 20 fourto seven-year-olds. The children were shown pictures of a moon on a black background and a sun on a blue background, and asked to

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say ‘sun’ and ‘moon’ in response to congruent pictures. After the first 16 trials, they had to give the incongruent response (saying ‘sun’ to the moon picture and vice versa) for the next 16 trials. Accuracy on incongruent trials was significantly correlated with scores on a standardized test of pretense skills, and with observations of spontaneous symbolic play during a 20-minute unstructured period. After controlling for mental age, partial correlations between inhibitory control and both play measures remained moderately high (.40 for the unstructured play and .55 for the standardized play assessment), though the association with unstructured play was no longer statistically significant. Consistent with Cemore and Herwig’s (2005) results, these findings point to an association between imaginary play and children’s ability to inhibit prepotent responses. The results should be viewed as preliminary in light of the small sample, however, and it should be noted that Kelly and Hammond also assessed children’s generativity (ability to generate ideas – an executive function skill), but did not find strong evidence of an association with pretense.

Pretense and Socially Responsible Behavior Private speech and impulse control provide the foundation for more complex selfregulatory abilities enabling children to cooperate with peers and adults, persist with challenging tasks, and behave responsibly in various contexts. Just as pretense has been linked to the underlying developmental processes of private speech and impulse control, sociodramatic play predicts improvement over time in young children’s socially responsible behavior. Specifically, Elias and Berk (2002) used a longitudinal design to examine the association between pretense and future self-regulation skills among 53 middle-SES preschoolers. Researchers blind to hypotheses observed each child in the fall and again several months later during free play, cleanup, and circle time. Play intervals

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were coded as sociodramatic (involving interaction), complex socio-dramatic (involving interaction and at least three other play elements such as role play or make-believe with objects), or solitary dramatic (involving at least one play element, but no interaction). Self-regulation was assessed by coding children’s cooperativeness and helpfulness during cleanup and their attentiveness during circle time. In addition, children’s impulsivity was assessed via parent report. Analyses revealed a connection between pretense and self-regulation that depended on the complexity and social elements of play. The frequency and persistence of children’s complex sociodramatic play in the fall predicted future cleanup behavior after controlling for age, vocabulary, and baseline cleanup behavior. Similar effects were not found for social play that lacked complexity, and solitary dramatic play was negatively related to future cleanup self-regulation. No effects of play on circle time attentiveness were observed. Further analyses revealed that the association between complex sociodramatic play and future cleanup behavior was strongest for children rated as highly impulsive and near zero for those lowest in impulsivity, suggesting that pretense may play an especially important role in the development of self-regulation among children deficient in this area. Harris and Berk (2003) attempted to replicate these results with a small sample (N = 19) of low-SES 4-year-olds. In the winter, researchers observed children using procedures similar to those just described. In late spring, self-regulation was again measured during cleanup and circle time. In contrast with Elias and Berk’s findings, results revealed a negative association between make-believe play and concurrent (winter) cleanup, and no association between make-believe and future (spring) cleanup behavior. Interestingly, children’s engagement in art and manipulative activities in the winter positively predicted concurrent and future cleanup, a finding inconsistent with Vygostkian predictions regarding pretend play and self-regulation.

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The researchers informally observed that teachers engaged in more scaffolding behaviors during art and manipulative activities (compared to pretend play); also, these activities had built-in goals. Both features may have fostered self-regulation. Furthermore, the observers noted that many of the sociodramatic play themes children enacted in this setting involved violence and conflict. Based on previous findings indicating that violent and negative play themes impede development of executive function, emotion regulation, and moral development (Dunn and Hughes, 2001), Harris and Berk speculated that the thematic content of play in their study could explain the lack of association between complex sociodramatic play and future self-regulation. In sum, the benefits of imaginary play seem to depend on its complexity and thematic content. Peer interactions, symbolic object substitutions, and cooperative verbal dialogues (as opposed to simplistic pretense) predict increased self-regulation, whereas violent, antisocial themes predict poorer executive function and moral immaturity.

Pretense and Emotion Regulation A component of self-regulation particularly important for adaptive functioning and mental health is emotion regulation – the ability to understand, control, cope with, and productively use affective experience. In line with psychoanalytic theory, experimental research suggests that children engage in thematically relevant sociodramatic play following exposure to stressors, and that such play reduces anxiety. In other words, makebelieve appears to play a role in children’s emotion regulation. Several decades ago, researchers demonstrated that children use thematically relevant imaginary play to cope with stressful situations (Barnett, 1984; Barnett and Storm, 1981). Barnett and Storm showed 40 threeto five-year-olds a scene from a movie in which a dog (Lassie) and her owner parachuted from an airplane during an electrical storm. Children were randomly assigned to

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an anxiety-inducing condition in which the characters appeared to be in great danger following the jump, or a neutral condition showing the dog and owner safely reunited. After presenting the assigned movie segment, researchers observed each child in an unstructured play situation with a variety of toys, including one that resembled Lassie. Compared to children in the neutral condition, those in the anxiety-inducing condition more often played with the Lassie toy (either hugging and cuddling it or acting out events related to the movie theme). Among children in the anxiety-inducing condition, anxiety levels measured by child self-report and Palmar Sweat Index scores increased following the movie and declined following the play period. Since all children had the opportunity to play, it is possible that the negative effect among children in the anxiety-inducing condition would have resolved over time even without the opportunity to play. Still, that children chose to engage in play related to the stressful movie theme and their anxiety subsequently declined suggests that pretense helps young children cope with unpleasant feelings. In a subsequent study, Barnett (1984) examined effects of play on stress management among anxious and non-anxious three- to five-year-olds. Researchers assessed children’s anxiety levels and assigned them to one of four conditions for their first day of preschool: 1) solitary free play; 2) free play with peers present; 3) solitary non-play (listening to a story about trees and shrubs); and 4) non-play (listening to the same story) with peers present. Compared to children with low baseline anxiety, highly anxious children in the play conditions engaged in more dramatic/fantasy play; they also showed greater declines in anxiety compared to high anxiety children in the non-play conditions, and compared to low anxiety children in all conditions. The presence of peers did not facilitate play or emotion regulation. High anxiety children exhibited elevated anxiety in the presence of peers and (in the play condition) tended to play by themselves even

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with peers present. Taken together, these studies lend support to the psychoanalytic view that children use pretense to process and gain mastery over unpleasant and intense affect, but also suggest that, at least for anxious children, solitary play may be more effective than social play as a means of stress management. Galyer and Evans (2001) further explored the role of pretend play in emotion regulation by examining associations between young children’s play behavior and mothers’ reports of their emotion management skills. Mothers’ ratings of children’s emotion regulation were associated with their ratings of children’s pretend play at home. In addition, when researchers presented children and mothers with an emotionally arousing play scenario in which a hungry crocodile puppet threatened to eat toys, children’s ability to successfully resolve the conflict and continue playing was correlated with maternal ratings of emotion-regulation skills. These results provide additional evidence that pretend play may facilitate children’s ability to cope with stressful situations and regulate strong affect.

Creation of Imaginary Characters and Theory of Mind A feature of make-believe that has received increased research attention is children’s creation of imaginary characters, which includes imaginary companions (ICs) and character impersonation. Correlational evidence reveals that children who engage in this type of make-believe also exhibit more complex and imaginative pretense. For example, in their study of 152 preschoolers, Taylor and Carlson (1997) reported that children’s imaginary character creation was significantly related to preference for highfantasy toys among four-year-olds. It was also significantly related to use of imaginary objects while pretending among three-year-olds, and marginally so among four-year-olds. In a subsequent study, Bouldin (2006) interviewed 74 children about fantasy experiences related

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to dreams, daydreams, scary thoughts, pretend play, and ICs. She also asked parents about the presence of ICs, finding perfect agreement between child and parent report. Compared to children without ICs, those with ICs reported more vivid imagery and mythical content in dreams and pretense. In light of the association between complex make-believe and self-regulation, a number of researchers have examined whether children who create imaginary characters also show signs of more effective self-regulation, such as understanding others’ viewpoints and emotions and self-regulatory self-talk. For example, in the study described previously, Taylor and Carlson (1997) investigated if imaginary character creation is associated with perspective-taking skills, using several Theory of Mind (ToM) tasks to assess children’s ability to differentiate their own mental representations from reality and from others’ perspectives. ToM performance was associated with imaginary character creation among four-year-olds (but not three-year-olds) after controlling for verbal intelligence and age. The authors speculated that the discrepant results might have been due to a floor effect among three-year-olds on the ToM tasks. In a follow-up study, Taylor, Carlson, Maring, Gerow and Charley (2004) reassessed 100 of the original 152 children. Although neither ICs nor imaginary character impersonation at time one predicted future perspective-taking abilities, impersonation (but not ICs) at time two was correlated with children’s concurrent understanding of others’ emotions. Finally, a retrospective study (Brinthaupt and Dove, 2012) indicated that college students who recalled having had ICs as children engaged in more self-regulatory self-talk as adults. Specifically, participants in the IC group reported more self-reinforcing selftalk (such as ‘something good has happened to me’) and more self-managing self-talk (such as ‘I want to remind myself of what I need to do’) than did participants in the nonIC group. Although prospective research is needed to confirm the interpretation, these

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findings lend support to Vygotsky’s view that pretense (in the form of childhood ICs) enhances development of self-regulation through a pathway involving private speech and behavior-regulating thought.

Pretend Play Interventions A number of interventions have been devised with the goal of enhancing young children’s self-regulation through sociodramatic play. One such intervention, Tools of the Mind, is an early childhood curriculum based on Vygotsky’s theory, which emphasizes sociodramatic play and includes numerous activities designed to promote self-regulation (Bodrova and Leong, 2007). Experimental research suggests that the curriculum produces gains in a variety of self-regulatory skills, but results are inconsistent. In a study with predominantly Latino participants, Barnett et al. (2008) randomly assigned children to Tools of the Mind or a control curriculum. When the researchers compared children’s outcomes on measures of language, social, and cognitive development, the most robust finding was that teacher ratings of behavior problems at the end of the year were higher for children in the control than the Tools classrooms. In a second study, Diamond, Barnett, Thomas and Munro (2007) compared 85 children randomly assigned to the Tools curriculum with 62 control group children. At the end of their second year of preschool, children in Tools outperformed controls on executive function measures involving inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility. Recent attempts to replicate these results have been unsuccessful. However, Farran, Wilson, Lipsey and Turner (2012) compared children randomized into 32 Tools and 28 comparison classrooms, and found that children in both conditions improved equally on all outcome measures (including several executive function skills such as attention, inhibitory control, and working memory). Thus, although initial research on this curriculum was quite promising, its generalizability may be limited.

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Research suggests that adults facilitate pretend play most effectively by supporting and extending – but not controlling – children’s play themes and choices. Ogan and Berk (2009) compared the effects of two makebelieve training protocols on the development of self-regulation among low-income 4- and 5-year-olds: a direct teaching intervention in which 24 children were taught specific play skills and a supportive guidance intervention in which 21 children were helped through encouragement, but were not disturbed when meaningfully engaged in elaborate play scenarios. In both conditions, children met individually, twice per week for eight weeks, with a research assistant who presented a play theme and invited each child to play with toys. In the direct instruction condition, the researcher assigned roles and followed a script, prompting children with questions such as ‘what’s the first thing the mom and child should do?’ and instructing them about what to do next. Scripts included preplanned practice of self-regulation (e.g. planning, impulse control/inhibition, rule following, and prosocial skills). In the supportive condition, the researcher did not intervene unless the child stopped playing or did something dangerous or destructive. Researchers blind to the study’s hypotheses administered pretest, post-test, and two-week follow-up measures of self-regulation, assessing delay of gratification, gross-motor control, fine-motor control, suppression and initiation of behavior, effortful attention, and planning. Results revealed that more pretense occurred in the supportive condition, whereas children in the direct instruction condition were more often unoccupied. Also, the supportive condition produced more improvement in fine-motor control and planning, and (for girls only) behavior suppression and initiation.

Summary of Research Findings Research to date suggests that pretend play and the development of self-regulation are closely linked. Children’s make-believe is

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related to such self-regulatory processes as private speech and impulse control. Pretense appears to play a role in emotion regulation, though solitary play may be more beneficial than social play for highly anxious children, at least in some contexts. Evidence also links complex, sociodramatic play to socially responsible behavior, but effects vary depending upon the dramatic themes being played out, with violent themes less likely to produce gains in prosocial self-regulatory skills. Children whose pretense includes imaginary characters may have a developmental advantage with respect to social and cognitive perspective-taking skills, though longitudinal research raises questions about how these effects unfold over time. Interventions designed to improve self-regulation through play have been met with mixed results, and there is some indication that adult involvement in children’s pretense should be supportive but not intrusive to achieve maximum benefits. In economically secure, industrialized contexts, adults appear to scaffold children’s early pretense, whereas in subsistence economies children are more likely to model adult behavior when pretending with older peers. In some cultures, pretend play is discouraged and occurs infrequently, suggesting it is one of multiple pathways for the development of self-regulation.

TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY CONTEXTS Our analysis reveals a general pattern of association between pretense and self-regulatory competencies, but its reliability, generalizability, and underlying causal mechanisms have yet to be established. Investigations in a variety of contexts, and with larger, more diverse samples, will enable researchers to examine interactions among play elements and their effects within various demographic sub-groups. Researchers have begun to examine constructs such as executive function and effortful control using measures that offer precise and controlled

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approaches to assessing the contributions of make-believe to self-regulation (e.g., Cemore and Herwig, 2005; Diamond et al., 2007; Ogan and Berk, 2009; Kelly and Hammond, 2011), but more work in this area is needed. Moreover, researchers must tease apart the role of pretend play specifically, as opposed to related experiences, in the development of various self-regulatory capacities. Smith (2009) proposed three hypotheses regarding the causal role of pretense in child development, suggesting that make-believe is either 1) crucial to healthy development; 2) one of multiple possible pathways to good outcomes; or 3) an epiphenomenon, associated with factors responsible for healthy development but not causally related to them. Smith concluded that the second hypothesis, termed ‘equifinality,’ represents the most plausible account. However, in a subsequent review of the pretend play literature, Lillard et al. (2013) argued that the existing evidence is generally not sufficient to support a causal relation between pretense and developmental outcomes (including self-regulation). Acknowledging that more research is needed, these authors designated the epiphenomenon hypothesis as the best account of the evidence to date, proposing adult involvement as a plausible ‘third variable’ explaining correlations between pretense and healthy development. Although we agree that more research is needed to understand the functions of pretense in early childhood, we consider it unlikely that play is merely an epiphenomenon of healthy development (see Berk and Meyers, 2013). Pretend play is goal-directed, rich in language and symbolic object substitutions, and a prime context in which children willingly subordinate their activity to social rules. Thus, it is inherently self-regulatory. As such, it offers opportunities for young children to develop and practice diverse prosocial skills, including social cooperation, perspective-taking, and turn-taking. In addition, sociodramatic play requires children to deploy essential aspects of executive function, including sustained attention, frustration tolerance, impulse control, and planning.

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Moreover, as early as age two, rich, extended symbolic play is heavily child-controlled, even with adult play partners (Fiese, 1990; Haight and Miller, 1993). After age two and a half, socio-dramatic play with peers increases rapidly in frequency and complexity, making it unlikely that adult involvement fully accounts for developmental benefits. Cultural variation certainly calls into question the notion that play is ‘crucial,’ but research indicates that make-believe is likely one of several pathways through which children become self-regulated. As Weisberg, Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff (2013) argued in response to Lillard et al. (2013), ‘The most fitting explanation of the data writ large is that play, or something strongly linked to play, is related to child outcomes’ (p. 36). Increased use of experimental and longitudinal designs in contexts such as parent–child and peer playful interactions, preschool curricula, targeted interventions, and community settings providing playful enrichment (such as children’s museums) is vital for enhancing our understanding of how to harness makebelieve play (or its correlates) to promote self-regulation. However, a key conundrum for researchers is that pretense does not transfer easily to the laboratory. Training studies in which children are randomly assigned to play instruction or control conditions have been touted as offering the strongest possible evidence of make-believe’s causal influence on developmental outcomes (e.g. Lillard et al., 2013), but such manipulations may not capture the most important and influential elements of children’s makebelieve. As Bergen (2013) points out, adults typically recall childhood play occurring over long time periods, without adult presence – contexts quite distinct from laboratory settings, and in which experimental manipulation may be impossible. Although other evidence suggests that adults can and do facilitate young children’s pretend play, effective adult scaffolding seems to require an indirect, facilitative approach rather than a direct, intrusive one (e.g. Fiese, 1990; Haight and Miller, 1993; Krafft and Berk, 1998;

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Ogan and Berk, 2009), further complicating efforts by researchers to design experiments with play as the independent variable. In response to these challenges, Weisberg et al. (2013) called for larger-scale longitudinal designs using sophisticated statistical modeling to examine the influence of various pretense elements, and possible causal pathways, over time. Given its complexity, Weisberg et al. suggest that sociodramatic play should not be treated as a unitary construct. Assessment and observation methods that capture multiple play elements (such as intrinsic motivation, flexibility, positive affect, and non-literal action) can be used along with statistical techniques such as structural equation modeling to test hypotheses about latent constructs underlying observable variables. With sufficiently large samples, such studies could explore interactions among play elements, investigating, for example, if different types of adult or peer involvement are associated with changes in children’s play behavior, motivation, dramatic themes, persistence, and positive affect, and if these changes in turn facilitate (or hinder) self-regulatory skill development. Experimental manipulations of play environments (as opposed to training protocols directly targeting children’s behavior) could provide another fruitful avenue for future research. The current trend in many US preschools to supplant playful educational experiences with academic drill and practice presents opportunities for natural experiments addressing the developmental impact of subtracting sociodramatic experiences from children’s lives. In this context, investigations targeting preschoolers with few out-of-school opportunities for make-believe play and those at risk for self-regulatory deficits will be particularly important.

REFERENCES Barnett, L.A. (1984) ‘Research note: Young children’s resolution of distress through play’, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 25: 477–483.

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Barnett, L.A. and Storm, B. (1981) ‘Play, pleasure, and pain: The reduction of anxiety through play’, Leisure Sciences, 4: 161–175. Barnett, W.S., Jung, K., Yarosz, D.J., Thomas, J., Hornbeck, A., Stechuk, R. and Burns, S. (2008) ‘Educational effects of the Tools of the Mind curriculum: A randomized trial’, Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 23: 299–313. Bergen, D. (2013) ‘Does pretend play matter? Searching for evidence: Comment on Lillard et al. (2013)’, Psychological Bulletin, 139: 45–48. Berk, L.E. (1992) ‘Children’s private speech: An overview of theory and the status of research’, in R.M. Diaz and L.E. Berk (eds), Private Speech: From Social Interaction to Self-regulation. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. pp. 17–53. Berk, L.E. and Meyers, A.B. (2013) ‘The role of makebelieve play in the development of executive function: Status of research and future directions’, American Journal of Play, 6: 98–110. Berk, L.E. and Spuhl, S.T. (1995) ‘Maternal interaction, private speech, and task-performance in preschool children’, Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 10: 145–169. Berk, L.E., Mann, T. and Ogan, A. (2006) ‘Make-believe play: Wellspring for development of self-regulation’, in D. Singer, K. Hirsh-Pasek and R. Golinkoff (eds), Play = Learning, New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 74–100. Bivens, J.A. and Berk, L.E. (1990) ‘A longitudinal study of the development of elementary school children’s private speech’, Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 36: 443–463. Blair, C. (2002) ‘School readiness: Integrating cognition and emotion in a neurobiological conceptualization of children’s functioning at school entry’, American Psychologist, 57: 111–127. Blair, C. and Diamond, A. (2008) ‘Biological processes in prevention and intervention: The promotion of selfregulation as a means of preventing school failure’, Development and Psychopathology, 20: 899–911. Blair, C. and Razza, R.P. (2007) ‘Relating effortful control, executive function, and false belief understanding to emerging math and literacy ability in kindergarten’, Developmental Psychology, 78: 647–663. Bodrova, E. and Leong, D.J. (2007) Tools of the Mind: The Vygotskian approach to early childhood education. (2nd ed.) Columbus, OH: Merrill/Prentice Hall. Bouldin, P. (2006) ‘An investigation of the fantasy predisposition and fantasy style of children with imaginary companions’, The Journal of Genetic Psychology, 167: 17–29.

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Brinthaupt, T.M. and Dove, C.T. (2012) ‘Differences in self-talk frequency as a function of age, only-child, and imaginary childhood companion status’, Journal of Research in Personality, 46: 326–333. Bronson, M.B. (2001) Self-regulation in Early Childhood: Nature and Nurture. New York: Guilford Press. Cemore, J.J. and Herwig, J.E. (2005) ‘Delay of gratification and make-believe play of preschoolers’, Journal of Research in Early Childhood Education, 19: 251–267. Diamond, A., Barnett, W., Thomas, J. and Munro, S. (2007) ‘Preschool program improves cognitive control’, Science, 318: 1387–1388. Duncan, G.J., Dowsett, C J., Claessens, A., Magnuson, K., Huston, A.C. and Klebanov, P., et al. (2007) ‘School readiness and later achievement’, Developmental Psychology, 43: 1428–1446. Dunn, J. and Hughes, C. (2001) ‘‘I got some swords and you’re dead!’: Violent fantasy, antisocial behavior, friendship, and moral sensibility in young children’, Child Development, 72: 491–505. Elias, C.L. and Berk, L.E. (2002) ‘Self-regulation in young children: Is there a role for sociodramatic play?’, Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 17: 1–17. Erikson, E. (1950) Childhood and Society. New York: W.W. Norton. Farran, D., Wilson, S.J., Lipsey, M.W. and Turner, K. (2012) ‘The effect of Tools of the Mind curriculum on children’s achievement and self-regulation’. Paper presented at Head Start Research Conference, Washington, DC. Fiese, B. (1990) ‘Playful relationships: A contextual analysis of mother–toddler interaction and symbolic play’, Child Development, 61: 1648–1656. Freud, S. (1961) Beyond the Pleasure Principle. New York: W.W. Norton. (Original work published 1920.) Galyer, K. and Evans, I. (2001) ‘Pretend play and the development of emotion regulation in preschool children’, Early Child Development and Care, 166: 93–108. Gaskins, S, Haight, W. and Lancy, D.F. (2007) ‘The cultural construction of play’, in A. Göncü and S. Gaskins (eds), Play and Development: Evolutionary, Sociocultural, and Functional Perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. pp. 179–202. Gillingham, K. and Berk, L.E. (1995) ‘The role of private speech in the early development of sustained attention’. Paper presented at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Indianapolis. Gosso, Y. (2009) ‘Play in different cultures’, in P.K. Smith (ed.), Children and Play: Understanding Children’s Worlds. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 80–98.

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Haight, W.L. and Miller, P.J. (1993) Pretending at Home: Early Development in Sociocultural Context. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Harris, S.K. and Berk, L.E. (2003) ‘Relationship of makebelieve play to self-regulation: A short-term longitudinal study of Head Start children’. Paper poster presented at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Tampa, FL. Kavanaugh, R.D. (2006) ‘Pretend play’, in B. Spodek and O. N. Saracho (eds), Handbook of Research on the Education of Young Children. (2nd ed.) Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. pp. 269–278. Kelly, R. and Hammond, S. (2011) ‘The relationship between symbolic play and executive function in young children’, Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, 36(2): 21–27. Krafft, K.C. and Berk, L.E. (1998) ‘Private speech in two preschools: Significance of open-ended activities and make-believe play for verbal self-regulation’, Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 13: 637–658. Lillard, A.S., Lerner, M.D., Hopkins, E.J., Dore, R.A., Smith, E.D. and Palmquist, C.M. (2013) ‘The impact of pretend play on children’s development: A review of the evidence’, Psychological Bulletin, 139: 1–34. Ogan, A.T. and Berk, L.E. (2009) Effects of two approaches to make-believe play training on development of self-regulation in Head Start children, in R. Golinkoff (Chair), ‘A mandate for playful learning in preschool: Presenting the evidence’. Symposium presented at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research on Child Development, April, Denver, CO. Pagani, L.S., Fitzpatrick, C., Archambault, I. and Janosz, M. (2010) ‘School readiness and later achievement: A French Canadian replication and extension’, Developmental Psychology, 46: 984–994. Piaget, J. (1962) Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood. New York: W.W. Norton. (Original work published 1945.) Piaget, J. (1966) ‘Response to Brian Sutton-Smith’, Psychological Review, 73: 111–112. Rakoczy, H., Tomasello, M. and Striano, T. (2005) ‘How children turn objects into symbols: A cultural learning account’, in L. Namy (ed.), Symbol Use and Symbol Representation. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. pp. 67–97. Rhoades, B.L., Greenberg, M.T. and Domitrovich, C.E. (2009) ‘The contribution of inhibitory control to preschoolers’ social-emotional competence’, Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 30: 310–320. Romano, E., Babchishin, L., Pagani, L.S. and Kohen, D. (2010) ‘School readiness and later achievement: Replication and extension using a nationwide Canadian survey’, Developmental Psychology, 46: 995–1007.

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Smith, P.K. (2009) Children and Play: Understanding Children’s Worlds. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Taylor, M. and Carlson, S.M. (1997) ‘The relation between individual differences in fantasy and theory of mind’, Child Development, 68: 436–455. Taylor, M., Carlson, S.M., Maring, B.L., Gerow, L., and Charley, C.M. (2004) ‘The characteristics and correlates of fantasy in school-age children: Imaginary companions, impersonation, and social understanding’, Developmental Psychology, 40: 1173–1187. Vygotsky, L.S. (1967) ‘Play and its role in the mental development of the child’, Soviet Psychology, 5: 6–17. (Original work published 1933.) Vygotsky, L.S. (1978) Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Mental Processes (M. Cole, V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner and E. Souberman, eds and trans), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Original work published 1930, 1933, 1935.)

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Weisberg, D., Hirsh-Pasek, K. and Golinkoff, R.M. (2013) ‘Embracing complexity: Rethinking the relation between play and learning: Comment on Lillard et al. (2013)’, Psychological Bulletin, 139(1): 35–39. Welsh, M.C. (2002) ‘Developmental and clinical variations in executive functions’, in U. Kirk and D. Molfese (eds), Developmental Variations in Language and Learning. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. pp. 139–185. Welsh, M.C., Friedman, S.L. and Spieker, S.J. (2008) ‘Executive functions in developing children: Current conceptualizations and questions for the future’, in K. McCartney and D. Phillips (eds), Blackwell Handbook of Early Childhood Development. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishing. pp. 167–187. Wood, D.J. (1989) ‘Social interaction as tutoring’, in M.H. Bornstein and J.S. Bruner (eds), Interaction in Human Development. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. pp. 59–80.

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5 Cultural–historical Perspectives on Play: Central Ideas Bert van Oers

INTRODUCTION The aim of this chapter is to explain the central concepts of a cultural–historical approach to play. The cultural–historical theory of human development was originally formulated by Vygotskij1 and his colleagues (Leont’ev and Lurija) in the first part of the twentieth century in an attempt to find an explanation for the development of human consciousness. The most complete and reliable overview of the roots and early developments of Vygotskij’s cultural–historical approach is given by van der Veer and Valsiner (1991). For current discussions it is important to assess the meanings of Vygotskij’s concepts that were central to his cultural–historical approach. However, from a cultural–historical point of view we should’nt be content with an exegesis of Vygotskij’s ideas on play and development. Some of the Vygotskian concepts need further elaboration and reformulation in today’s context (see, for example, Lambert, 2000), especially when we want to remain true to a cultural–historical approach.

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WHAT IS A CULTURAL–HISTORICAL APPROACH? Cultural–historical approaches to human development reject the idea that human behaviour and development is essentially a natural process that follows laws of nature. In his study on the historical development of higher psychological functions, Vygotskij (1983/1931) acknowledged that human beings are also natural entities and as such subject to natural laws of growth and maturation. However, what makes people ‘human’ in his view is precisely the culture that settles in their consciousness, behaviour and development. More precisely, it is the way people learn to deal with objects and other human beings that is crucial in the cultural development of human activities. This cultural influence on human actions (oriented at material, perceptual, linguistic and conceptual objects) is exerted by other cultured human beings. This process is called mediation and is the core of human beings’ enculturation process. For this mediation, adults, including

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educators, use language and other symbolic means, first for the regulation of other people’s actions. This process of ‘otherregulation’ gradually changes into a process of self-regulation in children. From that moment, the person starts to regulate his or her own actions with the help of cultural meanings (Wertsch, 1985). For a deeper understanding of the complexity of human development, it is helpful to see it as a multilayered process. Historical understanding for Vygotskij means ‘to study something in the process of change’ (Vygotsky, 1978: 65). For Vygotskij, changes should be analysed at different levels, and each level contains different mechanisms (laws) that explain these changes and their differential outcomes (see also Scribner, 1997b). Cultural–historical approaches view human development as ‘the emergent outcome of transformations within and among different developmental domains’ (Cole, 1996: 146). Hence, the modern human being is a complex product of changes on the phylogenetic level (evolution of the species), the cultural level (cultural history – producing new pedagogical ideas and settings), the ontogenetic level (individual development) and the microgenetic level (changes in actions, perceptions, language, emotions etc.). Each of the higher levels sets the conditions for the lower levels. Moreover, changes at the phylogenetic (biological– evolutionary) level, or the ontogenetic level (individual development), are based on essentially different mechanisms from those that underlie changes at the microgenetic level (transformations of actions). So, for example, the actually attained level in cultural history (e.g. ideas about good educational settings) sets constraints for ontogenesis and microgenesis through the type of tools that are made available in everyday interactions with children, and through the ways in which children are taught to use them. Hence, for example, cultures without written language will approach their offspring differently (as to ways of communicating) from cultures that have developed

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written tools for communication and want to pass these tools on to their children. The use of written language will significantly influence children’s development (see Vygotsky, 1978: 105–19; see also Cole, 1996). It is just one demonstration of how cultural developments may radically change our interactions with children and the developmental outcomes that result from them. When Vygotskij first proposed his cultural– historical view of human development, it fitted well in one of the dominant political philosophies of his time (the 1910s–1920s in the former Soviet Union). Marx and, especially, Friedrich Engels had already argued for a vision of the human being as a historical product that is formed by the conditions he or she lives in and the activities he or she is engaged in. And both the life conditions and the activities are products of a long preceding cultural history. Due to their dialectical relationships with their cultural environment, human beings internalise culture and start changing their environments from their own points of view, feeding personally processed cultural meanings back into their environments. By that time Vygotskij and his colleagues were anxious to find empirical evidence to support this cultural–historical assumption regarding human development. In order to test the assumption, they decided to make a research expedition to Uzbekistan and Kirghizia (two distant regions of the Soviet Union that had lived for a long time under completely different societal conditions as compared to Moscow: Islam was the dominant religion and most of the people were illiterate at the time of the early 1930s). To their surprise, the researchers found remarkable differences between test results in Moscow and these remote areas of the Caucasian region (see Lurija, 1974/Luria, 1976 for an account of this research project), especially with regard to the use of abstract thinking and categorisations. The researchers explained these differences by referring to variations in cultural tools that

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these people employed (especially language and abstract concepts). This research project demonstrated the essential importance of language as a means for cultural mediation, but it was only a very general relationship that was described. Later crosscultural studies by Michael Cole (1996) and Sylvia Scribner (1997a) supported the conclusion regarding the necessity of language for individual development, but could add a new dimension by pointing out that it is not the language per se but how it is used that determines the qualities of cognitive processes. It is important to note that Vygotskij’s cultural–historical approach goes beyond sociocultural studies that merely endorse the influence of culture on the course and content of human development and only study cultural influence by itself (as an independent variable), without taking serious notice of the historicity of the educational situation and of the ideas of the educators. A cultural–historical approach to human development acknowledges the historicity of the cultural contents, the situation and the educators’ ideas, and tries to understand children’s development as an outcome of a child’s complex interaction with them. A cultural–historical approach that focuses on developmental change should not be confined to the study of child development, but should take into account the history and changeability of the cultural context itself. Child development is not only dependent on the nature of the child’s development, but is deeply dependent on the cultural choices of the educators that are embodied in the cultural settings, the cultural goals we expect to be achievable for children and the way in which we engage children in interactions with adults and peers. As a consequence, a cultural–historical approach essentially rejects the assumptions of developmentalism that are common to most developmental stage theories (see, for example, Morse, 2003) and which explain human ontogeny by reference to the fixed dynamics of a developmental theory.

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THE SOCIAL REPRESENTATION OF PLAY Cultural activities are highly influenced by people’s general conceptions of these activities and of the entities involved in them. Take ‘education’, for example. Children are an essential part of this enterprise, but the notion of childhood is not a self-evident concept. Historical studies have shown that the notion of childhood has evolved over the centuries (Ariès, 1960). Over the years, people in different cultures and historical periods have developed specific ways of conceiving childhood and specific ways of speaking about children; about what they are, about what we should do with them or about what is absolutely prohibited to do with them. How we conceive of children and their education is dependent on cultural values, folk psychologies or academic theories. These conceptions of childhood and education are sometimes so strong that they reduce the child to images that are dictated by the corresponding theories (Engel, 2005). Each vision of children represents what we can call a social representation that regulates people’s ways of thinking and talking about childhood and its future. Social representations (Moscovici, 1988) are powerful images of social phenomena and narratives that regulate how to act and talk about them. Similar reflections are possible about the notion of play. One of the ways in which culture influences children’s play and mediates educators’ activities is based on their culturally developed social representation of play (van Oers, 2012a). Many authors have already stressed the status of play as a cultural construction (Göncü et al., 2007). This cultural construction of play is gradually built up over generations and endorses a specific narrative or ‘rhetoric’ (Sutton-Smith, 1997) about play, how it manifests itself and what we can expect from it. The currently dominant social representation of play strongly emphasises the self-initiated nature of children’s play and refers to the aspects of joyfulness, purposefulness and

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Cultural–historical Perspectives on Play: Central Ideas

freedom in its narrative, often referring to the nature of young children as immature, spontaneous and rich in fantasies (see Smith, 2010). The narratives of most current social representations of play are inherently rooted in the developmental assumption, seeing play mainly as a characteristic of children in a specific stage of development. Expressions such as ‘play is the child’s work’ (see, for example, Paley, 2004) can be seen as testimony of this assumption. However, from a cultural–historical point of view, this representation is problematic for three main reasons: 1. It gives no clear account of the position of adults with regard to children’s play. Most narratives that originate from the dominant social representation of play are very reluctant to accept or specify the adults’ position in children’s play. Nevertheless, play often occurs under adults’ supervision (which is by itself a cultural choice – see Roopnarine et al., 1994; Lancy, 2007). If educators decide that adults ought to stay out of play, a cultural–historical approach requires that convincing cultural reasons should be given, rather than reference to the spontaneous and unspoiled nature of young children. In the current social representation of play, the adult is often accepted as a provider of rich opportunities, toys and protection, but the influence of this position on the children’s play is not critically reflected. 2. The current representation of play is ambivalent on the issue of learning in the context of children’s play. It accepts processes of spontaneous learning in play, accepts that peers in play learn from each other and sometimes emphasises the importance of guided play with an eye on the promotion of play-based learning. However, there is no elaborated theory of playful learning (see, for example, Hirsh-Pasek et al., 2009: 53–4). 3. The current representation of play gives no detailed theoretical account for the development of playing throughout ontogeny. What happens with play after early childhood? Vygotskij, El’konin, Dewey, Piaget and many other theorists of play stress that play does not die out after childhood, but transforms into a playful attitude towards cultural reality, games and sports. In Vygotskij’s words: ‘For the school child play becomes a more limited form of activity, predominantly of the athletic type which fills a

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specific role in the school child’s development but lacks the significance of play for the preschooler’ (Vygotsky, 1978: 104). El’konin’s (1972) periodisation of human ontogeny also limits play to the early stages of development (until about the age of seven), and does not explain how the play of older children relates to school learning. It seems that both Vygotskij and El’konin were still caught in some kind of developmentalism, even though El’konin (1978) emphasises that play is an historical outcome related to how we see the role of young children in Western industrialised countries. Play, in his view, is children’s way of getting access to adult culture. It is obvious that El’konin is sensitive to cultural and historical differences, but he seems blind to play as older children’s or adolescents’ way of accessing adult culture. The reason for this limited conception of play is not clear in El’konin’s work. For El’konin, play seems to be an independent stage in education (Braun, 1991: 217), preparing for future industrious and disciplined activities in society.

Below I will explain a point of view from which a cultural–historical approach may address these three problems and contribute to innovation in the social representation of play.

Play as a Cultural Problem A cultural–historically inspired social representation of play first of all needs to get rid of developmentalist assumptions and conceive of play as a cultural problem related to decisions as to how actors are supposed to take part in cultural activities (or cultural practices), and what outcomes to expect. Such a social representation should articulate how playful accomplishments of activities and playful learning are basically rooted in cultural decisions. The relationships between culture and play were intensively studied by the Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga in his famous book Homo Ludens (Huizinga, 1938/1951; references to this book are to the original Dutch version). Although often quoted and discussed, Huizinga’s main point is more often than not inadequately presented. Huizinga’s argument is mostly used

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to support the claim about the importance of play in culture. However, in a foreword to one of the editions of his book he expressly rejects this interpretation, and stresses that he was not interested in investigating the role of play in culture alongside other cultural expressions or artefacts. What he tried to do was build an argument for the essentially playful nature of culture and cultural practices. Therefore he writes: Culture, in its initial stages, is played. It does not originate out of play as a living fruit that releases itself from the mother’s body; culture develops in play and as play (Huizinga, 1938/1951: 224).

Elsewhere in the book he explains: ‘In playing, a community expresses its interpretation of life and the world’ (68). He goes on to say that culture is just the evaluation that is attached in human historical judgements to these exhibited played practices. For the elaboration of his argument, Huizinga defined play as a ‘voluntary activity accomplished within specific temporal and spatial boundaries, according to voluntarily accepted but stringent rules and characterised by an intrinsic goal, accompanied by feelings of suspense and pleasure, and with an awareness of being different from ordinary life’ (Huizinga, 1938/1951: 47). On this basis he demonstrated that practices in the ancient Greek world (such as religious services, jurisdiction, trading, language use, science and so on) were originally accomplished in a playful way. In the course of the execution of these playful practices, new needs, problems and goals emerged that called for solutions and further elaborations of the practice with new rules, tools or rituals. However, according to Huizinga (103, 254, 266), there is no guarantee that cultural practices will necessarily maintain their playful character in the course of their development. This depends on the cultural environment’s wish to maintain this playfulness in organised practices. Huizinga’s cultural–historical analyses are important to keep in mind in the development

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of a cultural–historical concept of play. Huizinga conceives of play and culture as a unit that thrives in cultural practices and creates opportunities for further developments. The intrinsic relationship between culture and practices is close to the point of view of Vygotskij, Leont’ev and El’konin. What Huizinga contributes to their cultural– historical interpretation of play is the idea that play is basically a way of executing practices, not a special phenomenon that may exist outside practices or precede them. It is impossible to talk about play without specifying the activity in which this is embodied. It then seems consistent to conclude that play in a cultural– historical approach is actually a quality of activities in the same sense that colour is a quality of things. Like colour, play does not exist other than as an abstract notion. Whether an activity will manifest itself as play depends on the intentions, values and interests of the participants in an activity. Making this decision is basically a cultural problem that makes the occurrence of play essentially a cultural phenomenon.

THE CULTURAL–HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE ON PLAY The Imaginary Situation The founders of the Vygotskian approach to play (Vygotskij, Leont’ev and El’konin) did not develop a clear-cut theory of play, but they stressed close relationships between play and children’s actions. According to Vygotsky, ‘Play is imagination in action’ (1978: 93). In Vygotskij’s eyes a defining characteristic of a child’s play is the fact that it is based on an ‘imaginary situation’ (93–4). Despite the close connections that Vygotskij sees between the imaginary situation underlying play and human activity, he is not very specific about what exactly is imagined about the situation. Leont’ev (1983) also struggles with the concept of the ‘imaginary situation’ and rejects the interpretation that play is based on

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Cultural–historical Perspectives on Play: Central Ideas

the child’s imagined fantasy worlds. Leont’ev (310) argues that children, in their desire to act like adults, imagine the action potentials of the situation: what can we do here? Hence, we must conceive of the imaginary situation underlying a child’s play as his or her imaginations regarding the action affordances of the situation and particularly of the activity he or she is involved in. Therefore imagination emerges from being involved in human activities, rather than being the source of these activities. And this is also true, according to Leont’ev, when we construe the relationship between play and imagination. Imagination arises and is stimulated through involvement in playful activities. However, what a child ‘sees’ in the situation depends on his or her personal relationship with this situation, his or her background knowledge about the situation, and the help the child gets from others in interpreting the meaning of this situation. Interpreted in this way, the concept of the ‘imaginary situation’ comes close to what Bateson (1972) named as a ‘play frame’ (187–8). He conceived of this frame as a psychological picture of the situation that helps the player to evaluate the ‘messages’ a situation exhibits for the actor: what belongs to the play and what does not? In our cultural–historical interpretation, these messages imply both action potentials (what can or should be done?) and meanings (cultural and personal values that can be attributed to the situation and its objects).

The Format of Playful Realisations of Activities In elaborations of Leont’ev’s activity theory, I have elsewhere emphasised the importance of looking at the process qualities of activities, rather than just mapping the structure of constituent actions, goals and tools (van Oers, 2012a). Characteristically, human activities are often not an execution of a fixed plan of actions, but a dynamic open process that may change more or less as to the script, the accomplishments of actions,

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goals and the use of the tools. As Lompscher (1975) and Brušlinskij (1982) pointed out in the 1970s and 1980s, activities are not stable structures of organised actions and goals. While carrying out activities, actors sometimes adjust the goals, reinterpret the rules, or change the tools and the order of actions. Activity is a directed but fluid process too, guided by personal motives. Brušlinskij (1982) used this idea to characterise the processes of communication and thinking as essentially versatile endeavours. In my analyses of children’s play, this versatile process character of human activities is taken as a basis for the understanding of play. I approach play as a mode of human activities, combining the ideas of Leont’ev, Brušlinskij and Huizinga. Play is one version of human activity. Recently I have argued for a way to characterise human activities on the basis of what I call ‘the activity format’. The activity format refers specifically to the ways in which activities can be carried out, rather than to a detailed microgenetic analysis specifying motive, goals, actions, operations, tools, etc. This is not an attempt to deny the value of micro-analyses of activities. Micro-analyses are essential for the understanding of specific aspects of activities such as learning and interactions, but they cannot grasp the overall, gradual evolutions in activities such as play, thinking or communication. The format of activities is defined by three parameters: rules, involvement and degrees of freedom. As I have previously argued (van Oers, 2012a; 2013), the specific values of these parameters indicate whether an activity will be experienced or recognised as play. On the basis of this format, play activities can be defined as those activities that are accomplished by actors with high involvement (and actually provide the conditions for maintaining this involvement), that are based on rules acknowledged by the actors and that allow the actors some degrees of freedom. Degrees of freedom are considered essential by almost all play researchers for the occurrence of

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play. However, in these cases freedom is mostly negatively defined as ‘freedom from interference by adults’, or freedom from pressure by externally imposed purposes. In the cultural–historical account, freedom is positively defined as the freedom to change, to resist, to produce extravagant ideas and so on. This innovative freedom is the basis for the process character of play that manifests itself in changes of the rules, new applications of tools and redefinition of goals in play. However, as Vygotsky (1978: 103) has pointed out, there is no absolute freedom in play. The limitations of a player’s freedom are the consequence of the necessity of the rules that coregulate play. That is why it is better to speak about ‘degrees of freedom’ in play, rather than ‘free play’. Part of the excitement of play for children is to solve the inherent tensions between rules and freedom, to explore the action possibilities of activities in their own ways within the confines of their interpretations of the compelling limits of these activities. It is important to emphasise that activities formatted as play are to be distinguished from other activity formats that impose strict rules, sanction just one interpretation and application of the rules and do not provide conditions to maintain the actors’ engagement in the ongoing activity. Such activities do occur in society in the case of rituals, strongly proceduralised operations (such as with dangerous machines) and, for example, some teaching methods based on fixed action programmes. It is obvious that not everything in human cultures is play. In fact (as Huizinga also noticed), one of the dangers for playful versions of activities is that they become more and more ritualised into fixed and compulsory action programmes. With the help of the activity format, non-play activities can also be characterised. Within a cultural–historical perspective, it is important to reflect further on the status of the activity format, and especially how decisions on the value of its parameters are taken. All human activities (including conventionalised cultural practices such as trading,

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traffic, music, studying, sports, etc.) are somehow regulated by rules. One of the consequences of a format analysis of human activities is that, in essence, all activities can be accomplished in playful versions or in more strictly proceduralised versions. In all cases, it is the cultural context that decides how activities may be carried out. Hence, the decision of when and how children can play is basically a cultural (and sometimes even political) problem. El’konin (1978: 67) was aware of this historical dimension of children’s play. He emphasised that the growing complexity of cultural processes and their related activities raise the need for the development of playing. He points out that cultural decisions are at the basis of children’s play and these decisions are dependent on moments in cultural history. When work processes are becoming more and more complex, it is impossible to include children easily in these activities and new ways must be invented to give children access to these activities. When family life changes as a result of economic developments (e.g. working parents), society has to invent new ways of engaging children that are accessible and keep them connected to their community. According to El’konin, permitting children to use objects from their environment in their own playful ways is still a construction of a relationship between a child and cultural–historically produced objects. Summarising the arguments above, we may conclude that it is the cultural context at a certain moment in cultural history that decides how the parameters of the activity format are to be filled in. This is especially so in terms of how much freedom is permitted to the actors in a given situation and how important we find the actors’ involvement. In the context of children’s play, involvement is generally seen as an important condition and educators often take measures to create optimal conditions for involvement, e.g. by introducing rich and exciting toys or by preventing adult interference in children’s play. But even here, cultural decisions have to be taken with regard to which objects or toys are

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Cultural–historical Perspectives on Play: Central Ideas

made available (some toys or cultural tools – such as knives or lighters – are deemed dangerous by parents, others as spoiling children’s creativity). With respect to adult involvement, crosscultural studies have demonstrated that the view on parents’ right or duty to engage in children’s play is diverse among different cultures (Lancy, 2007; Roopnarine, 2011). From the perspective of cultural–historical activity theory, all sociocultural activities are essentially seen as basically interpersonal endeavours in which more people actually or virtually participate. Hence there is in principle no objection to adult participation in play as long as the play format for the children themselves is not destroyed.

The Cultural Function of Rules In the different views on the role of the adult and the value of toys or tools, we can also recognise different social representations of play. Social representations are always products of cultural history, and as such they are the first and most influential resource for solving the problem of when and how playful versions of activities are allowed in certain situations for certain actors. From their adopted social representation of play, adults (parents, teachers, inspectors) decide how much freedom children can have in a (pre) school context, how important personal engagement is, how it should be dealt with in institutional situations (such day care settings and nursery schools), which rules should be introduced and to what extent these should be obeyed. Social representations function as a historically produced basic resource for deciding on the playfulness of the activity format in a given situation. From an educational point of view, playful versions of activities are always based on decisions regarding the type of rules that may be introduced and how strictly they should be followed by the participants in play. In agreement with El’konin, rules should be seen as products of cultural history: rules are the most important elements of human activities

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as cultural–historical phenomena. In general we can distinguish between the following four rules, which have varying but important functions in playfully formatted activities. 1. Social rules: define how children in play should interact. This refers not only to moral rules like ‘be kind to each other’ but also role-based rules concerning the way a doctor treats his patients. In role play children usually know the rules from their everyday practices and often conceive of them as moral rules like in a shop play: ‘stealing is not allowed’. A participating adult can decide to clarify or endorse those rules, or to introduce new more sophisticated social rules, like how to tell bad news to a patient. Evidently, these decisions depend on the teacher’s understandings of play and her assumptions about the level of social development of the playing children. A special type of social rule is the use of proper words in specific situations. In their play children often need new words for communication and maintaining social relationships in the context of their role play. As we have demonstrated in our playbased curriculum, teachers can successfully decide to support children’s need for communication by providing appropriate vocabulary, without impairing the play quality of children’s activity (van Oers and Duijkers, 2012). Needless to say, this type of learning basically fulfils a social need. Conceptual explanations of the word’s meaning might be inappropriate in the given socially marked situation. 2. Technical rules: rules that should be followed in order to use a tool or objects properly. When building a high tower with building blocks, a participating adult may decide to explain how the blocks can be put on top of each other in order to make the tower as strong as possible, after some frustrating failed attempts by the children. When using scissors or complicated toys (like computers) children may themselves invite the adult to show the technical rules. Here again we can see that the decision to introduce special objects, tools and their technical rules is based on the adults’ presumptions regarding the value and dangers of these tools. In some cases, adults (but peers too!) explain the technical rules for spelling and writing when children are observed struggling with the cultural tool of script. These decisions are always built on other people’s presumptions about the importance of following these rules or

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learning these rules in the present situation. Again it should be emphasised that there is nothing wrong with the introduction of such technical rules per se as long as children can accept these rules as contributions to their engagement in the ongoing play, and don’t feel frustrated in their degrees of freedom and involvement. 3. Conceptual rules: rules that explain how to use cultural objects properly on the basis of concepts. In their play children may ask questions – ‘How come the light is not working in my doll’s house?’ – that teachers may try to explain in more or less conceptual terms. In early years classrooms we observed how peers explain to each other the conceptual rules of counting or making graphs (see van Oers, 2012c). The introduction of conceptual rules must be an answer to the children’s need to develop a deeper understanding of their current word meanings, for example counting numbers or words like ‘grandmother’. In many situations, educators decide to avoid the introduction of conceptual rules, often justified by developmentalist arguments (‘young children can’t learn this’). However, the examples above demonstrate that young children can indeed deal with conceptual rules. It is important to keep in mind that the introduction of conceptual explanations should only answer the playing child’s needs and not the teacher’s ambitions to teach children new concepts in play. Hence, in our view the decision to exclude or include conceptual rules should be based on psychological conditions with regard to children’s needs, personal interests and actual level of cognitive development, and the type of pedagogical assistance a teacher can offer. In our own research we have been able to reconcile the introduction of abstract schematic representations into children’s role play without destroying the play format (see van Oers, 2012b). Again it must be stressed that the introduction of conceptual rules and tools only makes sense if it is compatible with the play format of children’s activity. 4. Strategic rules: these rules intend to improve the course of the activity as a whole, to create conditions for desired outcomes or to maintain the ongoing interactions. In children’s role play, this can be frequently witnessed. For example, when deciding how to play ‘family’, who will be the mother, the father, the child, the baby? Or in children’s decisions to step in and out of play for a moment of reflection on new ideas from the participating players, or for planning the activity,

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or to evaluate new impulses from others into the ongoing activity: is this still contributing to this activity in a playful way? When problems arise in the context of their role play, 5–7-year-old children often show the need to resolve them by negotiating with each other about the play, its goals and its rules. It has been demonstrated that this meta-communicative strategy can contribute to a better understanding of the play-theme (Williamson and Silvern, 1991) and often leads to intermediate agreements, planning and changes in the goals, tools and roles in the role play. Such spontaneous events of strategic acting may be supported by an adult, if requested by children.

Despite the important function of rules in cultural–historical activities, we should keep in mind that rules do not need to be verbalised. For the youngest children most of the rules are better described as tacit regularities that children maintain in their actions, without being able to verbalise them properly. This of course is not a strange phenomenon in human activities, as, for example, the speech activities of most people demonstrate regularities of this type. Nonetheless, they can use their language perfectly most of the time. The same is true for playing: children’s activity may show regularities on a pre-verbalised level (like in manipulative play). Assisting children in their play is also educational in the sense that implicit spontaneous regularities can be made explicit and even formulated as rules by adults and more advanced peers. Introduction of new social, technical, conceptual or strategic rules in children’s play is in essence not a matter of developmental age, but is based on the sense they make for answering children’s needs as players of cultural practices, and on the help received from more knowledgeable others in applying the rules properly. Viewing rules and children’s ways of dealing with them in a context that also allows freedom of interpretation and organisation, opens up new perspectives on the continuity of play development throughout human ontogeny. All types of rules can be included in play activities at all developmental levels, provided proper needs have emerged in the activities and appropriate help is available.

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Cultural–historical Perspectives on Play: Central Ideas

Moreover, practices of conceptual learning in which children are likely to participate in later stages of development may also be formatted in playful ways. Children can playfully participate in diverse forms of cultural activities and, as a consequence, can participate in diverse forms of play. Play can continue throughout ontogeny and productive learning activity can also be organised in a playful way (van Oers, 2012b). This dimension in the development of playing is not consistently elaborated by Vygotskij and El’konin.

CONCLUSION The cultural–historical perspective on play needs further empirical research in order to corroborate it and figure out more precisely how children, in their play, can learn how to deal with the freedom that they have as players. In this chapter I have given a consideration of the meaning and consequences of a cultural– historical approach to play and proposed a theory of play based on the notion of activity format. On a theoretical level this cultural– historical activity approach to play can answer the critiques of Vygotskij’s ‘theory’ of play (as set out in Lambert, 2000). Even more importantly, this cultural–historical activity approach shows a way out of the restrictive assumptions associated with developmentalism. The approach, however, does not argue against developmental processes per se. Development occurs as a historically conditioned process of growing complexity, and not as a manifestation of a universal natural pattern of stage-wise progress. Play is here presented as essentially a cultural problem, based on value-laden decisions of educators and/or policy makers regarding what play is and how, where and when it should be implemented (see also van Oers, 2013). Remnants of developmentalism are still evident in Vygotskian interpretations of play as well, especially in research on the transitions of play to learning. In the present

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cultural–historical activity theory of play, it is obvious that play as a mode of cultural activity contains opportunities to learn and vice versa: learning activity can still (if permitted by the teacher) exhibit the quality of play (see van Oers, 2012b). The theory of play offered here can solve the problem of play and learning, and reconceptualises the question of the transition from play to learning into a question of learning within playful versions of human activities.

NOTE 1. There are different ways of spelling Russian names (using the Cyrillic alphabet) in Western alphabetic symbols. I have tried to be consistent in this by using the United Nations system (UN83) as a method of transliteration which does more justice to the actual Cyrillic spelling of Russian names. As a result, some names may now appear in a different form from the ones the reader may be familiar with (for example, Vygotsky v. Vygotskij or Luria v. Lurija). In cases of renowned publications (for example, Vygotsky, 1978) the spelling of the names has not been changed.

REFERENCES Ariès, P. (1960) Centuries of Childhood. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Bateson, G. (1972) Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Braun, K.-H. (1991) ‘Play and ontogenesis’, in C.W. Tolman and W. Maiers (eds), Critical Psychology. Contributions to an Historical Science of the Subject. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 212–32. Brušlinskij, A.V. (1982) Myšlenie. Process, Dejatel’nost’, Obšcˇ enie [Thinking. Process, Activity and Communication]. Moscow: Izd-vo Nauka. Cole, M. (1996) Cultural Psychology. A Once and Future Discipline. Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard. El’konin, D.B. (1972) ‘Toward the problem of stages in the mental development of the child’, Soviet Psychology, 10: 225–51. El’konin, D.B. (1978) Psichologija Igry [The Psychology of Play]. Moscow: Pedagogika. Engel, S. (2005) Real Kids. Creating Meaning in Everyday Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Göncü, A., Jain, J. and Tuermer, U. (2007) ‘Children’s play as cultural interpretation’, in A. Göncü and

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S. Gaskins (eds), Play and Development. Evolutionary, Sociocultural and Functional Perspectives. London: Taylor & Francis. pp. 155–78. Hirsh-Pasek, K., Michnick Golinkoff, R., Berk, L. and Singer, D.G. (2009) A Mandate for Playful Learning in Preschool. New York: Oxford University Press. Huizinga, J. (1938/1951) Homo ludens. Proeve ener bepaling van het spelelement der cultuur. [Homo ludens. A study of the play element of culture]. Haarlem, The Netherlands: Tjeenk Willink. Lambert, E.B. (2000) ‘Questioning Vygotsky’s “theory” of play’, Early Child Development and Care, 160(1): 25–31. Lancy, D.F. (2007) ‘Accounting for variability in mother– child play’, American Anthropologist, 109(2): 273–84. Leont’ev, A.N. (1983) ‘Psichologicˇeskie osnovy doškol’noj igry. [Psychological foundations of preschool play]’, in A.N. Leont’ev, Izbrannye Psichologicˇeskie Proizvedenija [Collected Psychological Works. Volume I.] Moscow: Pedagogika. pp. 303–23. Lompscher, J. (ed.) (1975) Theoretische und experi­ mentelle Untersuchungen geistiger Fähigkeiten [Theoretical and Experimental Studies on Cognitive Abilities]. Berlin: Volk und Wissen. Lurija, A.R. (1974) Ob Istoricˇ eskom Razvitija Poznavatel’nich Processov [On the Historical Develop­ ment of Cognitive Processes]. Moscow: Nauka. English edition: A.R. Luria (1976) Cognitive Development. Its Cultural and Social Foundations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Morse, J. (2003) ‘A rainbow of narratives: Childhood after developmentalism’, in B. van Oers (ed.), Narratives of Childhood. Theoretical and Practical Explorations for the Innovation of Early Childhood Education. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: VU University Press. pp. 81–90. Moscovici, S. (1988) ‘Notes towards a description of social representations’, European Journal of Social Psychology, 18: 211–50. van Oers, B. (2012a) ‘Culture in play’, in J. Valsiner (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Culture and Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 936–56. van Oers, B. (2012b) ‘Meaningful cultural learning by imitative participation: The case of abstract thinking in primary school’, Human Development, 55(3): 136–58. van Oers, B. (2012c) ‘How to promote young children’s mathematical thinking?’, Mediterranean Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 11(1–2): 1–15.

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van Oers, B. (2013) ‘Is it play? Towards a reconceptualisation of role-play from an activity theory perspective’, European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 21(2): 185–98. van Oers, B. and Duijkers, D. (2012) ‘Teaching in a playbased curriculum: Theory, practice and evidence of developmental education for young children’, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 44(1): 1–24. Paley, V.G. (2004) A Child’s Work. The Importance of Fantasy Play. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Roopnarine, J.L. (2011) ‘Cultural variations in beliefs about play, parent–child play, and children’s play: meaning for childhood development’, in A.D. Pellegrini (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Development of Play. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 19–37. Roopnarine, J.L., Johnson, J.E. and Hooper, F.H. (eds) (1994) Children’s Play in Diverse Cultures. New York: SUNY Press. Scribner, S. (1997a) Mind and Social Practice. Selected Writings of Sylvia Scribner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scribner, S. (1997b) ‘Vygotsky’s uses of history’, in S. Scribner, Mind and Social Practice. Selected Writings of Sylvia Scribner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 241–65. Smith, P.K. (2010) Children and Play. Oxford: WileyBlackwell. Sutton-Smith, B. (1997) The Ambiguity of Play. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. van der Veer, R. and Valsiner, J. (1991) Understanding Vygotsky. A Quest for Synthesis. Oxford: Blackwell. Vygotsky, L.S. (1978) Mind in Society. The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Vygotskij, L.S. (1983/1931) Istorija Razvitija Vyšich Psichicˇeskich Funcij [The Historical Development of Higher Psychological Functions]. Moscow: Pedagogika. Wertsch. J. (1985) Vygotsky and the Social Formation of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Williamson, P.A. and Silvern, S.B. (1991) ‘Thematicfantasy play and story comprehension’, in J.F. Christie (ed.), Play and Early Literacy Development. New York: SUNY Press. pp. 70–90.

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6 Postcolonial and Anti-racist Approaches to Understanding Play Ve ro n i c a P a c i n i - K e t c h a b a w

INTRODUCTION Developmental theory often forms the backbone both of early childhood education practices, especially in Western contexts, and of play-based approaches that are based on them. For instance, children’s play is often depicted as a right of childhood and as the foundation for learning (Grieshaber and McArdle, 2010). In recent years, however, several authors (e.g., Lenz Taguchi, 2009; Olsson, 2009) have argued that a focus on developmental theories silences other ways of thinking about young children’s play. Postdevelopmental perspectives in education reject the notion of universal stages of childhood or a universal child; they recognize diversity among children in terms of class, gender, ‘race’, sexuality, ethnicity, places of origin, abilities, and other social factors. In early childhood, these theories emphasize that the meanings of children’s play cannot be fixed in any one context, and points of reference for locating meanings of their play cannot be seen as single or transcendent

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(Cannella, 1997; Dahlberg, Moss, and Pence, 2007; Burman, 2008). This chapter provides an overview of the use of postdevelopmental perspectives to understand young children’s play; it identifies the key elements of this literature by tracing critical insights in relation to the intersection of play and racisms. The chapter’s first section highlights how postdevelopmental perspectives emerge from a need to complexify understandings of children’s play. The section introduces some of the earliest work on attending to racisms in early childhood education, through projects such as anti-bias and multicultural education, and briefly reviews the critiques to these approaches that emerged through postdevelopmental perspectives. The chapter’s second section traces the primary arguments of anti-racist and postcolonial perspectives and shows how these theories expand and go beyond multicultural and antibias approaches to understanding children’s play by unpacking how play reproduces dominant societal norms. Although not much has been written yet about anti-racist and

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postcolonial perspectives as they relate to play, the scant published literature has many implications for play pedagogies, in particular for thinking about the colonizing aspects of children’s play and how educators might intervene. The chapter concludes with a discussion of fertile future directions in which postdevelopmental perspectives on play might address issues of racism and ongoing colonialism. In particular, it highlights the potential of discursive–material perspectives to provide alternative ways to challenge the colonialisms encountered in early childhood education, and it notes the troubling marginalization of Indigenous knowledge in postcolonial literature.

EXTENDING THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES: MULTICULTURAL AND ANTI-BIAS APPROACHES Postdevelopmental perspectives on social justice respond to pioneering work in early childhood education on diversity and difference. As early as 1939, Clark and Clark investigated children’s racial attitudes and demonstrated that young children are not color-blind or without race consciousness. Many subsequent early contributions in the field (Derman-Sparks and the ABC Task Force, 1989; Paley, 1979, 1997; GonzalezMena, 1993) – and some recent ones that draw on their insights (Klein and Chen, 2001; Lane, 2008) – address the lack of debate about diversity issues in the field. For example, Derman-Sparks (and ABC Task Force, 1989; Derman-Sparks and Ramsey with Edwards, 2006) moved forward the discussions in early childhood education that assumed a universal child, without attention to racial or cultural identity. In her research in classrooms, she paid attention to children’s racial identity (including white racial identity) and brought forward how racisms and historical constructions of whiteness are always present in classrooms and how they emerge in children’s play. Her anti-bias approach is still influential today. Gonzalez-Mena (1993) was another pioneer in the field who highlighted the

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importance of attending to cultural differences in early childhood education. Her work re-envisioned developmental understandings of play by showing that cultural differences matter. She noted, for example, that cultural differences may influence the amount of stimulation provided to children during play, the number of choices offered to children, and the adult role in children’s play. In her book Multicultural Issues in Child Care, Gonzalez-Mena reports on an experiment she conducted. First, she records a scenario in a child care center that shows how infants and toddlers play during the day. She then asks a group of adults to view this scenario. The result is that the viewers react differently to what takes place in the scenario. Some adults in the study noted that the children seemed bored and did not have enough materials to play with. Others argued that there was too much going on for the children. Yet another group of adults thought that the environment and materials offered to the children to play was perfect. Gonzalez-Mena (1993) concludes that these three different reactions from the adults connect to their cultural values and beliefs. She writes, Some cultures wish to promote calm, placid styles of interaction and temperament, so they prefer less stimulating environments. They worry that the babies will get overstimulated in the exciting play and intense interactions if they aren’t toned down. Some cultures value activity; others value stillness. Active cultures promote exploration and movement for infants because these activities help develop problem-solving skills (1993: 76).

Culture is here presented as a determinant of how children’s play is approached and valued. Paley (1979, 1997), by shifting the focus from culture to racism and, more specifically, to the invisibility of racism in discussions of children’s play in the North American context, also changed how play pedagogies are perceived. Her ethnographic work shows that classrooms are important spaces for children to negotiate racial identities. More importantly, she helped her readers to challenge the invisibility of white identities in play encounters. In

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Postcolonial and Anti-racist Approaches to Understanding Play

The Girl with the Brown Crayon, for instance, Paley (1997) describes how she and the children spent an academic year exploring themes of race and identity through drawing and storytelling. The children and Paley reinvented ways to tell stories about themselves through children’s books. Paley’s work encouraged educators (e.g. Araujo and Strasser, 2003) to see children’s play differently by paying attention to how children negotiate themes of cultural and racial belonging through their everyday play encounters. Araujo and Strasser describe a story from a classroom where a teacher used storytelling to address ‘children’s racial comments’ and their ‘misconceptions about race and skin color’ (2003: 179). For instance, in order to respond to a child’s comment that ‘blacks are strangers,’ the teacher ‘created a problemsolving scenario to show that a stranger can include both black and white people’ (178). By doing this, Araujo and Strasser argue, the teacher ‘minimized the importance of skin color and focused instead on the understanding of the concept of strangers’ (2003: 178). Grugeon and Woods (1990) were education innovators who worked in the context of the United Kingdom. In Educating All: Multicultural Perspectives, they challenged the racial structures that support education and engaged with educators in understanding how racism works in classroom environments. Their research is significant because it made visible the importance of thinking about and challenging racism in classroom environments and emphasized that teachers have a role in these processes. Grugeon and Woods brought teachers into discussions of racism. In doing so, they acknowledged that educational institutions are political spaces. Another important text, The Early Years: Laying the Foundations for Racial Equality (Siraj-Blatchford, 1994), also recognized early childhood classrooms as political spaces. Its author suggested that educators are obliged to understand how racism emerges through children’s engagements with each other. Here is a powerful example that Siraj-Blatchford used to open the book:

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Six three year olds sat around a table in a large nursery school in a shire county playing with playdough. A mother sat with them talking to individual children about their ‘work’, explaining, encouraging and taking joy in the children’s learning and talk. Jennifer was going to be four years old the following week. She began to enthuse about her forthcoming birthday party. Mark, Sarah, Kylie and Nathan were going to be sent invitations to attend her special day. Nisha, a child of South Asian parentage was not mentioned. Kylie reminded Jennifer that Nisha had not been invited. Looking at Nisha, Jennifer said, ‘My mummy doesn’t want any blackies in the house’ (1994: 3).

Siraj-Blatchford discussed how teachers can deal with racist incidents such as this one, how to create an anti-racist curriculum that would prevent these kinds of incidents, and how to involve families in anti-racist work. Importantly, Siraj-Blatchford argued that policies, legislation, and training also need attention in successful anti-racist pedagogies, and provided examples of how these might be developed to combat racisms. One of the most comprehensive recent accounts of anti-bias pedagogies is the work of Lane (2008). In her text Young Children and Racial Justice, Lane outlines why an anti-bias approach like the one DermanSparks put forward needs to be implemented and how racial equality can be addressed in Early Years settings. Lane describes resources for a wide range of levels – from government to educators – and suggests that the kinds of resources available to children for play activities (for instance, dolls with a range of skin colors, hair textures, and physical features; photographs of people from various parts of the world; books that reflect a multicultural society) are important in creating antidiscriminatory classrooms. However, Lane emphasizes that play resources need to be coupled with discussions among teachers and with children. For example, she states, ‘Alone [dolls and books] cannot counter racism – talking about issues is likely to be more effective in changing attitudes than having resources reflecting our multicultural society which no-one plays with’ (2008: 204).

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Rethinking Multicultural and Anti-bias Approaches The idea of accepting other cultures and embracing multiculturalism changed discussions in early childhood education and altered how we view children’s play pedagogies. The discourses of multicultural and anti-bias approaches to education have not gone without careful scrutiny, however. Several scholars have put forward critiques that extend how we perceive play and that situate multicultural and anti-bias approaches within the context of governance (e.g., Rhedding-Jones, 2002; Vandenbroeck, 2004, 2007). These scholars suggest that multicultural and antibias approaches do not go far enough to challenge developmental norms while simultaneously considering how pedagogies are part of governing and colonizing strategies. For example, although multicultural and antibias approaches were introduced to preserve the integrity of diverse cultures, some cultural studies scholars (e.g. Giroux, 1993) argue that the actual effects of multicultural and antibias interventions lead in the direction of assimilation. Critiques of assimilation ‘interrogate the structural and subjective workings of normative whiteness’ (Robinson and Jones-Diaz, 2006: 66) embedded in multicultural practices. A critique of multiculturalism as approached in early childhood education is that often it is framed in essentialist and universal views of culture and development. These views erase complexity and heterogeneity within, across, and among children, creating ‘others’ through categories such as ‘immigrant,’ ‘refugee,’ ‘newcomers,’ and ‘indigenous’ and pathologizing these children and families through vulnerability discourses (Robinson and JonesDiaz, 2006; Vandenbroeck, 2007). Another area of contestation is how culture and race are conceptualized in anti-bias and multicultural approaches (Adair and Doucet, this volume). The approach to using culture as an analytic tool of interpretation holds several dangers. For example, if we interpret other ways of thinking about children

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and their education as a matter of cultural difference, we risk seeing the ‘other’ as a threat to cohesion (Inda, 2000; Worley, 2005). Others have argued that multicultural and anti-bias approaches ignore constitutive social relations of power (e.g. Becher, 2004). While the anti-bias approach has been recognized for its consideration of power relations (for instance, anti-bias educators are encouraged to recognize that institutional and societal structures create and maintain injustices such as sexisms and racisms; Derman-Sparks and ABC Task Force, 1989), later researchers posited that this analysis of power relations did not go far enough; they focused their work on micro-interactions, complexities, and contradictions of power dynamics (Robinson and Jones-Diaz, 2006; Vandenbroeck, 2007). In the words of Vandenbroeck: Power relations are acknowledged in the anti-bias approach and this has been a significant evolution, compared with the previous multicultural discourse. However, they are often described in a dichotomous way, defining victims (ethnic minorities) and perpetrators (majority), resulting in (with all due respect) sloganeering that racism affects the (white) offenders as much as its (black) victims. This dualistic model does not allow us deep analysis of how power relations occur, nor does it help us in dealing with racism among ethnic minorities or in seeing how specific (economically poor) families – both black and white – are marginalized or subject to institutional discriminations. The framework fails in analyzing the subtleties and reciprocities of power relations (2007: 26).

The anti-bias approach itself has been the target of much of the critique of multicultural approaches. For example, scholars such as Vandenbroeck (2007) and Rhedding-Jones (2002) note that the guidelines proposed for educators in the anti-bias curriculum tend to be individually focused. In other words, children’s attitudes are the main focus of intervention. Many of the anti-bias curriculum’s goals (for example ‘nurture each child’s construction of a knowledgeable, confident self-concept and group identity’; ‘promote each child’s comfortable, empathetic interaction with people from diverse backgrounds’)

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center on conflict avoidance or resolution. Derman-Sparks’ intention was to teach children the skills to take a stand for social justice by seeing another person’s point of view. However, if educators believe that young children are not developmentally ready to learn these skills, they sometimes end up teaching children to be polite and to avoid conflict, rather than getting into another person’s shoes to understand about fairness. Despite the limitations of the anti-bias curriculum, Derman-Sparks’ contribution to the field remains important because it brought discussions of racisms to the field. Without such pioneering work, the anti-racist and postcolonial perspectives that ‘reconsider the theoretical framings of the work on diversity and equity in early childhood education’ (Vandenbroeck, 2007: 27) would not have been possible. The following section explores anti-racist and postcolonial perspectives.

POSTDEVELOPMENTAL PERSPECTIVES: ATTENDING TO COLONIALISMS This section explores how postdevelopmental theories have been employed to interpret children’s play, with an emphasis on antiracist and postcolonial perspectives. For clarity’s sake, these different lenses are presented one at a time. However, they are not singular approaches; they can and do work together to enrich understandings of play, and they are always intersecting with other social factors, such as gender and sexuality (see Blaise, this volume). What these perspectives have in common is that they decenter developmental interpretations of play and bring a semiotic account of how children’s negotiations during play are linked to governance. Thus they allow educators and researchers to challenge the norms embedded in developmental perspectives and interrupt social injustices that are reproduced in children’s play. This work draws on poststructural theoretical perspectives, specifically on the work on discipline and power

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proposed by philosopher Michel Foucault and developed by early childhood scholars such as Cannella (1997). These perspectives challenge both the notion of the rational child who naturally plays and the idea that play is an important and innocent characteristic of childhood. They also link children’s play to colonial projects such as nation-building.

Anti-racist Perspectives and Play Anti-racist theories depart from the assumption that racism can be understood merely in relation to ‘race.’ Race is viewed instead as intersecting or interlocking with other markers of inequality, such as gender, nationality, migration, class, sexuality, ability, language, and so on (hooks, 1984; Anthias and Lloyd, 2002; Razack, 2002). Anti-racist scholars use the terms racialization and racialized to move away from an unexamined conception of race as an essential category toward an analytical view of assumptions about ‘race’ and how these assumptions are fundamental to our understanding of people and their cultures (Hall, 1997; Ali, 2006). Anti-racist perspectives also pay specific attention to the racial normalization and categorization that is part of society (MacNaughton, 2005). Goldberg (1993) argued that: racialized discourse does not consist simply in descriptive representations of other. It includes a set of hypothetical premises about human kinds … and about the differences between them (both mental and physical). It involves a class of ethical choices. … And it incorporates a set of institutional regulations, directions, and pedagogical models (47).

Anti-racist approaches differ from anti-bias and multicultural perspectives in that they re-envision identity as rational and unified (Grewal and Kaplan, 1994) and simultaneously question the often-assumed construction of racialized children as ‘vulnerable’ and ‘at risk’ when compared to the civilized, superior, white Euro-American citizen (MacNaughton and Davis, 2009). Instead of understanding racialized identities as natural

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and fixed, anti-racist approaches (drawing from poststructural theoretical frameworks) see them as active, productive, ongoing, and complex. Identity is seen to be socially constructed, mobile, multiple, and always in a process of formation in relation to the social context and to others in the lived environment; identity emerges through discourse and representation (Hall, 1990, 1997; Bhabha, 1994). With this approach, children are viewed as crafting mixed identities within the cultural boundaries of their communities and nation (Taylor, 2008). In early childhood education, an anti-racist perspective complicates and interrogates ‘race,’ as shown in the example of research conducted by MacNaughton and Davis provided later in this chapter. It makes visible the effects of racialization, which can be understood as a possible effect of encounters with ‘racial’ difference. In this way, the discursive and material processes by which social significance is attached to categories of difference in ways that are potentially divisive and discriminatory are made visible in play encounters. These categories include differences in skin and hair color, language and accent, clothing, religious markers, citizenship status, performance and intelligence measures, and inferred ‘personality’ traits, among others. (An example drawn from Taylor [2008] can be found below in the section ‘Postcolonial Perspectives and Play.’) Borrowing from anti-racist theories, early childhood scholars began to critically reflect on the ways in which young children’s and educators’ racialized identities are constantly negotiated within different and oppositional discourses in their play. Further, they suggested that unpacking the discourses at work in children’s play (e.g. Robinson and JonesDiaz, 2006) – both between and among teachers and in the classroom with young children – is an important part of creating socially just pedagogical possibilities. This work brings to educators’ attention the need to challenge racisms in the classroom. For example, when encounters with social injustices emerge in children’s play, it is the role

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of the educator to deconstruct dominant understandings with children, such as binary constructions of race (MacNaughton, 2005). Through this approach, anti-racist scholars are unmasking the power relations within which discourses of tolerance and acceptance of difference operate through children’s play (Robinson and Jones-Diaz, 2006; Taylor, 2007; MacNaughton and Davis, 2009). They also engage with children’s play as a way to actively resist racisms and other structural inequities (MacNaughton, 2005; Pacini-Ketchabaw and Berikoff, 2008; Taylor, 2008). Anti-racist scholars – and particularly anti-racist feminist scholars – bring forward the importance of critical reflection (as a critical literacy of ‘race,’ racisms, anti-racisms, and racialization). Lee and Lutz, for example, point to ‘the need for critical readings of how power operates and how it transforms, and reforms, social relations, through racial categories and consciousness’ (2005: 4). This need is just as critical when interpreting and analyzing children’s play. The examples reviewed below engage with this critical literacy of race, racisms, and racialization in classrooms. A group of scholars in Australia examining the social construction of whiteness and considering the critique of multiculturalism have done extensive work with young children by exposing racial power games and the reconfiguration of these games in early childhood classrooms (see MacNaughton, Davis, and Smith, 2009). These researchers explored the race hierarchies and the dynamics of race relations that are commonplace in young children’s play encounters. Specifically, they observed how children grouped themselves during play times, the characters they chose to act out during free play, the roles different children chose to take during play, and the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion that were evident during play. Another interesting method they employed was ethnographic feedback – actively seeking feedback from children on the data they gathered. Through this process, the children were able to elaborate, correct,

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or fill in how they negotiate race in their daily play encounters. Researchers in many countries (for example The Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Denmark, South Africa) use persona dolls to engage children in play. The use of persona dolls with children has a long history that began in the USA in the 1950s with preschool teacher Kay Taus (a member of the Anti-Bias Task Force, see Derman-Sparks and Anti-Bias Task Force, 1989), who describes the dolls as follows: While Persona Dolls can look just like the regular dramatic play dolls, they’re different because they have individual identities just like the children in the classroom do. They have a family, they live in a certain town, in a particular house or apartment building, they have certain friends, and these things don’t change. The individual identities for the dolls are created at the beginning of the year after the teacher knows all of the children in his/ her classroom so that some of the dolls can reflect the physical characteristics, identities, lifestyles, and circumstances of the children in the classroom (Taus, 1987, cited in Brown, 2001).

The hope is that the dolls raise children’s awareness of racisms and encourage them to challenge racisms in the classroom (Brown, 2001; Jesuvadian and Wright, 2011). In the United Kingdom, Connolly (1998) conducted an ethnographic study with young children in a primary school in a predominantly poor, urban, multicultural, working-class community to explore how children’s identities are shaped through gender and race discourses. His analysis, which draws on poststructural and anti-racist lenses, considers political, social, and economic dimensions and traces how they relate and find expression in children’s everyday encounters. Connolly explores how ethnicity, racism, gender, sexuality, and class intersect in complex ways in the social worlds of five- and six-year-old children to shape specific identities. His study addresses ‘the active and diverse ways in which [young children] make use of discourses on “race’’ and ‘the significance of “race” in the development of young children’s gender identities’ (5). In his findings, Connolly describes, in

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great detail, the multiple ways in which discourses of ‘race’ have an impact on children’s lives. For example, in one of his case studies Connolly speaks of the production of racialized masculine identities among Black boys and the constant shifting and negotiations that take place in the production of these identities. This particular case study on the school playground reveals how, through play, a group of Black boys develops and negotiates gendered and racialized identities in relation to other Black boys, white children, and girls. From his observations of, and conversations about, what takes place in the school playground, Connolly has learned that ‘the field of masculine peer-group relations provides one of the central dynamics, not only for the appropriation and reproduction of racist discourses but also for their contingent and contested nature’ (1998: 111). Although Connolly did not address play specifically, many of his findings have implications for what to pay attention to when observing how children play. Educators need to become vigilant to how racist and gendered discourses might creep into children’s conversations in play encounters. Connolly’s research unmasks the innocence of children’s play and situates it within political discourses rather than in the children themselves.

Postcolonial Perspectives and Play Viruru (2005) notes that research into children’s play needs to contest and question the power relations embedded in the universal categorization of all children under the normative gaze of Western neoliberal models of childhood development and care. Postcolonial perspectives offer possibilities to acknow­ ledge and resist both these power relations and other unjust effects of colonialism. Postcolonial theories make visible and confront the oppressive potentials that may be hidden or subtle in taken-for-granted understandings of play (Cannella and Viruru, 2004; Viruru, 2005). Postcolonial theories encourage interpretations that embrace ‘divergent

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thinking, characterized by movement away from set patterns and goals and toward a more whole perspective, one that includes rather than excludes’ (Viruru, 2005: 23). Cannella and Viruru (2004) outline how play becomes entangled with patriarchal colonialisms in Western societies: The idealized version of childhood that is represented through play as natural and normal perpetuates the Western dominant ideologies that are hoped to ultimately prepare children to be like the more ‘advanced’ Western male adult.… Play represents the biases and values of Western societies that privilege explorations with objects and monocultural notions of progress. The acceptance of play as a universal construct applicable to all creates a corporate structure of normalization and, consequently, labels for those considered abnormal because they cannot or choose not to play (108).

Viruru’s (2001) ethnographic study in a nursery school in urban India questions the universal notion that children’s play is a natural phenomenon. Further, Viruru argues that norms on play ‘exported’ from Western societies to other countries undervalue and undermine (or colonize) other sources of knowledge about raising and educating young children. She questions the grand narrative of play and challenges the belief that Euro-Western play pedagogies are superior to other pedagogies. Scholars working with Indigenous know­ ledges (Ritchie and Rau, 2010) have also employed postcolonial perspectives to shift discussions of pedagogies in early childhood education. From their research in New Zealand, Ritchie and Rau argue that colonial perspectives based on Euro-Western ideas about childhood invisibilize, other, and silence Maori perspectives about childhood. Although they do not specifically address play, they outline a Maori approach to early childhood education that is not solely based on Western developmental notions that privilege play as the way in which children learn. The major implication from their work is that researchers and educators need to question how play pedagogies based on developmental

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Euro-Western norms might silence other ways of knowing and being. Importantly, postcolonial theories enable critical enquiry into the effects of colonization in the present. They provide a framework from which to understand the lingering impacts of European colonialisms in terms of persistent social inequities that are divided along racial lines (Pacini-Ketchabaw and Berikoff, 2008; Taylor, 2008; Ritchie and Rau, 2010). The relevance of these ideas in play theory and pedagogies has not yet been realized. Much of the work with postcolonial theories in early childhood education has been conducted in postcolonial spaces such as India, North America, New Zealand, and Australia. This section reviews research that addresses pedagogical issues which may be relevant to the theorization and operationalization of play. An example of how a postcolonial lens might be used to complexify understandings of children’s play is the work of PaciniKetchabaw and colleagues in Canada. The focus of her participatory action research has been on how early childhood educators can employ postcolonial strategies to uncover the dynamics of racialization in their classrooms and actively challenge racism. In this research, early childhood educators are engaged in developing ‘new’ languages to understand their practices and to actively challenge dominant colonialist discourses that emerge during play (Pacini-Ketchabaw and Berikoff, 2008; Pacini-Ketchabaw and Nxumalo, 2010). For example, the 58 educators in the study engaged in multiple readings of the observations of children’s play they collected from their classrooms to consider events from developmental and multicultural perspectives as well as through other frameworks, including postcolonial perspectives (Pacini-Ketchabaw and Berikoff, 2008). In one case, when the educators read an example of children’s dialogue from an antiracist perspective, they realized that racism was part of the children’s everyday play and that further action and vigilance were required in the ways they interpreted children’s play.

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For example, they decided to challenge the violence inherent in colonialism and the operation of power that created racialized and colonial hierarchies in their classrooms (Pacini-Ketchabaw and Berikoff, 2008). Shifting how they read the dialogue allowed them to realize that everyone was implicated in racism, and that hiding instances of racism and colonialism in their classrooms was not going to eliminate it. In this way the group has opened up a dialogue about racisms and colonialisms, allowing for more opportunities to learn how to counter them in practice. Using postcolonial lenses, Taylor (2008) conducted an ethnographic study of children’s play in Australia in which she focused on the links between macro social processes and the micro politics of children’s play. Paying attention to children’s identity performances, Taylor showed that children’s play is not innocent; children ‘can and do recognize cultural difference as gendered and as racialized’ (2007: 147). Taylor notes that when children play, they ‘are able to recognize the links between cultural diversity, power and belonging, and can be cognizant players in negotiating the cultural politics of identity’ (147). For instance, she recounts a moment of play in the sandpit where a four-year-old boy who had just arrived in Australia from the Middle East attempted to join a group of white boys in their play. The Middle Eastern boy was rejected several times and, in one instance, he was told by one of the white boys that ‘he cannot play with them because he does not talk like them’ and his skin is dark brown (2008: 201). Taylor explains how this moment is ‘an unambiguously racialized struggle over belonging,’ not only in the sandpit where the boys are playing, but also in the early childhood center they all attend and in relation to the Australian nation: Not only did the children share an understanding of their border’s selective gatekeeping function, but they had no trouble in articulating their respective racialized subject positions in terms of prevailing Australian discourses of core white and marginal nonwhite (‘brown’) cultural belongings (201).

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Through her illuminating examples of how children’s conversations during play are political, Taylor (2007, 2008) challenges notions of the innocence of childhood. Children’s play needs to be considered within the context of nation-building discourses that position whiteness as superior and normal.

CONCLUSION The postdevelopmental research that this chapter has reviewed can make significant contributions to understanding how racisms and racialization matter in children’s play encounters. One important contribution these scholars have made is their challenge of developmental explanations of racialization. They have acknowledged the invisibility of colonial pasts, presents, and futures in children’s play. Overall, this body of work has focused attention on the role of discourse in creating social injustices, and how they emerge during children’s play encounters. Through postdevelopmental perspectives, scholars can unpack dominant discourses that are present in children’s play, making visible how power circulates, how it regulates what counts as desirable, how it shapes what is spoken through language, and how it shapes racialized subjectivities. For example, antiracist and postcolonial perspectives on children’s play enable critical enquiry into the effects of colonization in the present. They provide a framework from which to understand the lingering impacts of European colonialisms in terms of persistent social inequities that always emerge in children’s play. They also highlight the ways in which negotiations of race emerge in children’s play, decentering developmental multicultural perspectives and bringing a semiotic account of how children’s negotiations with ‘race’ emerge through daily play encounters. Yet very little has been done on these accounts, as this chapter has shown. More research that directly tackles play pedagogies is needed. The introduction of discourse analyses of children’s play has made the field differently

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aware of the politics of early childhood education, and is creating spaces for thinking about and acting toward social justice in children’s play. Emerging discursive– materialist perspectives that pay attention to the ‘more-than-human’ (see for example Lenz Taguchi and Blaise, this volume – the latter for an explanation of materialist perspectives) are expanding and adding to the discursive analysis reviewed here. However, only a few analyses have been made so far of the intersection of materialist and postcolonial theories (Pacini-Ketchabaw and Nxumalo, 2010; Taylor and Giugni, 2012; Taylor, Blaise, and Giugni, 2013; Nxumalo, 2012). Much more needs to be done to bring discourse and materialist ontologies of race (Saldanha, 2006) into early childhood education and, specifically, to address children’s play. In the context of early childhood education and play, this material-discursive conceptualization of the workings of colonialisms might provide new trajectories for research that interprets and analyzes the negotiations of ‘race’ and racialization in children’s play differently. Accounts of children’s play that draw from postcolonial and materialist perspectives have the potential to be realized as decolonizing pedagogies that go beyond mere critique. While critique is important, it is not enough for the realization of pedagogies that are socially just. This chapter has not addressed Indigenous perspectives on play; however, it is important to note that postcolonial perspectives on play need further investigation in relation to Indigenous knowledges. The marginalization of Indigenous knowledges in postcolonial literature on play is troubling. Although important and powerful work that uses both Indigenous knowledges and postcolonial perspectives exists in early childhood education (e.g. Viruru, 2005; Ritchie, 2012; Ritchie and Rau, n.d.), much more research is needed. Thus an important avenue for future research is attending to how Indigenous voices continue to be marginalized in the research literature that addresses racialization and colonialism in relation to play.

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REFERENCES Ali, Suki (2006) ‘Racializing research: Managing power and politics?’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 29(3): 471–86. Anthias, Floya and Lloyd, Cathy (eds) (2002) Rethinking Anti-Racisms: From Theory to Practice. Abingdon: Routledge. Araujo, Luisa and Strasser, Janis (2003) ‘Confronting prejudice in the early childhood classroom’, Kappa Delta Pi Record, 39(4): 178–82. Bhabha, Homi K. (1994) The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge. Becher, Aslaug A. (2004) ‘Research considerations concerning cultural differences’, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 5(1): 81–94. Brown, Babette (2001) Combating Discrimination: Persona Dolls in Action. Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books. Burman, Erica (2008) Deconstructing Developmental Psychology (2nd ed.). Abingdon: Routledge. Cannella, Gaile S. (1997) Deconstructing Early Childhood Education: Social Justice and Revolution. New York: Peter Lang. Cannella, Gaile S. and Viruru, Radhika (2004) Childhood and Postcolonization: Power, Education, and Contemporary Practice. New York: RoutledgeFalmer. Clark, Kenneth B. and Clark, Mamie K. (1939) ‘The development of consciousness of self and the emergence of racial identification in Negro preschool children’, Journal of Social Psychology, SSPSI Bulletin, 10: 591–9. Connolly, Paul (1998) Racism, Gender Identities and Young Children: Social Relations in a Multi-ethnic, Inner-city Primary School. London: Routledge. Dahlberg, Gunilla, Moss, Peter and Pence, Alan R. (2007) Beyond Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care: Languages of Evaluation (2nd ed.) Abingdon: Routledge. (1st ed. 1999.) Derman-Sparks, Louise and ABC Task Force (1989) Antibias Curriculum: Tools for Empowering Young Children. Washington, DC: National Association for the Education of Young Children. Derman-Sparks, Louise and Ramsey, Patricia G., with Edwards, Julie O. (2006) What If All the Kids are White? Anti-Bias Multicultural Education with Young Children and Families. New York: Teachers College Press. Giroux, Henry A. (1993) Living Dangerously: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Difference. New York: Peter Lang. Goldberg, David T. (1993) Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning. Oxford: Blackwell. Gonzalez-Mena, Janet (1993) Multicultural Issues in Child Care. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield.

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Grewal, Inderpal and Kaplan, Caren (eds) (1994) Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Grieshaber, Susan and McArdle, Felicity (2010) The Trouble With Play. New York: Open University Press. Grugeon, Elizabeth and Woods, Peter (1990) Educating All: Multicultural Perspectives in the Primary School. Abingdon: Routledge. Hall, Stuart (1990) ‘Cultural identity and diaspora’, in J. Rutherford (ed.), Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. London: Lawrence & Wishart. pp. 222–37. Hall, Stuart (1997) ‘Introduction’, in S. Hall (ed.), Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Open University Press and Sage. pp. 1–12. hooks, bell (1984) Feminist Theory from Margin to Center. Boston, MA: South End Press. Inda, Jonathan X. (2000) ‘Foreign bodies: Migrants, parasites, and the pathological nation’, Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, 22(3): 46–62. Jesuvadian, Mercy K. and Wright, Susan (2011) ‘Doll tales: Foregrounding children’s voices in research’, Early Child Development and Care, 181(3): 277–85. Klein, M. Diane and Chen, Deborah (2001) Working with Children from Diverse Backgrounds. Clifton Park, NY: Delmar. Lane, Jane (2008) Young Children and Racial Justice: Taking Action for Racial Equality in the Early Years: Understanding the Past, Thinking About the Present, Planning for the Future. London: National Children’s Bureau. Lee, Jo-Anne and Lutz, John S. (2005) ‘Introduction: Toward a critical literacy of racisms, anti-racisms, and racialization’, in Jo-Anne Lee and John S. Lutz (eds), Situating ‘Race’ and Racisms in Space, Time, and Theory: Volume 3: Critical Essays for Activists and Scholars. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. pp. 3–29. Lenz Taguchi, Hillevi (2009) Going Beyond the Theory/ Practice Divide in Early Childhood Education: Introducing an Intra-active Pedagogy. New York: Routledge. MacNaughton, Glenda (2005) Doing Foucault in Early Childhood: Applying Poststructural Ideas to Early Childhood. London: RoutledgeFalmer. MacNaughton, Glenda and Davis, Karina (eds) (2009) ‘Race’ and Early Childhood Education: An International Approach to Identity, Politics, and Pedagogy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. MacNaughton, Glenda, Davis, Karina and Smith, Kylie (2009) ‘Exploring “race-identities” with young

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children: Making politics visible’, in G. MacNaughton and K. Davis (eds), ‘Race’ and Early Childhood Education: An International Approach to Identity, Politics, and Pedagogy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 31–47. Nxumalo, Fikile (2012) ‘Unsettling representational practices: Inhabiting relational becomings in early child­hood education’, Child & Youth Services, 33: 281–302. Olsson, Liselott M. (2009) Movement and Experi­ mentation in Young Children’s Learning: Deleuze and Guattari in Early Childhood Education. New York: Routledge. Pacini-Ketchabaw, Veronica and Berikoff, Ahna (2008) ‘The politics of difference and diversity: From young children’s violence to creative power expressions’, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 9(3): 256–64. Pacini-Ketchabaw, Veronica and Nxumalo, Fikile (2010) ‘A curriculum for social change: Experimenting with politics of action or imperceptibility’, in Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw (ed.), Flows, Rhythms, and Intensities of Early Childhood Education Curriculum. New York: Peter Lang. pp. 133–54. Paley, Vivian G. (1979) White Teacher. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Paley, Vivian G. (1997) The Girl with the Brown Crayon: How Children Use Stories to Shape Their Lives. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Razack, Sherene (2002) Race, Space, and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society. Toronto: Between the Lines. Rhedding-Jones, Jeanette (2002) ‘An undoing of documents and other texts: Towards a critical multiculturalism in early childhood education’, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 3(1): 90–116. Ritchie, Jenny (2012) ‘Early childhood education as a site of ecocentric counter-colonial endeavour in Aotearoa New Zealand’, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 13(2): 86–98. Ritchie, Jenny and Rau, Cheryl (n.d.) ‘Whakawhana ungatanga: Partnerships in bicultural development in early childhood care and education’, Teaching and Learning Research Initiative (www.tlri.org.nz/sites/ default/files/projects/9207_summaryreport.pdf) Ritchie, Jenny and Rau, Cheryl (2010) ‘Kia mau ki te wairuatanga: Countercolonial narratives of early childhood education in Aotearoa’, in Gaile Cannella and Lourdes Diaz Soto (eds), Childhoods: A Handbook. New York: Peter Lang. pp. 355–73. Robinson, Kerry H. and Jones-Diaz, Criss (2006) Diversity and Difference in Early Childhood Education: Issues for Theory and Practice. Maidenhead: Open University Press.

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Saldanha, Arun (2006) ‘Reontologising race: The machinic geography of phenotype’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 24(1): 9–24. Siraj-Blatchford, Iram (1994) The Early Years: Laying the Foundations for Racial Equality. Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books. Taus, Kay (1987) ‘Teachers as storytellers for justice.’ Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Pacific Oaks College, Pasadena, CA. Taylor, Affrica (2007) ‘Playing with difference: The cultural politics of childhood belonging’, International Journal of Diversity in Organisations, Communities and Nations, 7(3): 143–9. Taylor, Affrica (2008) ‘Taking account of childhood excess: “Bringing the elsewhere home”, in B. Davies (ed.), Judith Butler in Conversation: Analyzing the Texts and Talk of Everyday Life. New York: Routledge. pp. 195–216. Taylor, Affrica and Giugni, Miriam (2012) ‘Common worlds: Reconceptualizing inclusion in early childhood communities’, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 13(2): 108–19.

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Taylor, Affrica, Blaise, Mindy and Giugni, Miriam (2013) ‘Haraway’s “bag lady story-telling”: Relocating childhood and learning within a post-human landscape’, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 34(1): 48–62. Vandenbroeck, Michel (2004) ‘Diverse aspects of diversity: A European perspective’, International Journal of Equity and Innovation in Early Childhood, 1(2): 27–44. Vandenbroeck, Michel (2007) Beyond anti-bias education: Changing conceptions of diversity and equity in European early childhood education’, European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 15(1): 21–35. Viruru, Radhika (2001) Early Childhood Education: Postcolonial Perspectives from India. New Delhi: Sage. Viruru, Radhika (2005) ‘The impact of postcolonial theory on early childhood education’, Journal of Education, 35: 7–29. Worley, Claire (2005) ‘It’s not about race. It’s about the community: New Labour and community cohesion’, Critical Social Policy, 25(4): 483–96.

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7 New Materialisms and Play H i l l e v i L e n z Ta g u c h i

INTRODUCTION Imagine a sandbox full of sand and a very young child standing there in front of a red plastic bucket. The child’s hand is grabbing a handful of sand and then slowly letting it go above the bucket. The light wind carries the grains, spreading them out across the surface of the sandbox in a wider area: the child’s eyes closely observing the glittering flow of sand, swirling in the wind and catching rays of sun: the grains spreading, dancing, and gently descending towards the sandpit surface to become part of the greater whole. Some, however, gets swallowed up by the shadows inside the bucket (Adapted from Hultman and Lenz Taguchi, 2010: 527).

What goes on in this sandbox play? Who is playing with whom? Who or what transforms in this event? Who or what, in this event, has power to learn, to play: to act? Most of us, without hesitating, would state that this is an image of a child playing with sand. Although the text above states that we should imagine ‘a sandbox full of sand’ and then describes the play of sand with the wind and sunlight, our perceptual style and habits of seeing as

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childhood researchers naturally centre the child (Hultman and Lenz Taguchi, 2010). As a consequence, our research questions will be formulated in ways that make the child an active agent, playing with the sand and bucket as passive tools. These materialities have, however, in some learning theories been understood as crucial artefacts for the child’s learning (e.g. Kress et al., 2001). In some of these theories there is an important sense in which the material world around the human subject affords it with possibilities of action; for instance, buttons for pushing or sand for throwing or constructing (Gibson, 1977). Materiality has even been understood more or less explicitly as an ‘active pedagogue’ itself in the Reggio Emilia approach (Reggio Children, 2008), as it has in the Montessori approach preceding it. However, human intention and perception (a human object-directedness), or human discursive language (as in the constructivist, sociocultural and social constructionist theories), are still the only possible driving forces of transformation and learning in these theoretically

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informed ways of reading the image of sandbox play. Moreover, there is an ontological separateness between fixed and passive tools in the material world, contrary to agentic and transformable human beings in these theories and practices of learning. Hence, in the reality produced by this dominating constructivist, cognitivist or social constructionist research, only humans are granted agency and power to act, to learn and to transform. This is because of the ontological underpinnings – the nature of being – that these dominating theories rely on. The ‘material turn’ in the social sciences and humanities research has, since at least 20 years back, severely challenged this way of understanding reality that puts human beings at the centre of knowledge-production and hierarchically above the rest of the world (Åsberg et.al., 2011; Hird and Roberts, 2011). As the material turn has come to our awareness in the field of childhood studies, a number of researchers of diverse theoretical directions claim to ‘have already’ considered the impact of material reality in their accounts.1 Others, however, have claimed that thus far, material that can make us understand children’s play and learning in new and transformative ways has been neglected and not considered. It is in terms of such a proposed neglect of the material that Karen Barad (2007) writes: Why are language and culture granted their own agency and historicity, while matter is figured as passive and immutable? … Language matters. Discourse matters. Culture matters. There is an important sense in which the only thing that doesn’t seem to matter anymore is matter (132).

It is in line with such a radical, still emerging and quickly growing response to the ‘material turn’ in childhood studies that this chapter suggests reading the image of sandbox play in ways that produce another kind of reality, where matter is seen to matter in more forceful ways. 1. It suggests imagining the sand and bucket as equally playing with the child’s hand, body, eyes and perceptive and productive bodymind.2

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2. It suggests granting agency to the sand and bucket in their interactions with the child, its body and discourses of sandbox play. 3. It suggests viewing the bodymind of the child, the sandbox, sand, bucket, as well as discourses and notions of play and learning, as playing with each other in a relational and horizontal field of play. 4. It suggests that humans and non-humans are to be understood as performative agents that have power to act and transform each other and themselves. 5. It suggests that the materiality of the sand can equally transform the notions, conceptions and emotions of the child, as much as the child can transform the sand.

This chapter examines why early childhood teachers and researchers might want to read the sandbox play in this way, and what we might learn about children’s play and learning if we make matter matter in a more significant way; as entangled with human discourse and human bodyminds. This is something quite different from the ‘old’ materialisms of various critical studies based on Marxist theorizing, which is also why this line of research has been referred to as ‘new materialisms’, based on some decisive ontological shifts (Dolphijn and van der Tuin, 2011, 2012). This ontological shift means granting matter agency in what is understood as an interdependent relationship between discourse and matter: that is, what is called the co-constitutiveness of materiality and discourse, giving rise to concepts such as the ‘sociomaterial’, the ‘materialdiscursive’ and ‘natureculture’ as relations of coexistence (Barad, 2007; Haraway, 2008). In the field of play and learning, an ontology that does not put human beings in a taken-for-granted human-centred (anthropocentric) position, as separate from matter and as the only possible agent, can mean devoted engagement in issues of children’s relations to the more-than-human world of animals, geographies, material places and ecologies (Taylor, Pacini-Ketchabaw and Blaise, 2012). It can also mean that research on play and learning can pay greater attention to the

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performative agency of different matter and the environment that will make us think differently about how we organize and perform childhood practices. The granting of agency to matter, the non-human, or what can be understood as the ‘minoritarian’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) produces a reality that has strong ethical and political implications. These not only concern children’s participation, inclusion and the enforcement of children’s power to act in early childhood settings but also concern the participating force of nonhumans, matter and environments that take equal part in the production of our ‘commonworlds’ (Taylor and Giugni, 2012). Hence, children’s power to act can be increased in attentiveness to their becoming-with more-than-human agents in our childhood practices. The next section provides a brief historical background to the ‘material turn’ in order to understand the ontological and epistemological underpinnings of this research. In the second part of this chapter, a review of some of the central studies of this turn is provided to show what kind of knowledge this research can produce, for whom and for what, and what the future possibilities might be in this still emergent research.

THE ‘MATERIAL TURN’ The ‘turn to the material’ in the social and educational sciences can be understood to build on and work in continuity from critical, feminist, postcolonial, queer and intersectional theoretical accounts that developed in the 1970s and into the present (Lykke, 2010). If critical pedagogy can be understood to have contributed to granting children stronger social agency in the 1970s (James and James, 2008), and if feminist theory has granted women the agency to think and act on equal terms with men, the ‘material turn’ is a posthumanist (Braidotti, 2013) line of theorizing that, for reasons of ethics, sustainability and equality, grants agency to non-humans and the more-than-human world, in order for all of

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these agents to live better together (Barad, 2007; Haraway, 2008). These new theories and philosophies of materialisms have farreaching transdisciplinary characters, cutting through disciplines from the natural, technical and computer sciences, as well as the social and human sciences (Åsberg et al., 2011). What is new in these theories can be conceived in the shift of ontology and concepts, such as the shift from a transcendental ontology to a relational ontology and the shift from the concept of interaction to intra-action. Whereas a transcendental ontology aspires to know or search for a lost origin, truth, law or meaning, understood to be independent from and transcending human worldly experiences, a relational ontology is constituted by interrelations, interdependencies and coexistences of meaning and matter. Only human subjects or human language can be the agent of change in the epistemologies that build on transcendental ontologies, as is the case in constructivist and social constructionist epistemologies. In a relational ontology, difference is the condition of the world’s continuous becomings, where humans and non-humans continuously become different in themselves in their interrelations (Deleuze, 1994; Dolphijn and van der Tuin, 2011). This has crucial consequences for the new materialist epistemologies. Knowledge, in the humanist and social sciences, cannot only be derived through representations in human language (or meaning-making discourse) produced in human interactions. Instead, knowledge is produced in intraactions that take place in sociomaterial and materialdiscursive relations – that is, in between humans and non-humans, discourse and matter, as relations of porosity and interdependence, where the respective agents have no fixed and inherent border (Barad, 2007). It also means that intention and agency can no longer be understood as owned and produced by human agents only, but rather as something that is dispersed and distributed to many diverse agents of different materialities and that is co-produced and thus emerges as a consequence of their intra-actions (Barad, 2007).

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Let us briefly turn to the sandbox play to exemplify the consequence of this turn to a relational ontology. The child’s power to act in this image is expanded in an event of becoming-with the sand, the wind and the sun (Haraway, 2008). This posthumanist notion of becoming-with differs in important ways from how the still dominant humanist philosophical tradition understands being and becoming. In dominant thinking, the child’s becoming is understood to be a state of lack in a process of becoming the ideal of a transcendental humanist subject and thus a complete human being and responsible citizen (Lee, 2005; Prout, 2005). Being constitutes an outcome of the idea of a perfect development of the child, where becoming refers only to the process leading up to that end state, as in any developmentally appropriate or constructivist-learning study of research. Contrary to such a humanist (and transcendent) understanding, the posthumanist notion of becoming-with constitutes an ontological turn in that it questions the notion of being, the given, stable, detached subject of a specific identity with distinctive borders in relation to other beings of identity. Instead all becomings are understood as interdependent and intertwined and thus without fixed boundaries. Rather, they are permeable and porous, in communication and mutually transforming in this relation, but in different ways, with different force, intensity and speed; because each agent has its own different style of becoming, as Deleuze (1988) writes. The notion of becoming-with not only disrupts and destabilizes the asymmetrical power-relations in some central binaries but also blurs them altogether. This goes for binaries such as humans/non-humans; adults/ children; language/matter; culture/nature, but also the Self/the Other, white/black, male/ female and masculine/feminine. When new materialists argue that materiality has been neglected, this is a critique not only of what is understood as an overemphasis on the human subject of humanism but also of an overemphasized focus on the constituting forces of language and meaningmaking discourse, which has been the focus

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of social constructionist, poststructuralist and queer studies for the past 15 years (Alaimo and Hekman, 2008). Thus, the new materialists would argue that both of these epistemological accounts neglect materiality – understanding matter either as fixed tools or backdrops for human agents (humanism), or as passive culturally constructed materiality or artefacts, produced by discursive practices (social constructionism). Although the latter theories focus on discourses, norms and practices and what has been understood as subjectless forces and power production, the focus remains on how humans are discursively constituted and how human discourse constitutes and transforms the world – and matter (Braidotti, 2013). Hence, matter is not understood as being productive of agentic or constitutive force in social constructionist and discursive theories, which also means that matter cannot be understood as a force in the production of meaning and discourse (Braidotti, 2013; Latour, 2013). How materiality indeed becomes a productive force in children’s meaning making is a crucial aspect in new materialisms studies of children’s play and learning (Lenz Taguchi, 2010).

REVISITING THE SANDBOX In recalling the sandbox play, the habitual style of seeing impels us to see an independent child with agency, intentionally grabbing hold of some sand and letting it go to observe what happens (humanism). In a social constructionist way of producing knowledge, we understand the image instead in terms of the child being produced by meaning-making (discursive) practices of playing with sand. The child is simply trying to figure out how to play with the sand in relation to norms and established practices of playing in a sandbox. Discourses on age and gender might also intersect with those on play, and regulate how girls and boys of different ages are understood to play with sand differently. It is the child who has the discursive ability to transform something in

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this event, not the sand or the bucket. Therefore, both the humanist and social constructionist way of reading this image reduces the materiality of the sand and bucket to tools of human play and learning. Ontologically, the sand and the child are understood not only as detached from each other but also in an asymmetrical power relationship, where only the child is granted (discursive) agency to act, transform, play and learn. Hence, the social constructionist way of reading the image does not manage to transgress the subject/object and discourse/matter binary divides (Alaimo and Hekman, 2008; Braidotti, 2013; Dolphijn and van der Tuin, 2011). In a new materialist reading of the image, the glittering sand and the child are in a coconstitutive relationship. The child cannot thinkfeel (perceive) the beauty of sand swirling and shining in the wind and sunlight without these particular grains of sand, the wind and the sunlight. And the grains of sand cannot be grabbed, tossed in the air, rearranged or reflect sunshine as they are dropped from the hand of the child without the child and its discursively inscribed actions, the wind and the sun. The sand cannot swirl around without the wind either, independently of the human child. Mutual transformations, thus becomings-with, are produced among all these agents in their intra-actions. In the chain of events, human discursive thinking is entangled somewhere along the line as well. To state it simply: the sand is affected by and affects the child; and the child (and its’ discursively inscribed perceptions) affects and is affected by the sand (Deleuze, 1988). Barad (2007: 152) summarizes this relation when stating that neither discursive practices nor material phenomena are ontologically or epistemologically prior: ‘the material and the discursive are mutually implicated in the dynamics of intra-activity’. To repeat, and to conclude this section; ontologically, nothing can exist on its own: a body cannot pre-exist its interaction with other matter (Barad, 2007).

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‘MATERIAL TURN’ RESEARCH IN EARLY CHILDHOOD STUDIES The research questions that guide new materialist research have the aim of studying how discourse and matter are co-productive in activities of play and learning where children intra-act with other humans and the more-than-human material world in the ‘common-worlds’ of early childhood spaces. Thus, the research reviewed for this chapter will focus only on studies that put to work a relational ontology where matter is granted (co-productive) agency in its intra-activity with other matter, human discourse and human bodymind agents. The studies picked for this review should be understood as important in relation to what they are trying to do and produce in terms of knowledge, as they represent different kinds of research focus, transdisciplinary research or new experimental methodological practices. In terms of methodological issues, the review will show that new materialist analysis can be understood in terms of producing postinterpretivist analysis (St. Pierre, 2010). This means that the researcher does not seek to interpret the meaning of data or understand reality as something separate from the researcher to be studied at a distance. Rather, the researcher acknowledges how she or he is already a part of the reality studied. It is, as Barad (2007: 185) writes, a ‘study of practices of knowing in being’, where different agents in reality are ‘trying to make themselves intelligible to each other’, including the researcher her-/himself. In the studies reviewed below there are examples of, for instance, how a researcher discovers that her own researching female body becomes a part of children’s play and gendered explorations of their subjectivities (Blaise, 2013). The challenge for the new materialist researcher is how to consider the agency of the material in the production of knowledge in the methodological practices of collecting data and doing analysis (Lenz Taguchi, 2012). This kind of postinterpretivist research constitutes something new, in relation to the discursive

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and social constructionist research paradigms of reading data from different perspectives or doing multiple readings from different discursive standpoints or positionings in the data, but it is also inclusive of and crucially dependent on what has been learnt from poststructural theorizing and research.

Becomings-with Preschool Classrooms, Material Things, Food and Music Karin Hultman’s (2011) study extends feminist poststructural enquiry by exploring young children’s constructions of gendered subjectivity in preschool classrooms to show that they are not just shaped and constituted by performative discourses, but rather co-constituted by matter and discourse in complex networks. These networks include and grant strong and forceful agentic qualities to the classroom itself, the furniture and material objects for play and learning. Hultman’s analytical tools are drawn from a mix of Bruno Latour’s (2005, 2013) ‘Actor Network Theory’ and Karen Barad’s theorizing illustrated above. By analysing two short memory stories told by grown-up women, Hultman shows how children are in significant relations with non-human matter that acts, performs and produces in its connections to other matter and discourse. The girl in the first story traverses from one room to another. She transforms from becoming materialdiscursively co-produced as a ‘proper’ schoolgirl in one classroom, to not passing as a competent or ‘proper enough’ girl in another. She might even be understood as disobedient and rebellious, as she presses her body against the wall of the large playroom to avoid the running bodies of other children playing. Hultman concludes that this girl cannot be a proper schoolgirl ‘on her own’: she is understood, either as proper, courageous, incompetent, a ‘misfit’ or an ‘ultra-feminine girl’, only in connection with these different rooms and a wide range of actors, human, non-human, and discursive. ‘Thus, she is not a girl in the room but rather of this room’,

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writes Hultman, with reference to Barad (2003: 23). Based on ethnographic data from an early years classroom in a project on exploring the construction of ‘naughty children’, Liz Jones (2013) shows how things and objects, such as the chair, the soft toy and the soft carpet on the floor, simultaneously ‘school’ children’s bodies as they can dislocate sedimented pedagogical practices so that something new becomes possible. By intertwining poststructuralist and new materialist theoretical accounts, Jones shows how the teacher’s chair has a materialdiscursive history with specific powers in relation to the children and teachers, which gives the chair a capacity to unseat the child, Jack, after his unallowed sitting on it. The chair is not a passive and inert thing in itself to be used by humans, but can, writes Jones, rather, be seen as ‘toying with Jack’, ‘redolent with vibrations, sensations, movements and intensities that call to the boy and encourage him to make the move from obedient boy to transgressor’ (2013: 7–8). The chair is, writes Jones, in a poststructural sense, a sign – saturated and enveloped in meaning – but in a discursivematerial sense the chair also has the potential to affect, to release a force, and the capacity to be affected and transformed, both in terms of its mattering and meaning. In their mutual materialdiscursive interaction and respective continual becomings, Jack transforms from obedience to disobedience, as ‘new circuits of causality’ are produced in their encounter (2013: 9). Christina MacRae (2012) calls into question the notion of agency in her article on a series of encounters with a baby doll in art-making practices with small children in a preschool. In this article, MacRae shows how she as researcher transforms her thinking and theorizing to understand how material objects act on children and become productive of their play. This means a shift in MacRae’s prior ontological presuppositions, where only children had agency to animate and transform material objects such as dolls. A plastic doll becomes ‘vibrant matter’ as two very young girls interact with it, writes MacRae (123). The doll

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seemed to call the girls into action in their playing with it. The girls’ conversation can be understood more as statements of what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) calls ‘collective enunciations’: their utterances do not seem to emerge from individual experiences, nor are they stated with specific intentions; rather, they were called forth and emerged as actualized consequences of what was going on in the interactions of playing with the material dolls. Playing becomes a collective assemblage where imagination and materialdiscursive desire and knowing intra-act with bodies and matter in a space where binary distinctions between humans and non-humans, adults and children are blurred. The becomings of children with food in the materialdiscursive practice of eating is explored in Nina Rossholt’s (2012) article ‘Food as touch/touching the food’. Eating is understood as a complex practice of different forms of touch on the body and inside the body, in the encounter with the materiality of food and matter such as spoons and bowls. In her analysis of ethnographic data observations of children (under the age of three) when eating together with the teachers, she shows that food on the table, bowls and spoons to eat with enact dominating discourses of age, play and learning. How to eat properly can be a learning experience but is not accepted as playing. Materialdiscursive practices of eating vary in relation to different children, depending on their eating habits – that is, how they touch the food in different ways and use spoons, etc. The teachers regulate children’s bodies accordingly, as bodies either in-place or out-of-place, in relation to dominant discourses on proper eating habits. But the children’s bodies are not just discursively inscribed; children actively participate in the materialdiscursive production of themselves as in-place or out-of-place eaters. Rossholt’s analysis also shows how the materiality of children’s resistance practices – how to hold the food and eat – can influence and alter adults’ discourses on eating. Hence, matter and discourse are mutually implicated in practices of eating in preschool contexts.

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In a study on transdisciplinary mathematics and gender by Anna Palmer (2010), it is possible to see how mathematics teaching and learning in early childhood practices can be understood as a bodymind experience, involving many different bodily faculties intra-acting in the process. Children transform their mathematical conceptions in their becomings-with music, pens and papers and their gendered notions, while drawing and writing choreography to a piece of music. This study shows how mathematics can be understood as a porous and distributed discipline which can be accessed and experienced by way of other intersecting disciplines such as dance and music: bodily movements and graphical signs intra-act in this work with the children’s mathematical concepts that can be understood as explorative algebra. Moreover, all of these different intersecting disciplines are gendered in ways that put to work materialdiscursive processes that can both normalize and help us queer our taken-forgranted understandings of gender and mathematics.

Childhood Places and Spaces as ‘Common-worlds’ of Co-dependencies Place and pedagogy can both be understood as assemblages, writes Iris Duhn, and ‘a pedagogy of places assembles and folds into places of pedagogy’ (2012: 104). Duhn shows how the preschool classroom, its yard and surroundings are, in different ways, territories where specific activities are to take place, designed to teach children predetermined things. Hence, sand belongs in the sandpit, and pots and pans in the dolls’ corner. But these territories might also be deterritorialized, folded into each other, remade and opened up for change; so that sand might move into the dolls’ corner. Pedagogies of places can negotiate flows of desire where matter, humans and more-than-humans can come together to modulate the self and each other in new ways. This is a move away from contemporary understandings of early years

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pedagogy, with its emphasis on educating autonomous, self-directed and independent learners, writes Duhn (2012: 104). Duhn’s article ‘Places for pedagogies, pedagogies for places’ opens up the ethics and politics of the studies reviewed below, which in decisive ways push early childhood play and learning into a relational ontology and thus into hopes of a less hierarchical space of childhood becomings and an increased power to act. In her article ‘ “Becoming worldly with: An encounter with the Early Years Learning Framework’,” Miriam Giugni (2011) redirects our understanding of children’s play with clay from a developmental framework as fine-motor experiences or children’s abilities of producing a three-dimensional clay-figure. She displaces events of play with clay to become significant events of activism, politics and ethics in a relational ontology. She exemplifies how teaching is constituted by assemblages of material discursive entanglements in two examples of young children playing with clay. When three very young girls play with clay while talking to each other and the teacher, it becomes impossible to untangle the multiple performative agents at work in the entangled material discursive processes that Giugni calls processes of ‘becoming-worldly’, with inspiration from Donna Haraway (2008). One girl enacts questions of identity, sexuality, gender and citizenship in and with the moulding of clay. She materializes, in her becoming-with the clay, her lived experiences and sense of justice, a same-sex couple going out to shop for their baby, while complaining that this couple cannot be married in Australia and that this is unfair. In the second example, the children discussed Easter and searched for ‘Jesus’ on an internet search engine. They found imagery of the statue Pietá by Michelangelo that intrigued them greatly. Why were Maria and Jesus White? Was it only because of the white marble the statue was made from? The white marble statue and the chunks of brown clay were slowly moulded into Pietà-figures

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by the children’s hands while questions of Jesus’ and Maria’s skin colour were debated. Where did they come from? And how are people from the Middle East perceived in Australia today? These materialdiscursive productions of children’s creative play with clay and socio-political notions, constitute practices of becoming-worldly in another way; enacting ‘another worldliness’, as Giugni writes. And these practices are, she concludes, both activist and ethical in their striving for openness to contradiction and difference, as well as in their critique of existing early childhood practices. In this way they constitute an opportunity for hope and change. As noted above, the material turn constitutes a decisive turn to ethics. This becomes explicit in Affrica Taylor and Mirian Giugni’s (2012) article on a reconceptualizing inclusion in early childhood communities in the conceptual framework of ‘common-worlds’. A children’s picture book by Jeannie Baker is used as a springboard to discuss how children’s worlds do not begin and end with human interpersonal relations and concerns, but constitute entangled worlds shared with ‘hosts of human and more-than-human others’ (2012: 111). In the case of Ben in the story, he is involved in playful, ethical and political ‘queer kin encounters’ of ‘worldling’, as he gets to know the ‘lurking below’ of the world of the seas in a cold-water Australian marine environment off Tasmania’s east coast. These encounters and relations are understood as ‘queer’, following Haraway (2008), because the relationships between humans and nonhumans (even children) are not symmetrical in terms of power, and thus need to be problematized rather than romanticized, as in the commercial images of children and wildlife. Instead, they need to be discussed in terms of how humans can ‘live responsively’ in ‘questioning relationships’ with the morethan-human world, write Taylor and Giugni (2012: 113). In line with Haraway’s relational ontology, children and adults in childhood ‘common-worlds’ need to figure out how to live and flourish together with

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the differences of human and non-human others. This is a matter of collective responsibility, a common-management and thus a fundamentally political question (Taylor and Giugni 2012). The spaces of early childhood, where children play and learn, are local ‘common-worlds’ entangled with the global world. Ben, in the story, is engaged in ‘queer kin’ relations with non-human others of the sea; learning how to ‘world’ and ‘becoming-worldly’ by forming ‘questioning relationships’ of power with these others and negotiating how to live in this particular ‘common-world’ in ways that might allow all to flourish (2012: 117). It is this ethical relationship that Hillevi Lenz Taguchi (2010) focuses on as she writes on what she calls an intra-active pedagogy in early childhood education. In numerous examples from children’s play with sticks in the yard or events of investigative learning where children explore their local environments, construct roads or draw maps, she shows how learning in an intraactive pedagogy is about the child becoming different in itself as an effect of its relations with other humans, discourse and nonhuman performative agents in the preschool classroom. She suggests an ethics of potentialities inspired by Deleuze (Lenz Taguchi 2010), which is not a search for some truth or foundation beyond or transcendent to what is. Rather, it is a ‘love of what is’ and of what might become, as Claire Colebrook (2002: 71, italics in original) puts it. An intra-active pedagogy is not interested in defining the truth of children’s development or judging learning by its limitations or lack, as in a negative search for difference to determine the child’s true identity. Instead, an intra-active pedagogy is interested in interrogating the child’s capacities for affecting and being affected in relations and encounters with other children, adults, concepts, matter and non-humans in the world. The political aim of this new materialist research is to make visible yet unknown potentialities of children and adults in childhood practices.

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Ethics and Politics in the Production of Research New materialism research is not just a form of political activism for early childhood practitioners and researchers in relation to what they do and research, in line with what has been described in the studies above. Rather, the material turn also activates an activism in the very activity of research and research analysis. The research produced is political in its emphasis on creating and inventing new forms of possible realities in the analysis. In this way the world might, as Haraway (2008) suggests, become a ‘more livable place’, where children have increased power to act, to play and learn together with performative agents that can also be other than merely human agents. Some of the new materialist studies also exemplify how the researcher aspires to engage with data differently in the process of analysis, and to transform and become different with the data. Mindy Blaise (2013), for instance, attempts to understanding the micro-politics of gendering bodies, how the researcher connects with the unexpected micro-processes going on in the event of collecting data. Doing participative observation turns out to involve the researcher’s own adult female body as well as the artefact of her earring, which has strong agentic powers. The children investigate the researcher, parts of her body and her earring just as much as the researcher observes and collects data featuring the children. Rather than dismissing these microprocesses or trying to shut them down as they emerge, the researcher tries to radically rethink the researching space and the role of the researching female adult-body in this event. Blaise experiments with a Deleuzian analysis of segmentary and micro-politics, and an analysis of relational materiality, in order to rethink gendered, aged and researching/researched bodies in this study. Gendered, aged and researching/researched bodies are understood not as discrete and separate entities, but as processes, constantly on the move

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and never complete. In the process of doing research, the event of participant observation becomes experimentation with relations in between bodies, where the developmental boundaries and binary segments that we use to define our bodies (such as adult/child, boy/girl, old/young, researcher/researched) are blurred and erased in transformative ways. In Lenz Taguchi’s study (2012), she states the need to install herself in the event of reading already collected data to become ‘minoritarian’ with the data (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). This is a relationship of nonhierarchical engagement, where the researcher imagines the intra-activity taking place between a boy, a boat and the water, described by a six-year-old boy declared by the adults to have social problems in an interview excerpt. ‘Installing oneself in the event’ and becoming-minoritarian – becoming-with the boy and the bark-boat in the data – makes it possible for the researcher to read with the data another reality: a reality where this particular boy isn’t simply judged by his (in) competence to form new friendships with other children, but also with his bark-boat. This is a reality that exists among the multiple realities being enacted in the thickness of an event of the real, but which has not been previously ‘disclosed’ (Hekman, 2010). This other reality that can be made visible in a post-interpretive new materialist analysis has not been disclosed, as Hultman and Lenz Taguchi (2010) note, because of our dominating and habitual styles of analysing data in most qualitative childhood studies. And this is, as Blaise (2013) states, because these studies are rooted in a developmentalism that aims to uncover a reductionist reality where the individual child can be ‘fixed’ and judged in relation to predetermined developmental standards. Contrary to this, the micro-political analysis of Blaise and the post-interpretive research practices of Lenz Taguchi are not just about being critical about such a reductionist reality, but about being engaged in active intervention and invention in the practice of doing

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research. Hence, new materialist analysis also aims to actively reshape early childhood environments of play and learning in ways that might increase children’s, as well as other agents’, power to act in these spaces. To summarize: the new materialist researcher is committed to an understanding of how we as researchers are responsibly engaged in shaping the future for humans, non-humans and the material environment in our production of knowledge (Barad, 2007), because productions of knowledge are always also productions of reality that will have specific material consequences (Hekman, 2010).

CONCLUSION The theory of ‘distributed cognition’, first formulated by Edwin Hutchins (1995), shows how knowledge from different disciplines can be intersected to create new knowledge that will transform the way we think about ourselves and how technologies around us will be constructed and function. For a pilot to fly a plane, he or she is totally dependent on artefacts and tools in the cockpit environment to ensure the plane’s functioning. It is not difficult to imagine how children, in similar ways, are totally dependent on things and artefacts for their learning, yet play and learning in a perspective of distributed cognition is so far under-researched and under-theorized in the field of early childhood. And yet such research has been going on for decades in other fields, not least in computer and technology studies, making possible new technological inventions, at a faster rate than ever, which shape and reshape our everyday life in what has been called a digital ecology. This chapter has tried to challenge dominant theorizing in the field of childhood play and learning in order to show why early childhood teachers and researchers might want to engage in new materialist studies of how matter matters in this field. The still emergent research presented above has shown how it is possible to ‘disclose’ another

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reality that is more inclusive and less hier­ archical in relation to all those various minoritarian material agents involved in our childhood practices. This kind of knowledge can, when put to work, increase not only children’s and adult practitioners’, but also a vast array of other non-human agents’, power to act in early childhood practices. These studies also show why attending to the material of children’s ‘common-worlds’ is of wider societal political and ethical concern, and that it also has impact on the research practices. The transdisciplinary character that research responding to the ‘material turn’ has taken so far in other scientific fields points to new, exciting possibilities for future research in the field of early childhood as well.

NOTES 1. In the field of childhood and early educational studies, a number of theories and pedagogical accounts would claim to have responded to the ‘material turn’ and the importance and impact of materiality in children’s play and learning: everything from ‘Neurodidactics’, ‘Cognitive Pedagogy’ and ‘Brain-Based Learning’, ‘Discovery Learning’, ‘Activity Theory’, ‘Social Development Theory’, ‘Affordance Theory’, ‘Social Semiotics’, ‘Multimodal Theory’ and ‘Lesson and Learning Studies’ to the pedagogical accounts of Maria Montessori, Waldorf and Reggio Emilia-inspired practices. 2. ‘Bodymind’ is a widely used concept that points to the fact that the mind and body are so closely linked that they can really be understood as an interdependent unit/body. The concept was, to my knowledge, first suggested in Merrell (2003).

REFERENCES Alaimo, Stacy and Hekman, Susan (eds) (2008) Material Feminisms. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Åsberg, Cecilia, Koobak, Redi and Johnson, Ericka (2011) ‘Beyond the humanist imagination’, NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, 19(4): 218–230. Barad, Karen (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Blaise, Mindy (2013) ‘Activating micropolitical practices in the early years: (Re)assembling bodies and participant

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observations’, in Rebecca Coleman and Jessica Ringrose (eds), Deleuze and Research Methodologies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Braidotti, Rosi (2013) The Posthuman. Cambridge Malden, MA: Polity Press. Colebrook, Claire (2002) Gilles Deleuze. London/New York: Routledge. Deleuze, G. (1994) Difference and Repetition. (Trans. Paul Patton.) New York: Colombia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles (1988) Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Dolphijn, Rick and van der Tuin, Iiris (2011) ‘Pushing dualism to an extreme: On the philosophical impetus of a new materialism’, Continental Philosophy Review, 44(4): 282–400. Dolphijn, R. and van der Tuin, I. (2012) New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. Duhn, Iris (2012) ‘Places for pedagogies, pedagogies for places’, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 13(2): 99–107. Gibson, James, J. (1977) ‘The theory of affordances’, in Robert Shaw and John Bransford (eds), Perceiving, Acting, and Knowing. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Pp. 67–82. Giugni, Miriam (2011) ‘“Becoming worldly with”: An encounter with the Early Years Learning Framework’, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 12(1): 11–27. Haraway, Donna J. (2008) When Species Meet. Minneapolis, MN/London: University of Minnesota Press. Hekman, Susan (2010) The Material of Knowledge. Feminist Disclosures. Bloomington, IA: Indiana University Press. Hird, Myra and Roberts, Celia (2011) ‘Feminism theorises the nonhuman’, Feminist Theory, 12(2): 109–117. Hultman, Karin (2011) ‘Making matter matter as a constitutive force in children’s subjectivities’, in ‘Barn, linjaler och andra aktörer: Posthumanistiska perspektiv på subjektsskapande och materialitet i förskola/ skola’ [Children, rulers and other actors: Posthuman perspectives on subjectivity and materiality in preschool/school]. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Department of Education, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden. Hultman, Karin and Lenz Taguchi, Hillevi (2010) ‘Challenging anthropocentric analysis of visual data: A relational materialist methodological approach to

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educational research’, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 23(5): 525–542. Hutchins, Edwin, L. (1995) ‘How a cockpit remembers its speed’, Cognitive Science, 19: 265–288. James, Allison and James, Adrian (2008) Key Concepts in Childhood Studies. London: Sage. Jones, Elizabeth (2013) ‘Children’s encounter with things: Schooling the body’, Qualitative Inquiry, 19(8): 604–610. Kress, Gunther, Jewitt, Carey, Ogborn, Jon and Tsatsarelis, Charalampos (2001) Multimodal Teaching and Learning: The Rhetorics of the Science Classroom. New York: Continuum International Publishing. Latour, Bruno (2013) An Inquiry into Modes of Existence. An Anthropology of the Moderns. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lee, Nick (2005) Childhood and Human Value: Development, Separation and Separability. New York: Open University Press. Lenz Taguchi, Hillevi (2012) ‘A diffractive and Deleuzian approach to analysing research data’, Feminist Theory, 13: 265–281. Lenz Taguchi, Hillevi (2010) Going Beyond the Theory/ Practice Divide in Early Childhood Education: Introducing an Intra-Active Pedagogy. Abingdon: Routledge. Lykke, Nina (2010) Feminist Studies. A Guide to Intersectional Theory, Methodology and Writing. Abingdon: Routledge.

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MacRae, Christina (2012) ‘Encounters with a life(less) baby doll: Rethinking relations of agency through a collectively lived moment’, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 13(2): 120–131. Merrell, Floyd (2003) Sensing Corporeally: Toward a Posthuman Understanding. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Palmer, Anna (2010) ‘“Let’s dance”: Theorising alternative mathematical practices in early childhood teacher education’, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 11(2): 130–143. Reggio Children (2008) Dialogues with Places. Municipality of Reggio Emilia, Italy: Reggio Children. Rossholt, Nina (2012) ‘Food as touch/touching the food: The body-in-place and out-of place in preschool’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 44(3): 323–334. Prout, Alan (2005) The Future of Childhood. London: Routledge Falmer. St. Pierre, Elizabeth, A. (2010) ‘Data analysis in qualitative research’. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Denver, CO. Taylor, Affrica and Giugni, Miriam (2012) ‘Common worlds: Reconceptualising inclusion in early childhood communities’, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 13(2): 108–119. Taylor, Affrica, Pacini-Ketchabaw, Veronica and Blaise, Mindy (2012) ‘Children’s relations to the more-than human world’, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 13(2): 81–85. van der Tuin, Iris and Rolphijn, Rick (2010) ‘The transversality of new materialism’, Women: A Cultural Review, 21(2): 153–171.

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8 Childhood Studies and Play Sue Saltmarsh

INTRODUCTION The field of childhood studies is generally considered to be a fairly recent development, emerging in the latter half of the twentieth century. However, issues concerning the nature of childhood, child-rearing practices, children’s health and education, and interests in the artefacts, activities and purposes of children’s play and everyday activities have been of interest to philosophers, theologians, historians, educators and political reformers for centuries (Frost, 2010). Mary Jane Kehily points out that ‘the study of children and childhood has been part of a diverse range of academic disciplines for a very long time’ (2009a: 1). Perhaps not surprisingly, then, a key feature of childhood studies today is the insistence by a number of its prominent scholars (see, for example, James and James, 2004; Kehily, 2003; Prout, 2005, 2011) that bringing these histories and knowledges together through interdisciplinary research approaches is a crucial means by which childhood as a conceptual, sociocultural,

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economic, juridical and political category can be better understood.

THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES: CHILDHOOD STUDIES, INTERDISCIPLINARITY AND CULTURAL POLITICS Theoretical and historical perspectives concerning the study of childhood are subject to ongoing debate, including criticisms levelled at what is often referred to in terms of the ‘new’ social studies of childhood. Critics such as Patrick Ryan contend that claims regarding a paradigm shift in the study of childhood are overstated, arguing that for centuries ‘philosophers, social scientists, and political theorists have not only discussed children at length but also centred their view of humanity and society on the possibilities of childhood’ (2008: 553). While a detailed analysis of these debates is beyond the scope of this chapter, it is acknowledged nonetheless that historical

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and social perspectives on childhood have ‘provided robust alternatives to the developmental psychology of the mid-twentieth century through their emphasis on culture, history, and subjectivity over biology, universality, and objectivity’ (Ryan, 2008: 564). It is through such perspectives that play will be discussed here – not as a biological, evolutionary or psychological phenomenon, but, rather, as a constellation of socially, culturally, historically and politically situated meaning-making practices. Throughout the chapter, the term ‘childhood studies’ is used as an umbrella term that encompasses research concerned specifically with children and childhood, including the ways in which childhood has come to be constructed as a social category. Some of the research discussed here can be classified as also belonging within other disciplinary domains, such as ‘sociology of childhood’ and ‘early childhood education’, that have their own specific orientations, agendas and concerns (Hutchby and MoranEllis, 1998; Stainton Rogers and Stainton Rogers, 1998; Stainton Rogers, 2009). Research from these fields has been denoted as such where practical as an aid to readers with more discipline-specific orientations and vocabularies. That notwithstanding, they are understood in this chapter as falling together under the rubric of childhood studies, which, as Kehily explains, can helpfully be understood as ‘an interdisciplinary focus or “meeting place”, a forum for critical analysis, research and debate’ (2009b: 31). This chapter locates children’s play in relation to a range of fields in which play makes an appearance in terms of its historical, educational and cultural significance. The chapter is situated within what James and James (2004) refer to as the ‘cultural politics of childhood’, which they see as being concerned with understanding firstly the ‘cultural determinants of childhood’, described as encompassing those factors that have an influence over children’s social status and positioning, as well as ‘the influences that children themselves might have over

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their position as children during childhood in any society’ (James and James, 2004: 7, original emphasis). A second feature of the cultural politics of childhood pertains to identifying the processes by which ‘cultural determinants and discourses are put into practice at any given time, in any given culture, to construct “childhood” in society’ (2004: 7). The third pertains to understanding children’s lives and, in particular, examining ‘the ways in which children themselves experience these cultural determinants, the processes of ordering and control and the regulatory framings of who they are’ (2004: 7). Understanding children’s play in an interdisciplinary sense requires engagement with matters such as these, in order to more fully appreciate play as situated in relation to and in dialogue with social factors and political forces, rather than as a matter pertaining solely to children’s individual or group activities per se. The following sections of this chapter begin with a brief overview of some of the key foci and debates within historical orientations to studies of childhood. While a detailed genealogy of childhood studies will not be undertaken here, it is important to acknowledge the significance of historical studies of childhood to the emergence and ongoing expansion of research focused on childhood as an object of enquiry in its own right. A considerable body of literature concerns itself with the history of children’s play, in some cases tracing the history of cultural objects such as dolls and toys and in others drawing on archival and other sources in order to piece together portraits of children’s everyday play in nurseries, homes, schools and communities, as well as in the natural world in different periods of history. Following this overview, the chapter moves on to consider contemporary issues and understandings of play as a site of children’s development, social experimentation and self-making. While play in the current era is often treated as a site of risk, moral regulation and social governance, the research literature (predominantly from the

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field of sociology of childhood) concerned with children’s rights, agency and quality of life also points out that play has other social functions, such as pleasure, enjoyment and agentive participation in the social world, to which children are entitled (MacNaughton, Hughes, and Smith, 2008; MacNaughton and Smith, 2009; Oswell, 2012; Page, 2008; Stainton Rogers, 2009). Recognizing and acknowledging young children’s situated competence and agency, as Hutchby and Moran-Ellis argue, ‘reveals a picture of childhood as a dynamic arena of social activity involving struggles for power, contested meanings and negotiated relationships’ (1998: 16). Research in the field of early childhood education has been particularly interested in play within these terms. Thus, while play as the object of research in historical, sociological and cultural studies of childhood has more typically focused on children of school age (ages 8 and above), the cultural politics of play in the early years has become a particular concern of researchers in the field of early childhood education. The final section of the chapter considers play from the perspectives of researchers with a particular interest in young children’s play, and the cultural politics of play as it is situated within the gendered social norms and institutional contexts of early childhood settings.

PLAY, FOLKLORE AND CHILDREN’S CULTURE: SOCIAL AND CULTURAL HISTORIES OF CHILDHOOD Social historians and folklorists in the midtwentieth century made a particularly significant contribution to understanding children’s play in cultural terms. During this period, scholars such as Dorothy Howard and Iona and Peter Opie were interested in the ways in which children’s rhymes, jingles, songs, games and stories could provide evidence of the culture and ‘folklife’ of children (Darian-Smith and Factor, 2006; Rosenberg, 2008). Studies in this oeuvre extensively

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documented the ways in which children themselves maintained everyday childhood culture through the repetition and circulation of songs, rhymes and folklore and participation in riddles, taunts and games that were distinct from adult life. Play in this sense is understood as part of an assemblage of cultural practices unique to children’s culture. The pioneering work of American folklorist Dorothy Howard in the post-war years made a valuable contribution to contemporary understandings of children’s folklore and its significance in children’s lives, and is credited with providing ‘the foundation for contemporary research on play’ (DarianSmith, 2010: 14). Howard spent a number of years as a language arts teacher in New York and New Jersey schools, during which time she devoted attention to collecting, and encouraging her students to record, the folklore of children’s play (Rosenberg, 2008). Howard later broadened her interests to the folk and playlore of children in other English-speaking countries and travelled to Australia in 1954 on a Fulbright postdoctoral scholarship, enabling her to extensively document children’s play in Australian schools (Darian-Smith and Factor, 2006; Tucker, 2008). She was particularly interested in documenting children’s perspectives on their games and play, finding that children’s ‘folklife… is accessible and organized according to a child’s system of rules, mores, and attitudes’ (Rosenberg, 2008: 373). As Darian-Smith points out, ‘Across widely played traditional games such as skipping and counting rhymes, hopscotch, string games and marbles, Howard found variations arising from gender, age, social class and cultural differences’ (2010: 1). Howard’s research in Australia traversed playgrounds around the country, demonstrating that Australian children sustained their own games and cultural traditions that were distinct from those of children elsewhere in the English-speaking world. Iona and Peter Opie were similarly researching children’s folklore in the UK during the same period, with findings from a

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study of 5000 children in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales published in 1959 in the best known of their works, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren. The Opies showed that unlike the rhymes and games learned by children in the nursery, and therefore generally learned from and sanctioned by adults, those learned from and circulated among other children are enjoyed in part because they are not intended for the scrutiny of adults. Songs, rhymes, skipping games and other schoolyard rituals are shown by the Opies to have been transmitted virtually unchanged across many generations of schoolchildren. They argue that ‘traditional games are known to city children as to country children; and… children with homes and backgrounds as different from each other as mining community and garden suburb share jokes, rhymes and songs, which are basically identical’ (Opie and Opie, 1959/2001: 3–4). Despite the continuities identified, they also document the extent to which children’s folklore and games in the UK ‘travelled’ – carried by children wherever they went and transmitted to distant relatives, new schoolmates and neighbourhood friends, who in turn incorporated them into their own cultural repertoires, adapting them to local circumstance and conventions. For instance: When a child newly arrives in a district any slang expression he knows, any jokes or tricks, or any new skipping or two-ball rhymes he brings with him, are eagerly listened to, and if found amusing, are added to the local repertoire, and may eventually supplant similar pieces of lore already known. (Opie and Opie, 1959/2001: 15)

Folklore studies such as these were highly influential, highlighting the richness and significance of the language, lore and play in children’s culture. An important contribution to social historical perspectives subsequently emerged in the work of Philippe Ariès in Centuries of Childhood (1962/1973), first published in English in 1962. Whereas folklorists of the previous decade had undertaken observational

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research and collected material from children themselves, Ariès turned to the historical record in order to make inferences about how the place of children and the significance of childhood had changed over time. Widely considered as a landmark text, Centuries of Childhood contributed significantly to establishing the history of childhood as a field of study (Dekker and Groenendijk, 2012; Hutton, 2004). While documenting the detail of children’s lives was not particularly new, Ariès’ work was novel in drawing attention to what the historical record could reveal about how childhood was understood and constructed as a social category. In particular, Ariés drew attention to the ways that representations of children in art, iconography and other historical texts could offer insights into the ‘sentiments’ of society in relation to children and childhood over time. He controversially argued that childhood did not exist during the middle ages, but, rather, had been ‘discovered’ and evolved as a category of social existence in accordance with a range of other social changes. Despite subsequent critiques (Ozment, 1983, 2001; Pollock, 1983; Stone, 1974), Centuries of Childhood remains highly influential for social historians and scholars of childhood, youth and family life (Ben-Amos, 1995; Dekker and Groenendijk, 2012; Hutton, 2004). With respect to children’s play, Ariès devoted an entire chapter to the history of games and pastimes. Drawing on diaries, images and other historical accounts, he argues that prior to the seventeenth century there were limited distinctions between the games, toys, amusements and play activities of children and those of adults. Certain toys and games were the special preserve of infancy, but after the age of about three or four, children and adults appear to have shared delight in similar toys, dolls and baubles. Similarly, children played games that advanced their skills in adult activities such as hunting and warfare, and generally took part in the same games as adults. Together with adults, children participated in community

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activities such as music, plays and dancing. They also took part in feast days and seasonal festivals that involved the whole community. They did so ‘on an equal footing with all the other members of society, and more often than not played a part in them that was reserved for them by tradition’ (Ariès, 1962/1973: 70). However, as the status of childhood gradually changed, Ariès observes that by 1600 ‘Childhood was becoming the repository of customs abandoned by the adults’ (1962/1973: 68), and games of old were relegated to the domain of ‘children’s games and popular amusements’ (91). As social sentiments regarding childhood continued to evolve, so too did the views of adult society concerning activities deemed suitable and necessary for children’s health and moral development. According to Ariès, children’s involvement in physical games in the eighteenth century was justified by new interests in bodily hygiene and exercise, while the rise of modern nationalism justified games involving drills and gymnastics in patriotic terms. By the nineteenth century, desires to safeguard and educate the morality of children distinctly forbade children’s participation in games and activities that had previously been considered acceptable. Games and forms of play and activities that had once been ‘common to all ages and classes’ gradually either disappeared or were transformed by distinctions ‘between children and adults, between lower class and middle class’ (Ariès, 1962/1973: 96–7). While not intended to provide a comprehensive genealogy, social and cultural studies of childhood play such as those discussed here have had broad influence across a range of disciplines concerned with the ways that childhood is both constructed and experienced. Studies of children’s folk- and playlore have extensively documented children’s cultures in ways that enable rich and nuanced accounts of historically situated everyday practices during key eras of social change. Social historical studies have added to this richness, considering how artefacts, images and documentary evidence of forms

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of play inform knowledge about changing social views and practices over time. Together, such studies have contributed greatly to understandings about the ways that childhood is situated in relation to broader social discourses and cultural practices. Building on the premise that the cultural politics of childhood concerns those factors or determinants (James and James, 2004) that shape, and are shaped by, constructions of childhood, childhood experience and children’s culture, the following section turns to a discussion of social changes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the subsequent contemporary issues that inform current thought and practice regarding children’s play.

SOCIAL CHANGE, CULTURAL POLITICS AND PLAY Nineteenth and twentieth centuries Sociocultural and historical approaches such as those outlined above contribute greatly to understandings of play and its purposes in particular historical and discursive contexts. Social change and cultural politics across the twentieth century, in particular, provide the backdrop for contemporary issues and concerns regarding childhood. As Marianne Bloch points out: The ways of reasoning that were fabricated from a complex amalgamation of different discursive languages and practices circulated broadly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as different ways of reasoning circulate today. In the past, and the present, the assemblage of discourses have influenced how we form our own subjectivities as well as how individuals, groups and nations, think about themselves and others (2006: 22).

Understanding discourses of childhood and the place of play in contemporary culture is greatly enhanced by consideration of the social changes and discursive histories of the preceding era. Earlier views and reasoning about a diverse range of issues – children’s

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health and development, their learning and perceived educational needs, their economic and emotional worth and the governance and organization of children’s time, to name but a few – continue to shape and impact upon play as one of many complex features of children’s lives today. In contexts of rapid and significant social and economic changes, attitudes toward play in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries underwent considerable transformation. In many parts of the world, the latter half of the nineteenth century witnessed the rise of industrialization and the rapid expansion of cities. This change brought with it exploitative and oppressive conditions that led churches, schools and civic organizations to form ‘child-saving’ movements aimed at ameliorating the often desperate plight of many children during this period (Frost, 2010). Such concerns were reflected, too, in popular and political spheres grappling with the changes associated with progress: Children’s lives began to be featured in fictional and social historical accounts of the early industrial period, notably in the novels and stories of Charles Dickens, often either as warnings about the brutality of industrialism or as indications of social progress achieved by the factory acts of the opening decades of the nineteenth century and the ‘free’ schooling acts of the later third (Kline, 1993: 47).

The commencement of the ‘Progressive Era’ just prior to the turn of the century saw the emergence of a range of social reforms and movements with a common goal ‘to improve conditions for children by providing organized opportunities, spaces, and playgrounds for their play, recreation, and learning while protecting them from crime, poverty, abuse, and illiteracy’ (Frost, 2010: 62). Middle-class attitudes towards play as a moral corrective for children of the working class, migrants, the poor and orphaned coincided with rising prosperity and changes to labour conditions during the early part of the twentieth century (McLeod, 1983). During

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this period, adult concerns about children’s moral development also saw play appropriated as a character-building enterprise. Character-building organizations such as Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, YMCA and Campfire Girls flourished, and were among the many programmes associated with social reforms of the period (Cavallo, 1981; Frost, 2010; McLeod, 1983). Organized recreation in the form of military drills and gymnastics became a substitute for the disciplinary influence of work, and ‘play became the proper work of children, promising moral benefits under proper supervision’ (McLeod, 1983: 19). Play during this period was also being shaped by improved social and economic conditions among the middle class. Working hours were lessened, resulting in more time for leisurely pursuits for adults and children alike, and children spent less time in work as mass education and child labour laws came into effect. Alongside more structured drills, exercises and activities of schooling and organized recreational activities, the development of an ‘imperial consciousness’ was encouraged through a variety of party and parlour games, home theatricals and improvisational play (Norcia, 2004). Although options were more limited for girls, both boys and girls took part in such activities, and girls themselves were conscripted into what Norcia refers to as ‘culture[s] of Empire’ (2004: 295) through the emphasis on girls’ play as a means of cultivating domestic usefulness. Cultural histories of specific objects and forms of play, such as Miriam FormanekBrunell’s consideration of dolls and American girlhood, have pointed out that by the mid-nineteenth century the ‘shift from household production to conspicuous consumption’ (1998: 8) was nonetheless accompanied by parenting discourses that urged mothers ‘to direct their children’s play toward useful ends’ (1998: 8). Play had come to be seen as a means of ‘natural training in the republican values [girls] would need as future wives and mothers of citizens’ (1998: 9). By the turn of the century, urban middle-class women were a significant

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group of consumers whose selection of dolls and toys for their daughters often reflected cultural ideals of beauty and middle-class social conventions and aspirations. Doll play became a means by which the rituals of ‘polite’ society could be rehearsed in both private and public domains. Economic sociologist Vivianna Zelizer (1985/1994, 2011) provides a detailed account of the ways in which emerging views of children’s economic worth have been implicated in the kinds of cultural shifts described by social historians of this period. The establishment of supervised playgrounds and specially designed recreational areas for children, clubs and programmes aimed at children’s safety education and public campaigns encouraging parents to provide increased supervision of their children outside the home and designated play spaces for them indoors were all part of a general emphasis on children’s safety. This emphasis accompanied the notion of the child as at once ‘sacred’ and ‘priceless’ (Zelizer, 1985/1994), as well as calculable in terms of their economic worth to families and the nation. The significance of childhood to the future of the nation’s well-being and prosperity was further supported by theories of education informed by the social and behavioural sciences (Jacobson, 2008), in which ‘teaching the whole child, knowledge of child development, individual differences, child study, and the values of free play’ (Frost, 2012: 118) were emphasized. Through such discursive lenses, childhood came to be viewed as an object of expert knowledge, through which it could in turn become the subject of governmentality:

While a detailed mapping of twentiethcentury events is beyond the scope of this chapter, it is worth noting that childhood and the nature of play continued to change with the advent of geopolitical and social changes. World War II, changes in family and social class structures, technological innovations, the renewed emphasis on education as a means of nation-building and the emergence of a global consumer economy (Fass and Grossberg, 2012; Mintz, 2012a, 2012b) all serve as reminders of Bloch’s contention that the ‘continuities and ruptures’ of periods and places enable us to understand the transformation of discursive language and practice across time and space (2006: 22). For the purposes of this chapter, play can thus be understood as historically and discursively situated in relation to both past and future. In the final section of the chapter, we turn towards some key twenty-first-century contexts of play, considering how social changes of our time contribute to contemporary discourses through which childhood and play are understood. In particular, the final section discusses how contemporary children’s play in social and educational contexts functions simultaneously as a site of social concern as well as a site of agentive possibility. Play, in other words, is taken to be an active and creative means by which young children participate in and contribute to the broader cultural politics of social life within which they are situated.

As the constructions of childhood and their relation to different forms of education played out in the early twentieth century, a focus on children’s biological, emotional, linguistic, and social development merged with the conception of a findable set of universal truths and predictable laws of child development that guide teachers and parents, doctors, and social workers in their work to characterize normal and ‘scientifically’ knowable (observable, testable) children (Bloch, 2006: 21–2, original emphasis).

Twenty-first-century contexts provide multiple sites for considering how normative discourses and practices of play are situated within a broader cultural politics of childhood. Just as play in preceding centuries can be understood as embedded within gendered, nation-building and economically inflected discourses of social life, so too play in twenty-first-century contexts is embedded

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within a similar range of contemporary discourses. Concerns about national economies in an era of neoliberal governance, globalization and the seemingly inexhaustible quest to maintain competitive advantage in the global marketplace have profoundly shaped the ways in which childhood – and in particular, childhood education – is now conceptualized, managed and scrutinized (Edwards and Usher, 2008; Rogers, 2011). Importantly, policy, pedagogy and culture intersect at the site of children’s play, which is increasingly pedagogized (Rogers, 2011), commodified (Kenway and Bullen, 2001) and taken up in everyday normative home and classroom practices (Saltmarsh, 2009). Such discourses and the ways in which they shape children’s experiences can differ widely between cultures (Tobin, Hsueh and Karasawa, 2009), but are nonetheless implicated in children’s meaning-making practices and subjectivity formations within their own cultural contexts. As Kerry Robinson points out, for children growing up today, ‘Negotiating normative life markers… is about negotiating powerful hegemonic social, political, economic and educational representations of measures of one’s personal and societal competency, worthiness and “normality”’ (2012: 112). These discourses structure and regulate all manner of power relations between children and peers, family members, educators and others. Recent perspectives on play in the early years of childhood (MacNaughton, 2005; Blaise, 2005; Jones-Diaz and Robinson, 2005; Robinson, 2012) therefore underscore the importance of understanding children’s play not only as subject to the social contexts and conditions within which they are situated, but also as a means of children’s participation in the production of contemporary culture and their implication in the operations of power. Such perspectives differ considerably from biological explanations that see play as a natural expression of innate characteristics and socialization explanations that see play as a means by which children adapt to, internalize, imitate and reproduce

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the skills and knowledges they encounter in the adult world. Instead, children are seen as active and creative agents ‘contributing to cultural production and change’ (Corsaro, 2005: 19, original emphasis). Of particular interest here is what Blaise refers to as ‘postdevelopmentalism’, or ‘theoretical perspectives that question modernist assumptions of truth, universality, and certainty’ (2005: 3). Informed by feminist poststructuralist theories of power, knowledge and subjectivity, such perspectives consider children’s play in terms of the way in which power operates in a range of early childhood settings. Building on earlier studies concerned with gender and power in early childhood educational settings and also in popular culture (see, for example, Davies, 1989; Walkerdine, 1991, 1997), ethnographers of early childhood have offered considerable insights into the ways in which children take up, police, resist and reconfigure dominant gendered, racial and heteronormative discourses in the course of everyday play (Blaise, 2005; Blaise, this volume; Robinson, 2002, 2005, 2012; Taylor, 2007). For these scholars, children’s play needs to be seen not merely as activities through which children learn about the social world but also as a means of actively negotiating the discourses within which they are situated and which in turn function as sites of subjection and agency. Through children’s play in the early childhood classroom, regimes of truth are often reiterated, gender and racial social orders are policed and unequal relations of power are enacted (MacNaughton 2005; Robinson 2002, 2005, 2012; Taylor, 2007). Games that involve dressing up, playing house and mock weddings, for example, have all been shown to be forms of play that normalize heterosexuality and gender stereotypes and that are used by some children as a form of boundary policing and what has been described as ‘category-maintenance work’ (Davies, 1989; Davies and Kasama, 2004). As Jo Ailwood argues, ‘These power relationships and actions function within and are dependent upon a field of regulated possibilities; that is

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there are a range of conditions of possibility that children and adults can and cannot draw upon to “do” school’ (2011: 20). This in turn has implications for the curricular, pedagogic and political dimensions of early childhood education. Play in these settings is an important means by which children’s curricular, agentive and relational learning intersects with the formation of children’s culture. In this respect, early childhood educators occupy pivotal, if at times contradictory, roles with respect both to children’s explorations of agency, autonomy and resistance to social norms as well as their socialization into them (Raino, 2008). This can present particular conundrums for the ways in which play in early childhood classrooms is understood and managed by educators. As Blaise points out in her analysis of preschool children’s games, ‘If… children are not only socialized into dominant gendered ways of behaving, but are active in and through their own culture of creating particular gendered social orders, then teachers have to rethink their actions in the classroom’ (2005: 30). However, what Raino describes as a ‘dilemmatic relation between agency and control’ (2008: 120) in early childhood classrooms can make transformative agendas difficult to accomplish. Similarly, teachers are themselves situated by and implicated in gender and racial social orders and discursive regimes that pose additional challenges to maintaining critically aware classrooms that create safe environments for interrogating taken-for-granted norms. Robinson’s recent work on ‘difficult’ knowledges pertaining to gender, sexuality and sexual citizenship (2012) highlights the extent to which educational institutions function (and are expected to function) in regulating the kinds of information that children have access to. There can be substantial risks in attempting to disrupt dominant discourses that hold powerful sway in contemporary thinking about children and childhood. Discourses of childhood innocence and naïveté, for example, can be powerfully challenged when children engage

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with ‘difficult’ and ‘subjugated’ knowledges (Robinson, 2013) and, as Robinson observes, ‘Moral panic often prevails when normative values, especially heteronormative values, are transgressed’ (2012: 110). Yet play is an important means by which necessary challenges to discriminatory and exclusionary norms can be explored and enacted. Importantly, Osgood argues for the need to recognize the damaging aspects of insisting on childhood as innocent of such norms, suggesting that in so doing ‘adults deny subjective experiences of racism and other forms of prejudice that are often commonplace’ (2012: 68). Indeed, MacNaughton offers a description of early childhood educators’ efforts to disrupt dominant discourses of gender and race in the classroom as ‘risky and uncertain’, acknowledging that it is not possible to ‘guarantee the effects or outcomes of “playing it otherwise” or in attempting to play “another game”’ (2005: 54). Again, such risks do not occur inside a vacuum, but, rather, intersect with the broader cultural politics through which childhood – hence social institutions such as ‘the family’ or ‘the nation’ – continue to be constituted as in some way under threat (Davies and Robinson, 2013). Despite potential risks, however, the literature supports new approaches that move beyond the outdated developmental and socialization discourses, seeing this as necessary if children’s learning and play are to be and become sites of equitable and transformative social engagement.

CONCLUSION This chapter has discussed a wide range of cultural perspectives that see play not as a biological, evolutionary or psychological phenomenon, but rather as a constellation of socially, culturally, historically and politically situated meaning-making practices. Despite contemporary moral panics and discourses of risk, Mintz (2012a) takes the view that while social and historical change has a clear impact on the nature of children’s

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play, it is important to avoid overstating perceived negative impacts: Children’s play, despite changes in form, remains what it has always been: a way for kids to hone their physical skills, nourish their imagination, rehearse adult roles, conquer their fears, and achieve a sense of mastery. It still provides a space where children can learn to interact with others and formulate and follow rules. What has changed are the social and cultural contexts in which children play – as well as the future for which children are preparing themselves (50).

In methodological terms, the subjective, cultural and political implications of childhood as it is currently constructed suggest that researching play now, perhaps more than at any other time, necessitates interdisciplinary approaches. Understanding children’s play involves engaging with its complex relationships to other dimensions of social life, including the cultural politics through which children’s worlds are determined, ordered and experienced (James and James, 2004). Across a range of disciplinary concerns, the ‘folklife’, language, games, play objects and lore of children’s culture have been shown to be neither innocent of nor fully subordinate to broader social norms. Indeed, it is through play in its many forms that children exercise agency, experiment with and pose challenges to dominant discourses, contribute to cultural production and position themselves in relation to the broader politics within which they are always already situated. Understanding play, in other words, requires more than merely documenting and describing objects and activities within narrowly prescribed domains of enquiry. Instead, it involves dialogues between play, its engagement with normative regimes of gender, race and other identity categories and its positionings within and contribution to the cultural politics of childhood and of nations. For this reason, the interdisciplinarity of approaches brought together under the broad rubric of childhood studies offers exciting possibilities for attending to the nuances and complexities of play in children’s culture,

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and for better understanding the connections between the social, economic and political factors that together shape contemporary discourses of childhood.

REFERENCES Ailwood, J. (2011) It’s about power: researching play, pedagogy and participation in the early years of school, in S. Rogers (ed.) (2011) Rethinking Play and Pedagogy in Early Childhood Education: Concepts, Contexts and Cultures. Abingdon: Routledge. pp. 19–31. Ariès, P. (1962/1973) Centuries of Childhood. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books (first published in English in 1962 by Jonathan Cape). Ben-Amos, I. K. (1995) ‘Adolescence as a cultural invention: Philippe Ariès and the sociology of youth’, History of the Human Sciences, 8(2): 69–89. Blaise, M. (2005) Playing It Straight: Uncovering Gender Discourses in the Early Childhood Classroom. Abingdon: Routledge. Bloch, M. (2006) ‘Educational theories and pedagogies as technologies of power/knowledge: educating the young child as a citizen of an imagined nation and world’, in M. Bloch, D. Kennedy, T. Lightfoot and D. Weyenberg (eds), The Child in the World/The World in the Child: Education and the Configuration of a Universal, Modern and Globalized Childhood. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 21–42. Cavallo, D. (1981) Muscles and Morals: Organized Playground and Urban Reform, 1880-1920. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Corsaro, W. A. (2005) The Sociology of Childhood. (2nd ed.) Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Darian-Smith, K. (2010) ‘Children’, Sydney Journal, 2(2): 1–15. Darian-Smith, K. and Factor, J. (eds) (2006) Child’s Play: Dorothy Howard and the Folklore of Australian Children. Melbourne: Museum Victoria. Davies, B. (1989) Frogs and Snails and Feminist Tales: Gender and Preschool Children. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Davies, B. and Kasama, H. (2004) Japanese Preschool Children and Gender: Frogs and Snails and Feminist Tales in Japan. New York: Hampton Press. Davies, C. and Robinson, K. H. (2013) ‘Reconceptualising family: negotiating sexuality in a governmental climate of neoliberalism’, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 14(1): 39–53.

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Dekker, J. J. H. and Groenendijk, L. F. (2012) ‘Philippe Ariés’s discovery of childhood after fifty years: the impact of a classic study on educational research’, Oxford Review of Education, 38(2): 133–47. Edwards, R. and Usher, R. (2008) Globalisation and Pedagogy: Space, Place and Identity. Abingdon: Routledge. Fass, P. and Grossberg, M. (eds) (2012) Reinventing Childhood After World War II. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Formanek-Brunell, M. (1998) Made to Play House: Dolls and the Commercialization of American Girlhood 1830–1930. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Frost, J. L. (2010) A History of Children’s Play and Play Environments: Toward a Contemporary Child-Saving Moment. Abingdon: Routledge. Frost, J. L. (2012) ‘The changing culture of play’, International Journal of Play, 1(2): 117–30. Hutchby, I. and Moran-Ellis, J. (eds) (1998) Children and Social Competence: Arenas of Action. London: Falmer Press. Hutton, P. H. (2004) Philippe Ariès and the Politics of French Cultural History. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Jacobson, L. (ed.) (2008) Children and Consumer Culture in American Society: A Historical Handbook and Guide. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers. James, A. and James, A. L. (2004) Constructing Childhood: Theory, Policy and Social Practice. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Jones-Diaz, C. and Robinson, K. (2005) Difference and Diversity in Early Childhood: Issues for Theory and Practice. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Kehily, M. J. (ed.) (2003) An Introduction to Childhood Studies. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Kehily, M. J. (2009a) ‘Understanding childhood: an introduction to some key themes and issues’, in M. J. Kehily (ed.), An Introduction to Childhood Studies. (2nd ed.) Maidenhead: Open University Press. pp. 1–16. Kehily, M. J. (ed.) (2009b) An Introduction to Childhood Studies. (2nd ed.) Maidenhead: Open University Press. Kenway, J. and Bullen, E. (2001) Consuming Children: Education-Entertainment-Advertising. Buckingham: Open University Press. Kline, S. (1993) Out of the Garden: Toys and Children’s Culture in the Age of TV Marketing. London: Verso. MacNaughton, G. (2005) Doing Foucault in Early Childhood Studies: Applying Poststructural Ideas. Abingdon Routledge. MacNaughton, G. and Smith, K. (2009) ‘Children’s rights in early childhood’, in M. J. Kehily (ed.), An

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Introduction to Childhood Studies. (2nd ed.) Maidenhead: Open University Press. pp. 161–77. MacNaughton, G., Hughes, Patrick and Smith, Kylie (ed.) (2008) Young Children as Active Citizens: Principles, Policies and Pedagogies. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. McLeod, D. (1983) Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA, and Their Forerunners, 1870–1920. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Mintz, S. (2012a) ‘The changing face of children’s culture’, in P. Fass and M. Grossberg (eds), Reinventing Childhood After World War II. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. pp. 38–50. Mintz, S. (2012b) ‘Why the history of childhood matters’, The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 5(1): 15–28. Norcia, M. A. (2004) ‘Playing Empire: children’s parlor games, home theatricals, and improvisational play’, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 29(4): 294–314. Opie, I. and Opie, P. (1959/2001) The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren. New York: New York Review of Books. Osgood, J. (2012) Narratives from the Nursery: Negotiating Professional Identities in Early Childhood. Abingdon: Routledge. Oswell, D. (2012) The Agency of Children: From Family to Global Human Rights. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Ozment, S. E. (1983) When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ozment, S. E. (2001) Ancestors: The Loving Family in Old Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Page, J. (2008) ‘Rethinking citizenship from the perspectives of four and five year old children’s experiences of being happy’, in G. MacNaughton, P. Hughes and K. Smith (eds), Young Children as Active Citizens: Principles, Policies and Pedagogies. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. pp. 226–36. Pollock, L. A. (1983) Forgotten Children: Parent–Child Relations from 1500 to 1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Prout, A. (2005) The Future of Childhood: Towards the Interdisciplinary Study of Children. London: RoutledgeFalmer. Prout, A. (2011) ‘Taking a step away from modernity: reconsidering the new sociology of childhood’, Global Studies of Childhood, 1(1): 4–14. Raino, A. P. (2008) ‘From resistance to involvement: imagining agency and control in a playworld activity’, Mind, Culture and Activity, 15(2): 115–40.

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Robinson, K. H. (2002) ‘Making the invisible visible: gay and lesbian issues in early childhood education’, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 3(3): 415–34. Robinson, K. H. (2005) ‘“Queerying” gender: heteronormativity in early childhood education’, Australian Journal of Early Childhood, 30(2): 19–28. Robinson, K. H. (2012) ‘Childhood as a “queer time and space”: Alternative imaginings of normative markers of gendered lives’, in K. H. Robinson and C. Davies (eds), Queer and Subjugated Knowledges: Generating Subversive Imaginaries. Bentham eBooks. pp. 110–39. Robinson, K. H. (2013) Innocence, Knowledge and the Construction of Childhood: The Contradictory Nature of Sexuality and Censorship in Children’s Contemporary Lives. Abingdon: Routledge. Rogers, S. (ed.) (2011) ‘Pedagogy and play: A conflict of interests?’, in S. Rogers (ed.), Rethinking Play and Pedagogy in Early Childhood Education: Concepts, Contexts and Cultures. Abingdon: Routledge. pp. 5–18. Rosenberg, J. (2008) ‘Child’s play: Dorothy Howard and the folklore of Australian children (Review)’, Journal of American Folklore, 121(481): 372–4. Ryan, P. J. (2008) ‘How new is the “new” social study of childhood? The myth of a paradigm shift’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 38(4): 553–76. Saltmarsh, S. (2009) ‘Becoming economic subjects: agency, consumption and popular culture in early childhood’, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 30(1): 47–59.

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Stainton Rogers, W. (2009) ‘Promoting better childhoods: constructions of child concern’, in M. J. Kehily (ed.), An Introduction to Childhood Studies. Maidenhead: Open University Press. pp. 141–61. Stainton Rogers, R. and Stainton Rogers, W. (1998) ‘Word children’, in K. Lesnik-Oberstein (ed.), Children in Culture: Approaches to Childhood. New York: St. Martin’s Press, pp. 178–203. Stone, L. (1974) ‘The massacre of the innocents’, New York Review of Books, 21, 14 November 25–31. Taylor, A. (2007) ‘Bringing the elsewhere home: dragkids and queer belongings’, in J. Butler and B. Davies (eds) Judith Butler in Conversation: Analyzing the Texts and Talk of Everyday Life. New York: Routledge. pp. 195–216. Tobin, J., Hsueh, Y. and Karasawa, M. (2009) Preschool in Three Cultures Revisited: China, Japan and the United States. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Tucker, E. (2008) Children’s Folklore: A Handbook. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Walkerdine, V. (1991) Schoolgirl Fictions. London: Verso. Walkerdine, V. (1997) Daddy’s Girl: Young Girls and Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Zelizer, V. (1985/1994) Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Zelizer, V. (2011) Economic Lives: How Culture Shapes The Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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9 Ethical Dimensions and Perspectives on Play Susan Grieshaber and Felicity McArdle

INTRODUCTION A familiar way of understanding and defining what is meant by play is to define what play is not. At first glance, many people see play as ‘not work’, ‘not mature’, ‘not serious’, ‘not learning’. This binary logic works as a means for organising, categorising and ordering knowledge in neat oppositional terms, such as good/bad, right/wrong, appropriate/ inappropriate. This means of imposing order on thought is a powerful way of making sense of the world, and can work as a takenfor-granted truth. Enlightenment or modernist ways of seeing and knowing separate play from work, teaching from learning, adult from child, individual from group. Modernist approaches also establish a dualism in regard to ethics: things are ethical and meet the ethical code or standard or they do not. Indeed, a list can be drawn up, categorising behaviours and practices and delineating the ethical in each situation. The trouble with this type of reasoning is that it sets up practices that can both enable and constrain what

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teachers and children do on a daily basis in early learning settings. Modernist understandings about ethics and morality come from the influential philosopher Emmanuel Kant. Tronto explains that ‘Kant’s notions of ethics set the boundaries… around morality as an autonomous sphere of human life… morality consists of a set of principles that are universalizable, impartial, concerned with describing what is right’ (1993: 27). This is a one-size-fits-all approach, where normalised categories of right and wrong are used to judge all, with no consideration of different contexts or circumstances. As Kohn (1997) suggested in his critique of character education programmes, the focus is the right answer and what ‘should’ be done. A universal approach to ethics pervades much policy and practice in early childhood education, where there is a ‘search… for universal codes that will govern practice and evaluation’ (Dahlberg and Moss, 2005: 67). Universal codes require no ‘active ethical practice’ (68). Instead, an ‘active technical practice’ (68) or technical

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compliance with a pre-established code is all that is required, divesting educators and children of any chance to engage with the often ambiguous nature of ethical dilemmas. Developmental theories have long not only framed ways of seeing children, childhood, learning, assessment, early childhood settings and so on, but also shaped ways of interacting with children and the ways children come to understand themselves. Particular economic and political conditions operate in conjunction with the discourse of developmental psychology – what Dahlberg and Moss describe as a ‘positivistic and empirical-analytical paradigm’ (2005: vi). This paradigm characterises modernity because scientific knowledge is the basis for claims of objectivity, certainty and mastery and the rationale for the universal application of ideas and processes (Dahlberg and Moss, 2005). It uses technologies as a solution for the problems of society in a much more calculating way than was evident in earlier discourses of education. A scientific, developmental approach to ethics is a perfect fit with approaches to education that are steeped in the same discourses. In recognition of the many other ways of being with children, philosophers, postmodern theorists and researchers have called for a shift from modernist conceptions of children, childhood and ways of being in, understanding and operating on the world. These points of departure raise questions about the neatness of binary logic, recognise the competence of children and their capacities, understand children as relational rather than individual entities and acknowledge that complexity and diversity are important elements of everyday life (the condition of postmodernity). In light of these philosophical and theoretical shifts, we investigate some of these different ways of thinking about self and care of the self and relate these ideas to how play might provide a means for children to form ethical selves. We consider how teachers might engage in ethical pedagogies that incorporate a play perspective. And, because of the direction of some recent

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research, we use ethics as a way to think about relationships and learning.

MODERNIST APPROACHES TO ETHICS, MORALITY AND PLAY Historically, kindergartens and schooling were charged with the moral education of children, in preparing them to mature into adults who were expected to meet society’s codes of behaviour – a process of social reproduction. At the same time, children have also been seen as ‘hope for the future’, and so moral education aimed at making the world a better place through social production (Fromberg and Williams, 1992), social reform or social engineering. It is rare to see ethics discussed in any teacher texts in the same context as strategies for fostering play. Ethics and moral education seem to fall on the opposite side of the play binary, presumably because they are considered too important and serious to be left to play. Ethics is usually positioned as a separate matter to children’s play, and as something that requires the teacher to step in, intervene and problem-solve for the children. Commonly accepted moral development theories, for example those of Piaget (1965), Kohlberg (1984) and Hoffman (2000), position children as both vulnerable and immature, not yet moral and ethical. Adult attitudes that are shaped by these assumptions generally consider young children too egocentric to empathise with others and in need of being taught how to behave morally and ethically. When children exhibit unacceptable behaviours like racism or sexism, adult responses might range from a benevolent refusal to see (‘they’re just being children’) to a fear of the uncivilised potential in all children such as is shown in Golding’s (1954) novel Lord of the Flies, and a need to step in, intervene and assert order and control. Benevolent and romantic notions of children as free and innocent constrain teachers who choose not to intervene in children’s play, and position adults

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as not playing, disconnected and superior (Edmiston, 2008). In classrooms based on democratic principles, a common activity at the beginning of the school year is for a set of class ‘rules’ to be composed by the teacher and children together. Children are expected to know the rules, and teachers deliver and regulate these rules and codes of conduct. In most early years programmes, attention is generally drawn to ethics and morals when a ‘situation’ arises, such as a quarrel, injury or misdemeanour. In such instances, the teacher assumes the superior position and knowledge, and enforces the right or correct behaviour. The rules are referred to, explanations made, conflict mediated. The assumption is that most dilemmas can be solved by referring to the rules. However, both Kohn (1997) and Edmiston (2008) argue that traditional theories of ethics can mask power relationships. Moralising adults can use their power over children to tell them how to behave: ‘Use your words’; ‘You can’t say you can’t play’ (Paley, 1993). Even when they act with the best of intentions, teachers are often unaware that their beliefs about right and wrong are ‘ideologies constructed and then regulated within institutional and relational power structures that most often privilege and benefit some people and not others’ (Edmiston, 2008: 15). Sometimes these ideologies are so entrenched that they are understood as ‘truths’, and to take these rules away can be quite unsettling. Consider for example why the teacher always has ‘the last word’ in arbitrating a dispute, or why physical harm is forbidden but using words to establish and maintain power imbalances is modelled and taught. The temptation is to retreat to the tried and true codes (Olsson, 2009). Similarly, professional codes of ethics or codes of conduct cover every possible ethical dilemma that might arise. It is supposedly a simple matter for teachers to refer to the code of ethics for the answer to the right way to behave. When moral and ethical values are taught explicitly in school classrooms, programmes generally position character as a ‘complex

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set of psychological characteristics that enable an individual to act as a moral agent’ (Berkowitz and Bier, 2004: 73). Commonly held ideas about what constitutes ethical behaviour include fairness, active community participation, empathy and respect. The idea of ethics is frequently intertwined, both in popular consciousness and in academia, with morality. Ethical and/or moral behaviour involves such things as caring (Derman-Sparks, 1993; Noddings, 2002), empathy, sympathy and justice (Kristjansson, 2004), as well as honesty, generosity, kindness, freedom, courage, respect, equality and good citizenship (Berkowitz and Bier, 2005). Therefore ethical and moral behaviour involves ideas about what it means to be a ‘good person’ in society. Knowledge of ethics and what constitutes ‘good character’ invariably influences the way ethics is taught or fostered in children. An implicit assumption in much research on ethics is that ethical ideas and ethical behaviour can be fostered in, or indeed taught to, children. The pedagogical approach might be behaviourally based, whereby morality is taught via character training including modelling, punishment, reward and explanation. The belief here is that we become brave or kind by being brave or kind (Edmiston, 2008), so teachers require certain behaviours of children such as taking turns, using a quiet voice and not fighting. Or teachers may take a cognitively based approach, teaching morality via increasingly complex problem setting and solving (Rose, 1992). The idea is that, with the right teaching, children can learn to behave ethically and morally (Kohn, 1997). But this idea is prefaced on an unquestionable acceptance of principles of maturation: children are seen as ‘not-adult’ individuals at the start of a long march toward a mature application of universal ethical principles (Edmiston, 2008: 276). Evaluative research suggests that pedagogical strategies of direct and interactive teaching and modelling/mentoring can be effective (Berkowitz and Bier, 2005). However, these approaches tend to focus on

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the difference between right and wrong and endorse the idea that most problems can be ‘covered’ and indeed solved. The character education movement (Lickona, 1991) and its methods of teaching moral and ethical behaviour have produced positive and desired outcomes, although these programmes are primarily aimed at children in the years of formal schooling and are not easily transferable to early childhood education. The applicability of character education programmes to early childhood settings is rarely discussed and the approach is not without its critics. Kohn (1997), for example, questions the blurring of ethics and morals as well as the methods utilised in popular character education programmes in schools in the United States. He challenges the approach of many of the programmes that choose to focus on, and thus assign blame to, the perceived shortcomings of the individual over broader social and cultural issues that affect moral and ethical behaviour, such as high levels of poverty in specific populations that may exert an influence over criminal behaviour. He also questions the underlying assumptions of such programmes – for example, that children are born morally and ethically deficient and thus require ‘fixing’ – as well as the ultimate goal of the programmes, which is often to instil obedient behaviour in children rather than encouraging them to become active, democratic and empathetic members of their communities. Furthermore, Kohn highlights the unquestioning acceptance of the type of values that are taught within the programmes, including valuing the ‘right’ answer over an awareness of the often ambiguous nature of ethical dilemmas, and the methods employed to teach them, such as rote memorisation. Kohn’s critique goes to the heart of modernist understandings about ethics and morality.

ETHICS AND CURRICULUM GUIDES Recently developed curriculum and learning guides have acknowledged the place of ethics

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in programmes for young children. The revised Swedish Curriculum for the Preschool (Skolverket: Swedish National Agency for Education, 2010) provides an explicit link to ethics. Like the previous version, ethics and ethical behaviour appear in the first section and fundamental values are outlined. The curriculum explicitly relates these values to ethical behaviour and attitudes, and highlights the importance of adults: The foundation on which these values rests expresses the ethical attitude that should characterise all preschool activity. Care and consideration towards other people, justice and equality and the rights of each individual shall be emphasised and made explicit in all preschool activities. Children assimilate ethical values and norms primarily through their concrete experiences. The attitudes of adults influence the child’s understanding and respect for the rights and obligations that apply in a democratic society. For this reason adults serve an important role as models (3).

This excerpt endorses developmental approaches because children are positioned as assimilating values and norms (rather than explicitly learning) and the importance of adults is understood in terms of role models, which is a passive approach, as no active teaching or child agency is suggested. Both are indicative of a belief in a process of osmosis and belie the importance of teaching and learning. However, the document offers more hope that children will have opportunities to engage with ethical dilemmas in another section, which states that the ‘work team should… emphasise and approach the problems involved in ethical dilemmas and questions of life’ (9). In contrast to the explicit links to ethics in the Swedish preschool curriculum, the recently amended Norwegian Framework Plan for the Content and Tasks of Kinder­ gartens (Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research, 2011) relates ethics primarily to behaviour and attitudes expressed by staff. This includes responding to children in professional and ethical ways, the professional ethical obligation that staff have to provide care and the ethical perspective to be used in

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documenting children’s play, learning and work. The curriculum does not specifically address the idea of children becoming ethical beings; however, it does specify that ‘children must be given challenges, opportunities to develop knowledge and skills and support in order to act with compassion and care and make choices based on an ethical foundation (2011: 13). Thus, while the curriculum does not explicitly address the ethical development of children, it does stress that ‘ethics, religion and philosophy affect our values and attitudes, and help to shape the way in which we perceive and understand the world and human beings’ (38). The onus is on staff to act ethically and provide opportunities for children to learn to do the same. The Hong Kong Guide to the Pre-primary Curriculum (Curriculum Development Council, 2006) encourages child-centredness and learning through play and establishes ethics as an aim of education: ‘to enable every person to attain all-round development in the domains of ethics, intellect, physique, social skills and aesthetics…’ (18). However, fostering ethical attitudes and behaviour in children is not explicitly addressed, as the learning objectives do not include any reference to developing ethical identities or acting ethically. The appendix includes a proposed set of values and attitudes that could be considered ethical, such as equality, justice and respect for fair play. It includes values associated with Confucian heritage (such as modesty, perseverance, valuing the common good), but they are not referred to as ethical values. The Guide states that developing ethical behaviour is a core aim, but does not suggest approaches for achieving this. The emphasis is on guiding the conduct of the curriculum in individual sites. Fung and Lee (2008) question whether preschool teachers in Hong Kong have beliefs and practices that are compatible with the child-centred and play-based approaches encouraged in the Guide. Being, Belonging and Becoming: The Early Years Learning Framework for Australia (Australian Government Department of Education, Employment and Workplace

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Relations [DEEWR], 2009) is the first national learning framework for children from birth to five years. This mandated document contains wording that connects play overtly with aspects of ethical behaviour: educators can ‘provide opportunities for children to investigate ideas, complex concepts and ethical issues that are relevant to their lives and their local communities’ (2009: 26). In the context of the rest of the document, this statement implies that ethical awareness and understanding can be encouraged or taught through play. The importance of fostering ethical ideas and behaviour is present throughout the Framework but not expanded in depth. The English Statutory Framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage (Department for Education, 2012) does not explicitly address the issue of ethical behaviour and attitudes of children. However the supporting document, Development Matters in the Early Years Foundation Stage (Early Education: The British Association for Early Childhood Education, 2012), does mention developing ethical behaviour, although it is not explicitly related to the idea of ethics. This document suggests that as children get older (aged 40 to 60 months) it is appropriate to talk about fair and unfair situations, children’s ideas about fairness and how things can be made fair. Like the Australian Framework, staff are advised to be alert to injustices and show children how these are addressed and resolved, as well as to make time to listen to children with respect and kindness, showing that they will be listened to if they raise injustices. While the Norwegian and English documents do not address issues of ethical behaviour or attitudes in a holistic and explicit manner (like the Swedish curriculum), they do outline methods to encourage children to take the perspective of others, which relates to ideas about developing children’s ethical identities (e.g. Edmiston, 2008). The Norwegian curriculum specifies: ‘By playing pretend, children enter their own imaginative worlds, see other

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people’s perspectives and give shape to their thoughts and feelings’ (28). The English Statutory Framework contains similar ideas about encouraging children to think about issues from viewpoints other than their own. However, the daily work of educators makes the difference between curriculum guides and realising potentialities – that is, providing possibilities for entering imaginative worlds and being able to see other perspectives.

ETHICS, PLAY AND PEDAGOGIES Understanding ethics as care of self, and understanding self as a more complex concept than a single, autonomous individual, has led to alternative thinking about ethical dimensions of children’s play. Moves away from a model of teaching and learning built on ideas of the individual child have particular significance for ethics and play, and have emerged in a number of contexts. For instance, Edmiston (2010b) refers to coauthoring as an inter-relational strategy. Similarly, Kolbe (2007) discusses the role of co-artist as teacher and children together create and imagine. And before this, Bruce (1997) argued that the role of adults in play is observation, support and ‘extending appropriately’ (i.e. developing play together). An essential element of play that encourages ethical development is the involvement of adults, whether they are parents or teachers (Kristjansson, 2004; Wilson, 2007). A problem in contemporary discourses of play is the separation of children’s play from the adult world (Ailwood, 2003). The assumption is that children’s play has no importance or applicability to the world of adulthood. However, to Olsson (2009), adults are an essential element of play that in turn encourages ethical thinking. They can become involved through constructing problems and possibilities, not by regulating but, rather, through anticipating potentialities. Olsson describes ethical ways for teachers and children to listen, and frames these as pedagogical

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strategies for interrelationships and recognising the group rather than for children as individuals. By themselves, children rarely engage in evaluation of their own deeds in play (Edmiston, 2010b). But when adults join play with children, they are able to add their own ethical identities, including ethical actions and evaluations, to the resources available for play scenarios, thus creating spaces for contemplating ethical actions and approaches. It is important that adults assist and encourage children to construct ethical identities in play situations rather than viewing themselves as possessors of absolute knowledge. Superhero play is a specific example of dramatic play that has drawn attention from different schools of thought. Although not without its critics (e.g. Carlsson-Paige and Levin, 1995), superhero/mythic play can be useful in fostering ethical ideas. Bauer and Dettore (1997) maintain that play is important for social–emotional development because it helps young children develop concepts of right and wrong, a binary interpretation of ethics. They claim that early childhood educators can utilise superhero characters to illustrate these ethical points of view. Similarly, they argue that dramatic play can provide opportunities to explore different interpretations of play themes, thus influencing cognitive development and the ability to adopt perspectives of others and explore differing consequences of action – all qualities that are important when considering ethics. Critics object to the power issues in goodguys/bad-guys play (see Holland, 2003). There is an irony in suggesting that in teaching children to develop understandings of ethics, it is the teachers who impose their moral/ethical stance from the start. Teachers decide what is appropriate for play and what is not. That is, playing ‘tea parties’ is appropriate, while playing with ‘guns’ is not. Alternatively, teachers can enable superhero play, which provides opportunities for girls to experience being powerful in ways that might not otherwise be available. For instance, teachers have constructed pretend

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superhero play that attended to gender issues (denoting a ‘Batwoman’ as well as a ‘Batman’), in which both girls and boys explored ideas and assumptions regarding gender (Marsh, 2000). Although there were differences within the gendered superhero discourses (such as the type of heroic acts in which ‘Batwoman’ or ‘Batman’ engaged), disturbing the masculine nature of the superhero discourse along with presenting a positive image of women as active agents allowed girls access to this type of play. Furthermore, several of the (male) children demonstrated an understanding of gender issues: when asked why the play area belonged to Batwoman as well as Batman, they replied ‘So that girls would have a turn’; ‘Cos if it’s just Batman, they’d think, “I can’t do it’”, and ‘They’d think it’s not for girls’ (210). Here the teacher’s active listening and pedagogy worked alongside children’s play to support the development of ideas around ethics, gender and power relationships. Nevertheless, superhero and other roughand-tumble play can prevail as a means of gender differentiation, and privilege ‘language-based’ play over other (noisier) forms of play. Later, we discuss the modernist ‘rules’ approach to ethics and how an ethicoaesthetic approach (Olsson, 2009) provides alternatives and is more complex than simply reversing who gets to play what. Since learning to be ethical requires imagination to consider the effect of actions, dramatic play lets children practise using their imagination and adopt multiple positions to explore ethical issues such as racism, sexism and discrimination (Edmiston, 2010a). Combining imaginative play-worlds and realistic problem-solving in the form of narrative learning (see Hakkarainen, 2008; Hakkarainen and Bredikyte, this volume) has served as a basis for cognitive learning, and differs significantly from more traditional understandings of learning. Winston (1999) advocates a more formalised use of drama in schools to explore and encourage ethical behaviour, based primarily on using narratives (see also O’Toole and

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Dunn, 2002). However, he is careful to make a distinction between drama that merely re-enacts scripts and thus enforces the moral agenda of the teacher, and drama that enables exploration and debate of issues that impact morality and ethics. Although drama such as this may be more applicable to school than preschool settings, the benefits of exploring ethical issues are extolled by these researchers. Rather than posing abstract questions and dilemmas, play provides opportunities for players to take on another’s perspective imaginatively. Gee (2003) proposes multiple identities for the video gamer, including the ‘real’ person who is playing and the avatar. He argues that games require ‘active and critical learning’ of players and ‘identity work’ involving thinking about values (2003: 51). Imagination is an ingredient that is crucial in creating ethical behaviour (Kohn, 1997; Kristjansson, 2004; Wilson, 2007). Other forms of the arts can also prompt deep engagement with ethics. Bakhtin (1981) discusses the value of dialogic novels and stories that depict ethics and morals not as separate and definable but in interaction and dialogue with each other, so that it is the tension that absorbs the reader. Edmiston (2008) recounts the application of this theory in play with his son, when they shared endless replaying of stories such as Beauty and the Beast and The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Through imagination and playing together, they tried many scenarios, walking in the shoes, to a degree, of ‘both the hunter and the hunted’ (2008: 19). Play can encourage children’s ability to discern what others are thinking or feeling (Wilson, 2007); allows children to experience a range of emotions that may encourage the development of empathy and sympathy (Kristjansson, 2004); provides settings for children to engage with others who are different (such as children from diverse cultural and social backgrounds or children who have disabilities; Derman-Sparks, 1993); encourages children to experiment with different ways of being (Bauer and Dettore, 1997); and allows them to practise using imagination in ways which

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are important in everyday ethical decisions and actions (Edmiston, 2010a). This is not confined to dramatic or pretend play; rather, all forms of the arts can evoke similar possibilities. In England in the nineteenth century, paintings played a role in the moral, historical and social education of the mainly middle-class population who viewed them. The most popular painting featuring children at a local gallery (Brisbane, Australia) is a sad and moving painting by Blandford Fletcher (see GoMA, 2012). Evicted 1887 presents the narrative of a dispossessed widow and her child, forced to leave their home while the top-hatted bailiff and the village look on. Fletcher’s choice of an overcast autumn day heightens the sense of loss and sadness. The leaves littering the ground and the child’s broken toy add to the drama. Without prompting, it is not uncommon to observe children visiting the gallery visibly empathising with the people in the painting, particularly the young girl, expressing their concern with her plight and their capacity to relate to her experience (Piscitelli, McArdle and Weier, 1999). If one accepts the idea that being ethical involves the ability to take another’s point of view, then imaginative dramatic play is important as it allows children to enter conflicting situations, and thereby explore their own identities, as well as contemplate ethical problems from others’ points of view. Through imaginative play children can access experiences that may not be available to them in everyday life and explore ethical issues arising from these experiences: a child can be a victim, a perpetrator, a bystander and/or a hero in any or all scenarios (Bauer and Dettore, 1997). Furthermore, imaginative play allows children to move outside themselves to experience the consequences of their own actions (Edmiston, 2010b). The primary benefit of play in fostering ethical behaviour and thinking appears to be the ability to encourage children to experience views of others, including the effect or consequences of ethical actions and the possible ethical reasoning behind such actions. In this

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approach, the social aspect of identity development is crucial and thus the involvement of adults in play with children is vital. It appears that to the extent that becoming ethical is a social endeavour, playing with children can assist them on this path of ethical and moral development.

RECENT THEORISING ABOUT ETHICS AND PLAY Critiques of modernist approaches have led to positions that draw on alternative philosophical and theoretical perspectives to engage with ethics and ethics and play. They range from ideas about nurturing the ability to take another’s perspective (Edmiston, 2008) to considering early childhood settings as spaces for ethical and political practice (Dahlberg and Moss, 2005), and as places where an ethics of immanence and potentialities can be adopted (Lenz Taguchi, 2010). Such critiques also include exploration of what Olsson (2009) calls an ethico-aesthetic paradigm, an ethics that ‘can stand to live in the moment’ (83). Rather than seeing ethics as a matter of knowing the difference between right and wrong, acting ethically revolves around answerability; the ability to be answerable to others for one’s own actions (Edmiston, 2010a). Ideas about answerability, authorship and action are drawn from Bakhtinian (1981) philosophy and the evaluation of ethical/ unethical behaviour involves considering the effect of actions in the past, present and future. Bakhtin’s view is that ‘each person’s moral life quest is to continually “author” a self that is in a changing dynamic ethical relationship with all of the other people encountered in social relationships and cultural groupings’ (Edmiston, 2010b: 198). Therefore an ethical identity is never complete: it is an ongoing process throughout life. In contrast to a static code or set of rules, ethical identity is a framework which guides relationships to the world, behaviour and evaluations of both personal and others’ behaviour. It is important for

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teachers to understand early childhood institutions as places of identity construction where, through play and activities, children engage in the formation of ethical identities. In his sixyear case study with his son, Edmiston (2008) documented a list of sophisticated and complex moral dilemmas that Michael was interested in discussing; not in abstract conversations but through play, replaying, imagination, role play and dramatisation. One example is a living dead zombie: A living dead zombie has been human but is it still human as it reaches out to strangle you? Is it OK to use a machine gun to stop it? (194).

Further, being ethical is an everyday occurrence, not simply a reaction to high-stakes situations (Edmiston, 2010b). Thus ethical actions must always be evaluated in relation to others. In considering preschools as places and spaces for ethical and political practice, Dahlberg and Moss (2005) critique universal or modernist approaches to ethics – that is, those that endorse technical practices, codes of ethics and right and wrong. They propose making ethics ‘explicit and central to the life of the preschool – something that is openly and knowingly practised’ (12). In doing so, they identify alternative possibilities for ethical practices that focus on relational approaches. The relational nature of ethics has been the focus of much philosophical debate and is an important part of discussion about constituting the self. Discussion centres on how one relates to the Other (the unknown, the different) without making the Other the same, and without marginalising and subordinating the Other. Relating without marginalising, subordinating or making the Other the same depends on responsibility for the Other, respect for otherness and ‘a rejection of calculative and rational thinking in relations with the Other’ (2005: 84, emphasis in original). Responsibility and respect hinge on choices made about how persons relate to each other in particular contexts and moments. Rejecting rational thinking means resisting normalised and

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universalistic approaches, and instead of asking ‘“What works”, focusing on “Why?”’ (120). When combined with pedagogy and adopted in preschool settings, these philosophical understandings enable enactment of an ‘ethics of an encounter’, which calls for practices of thinking, listening to thought, radical dialogue and completely different conceptualisations of children, teachers and schools from those found in the modernist project. Listening to thought and pedagogy of listening are associated with preschools in the Reggio Emilia area of northern Italy. These ethical choices and practices value otherness and seek to ‘create conditions where encounters with difference can provoke thought’ (120). Encounters and relations with difference (the unknown, the Other) abound in the everyday life of preschools, so many possibilities exist for prompting and listening to thought. Some practices associated with Reggio Emilia preschools are familiar to many. What might not be so familiar is that informed choices about ethics and values lie at the heart of these programmes. One of the founding educators, Carla Rinaldi (2006), stresses that from a very early age, we develop a concept of ‘others’, and ‘we must try to understand differences rather than wanting to cancel them’ (140). Ethical practice in early childhood education is also a feature of the work of Hillevi Lenz Taguchi (2010), who proposes an ethics of immanence and potentialities that rejects modernist binary divides. An ethics of immanence considers ‘the inter-connections and intra-connections in between human and non-human organisms, matter and things, the contents and subjectivities of students that emerge through the learning events… with students and teachers in processes of mutual engagement and transformation’ (Lenz Taguchi, 2010: 175–6; emphasis in original). Like Dahlberg and Moss (2005), Lenz Taguchi emphasises responsibility as part of processes of mutual engagement. Potentialities investigate what might and ‘can’ be done ‘here and now’ rather than what ‘should’ be

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done according to learning outcomes or universal norms (176; emphasis in original). Exploring potentialities of what can be done in the present through inter- and intraconnectedness means moving simultaneously between ‘what is (the actual), and what might become (the virtual)’ (176). This simultaneous movement between the actual and the virtual brings opportunities for teachers and children to reinvent themselves with each learning event. Such reinvention comes with an affirmation of ‘learning as a state of transformation’ (176). However, it also comes with responsibility to ‘extend and expand ourselves to that which is not yet’ (176). Expanding selves to what is not yet means looking for possibilities and potentialities that emerge ‘… and what can become’ (177; emphasis in original). Such an approach is ‘a fundamental shift when we think of ethics and justice in education’ (177). While Dahlberg and Moss (2005) and Lenz Taguchi (2010) do not specifically address ethics and play, Liselott Olsson (2009) suggests an ethico-aesthetic paradigm, part of which considers play from the perspective of ‘virtual/actual rather than fantasy/real’ (191). Olsson contends that there is more than one actualised dimension to reality; that reality also has a ‘virtual dimension’ (191). Modernist conceptions of children and childhood suggest reality is one-dimensional. The idea that there can be more than one dimension (such as virtual/actual) challenges what and how modernist ways make it possible to think: a virtual child is ‘not yet defined, and not perceptible on a plane of transcendence’ (191). That is, a virtual child remains untainted by universalist norms and expectations: when children are playing they are ‘probably plunging into the most intense actualization of virtuality’ (191). Unless we understand this, Olsson claims play is ‘not worth taking seriously… Children’s play is poorly understood, invaded by psychology or dismissed as meaningless and of no value. Children’s play as plunging into an intense actualization of virtuality could open up new dimensions of reality’ (191–2). To Olsson,

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ethics is about ‘what a body can do and looking for the potentiality in every action’ (80). This might mean creating thought through encounters, or asking questions about what it is possible to think, such as challenging taken-for-granted ways of doing things such as teachers making class rules about moral behaviour. Teachers and children together, in each situation for the people involved, engage in a ‘collective construction of new values’ (80). Such an approach is ‘completely situational… it happens in between people, in the social gaps… Ethics is about how we inhabit uncertainty together’ (Massumi, cited in Olsson, 2009: 80). Accordingly, Olsson proposes an ethics that is not determined by universal codes and is created in the moment on a case-by-case basis. This becomes possible if reality is not conceptualised as one-dimensional and children’s play is seen as actualisation of virtuality. Valuing aesthetic connections within children’s play requires teacher acknowledgement of not knowing. For some, this is not comfortable. It needs genuine listening and attending to the children, their politics and their play, which is different from needing to control through imposing linear processes such as labelling, recognition, judgements. Instead, the work of teachers is carried out through encounters and creating spaces for dialogue, not imposing ‘rules’. Democracy is not imposed, it is enacted.

CONCLUSION The extent to which play can be a strategy for fostering ethical awareness depends upon understandings of ethics. The idea of teaching ethics explicitly negates the need to develop ethical awareness through play. However, if promoting critical thinking about everyday possibilities for ethical decisions is not to be limited by dualistic understandings of right/wrong or ethical/unethical, then play becomes an important strategy. In relational and situational approaches, children

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and adults together can push boundaries and challenge accepted ways of knowing, being and doing to produce knowledge in ways inconceivable within the paradigm of developmental psychology. The potential for children to continually make and remake ethical identities abounds in an ethics that seeks what is possible in the here and now (Lenz Taguchi, 2010) and that is created moment by moment (Olsson, 2009). This approach is ‘messy’, difficult to characterise and generally absent from curriculum frameworks in the early years. Such documents tend to locate play as a means to an end (learning), involve specific purposes and types of learning that privilege language, use particular types of play as indicators of progress and create certain identities of and for children. Thinking, working and playing in the here and now provides spaces for early childhood educators to: go beyond that which we think we already know as a truth about children’s development and learning, and instead engage in an ethics of potentialities, where it becomes impossible to judge, value or diagnose children in relation to pre-set ideas or truths (Lenz Taguchi, 2011: 47).

An ethics of potentialities begins with educators releasing ourselves from accepted ways of knowing, being and doing to imagine and create what we might become, and opening and enacting opportunities for children to do the same.

REFERENCES Ailwood, J. (2003) ‘Governing early childhood through play’, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 4(1): 286–299. Australian Government Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR). (2009) Belonging, Being and Becoming: The Early Years Learning Framework for Australia. Canberra: DEEWR. Bakhtin, M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination. (Holquist, M. (ed.), Emerson, C. and Holquist, M. (trans.).) Austin, TX: Texas University Press. Bauer, K. L. and Dettore, E. (1997) ‘Superhero play: What’s a teacher to do?’, Early Childhood Education Journal, 25(1): 17–21.

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Berkowitz, M. W. and Bier, M. C. (2004) ‘Researchbased character education’, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 591: 72–85. Berkowitz, M. W. and Bier, M. C. (2005) What Works in Character Education: A Research-driven Guide for Educators. Washington, DC: Character Education Partnership and the University of Missouri. Bruce, T. (1997) ‘Adults and children developing play together’, European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 5(1): 89–99. Carlsson-Paige, N. and Levin, D. E. (1995) ‘Can teachers resolve the war-play dilemma’, Young Children, 50(5): 62–63. Curriculum Development Council. (2006) Guide to the Pre-primary Curriculum. Hong Kong: Government Printer. Dahlberg, G. and Moss, P. (2005) Ethics and Politics in Early Childhood Education. London: RoutledgeFalmer. Department for Education (2012) Statutory Framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage: Setting the Standards for Learning, Development and Care for Children from Birth to Five. Accessed 16 May 2012 from www.webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ 20130401151715/https://www.education.gov.uk/ publications/eOrderingDownload/EYFS%20 Statutory%20Framework.pdf Derman-Sparks, L. (1993) ‘Empowering children to create a caring culture in a world of differences’, Childhood Education, 70(2): 66–71. Early Education: The British Association for Early Childhood Education (2012) Development Matters in the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS). Accessed 14 June 2012 from www.foundationyears.org.uk/ files/2012/03/Development-Matters-FINAL-PRINTAMENDED.pdf Edmiston, B. (2008) Forming Ethical Identities in Early Childhood Play. Abingdon: Routledge. Edmiston, B. (2010a) ‘Drama as ethical education’, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 5(1): 63–84. Edmiston, B. (2010b) ‘Playing with children, answering with our lives: A Bakhtinian approach to coauthoring ethical identities in early childhood’, British Journal of Educational Studies, 58(2): 197–211. Fromberg, D. and Williams, L. (eds) (1992) Encyclopedia of Early Childhood Education. New York: Routledge. Fung, C. K. H. and Lee, J. C. K. (2008) ‘A critical review of the early childhood education (ECE) curriculum documents in Hong Kong’, Journal of Basic Education, 17(1): 33–56.

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Gee, J. P. (2003) What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Golding, W. (2005 [1954]) Lord of the Flies. London: Faber and Faber. GoMA (Gallery of Modern Art) (2012) Evicted 1887 by Blandford Fletcher (www.qagoma.qld.gov.au/ collection/international_art/blandford_fletcher). Hakkarainen, P. (2008) ‘The challenges and possibilities of a narrative learning approach in the Finnish early childhood education system’, International Journal of Educational Research, 47(5): 292–300. Hoffman, M. L. (2000) Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for Caring and Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holland, P. (2003) We Don’t Play with Guns Here: War, Weapon and Superhero Play in the Early Years. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Kohlberg, L. (1984) The Psychology of Moral Development: The Nature and Validity of Moral Stages. San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row. Kohn, A. (1997) ‘How not to teach values: A critical look at character education, Phi Delta Kappan, 78 (6): 428–439. Kolbe, U. (2007) Rapunzel’s Supermarket: All About Young Children and Their Art. Byron Bay, NSW: Peppinot Press. Kristjansson, J. (2004) ‘Empathy, sympathy, justice and the child’, Journal of Moral Education, 33(3): 291–305. Lenz Taguchi, H. (2010) Going Beyond the Theory/ Practice Divide in Early Childhood Education: Introducing an Intra-active Pedagogy. London: RoutledgeFalmer. Lenz Taguchi, H. (2011) ‘Investigating learning, participation and becoming in early childhood practices with a relational materialist approach’, Global Studies of Childhood, 1(1): 36–50. Lickona, T. (1991) Educating for Character: How Our Schools Can Teach Respect and Responsibility. New York: Bantam Books. Marsh, J. (2000) ‘’’But I want to fly too!”: Girls and superhero play in the infant classroom’, Gender and Education, 12(2): 209–220.

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Noddings, N. (2002) Educating Moral People: A Caring Alternative to Character Education. New York: Teachers College Press. Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research (2011) Framework Plan for the Content and Tasks of Kindergartens. Oslo: Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research. Olsson, L. M. (2009) Movement and Experimentation in Young Children’s Learning: Deleuze and Guattari in Early Childhood Education. London: RoutledgeFalmer. O’Toole, J. and Dunn, J. (2002) Pretending to Learn: Helping Children Learn through Drama. Frenchs Forest, NSW: Pearson Education. Paley, V. G. (1993) You Can’t Say You Can’t Play. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Piaget, J. (1965) The Moral Judgement of the Child. New York: Free Press. Piscitelli, B., McArdle, F. and Weier, K. (1999) ‘Beyond “look and learn”: Investigating, implementing and evaluating interative learning strategies for young children in museums’. Unpublished final report, QUT–Industry Collaborative Research Project, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. Rinaldi, C. (2006) In Dialogue with Reggio Emilia: Listening, Researching and Learning. London: RoutledgeFalmer. Rose, N. S. (1992) ‘Moral development: The experiential perspective’, Journal of Moral Education, 21(1): 29–40. Skolverket: Swedish National Agency for Education. (2010) Curriculum for the Preschool Lpfö, 98: Revised 2010. Accessed 18 June 2011 from www. skolverket.se/om-skolverket/andra-sprak-och-lattlast/in-english/publications Tronto, J. (1993) Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for the Ethics of Care. London: Routledge. Wilson, R. A. (2007) ‘Fostering goodness and caring: Promoting moral development of young children’, Early Childhood News, 13(6): 54–61. Winston, J. (1999) ‘Theorising drama as moral education’, Journal of Moral Education, 28(4): 459–471.

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10 Gender Discourses and Play Mindy Blaise

INTRODUCTION Feminism makes this chapter possible. Research on gender/sex/uality discourses and children’s play has developed from the field’s commitment to gender equity. The hybridized term gender/sex/uality is used to indicate the complex and shifting relationships that exist between gender, sex and sexuality. The research on gender/sex/uality discourses and play varies, while making visible different aspects of equity, such as the importance of promoting equal access to play experiences and materials for girls and boys (Sprung, 1978) and how boys and their concerns often dominate teachers’ attention (Browne, 2004; Chen and Rao, 2011). A large portion of this research has focused on how children role-play traditional and nontraditional gender roles (Paley, 1984; Gallas, 1998; Brooker and Ha, 2005; Rogers and Evans, 2008). There is also research that recognizes children as sexual beings and shows how their sex play is often based on healthy sexual curiosity, which should be neither

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minimized nor normalized (Surtees, 2005) but should instead be respected (Sciaraffa and Randolph, 2011). The focus of this chapter is how gender/ sex/uality discourses circulate through children’s play, which is often not seen as influenced by teaching practices. How these discourses are made visible in children’s play depends upon the theoretical framings used to understand gender, sex and sexuality. For example, Western logic uses sex to determine whether a person is considered female or male, based on their biological body, and gender to describe the characteristics of boys and girls, which are learned and shaped by social interactions, interpersonal relationships, cultures and opportunities. From this point of view, gender identity is seen as relatively fixed by the time a person enters adulthood. Western logic tells a simple story where people are assumed first to be born either female or male and then learn how to be girls or boys, a process that has come to be considered ‘common sense’. It is also a developmental logic because it begins with the

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sexed child who, over time and through experiences, is socialized into and naturally becomes gendered, and eventually (hetero) sexualized. Despite wide-ranging critiques of such structural thinking (e.g. Foucault, 1978; Wittig, 1996; Butler, [1990] 1999), gender/ sex/uality discourses based on commonsense notions of fixed sex and gender identities remain dominant within educational research. This chapter deliberately sidelines such research. Instead it focuses on reviewing studies drawing from theories that view gender/sex/uality as situated, interactional accomplishments, moving away from dominant biological and socialization models of sex and gender. It should be noted that searching for research about children’s play behaviours and gender/sex/uality discourses requires one to focus on the ontological issues that underpin such work. In doing so, this chapter attends to these issues, rather than simply presenting examples of play. As a feminist strategy to promote gender equity, this chapter shows how postdevelopmental perspectives are used to challenge taken-for-granted understandings of gender/ sex/uality. These views offer alternative ways of framing gender/sex/uality discourses that may be useful to those researching play and childhoods across the globe. Finally, questions are raised about how a research agenda might be put forth that is capable of illuminating the changing configurations of gender/ sex/uality discourses in children’s play, so that issues of equity can be addressed.

EXPLORING KNOWLEDGE, TRUTH AND POWER RELATIONSHIPS Important early feminist thinking about gender and children appeared in the work of Walkerdine (1981), Davies ([1989] 2003) and Thorne (1993). This research contested developmental and socialization theories of children’s gender construction. This early gender research is significant because these feminist scholars drew explicitly upon poststructuralist ideas of the

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knowledge/power nexus (Foucault, 1978). Exploring the relationships between know­ ledge, truth and power has had important consequences for promoting equity through making visible how children’s subjectivity is constructed by language and discursive practices (Weedon, 1987). This research, which argued that gender was a socially, culturally and historically shifting construct, marked an important shift in how ideas of sex, gender and sexuality were understood in children’s play. These researchers contested the belief that biological difference between the sexes was the only way to understand gender. One of the most important achievements that came from this early research was a new awareness of children’s agency and the role that children themselves play in constructing gender. For example, Thorne (1993: 64) coined the term ‘borderwork’ to describe when and how gender borders, such as notions of ‘the girls’ and ‘the boys’, are policed by children. Findings from her ethno­ graphy of gender play in two US primary schools showed how children’s borderwork (through contests, invasions and chasing games) and border crossings (instances when children challenged traditional gender arrangements) suggest that gender stereotypes are deeply embedded in children’s understandings of gender. Davies’ ([1989] 2003) research in Australian preschools supports gender borderwork by showing how four- and five-year olds effectively use ‘category-maintenance work’ (29) to influence their own (and others’) place in the gender order. One of the most powerful examples of children’s understandings of this category-maintenance work is of Anika, a girl who talks about feeling funny, or getting a ‘tickle in my brain’ (2003: 115), when she sees boys doing ‘girl’ things or girls doing ‘boy’ things. Anika’s ‘tickle’ shows her awareness of what happens when people cross gender boundaries, and the difficulties in finding language to describe that. As a result, Anika explains that she would only practise ‘boy’ things, like flying an airplane, alone, when girls or boys could not see her,

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because they might laugh at her ‘inappropriate’ gender play. This early feminist research illuminates children’s capabilities in constructing and reconstructing what it means to be gendered and how hard children work at this process, which occurs in their play. It paved the way for others interested in understanding children’s gender beyond sex role and socialization models of gender identity.

EXAMINING THE INTERSECTIONS OF GENDER, RACE AND SOCIAL CLASS As ‘gender’ became an analytic category for (White) feminists disputing biological determinism in a range of disciplines, it was critiqued by women of colour for creating a social identity that failed to represent their experiences as women (Cornell, 2004). Out of this critique came an important move towards expanding gender analysis to include other attributes of identity, including race and social class. Crenshaw (1991) introduced the concept of intersectionality to demonstrate how gender, race and social class intersect, bringing forth a more complex understanding of identities and social relations. Research on children’s play that engages with intersectionality to study gender alongside other important areas of children’s identities tries to elucidate the multiple factors that structure experiences of oppression and privilege. One of the first substantial studies that used intersectionality to examine the processes of racism is Connolly’s (1998) ethnography of racism and gender identities in an English multi-ethnic, inner-city primary school. By bringing together race and gender, Connolly shows how social relations of oppression and privilege exist in various ways for five- and six-year-old Black boys, South Asian boys, Black girls and South Asian girls. For example, Connolly observed how White and Black girls positioned and excluded South Asian girls in their play by calling them ‘Pakis’. Connolly also discusses

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how a close friendship group of three South Asian girls carved out their own social space on the playground. In doing so, these girls were able to avoid their exclusion from the wider kiss-and-chase games involving boyfriends and girlfriends, and yet explore their own understandings of gender in their play of mummies, daddies and babies. This research shows how children appropriated, reworked and reproduced discourses of race, social class, sexuality and age to shape their own and others’ gender identities in their play.

POSTDEVELOPMENTAL LOGIC ‘Postdevelopmental’ is an umbrella term used for various theoretical perspectives that take a social constructionist understanding of difference and identity as a starting point for perceiving gender subjectivity. It is used to signal a move that is both transgressing and including development. Post­ developmentalism does not deny children’s development. Rather, it makes room for other perspectives that are useful in illuminating aspects of children’s subjectivity. Since postdevelopmentalism does not privilege linear relationships, different connections and understandings can be made between sex, gender and sexuality. Postdevelopmental perspectives continue the work initiated by Walkerdine (1981), Davies ([1989] 2003) and Thorne (1993) by critiquing biological and simplistic socialization theories of gender identity and the sex-gender-sexuality relationship. These simple explanations about children’s sex and gender seem both logical and obvious, as Browne (2004) explains, because they are read as scientific discourses whose ‘truth’ cannot be challenged. Mapping postdevelopmental perspectives on children’s play elucidates how each viewpoint uses differing angles on relationality and intersectionality to understand how gender is constructed. The next section briefly defines important aspects of six postdevelopmental perspectives, highlighting significant concepts that

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each brings to understanding and researching gender/sex/uality discourses and play. Then, studies that draw from these perspectives are reviewed by attending to how different aspects of gender/sex/uality are made visible. This is followed by the questions and insights that are offered by each framework.

Poststructuralism With an emphasis on language, power and discourse, poststructuralist research tends to focus on how gender is discursively constructed between children while they are playing (Francis, 1998; Yelland, 1998; MacNaughton, 2000). A poststructuralist approach values children’s access to alternative gender discourses that can disrupt taken-for-granted understandings of what it means to be a girl and boy. With this perspective comes a turn away from the unified sexual subject constructed within developmental understandings of gender. Research drawing upon poststructuralist ideas works to highlight children’s gender subjectivities and shows how gender is imbued in power relations, how children’s gender relations are based on gender hierarchies and how gender is an ongoing process. This body of research suggests that there are multiple ways of ‘doing’ girl and boy. For instance, Maclean’s (1999) poststructural analysis of five-year-old girls’ talk and play interactions shows how girls explore gender positions, relationships and identities across different peer groups. One of the girls, Melanie, asserts her power in completely different ways when playing with a group of girls compared with a mixed group of girls and boys. This analysis shows that Melanie is never a passive recipient of gender roles, but instead draws on age and gender discourses to try out new subjectivities. Melanie exploits her marginal position as a new and younger girl when playing with a group of older six- and seven-year-old girls. Then, when sitting with a group of five-yearold girls and boys while completing seatwork, Melanie draws from a heterosexual discourse of ‘kissing’ to exercise gendered power and

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put one of the boys at a disadvantage. This research shows how Melanie draws from multiple gender, age and heterosexual discourses to position herself as powerful within different peer groups. A more recent study conducted by Martin (2011) draws from poststructuralism to move beyond understanding gender in terms of dualisms towards showing how gender is a complicated and ongoing process for young children. Martin spent two years in an English Nursery (three- and four-year-olds) and Reception class (four- and five-year olds), using ethnographic methods to explore children’s gender and play practices. She extends poststructuralist understandings of discourse and power by drawing from Paechter’s theoretical work (2007) on communities of gender practices. Martin’s (2011) research shows children becoming fully involved members of boys’ or girls’ communities of practice by embodying and demonstrating their successful use of ‘appropriate’ gendered objects of knowledge. This is shown through children’s gendered use of spaces. For instance, while playing outside, boys dominated the outdoor play space by playing football and the girls took part in skipping rope. Findings also show that boys took up more indoor and outdoor space than girls. Children are not just learning that skipping rope is for girls and football is for boys; they are also embodying the social rules about how to perform masculinities and femininities through the gendered uses of footballs, ropes and space. Although groups of girls were observed attempting to claim space for themselves, boys’ strategies of exclusion imply that girls have less ‘right’ to particular spaces, take up less space and thus are inferior as well as different from the boys. In addition to making visible the gender power relations between children and the ways in which gender is an ongoing process, poststructuralism also exposes the inequitable and problematic nature of developmentally appropriate practice (DAP) (Lubeck, 1998). For example, Wohlwend’s (2007) critical discourse analysis of a playground incident

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demonstrates how DAP often magnifies gender inequities via teachers’ disciplinary decisions based on gender norms. Wohlwend illuminates the ways in which she and the girls drew on five cultural models of identities (DAP, innocence, child obedience, gendered aggression and school discipline) that reinforced gender stereotypes of feminine passivity and masculine activity. Wohlwend then examines her own reluctance to move beyond being a ‘good’ developmentally appropriate teacher. Her research shows how taking a critical stance and highlighting the relations between the micropractices of children during their play sheds light on complex gender/sex/uality power relations. This study reveals how the nature of childcentred practices is anything but neutral and apolitical.

Queer Theory Queer theory builds on poststructuralist understandings of power and knowledge by recognizing how femininity and masculinity are regulated by discourses of sexuality. This perspective presumes that gender cannot be understood without also considering sexuality. Therefore, queer theory reconfigures the developmental gender/sex/uality relationship because it believes that dominant gender discourses and the dominant discourse of heterosexuality are inseparable and must be considered together to understand the persistence of gender stereotypes (Butler, [1990] 1999). Queer theory raises some challenges for studying gender because it requires that we think about children’s behaviours not only as gendered but also as sexual. This perspective contests the assumption that children are too young to understand sexuality, and directs our attention to the extent to which heterosexual assumptions and behaviours are an everyday yet unacknowledged routine occurrence in early childhood settings (Tobin, 1997; Robinson, 2005; Gunn, 2011). Heteronormativity, gender performativity and the heterosexual matrix are three concepts

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used by queer theorists to illuminate the powerful ways in which gender and heterosexuality discourses work together. These concepts can also be used as tools for seeing how gender stereotypes are produced, reproduced and challenged in children’s play (see Blaise and Taylor, 2012 for a review of this research). Heteronormativity is a term used to name the assumption that everyone is or should be heterosexual. This is evident when children’s wedding games are encouraged or celebrated, or when playing boyfriends and girlfriends, kiss-and-chase games or ‘mummies and daddies’ is considered natural and ‘normal’ (Robinson, 2013). The concept of gender performativity suggests that gender is a kind of performance. According to queer theory, gender is performed through children’s everyday talk and actions, including their play. Children are ‘doing’ gender through the ways in which they talk about themselves as girls and boys and by specific bodily practices and expressions and their repetitions. The heterosexual matrix is a metaphor used to describe how stereotypical gender performances take place within the twin dualistic frameworks of gender (masculinity/femininity) and sexuality (heterosexuality/homosexuality). It is this matrix that produces masculinity, femininity and heterosexuality as the only logical options (Butler, [1990] 1999). One of the first studies to bring queer theory to children’s play is Blaise’s (2005) qualitative case study of gender in an urban US kindergarten classroom, with children aged five–six. This research shows how children use gender and sexuality discourses to regulate what it means to be a girl and boy. In particular it shows how the heterosexual matrix is useful for understanding how children actively ‘do’ gender by adhering to heteronormative ideals. For example, Blaise recounts an incident during show-and-tell in which a five-year-old boy named Cheng showed an excited interest in the make-up that a girl brought to school to play with. His classmates let him know the ‘inappropriateness’ of his interest in this highly feminized item by ignoring his questions about the

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make-up, dismissing him with disgusted body language and laughing at him. These actions disclose how this group of children was actively regulating what it means to be a boy. They were also shoring up the heterosexual matrix because wearing make-up, even when it was used during children’s play, is an activity only available to females with the explicit purpose of attracting males. Cheng is learning that there is a particular kind of masculinity that is valued in his classroom: this shapes his sense of belonging and prevents him from playing with items considered ‘too girly’ and ‘inappropriate’ for ‘real’ boys. Queer theory is expanding discussions about gender/sex/uality discourse and childhood by showing how heterosexual gender discourses are infused with power relations, how children strategically negotiate these discourses and how children’s negotiations of these discourses produce patterns of inclusion and exclusion (Boldt, 1996; Taylor and Richardson, 2005). For instance, Taylor and Richardson (2005) show how the home corner can be an inclusive play space for difference. Their ethnographic research in an Australian childcare centre shows how young children allowed and accepted four-year-old Reg’s ‘queer play’ as he challenged gender binaries when playing both a male policeman and ‘policeman mother Thelma’ (169).

Posthumanism Scholars analysing gender/sex/uality discourse and children’s play through posthu­ manism are interested in exploring what might fall outside of the boundaries of language and discourse. They do this by paying attention to materiality and reworking the concept of gender performativity. This focus on materiality and performativity has been taken up broadly by examining children’s relations with the more-than-human, including the material, the body and affect (see Lenz Taguchi, this volume). A posthuman perspective encourages new ways of perceiving a gendered subject.

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It moves away from deconstruction as a strategy of analysis towards the idea of ‘making room for more’, and in this case the more-than-human. ‘Making room for more’ is about examining how gender/sex/ uality is mutually constituted and generated in the inter- and intra-actions between the material and the discursive (Barad, 2007), or between children and the more-thanhuman. Renold and Mellor (2013) work with Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) ontological framework to research the dynamic realities of young children’s gendered subjectivities. Their five-month multi-sensory micro-ethnography explored how three- and four-year olds were ‘doing gender’ in the social, material and cultural world of a nursery in South Wales, UK. Their study goes beyond discursive and developmental understandings of gender by researching subjectivity through an assemblage of bodies, sounds and objects. For example, the gendered sounds of the nursery (hammering in the construction area, clip-clopping of heels in the dress-up area) show different kinds of relationships between children and objects. It was these gendered sounds that opened up ‘… the ways in which bodies (through sound and movement) flowed through, and bonded with others, enabling and restricting bodies/subjects capacity to act, to “become”’ (31). While watching video footage from the project, Renold and Mellor heard Sophie’s high-pitched call for a boy named Tyler, over and over. It was these repeated calls that drew the analysis to the silence and near-invisibility of Sophie in the nursery. By bringing together bodiesobjects-sounds, Renold and Mellor show how Sophie’s agency is caught up in un­equal power relations. Their findings show how Sophie and Tyler’s gender relationship closely resembles forms of domestic violence. They are an important reminder of how ordinary everyday practices that circulate across and through bodies contribute in the making of young gendered bodies and relations in play.

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Girlhood and Masculinity Studies The emerging fields of girlhood and masculinity studies provide another way to situate research on gender/sex/uality by critically exploring childhood outside of develop­ mental frameworks that view girlhood and boyhood as universal and biological experiences. Girlhood studies include critical research about girls’ lives from a range of disciplinary perspectives. These studies often separate out differences of race, social class, age, etc. within girls’ lives to uncover issues that are unique to particular groups of girls rather than the standard experiences of childhood, which presume boys as the norm (Lipkin, 2009). Although scholars researching gender/sex/uality and play in early childhood do not usually locate their work in girlhood studies, some have embraced a similar perspective. Madrid and Kantor (2009) do this by focusing on the ways in which a group of five preschool girls use a feminine ‘kitty’ storyline in their play to exclude boys, regulate ‘proper’ feminine behaviours and maintain harmony. By privileging the girls’ experiences, this research challenges the assumption that social– emotional development naturally occurs or is an essentialized feminine trait, because the girls’ social–emotional work done in their play is made visible. Feminist-informed masculinity studies, as opposed to studies concerned with ‘failing boys’ (see Weaver-Hightower 2008 for an overview), focus on masculinities by building on Connell’s (1987) theory of hegemonic masculinity. Hegemonic masculinity is the cultural expression of the dominant form of masculinity that regulates and subordinates other forms of masculinity and femininity. Although hegemonic masculinity has been critiqued widely (Beasley, 2008), it has been productive in illuminating gender hierarchies and how male domination occurs in children’s play (Connolly, 2004; Bhana, 2009; Davis and MacNaughton, 2009). One of the few studies situated within feminist-informed masculinity studies is

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Bartholomaeus’ (2012) qualitative gender research of six- and seven-year-olds in two Australian primary schools. Hegemonic masculinity is reframed by considering how discourses of age and multiple masculinities intersect in children’s play. Findings show that boys had limited access to hegemonic masculinity because of their young age and size. Interestingly, the constructions of masculinity that were most valued by the boys included attributes not usually associated with hegemonic masculinity, such as being ‘nice’ and obedient. The qualities that were valued in this context show the fluidity and local particularities of discourses of hegemonic masculinities, rather than a static understanding of what it means to be a boy.

Postcolonialism Postcolonialism takes many forms and enables critical enquiries that connect the colonial past with the present (Gandhi, 1998), as well as providing conceptual tools to understand the workings of colonialism. Colonial discourse is based on the processes of ‘othering’ – the discriminatory practices that position particular cultures as primitive, less than, hence ‘other’. This ‘othering’ is found in oppositional binaries such as adult/child, West/East, boy/girl, and is an example of colonial knowledge production. In early childhood, postcolonialism offers new insights about the intersection of play, racisms and colonialisms (see PaciniKetchabaw, this volume), and is useful for illuminating the politics of gender and race in children’s play. Some studies that have drawn from postcolonialism shed light on how gender and racialized identities are multilayered, complex and historical (Skattebol, 2005; Taylor, 2008). This body of research has been significant in showing how the colonial past is always present in children’s current gender practices. Skattebol (2005), a teacherresearcher, shows how past ideas about gender and race circulate through children’s play narratives in the present. For example,

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Zac, a four-year-old Anglo-Australian boy, drew on privileges of maleness and Whiteness when sharing a story about protecting his house from ‘baddies’, who were described as having ‘brown faces’ (2005: 95) and guns. Zac’s sense of entitlement to property can be traced to the attitudes of White European ‘settlers’ in Australia, who stole Indigenous land, and reflects male, middle-class and White privilege. Instead of attempting to edit out the politics of the ‘racing’ and gendering of young children, MacNaughton and Davis (2009) deliberately draw from postcolonial and critical race theory to explore these complex race and gender identities with young children. MacNaughton, Davis and Smith (2009) show how the cultural categories of race and gender are organized and reorganized by threeand four-year-old Vietnamese-Australian, Chinese-Australian and Anglo-Australian girls when asked to name themselves for a research project by choosing their own pseudonym. Although this study did not focus on children’s play, analysis of the girls’ pseudonym choices (‘Barbie’, ‘Fairy’ and ‘Princess’ were popular) shows how they aligned their identities to idealized norms of femininity and Western beauty. Given feminist understandings of dominant gender/sex/uality discourses, these findings are predictable and found amongst East Asian girls’ play (see Lim, 2007; Yoon, 2007; Chou, 2011). Another way that postcolonial thought has been useful is through its search for more ways to include the lived realities of those who have and continue to be ‘othered’. An example of this kind of research can be found in Lim’s (2007) postcritical and postcolonial ethnography of preschool life in Singapore. Lim examines how four- and five-year-old children interact with ‘glocal’ power relations within postcolonial Singapore. This study recognized that children’s lives are situated within multiple social worlds (school, home, community, nation) and that children must make meaning within adultcreated contexts, which are both local and global. Ethnographic methods were used to

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generate data about the local gendered realities of Singaporean children as they defined for themselves what it means to be a ‘girl’ or ‘boy’ and show how globalization is part of this construction process. The broader context of Singaporean history, culture, politics, and economics was brought into the study by including adults’ views (through parent and teacher interviews, published official speeches, preschool resources and publications and popular Singaporean parents’ magazines). By bringing together globalization from these two different angles and showing the multiple connections between resistance and harmony, Lim challenges the rigidity of gender binaries. It is clear that postdevelopmental perspectives have made significant contributions to understanding gender/sex/uality discourses in young children’s play. However, it is important to recognize that the majority of these studies, even the postcolonial ones, have drawn almost exclusively from Western feminist ideas of gender/sex/uality. They have taken place in privileged contexts, excluding substantial sections of the global population as well as some fundamentally distinct cultural traditions. As Chen (2010) argues, there is a need to consider those on the epistemological margins of academia in order to understand more fully our increasingly interconnected world. The next section will focus on studies of play taking a postConfucian perspective, highlighting East Asian gender/sex/uality discourses that have previously been positioned on the margins.

Post-Confucianism Post-Confucianism acknowledges the shared discourses of Confucianism within the nationstates of East Asia (China, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Macau), recognizing that each has its own unique history, including histories of colonization. There is no true ‘East Asian’ gender/sexual way of being, just as there are no ‘true’ genders or sexual beings anywhere (Plummer, 2011). Post-Confucianism raises the awareness that

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all gender/sex/uality discourses are always intimately shaped by specific histories and cultures. There is a rapidly expanding body of scholarship on gender/sex/uality discourse across East Asia that rejects the presumptions of Western theorization about queer sexuality. This work is a result of Asian queer and feminist debates about the appropriateness and adequacy of Western theories in understanding gender/sex/uality across Asia (Brownell and Wasserstrom, 2002; Ha, 2009). Chou’s (2000) scholarship on the cultural politics of tongzhi1 has been vital for reconsidering gender construction in otherthan-Western societies. He shows how the family kinship system found in Confucian societies is more critical to a person’s identity than their sexual identity. In Asian gender and sexuality studies, this work has inspired contemporary reworkings of the familialist tradition to include broader notions of gender/sex/uality. Although much of this research focuses on young people and adults (e.g. Kong, 2011; Tang, 2011) rather than young children, it is important because it acknowledges the past and present colonial histories of the research contexts, and is framed by post-Confucian understandings of gender/sex/uality. In order to initiate new dialogues about gender/sex/uality in early childhood, three postdevelopmental studies conducted in East Asian contexts will be highlighted. Feminist poststructuralism influences these studies and each works to various degrees with postConfucian approaches to gender. These studies are significant because they are attending to issues associated with researching East Asian gender/sex/uality discourses alongside Western perspectives and producing new East Asian knowledge. Chou’s (2011) case study of the gendering culture of ‘New Taiwanese Children’ (NTC)2 sets out to understand the gendered culture of NTC by combining tenets of feminist poststructuralism, postcolonialism and a Confucian gender lens to address cultural understandings of gender from a Taiwanese

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perspective. Confucianism influences gender concepts across East Asian societies with the belief that they are based on a complementary relationship, often referred to as yin-yang (Chan, 2007). For those influenced by Confucian heritage, yin-yang offers a more complex understanding of ‘genderedness’ than Western ideas of ‘opposite sexes’ as it sees all people expressing the same elements, if perhaps in different degrees. Within Confucian cultures, the relationship between males and females corresponds with two different bases for drawing gender distinctions: the yin-yang (陰陽) correlation and the inner–outer (內外) distinction. Since yin (陰) and yang (陽) are aligned with Earth and Heaven, they are considered two cosmic forces that have always been seen as hierarchical. Under Confucian thought, both yin and yang work in a complementary manner to create a balanced, natural environment as well as to build a harmonious (though patriarchal) family (Chan, 2007). Chou (2011) brings in Confucian gender understandings by paying careful attention to children’s talk and play about their families, highlighting critical incidents when children were trying to understand what it meant to be a ‘good’ son or daughter. Interviews with parents showed a strong desire for their children to maintain traditional gender differences and the belief that mixed-gender play should not be promoted because children are not learning how to be ‘proper’ girls or boys, which is important in Taiwan society. Interestingly, Chan’s (2007) overview of the Confucian conception of gender in contemporary workplaces notes that a Confucian approach to yin-yang should challenge gender segregation in the workplace because such segregation interferes with the proper interplay between yin and yang. This viewpoint suggests that the non-Taiwanese mothers in Chou’s (2011) study were not seeing gender as complementary, but instead from a difference perspective. This is an example of how Confucian East Asian values intersect with each other and also with Western values, which can prove to be difficult to untangle and understand.

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Situating her research within girlhood studies, Yoon’s (2007) case study illuminates three constructions of Korean girlhood: girlish girlhoods, oppositional girlhoods and heterosexual girlhoods. Considering the invisibility of research about girls in otherthan-Western cultures, these findings contribute to expanding and diversifying research on the gendered worlds of girls. Although Yoon uses Western poststructuralist understanding of gender/sex/uality to frame her study, she found this problematic as a Korean female researcher. This becomes evident when Yoon shares her concerns about her research relationship with the classroom teacher. After realizing that she was avoiding asking the teacher difficult questions about the girls’ play in their scheduled weekly reflexive interviews, Yoon wonders about this power relationship and writes: It may have been the consequence of my resistance to the idea of making equal relationships with certain people, in this case, an older and more experienced person. In other words, it may have been my resistance to adjusting to the Western perspective on equality (2007: 105).

Yoon does not just question her ability to ‘appropriately’ work with Western pers­ pectives in Korea. She also queries how her research might have been an apparatus of neocolonialism. After completing the study, Yoon expressed concerns about her own colonizing/colonized positioning as a Korean female. She reflects on the dilemma of attending a Western university and drawing from Western, rather than Chinese or Korean, feminist perspectives to understand Korean girlhood. Yoon concludes by seeing herself as a colonized researcher, who might have in turn colonized the Korean girls by imposing a Western lens on their constructions of gender in their play. These are difficult yet important questions to ask because they begin to show the difficulties of using Western theories to understand gender/sex/uality discourses and play in other-than-Western contexts.

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Ha (2009) expresses doubts about the ability to conduct gender research in some Asian contexts without using Western theories – Chou (2011) and Yoon (2007) might find this useful and reassuring. Ha proposes that contemporary Hong Kong and Chinese gender identities are the effects of both Confucian and Western theories. Rather than dismissing Western theories, Ha suggests the need to retain the Western conceptual matrix as a lens to view gender practices, while also articulating a research framework that allows the various Confucian conceptions of gender to exist. Davies and Kasama (2004) draw from Confucian concepts, such as harmony, social rules and obedience, to show the specifics of Japanese culture and how this ultimately shapes children’s gendered experiences. Davies, a female Western researcher, and Kasama, a male Japanese researcher, use their different cultural and gendered positionings to challenge cultural and gender binaries. They do this through the use of what they name asides, to elucidate assumptions about Confucian and Western differences. Asides are integrated throughout their work and help readers become aware of assumptions that might get in the way of understanding the complexities of children’s play.

CONCLUSION This chapter has mapped six postdevelopmental perspectives on children’s gendered play, showing how each viewpoint focuses differently on relationality and intersectionality. In doing so, it has highlighted how postdevelopmental research privileges various concepts that reside outside of developmental understandings of gender, sex and sexuality. Making a geographical and conceptual shift, this chapter then examined studies that might be termed post-Confucian. It shows the different ways in which East Asian scholars researching play and gender/sex/uality discourses recognize the shared legacy of Confucianism as a critical

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concept in their work. Highlighting the methodological issues these scholars faced when working with Confucian and Western notions of gender/sex/uality, and the strategies they used to research and work with difference, turns up significant questions not just for researching gender/sex/uality and play but also for knowledge production across the international field of early childhood education. While postdevelopmental research has made significant contributions to challenging the assumptions of developmental approaches to gender, it still often leaves the privileged Western lens in place. East Asian studies of gender/sex/uality discourse and play remind us that it is important to challenge the ethnocentrism of all Western research. Future directions in gender/sex/uality research must attend to the conscious and unconscious ways in which we remain within our own feminist comfort zones. With this in mind, it is important to consider how recognizing the multiplicity of patriarchal power relations across the world, and the different strategies of resistance these allow or deny, might challenge and strengthen research on gender/sex/ uality and play. ‘White’ and Western blindness continues in the field and is evident when race and ethnicity only seems to matter when ‘others’ are present in the play research. This blindness is compounded further when we fail to question the appropriateness of employing Western theories in other-than Western contexts. The difficulty of locating published studies of gender/sex/uality and play in East Asian contexts raises vital, and uneasy, questions about knowledge production more broadly. It forces us to wonder about who gets to speak, and who has to listen, in the international field of early childhood research? Whose concept of ‘play’ and gender/sex/uality gets heard in such a world? How do and should editors and publishers support other-than-Western perspectives, rather than business-as-usual? Finally, what might a southward-advancing discourse of gender/sex/uality and play offer the global

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field of early childhood education and, in consequence, how might new issues of equity emerge and be addressed? These are significant questions about power and knowledge that feminist postcolonial scholars (e.g. Mohanty, 1984) have been raising for decades. Not only did feminism make this chapter possible; it also shows how and why the field of early childhood education and play must look outside the narrow confines of developmentalism to generate alternative feminist projects about gender/sex/uality discourses, equity and play.

NOTES 1. Tongzhi is a Chinese term that has been appropriated by Hong Kong gay activists as an Indigenous representation of same-sex sexuality. 2. NTC are children whose mothers have come from SouthEast Asia or China to marry Taiwanese men.

REFERENCES Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bartholomaeus, C. (2012) ‘“I’m not allowed wrestling stuff”: Hegemonic masculinity and primary school boys’, Journal of Sociology, 48(3): 227–47. Beasley, C. (2008) ‘Rethinking hegemonic masculinity in a globalizing world’, Men and Masculinities, 11(1): 86–103. Bhana, D. (2009) ‘“Boys will be boys”: What do early childhood teachers have to do with it?’, Educational Review, 61(3): 327–39. Blaise, M. (2005) Playing it Straight!: Uncovering Gender Discourses in an Early Childhood Classroom. New York: Routledge. Blaise, M. and Taylor, A. (2012) ‘Research in review: A queer eye for early childhood’, Young Children, 67(1): 88–98. Boldt, G.M. (1996) ‘Sexist and heterosexist responses to gender bending in an elementary classroom’, Curriculum Inquiry, 26(2): 113–31. Brooker, L. and Ha, S.J. (2005) ‘The cooking teacher: Investigating gender stereotypes in a Korean kindergarten’, Early Years, 25(1): 17–30. Browne, N. (2004) Gender Equity in the Early Years. Maidenhead: Open University Press.

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Brownell, S. and Wasserstrom, J.N. (2002) Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Butler, J. ([1990] 1999) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Chan, S.Y. (2007) ‘The Confucian conception of gender in the twenty-first century’, in D.A. Bell and H. Chaibong (eds), Confucianism for the Modern World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 312–33. Chen, K.H. (2010). Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Chen, E.S.L. and Rao, N. (2011) ‘Gender socialization in Chinese kindergartens: Teacher’s contributions’, Sex Roles, 64(1–2): 103–16. Chou, W.S. (2000) Tongzhi: Politics of Same-sex Eroticism in Chinese Societies. New York: Haworth Press. Chou, Y.H. (2011) ‘A study of gendering culture of New Taiwanese Children in their kindergarten classroom’. Doctoral dissertation, Kent State University, Kent, O-H. Connell, R.W. (1987) Gender and Power. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Connolly, P. (1998) Racism, Gender Identities and Young Children: Social Relations in a Multi-ethnic, Inner-city Primary School. London: Routledge. Connolly, P. (2004) Boys and Schooling in the Early Years. London: RoutledgeFalmer. Cornell, D. (2004) ‘Gender in America’, in N. Tazia (ed.), Gender: For a Different Kind of Globalization. New York: Other Press. pp. 33–54. Crenshaw, K.W. (1991) ‘Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics and violence against women of color’, Stanford Law Review, 43(6): 124–99. Davis, K. and MacNaughton, G. (2009) ‘Masculinities, mateship, and young boys: Defending borders, playing footy, and kissing Meg’, in G. MacNaughton and K. Davies (eds), ‘Race’ and Early Childhood Education: An International Approach to Identity, Politics and Pedagogy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 85–97. Davies, B. ([1989] 2003) Frogs and Snails and Feminist Tales. London: Allen & Unwin. Davies, B. and Kasama, H. (2004) Gender in Japanese Preschools: Frogs and Snails and Feminist Tales in Japan. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (R. Hurley, M. Seem and H.R. Lane, trans.). London: Continuum. Foucault, M. (1978) The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (R. Hurley, trans.). Volume 1. New York: Pantheon Books. Francis, B. (1998) Power Plays: Primary School Children’s Constructions of Gender, Power and Adult Work. Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books.

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Gallas, K. (1998) Sometimes I Can Be Anything: Power, Gender and Identity in a Primary Classroom. New York: Teachers College Press. Gandhi, L. (1998) Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction. New York: Columbia University Press. Gunn, A.C. (2011) ‘Even if you say it three ways, it still doesn’t mean it’s true: The pervasiveness of hetero­ normativity in early childhood education’, Journal of Early Childhood Research, 9(3): 280–90. Ha, M.P. (2009) ‘Double trouble: Doing gender in Hong Kong’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 34(2): 423–49. Kong, T.S.K. (2011) Chinese Male Homosexualities: Memba, Tongzhi and Golden Boy. Abingdon: Routledge. Lim, S. (2007) ‘Exploring colonization: Situating young children’s experiences within the multiple contexts of globalizing Singapore’. Doctoral dissertation, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York. Lipkin, E. (2009) Girls’ Studies. Berkeley, CA: Seal Press. Lubeck, S. (1998) ‘Is developmentally appropriate practice for everyone?’, Childhood Education, 74(5): 283–92. MacLean, R. (1999) ‘Constructing gendered subjectivities: Peer interactions in the first weeks of school’, in B. Kamler (ed.), Constructing Gender and Difference: Critical Research Perspectives on Early Childhood. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. pp. 71–96. MacNaughton, G. (2000) Rethinking Gender in Early Childhood Education. London: Paul Chapman. MacNaughton, G. and Davis, K. (eds) (2009) ‘Race’ and Early Childhood Education: An International Approach to Identity, Politics and Pedagogy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. MacNaughton, G., Davis, K. and Smith, K. (2009) ‘Intersecting identities: Fantasy, popular culture, and feminized “race-gender”’, in G. MacNaughton and K. Davies (eds), ‘Race’ and Early Childhood Education: An International Approach to Identity, Politics and Pedagogy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 67–84. Madrid, S. and Kantor, R. (2009) ‘Being kitties in a preschool classroom: Maintaining group harmony and acting proper in a female peer-culture play routine’, Ethnography and Education, 4(2): 229–47. Martin, B. (2011) Children at Play: Learning Gender in the Early Years. Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books. Mohanty, C.T. (1984) ‘Under Western eyes: Feminist scholarship and colonial discourses’, Boundary 2, 12(3) 13(1). Paechter, C. (2007) Being Boys, Being Girls: Learning Masculinities and Femininities. Maidenhead: Open University Press.

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Paley, V.G. (1984) Boys and Girls: Superheroes in the Doll Corner. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Plummer, K. (2011) ‘Hybridic sexualities and the search for global intimate citizenship: Introduction to Travis Kong’s Chinese Male Homosexualities’, in T. Kong, Chinese Male Homosexualities: Memba, Tongzhi and Golden Boy, Abingdon: Routledge. pp. xiii–xix. Renold, E. and Mellor, D. (2013) ‘Deleuze and Guattari in the nursery: Towards an ethnographic multisensory mapping of young gendered becomings’, in R. Coleman and J. Ringrose (eds), Deleuze and Research Methodologies (Deleuze Connections Series). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Robinson, K. (2005) ‘Childhood and sexuality: Adult constructions and silenced children’, in J. Mason and T. Fattore (eds), Children Taken Seriously in Theory, Policy, and Practice. London: Jessica Kingsley. pp. 66–76. Robinson, K. (2013) Innocence, Knowledge, and the Construction of Childhood: The Contradictory Nature of Sexuality and Censorship in Children’s Contemporary Lives. Abingdon: Routledge. Rogers, S. and Evans, J. (2008) Inside Role-play in Early Childhood Education: Researching Young Children’s Perspectives. Abingdon: Routledge. Sciaraffa, M. and Randolph, T. (2011) ‘“You want me to talk to children about what?”: Responding to the subject of sexuality development in young children’, Young Children, 66(4): 32–8. Skattebol, J. (2005) ‘Insider/outsider belongings: Traversing the borders of whiteness in early childhood’, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 6(2): 189–203. Sprung, B. (ed.) (1978) Perspectives on Non-sexist Early Childhood Education. New York: Teachers College Press.

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Surtees, N. (2005) ‘Teacher talk about and around sexuality in early childhood education: Deciphering an unwritten code’, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 6(1): 19–29. Tang, D.T.S. (2011) Conditional Spaces: Hong Kong Lesbian Desires and Everyday Life. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Taylor, A. (2008) ‘Taking account of childhood excess: “Bringing the elsewhere home”’, in B. Davies (ed.), Judith Butler in Conversation: Analyzing the Texts and Talk of Everyday Life. New York: Routledge. pp. 195–216. Taylor, A. and Richardson, C. (2005) ‘Queering home corner’, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 6(2): 163–74. Thorne, B. (1993) Gender Play. Buckingham: Open University Press. Tobin, J. (1997) ‘Introduction: The missing discourse of pleasure and desire’, in J. Tobin (ed.), Making a Place for Pleasure in Early Childhood Education. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. pp. 1–37. Walkerdine, V. (1981) ‘Sex, power, and pedagogy’, Screen Education, Spring: 38. Weaver-Hightower, M.B. (2008) The Politics of Policy in Boys’ Education: Getting Boys ‘Right’. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Weedon, C. (1987) Feminist Practice and Poststructu­ ralist Theory. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Wohlwend, K. (2007) ‘Friendship meeting or blocking circle?: Identities in the laminated spaces of a playground conflict’, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 8(1): 73–88. Yelland, N. (ed.) (1998) Gender in Early Childhood. London: Routledge. Yoon, J.H. (2007) ‘A case study of Korean girls’ constructions of girlhood in a kindergarten class’. Doctoral dissertation, The University of Texas at Austin, TX.

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11 Studying Play through New Research Practices Liz Jones and Rachel Holmes

INTRODUCTION This chapter works from the premise that children’s play is a serious subject and worth studying. It aims to explicate some of the research traditions and different methods that are used when examining play, the child and her learning. The chapter moves between three frames, modernity, postmodernism and posthumanism, and in so doing maps some of the ontological and epistemological reper­ cussions when research is situated within one of these three frames. Thus, the first section of the chapter takes the Enlightenment as a point of departure, where we consider the ‘modern child’, her play and learning, where specific notions of rationality and progress underpin methodolo­ gies used to both document and understand play. The latter finds resonance within a dis­ course of liberal humanism, still prevalent within early years settings in the UK, where the child, play and learning are predicated on notions of autonomy, responsibility, independ­ ence and so on. Methodological approaches

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that seek to understand such ideals draw on a range of techniques including systematic observations and ethnographic practices. The further section explores ‘postmodern childhoods’ and is a move that effects two considerations. First, the ideas underpin­ ning and which give credence to the modern child are fractured, and second, such frac­ turing has consequences in terms of the researcher, the research foci and the research methodologies employed, where the pursuit of universal truth is abandoned, favouring instead multiple truths and or interpreta­ tions. The final stage of the chapter moves to radically suggest that play has no identity itself, but can only be fleetingly defined according to its specific time–space context (Harker, 2005). In trying to understand something of play as an ontological fugi­ tive, we consider ways in which research practices might be used to conjure alterna­ tive facets of play, including embodiment, affective performativity and children’s rela­ tionship with objects, where matter matters (Barad, 2008; Bennett, 2010).

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As a way of situating this chapter, we will begin with the following observation drawn from a recently completed ethnographic pro­ ject1 that the two authors were involved in. This week there are new additions to the plastic bricks – wheels and sticks to join the cubes and semi-circles – children are very soon making various vehicles as well as structures which they try and balance on. Ms M. calls a group of children to work with her on a ‘focused activity’ and the construction continues. Two four-year-old boys have built it very high – Ms M. calls to them across the room ‘to be careful’. Some while later she notices a child who is not being sensible and she uses a sudden and loud voice to point this out and some children momentarily stop in their tracks and then they continue with what they were doing. At 10 am ‘change over time’2 is called and at 10.10 am I3 count four girls and 12 boys in the construction room. There is a concentrated, focused atmosphere in the construction area. Ms M. notices the platforms that have been constructed and the way that children are balancing along them and suggests that they make an obstacle course, a suggestion that the children go along with enthusiastically. Ms M. participates occasionally by offering ideas and at the same time she makes observations on the children, jotting things down on her clipboard. I film this activity for a while. I also capture on film Samuel who after making a model, deconstructs it and tidies it away before leaving the room for another activity.

In general, the scene that has been docu­ mented is quite typical of practices that occur in contemporary English early years class­ rooms. It is also suggested that the scene typifies educational and social research in which the researcher is using both quantita­ tive and qualitative methods to collect data. Arguably, however, questions of methods are secondary to questions of paradigm (Guba and Lincoln, 1994). By using the same exam­ ple of data throughout the chapter we aim to illustrate what the consequences are when the researcher is positioned within different paradigms. What sorts of knowledge claims are possible when the play and learning that is briefly glimpsed in the data is read against a particular worldview? In order to begin addressing this question, we turn to the idea of ‘the modern child’.

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THE MODERN CHILD: PLAY AND LEARNING To speak of ‘the modern child’ is to acknow­ ledge the Enlightenment project which came into focus during the eighteenth century. Harvey (1990: 12–27) discusses modernity, making clear the interrelationship between research and the aspiration for progress lead­ ing to social betterment via the development of rational forms of social organization and rational modes of thought. Taking this characterization across to the data, we can begin to posit reasons as to why the researcher is taking notes and filming the children’s activities and how these activities can be tied to development. We can also begin to appreciate why the class teacher has an interest in documenting aspects of play. As teacher, she has a responsibility to monitor the children’s learning, which in turn will develop their capacity for reasoning. Such knowledge will allow her to plan where she will use the classroom environment so as to maximize children’s play and the opportunities it affords for progressing further development. This prompts the question: ‘How are judgements made about children’s learn­ ing?’ Piaget (1962/1997) is a major influence on securing the relationship between playing with construction materi­ als and learning. Central to the development of knowledge for Piaget is the idea of an ‘operation’, for example, ‘ordering, or put­ ting things in a series… or counting, or measuring’ (Piaget, 1997: 20). Whilst it is not explicitly stated in the data, there is by implication the suggestion that the children must have been undertaking some of these actions in order to materialize ‘various vehicles as well as structures which they try and balance on’. It is the knowledge of Piaget’s stages of development which con­ stitutes a benchmark against which the children’s play and learning can be evalu­ ated and taken forward. The researcher’s task meanwhile is located around the ‘accumulation’ of knowledge (about play and learning) that will also lead to

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progress. The task of gathering data is dependent upon the epistemological commitments of the researcher. And whilst we would align ourselves with postmodern/posthumanist epis­ temological commitments, other researchers who are assuming a more positivist orientation are likely to be systematically gathering data under relatively controlled conditions. Samples of data can then be statistically analysed so that generalizable findings in relation to four-yearold children’s play and learning can be formalized. As a marker of developmental sta­ tus, age is always a factor in such studies (Meire, 2007). Research that is directed towards children’s development and is situated within quasi-positivist traditions is posited on sets of presuppositions that developmental change is ‘natural’. Piaget’s ‘stages and ages’ theories of development represent these presuppositions most clearly (Morss, 1996). If this is the researcher’s position, we can then begin to appreciate why she is noting activities, changes and events – including the introduction of new materials – on a week-by-week basis where the goal is to establish general and universal laws of development (Karmiloff-Smith, 1992). By aligning oneself with Piagetian, mainstream developmental psychology the researcher can, through careful observations, uncover ‘the universal and natural processes by which human infants are transformed into fully adapted adults’ (Morss, 1996; see also Burman, 1994). However, the data does suggest that the researcher’s interest goes beyond collecting numerical data. She is, for instance, interested in children’s interactions with their teacher and with one another. In collecting qualitative data there is recognition that other variables exist in the context that might impact upon children, their play and their learning and cannot be accommodated within more positivist approaches. Similar criticisms have been mounted against developmental psychology, leading to modifications within the field, where the focus has been widened and the terms revised to take account of the social context (Rogoff, 1990; Fisher, 1992). In the data, it is Ms M.’s suggestions which have been recorded:

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Ms M. notices the platforms that have been constructed and the way that children are balancing along them and suggests that they make an obstacle course, a suggestion that the children go along with enthusiastically. Ms M. participates occasionally by offering ideas…

Following Bruner (1985), we could under­ stand this moment as the practice ‘scaffold­ ing’. ‘Scaffolding’ allows for the interplay between adult and child where contributions from the adult can develop language and problem-solving, leading to advancements in learning. ‘Scaffolding’ follows on from and is significantly influenced by Vygotsky’s (1978) notion of the ‘zone of proximal devel­ opment’ (ZPD), where the ZPD is the differ­ ence between what a learner can do without help and what he or she can do with help. Thus, whilst the researcher is noting what children are doing, when they are doing it and if there is gender prevalence in relation to these activities, it is also apparent that notice is being taken of the adult’s role in the children’s play and learning (Rogoff, 1990). Similarly, it has also been noted that ‘[t] wo four-year-old boys have built it very high’, an observation that hints at a possi­ ble interest in collaborative play, where learning is influenced and perhaps deep­ ened through peer group interactions (Coolahan et al., 2000). Thus research predicated on developmental–ecological theories would be interested in the boys’ acquisition of age-appropriate competen­ cies within the social context of early schooling (Bredekamp and Copple, 1997). The researcher might also have an interest in the emergence of friendship groups, where the development of positive peer relationships during the preschool years has been associated with positive adjustment to early schooling as well as subsequent aca­ demic success (Ladd, Price, and Hart, 1988). Thus it is possible to appreciate how the children’s play, the learning it assists and the social bonds it supports are impli­ cated in ‘rational forms of social organization and rational modes of thought’ (Harvey, 1990: 26).

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Studying Play through New Research Practices

THE MODERN CHILD: PARTICIPATORY APPROACHES Up until this point, our focus has been on the researcher as key actor in the process of enquiry in the classroom, observing a teacher and young children (as ‘pre-adult becom­ ings’) at work (Holloway and Valentine, 2000: 5; Cahill 2004). This next section focuses on the epistemological and ontologi­ cal shifts occurring over the past two decades that reconceptualize the child as competent and able to participate in accessing more ‘authentic’ or ‘better’ knowledge (Cahill, 2004) of herself and of other children amongst what is sometimes referred to as the ‘new social studies of childhood’ (see for example Prout and James, 1990). These shifts towards more participatory methods remain under­ pinned by a broadly Cartesian subjectivity, yet reposition the child in relation to the adults who work with her (Holloway and Valentine, 2000). For example, Gallacher and Gallagher (2008) discuss Clark and Moss’s (2001) claims that three- and four-year-olds might provide better insights into the experi­ ence of babies at nursery than adult researchers (see Einarsdottir, this volume). Along with this global notion of emerging participation, many early childhood, as well as methodological, commentators document how research participants, including the youngest of children, have become valued as more active collaborators in the research process itself. No longer is the child conceptualized as ‘found wanting’ (Lee, 2001), and researchers and prac­ titioners have begun to consult with children to elicit their perspectives, views and opinions about their own lives. A motivating force to work with children foregrounds the need for adults to work more collaboratively and in multisensory ways to find opportunities to make young children’s perspectives visible.

Child-centred Research Methods If we return to the example of data we can consider what research tools are needed that are specifically devised to engage children.

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How might the children in the data narrate and document the activities they are engaged with? They might for example create, share and discuss photographs as part of research processes. Such a step, it is argued, can alter the constructs of traditional qualitative research enquiry in which ‘outsider’ research­ ers investigate and assess the lives of ‘insider’ research subjects (Wang and Burris 1994; Kaplan and Howes 2004). And whilst the data does impose limits on the discussion of children’s participation, others in the field have involved them using: drama, role play and storytelling (Rogers and Evans, 2008); music and dance (Emberly, 2003); puppetry (Cree, Kay and Tisdall, 2002); visual arts (Thomson, 2008; Sullivan, 2010); drawing, diagrams and maps (Clark and Moss 2001); still and moving imagery, such as photogra­ phy using disposable and digital cameras, video cameras, web and baby-cams and filmmaking (Fernandes, 2007; Mizen and Ofosu-Kusi, 2007); and a range of new media technologies (see Burnett, 2010). Serving a particular participatory aim, these approaches simultaneously serve as research tools and outputs. The child’s photograph, film, role play, map or drawing becomes data, repre­ senting what might often be overlooked by adults but is crucial to the child’s perspec­ tive, and potentially offering adults an insight into something of her complex world and childhood spaces. What can ensue is a pro­ cess of child-led data collection and analysis (for example see Clark and Moss, 2001) that can ‘access and valorise previously neglected knowledges and provide more nuanced under­ standings of complex social phenomena’ (Kesby, 2000: 423). Moving beyond the classroom, these new approaches to participatory research became more frequently used to assist with chil­ dren’s broader participation. Burke (2005) describes a notable trend or even ‘… an interdisciplinary turn towards the use of visual techniques in children’s cultures and material contexts for learning and play…’ (2005: 28). With a cascade of creative approaches to researching with young

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children beginning to spread across many different settings, including museums, art galleries and theatres, opportunities emerge to develop innovative and interdisciplinary partnerships as part of a broader agenda for children’s participation. However, with a focus on participation and new research methods, the following critical and ethical questions remain foregrounded in early years research practices: what are counted – or discounted – as legitimate forms of participation? And how are the roles of adults (participation workers) understood (Tisdall, 2008)? Momentarily, we return to an extract of the data: I film this activity for a while. I also capture on film Samuel who after making a model, deconstructs it and tidies it away before leaving the room for another activity.

Here Samuel is being recorded and observed by the researcher and a video. There seems to be little verbal interaction documented between them, but silently the camera traces his movements and actions and the researcher also briefly interprets, notes and, here, has sketched out his activities as seen through the lens. On reflection, the video footage offers a visual story that has pursued and can repeat­ edly retell (albeit in various and differenti­ ated ways) Samuel’s model-making, subse­ quent dismantling and tidying away of the building materials. However, if we assume a different perspective, a researcher working from a postmodern paradigm might wonder whose agenda was being served by filming Samuel in this way? How might the researcher otherwise have enabled Samuel’s active participation in this research activity and what might this participation – perhaps in the form of him being able to photograph his model as it emerged and discuss the model before and during its deconstruction – have opened up for Samuel, the researcher, the reader here? How might the researcher glimpse more insight into the purpose of Samuel’s play activities if he was actively participating in the documentation of his

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experiences? Could other and more diverse questions be contemplated, such as: did he intend to build and then dismantle the model? Could he have chosen to leave it for others to play with? Did he know the rules about how he should leave the construction area? How could Samuel’s more active participation inform the postmodern researcher about his desires to conform to the collective rules and be seen to be ‘good’ by tidying away before leaving the construction area? With the aforementioned intention in mind, there seem to be tensions emerging here. Tisdall points out that: … The term ‘participation’ in the children’s field tends to have positive associations, seen as inevitably a ‘good thing’, something to be promoted, something that should be beneficial to all involved. Such a presentation, unthreatening and inclusive, no doubt has aided its permeation into a host of policy and practice arenas… (2008: 421).

However, despite the assumed positive asso­ ciations made with the idea of children’s participation, a postmodern researcher would take a more critical stance here. If Samuel’s active participation had been nurtured from the outset, how could the researcher resist this activity only being harnessed as ‘partici­ patory’ because it happens to fit comfortably into her conceptual organization of the room, the children, the subject under scrutiny, the funders’ agenda and the project’s govern­ ing structures (O’Toole and Gale, 2008)? This potential double bind is discussed by Gallacher and Gallagher (2008), who point out the complications of encouraging chil­ dren to participate in creating knowledge about themselves, which also renders their contributions part of the processes used to regulate them. We do need to acknowledge that although hypothetically we are inviting Samuel to participate in data collection and analysis by offering him a camera and opening up a discussion about his activities (and subsequently also his photographs of the activities), there could remain further complex issues of empowerment and com­ pliance (Cahill, 2004; Theis, 2007). These

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tensions raise ongoing and difficult ques­ tions around, for example, the role of adults in nurturing ‘legitimate’ forms of a child’s participation.

POSTMODERN CHILDHOODS The terms ‘postmodernism’ and ‘poststruc­ turalism’ are often alternated. Lather, for example, uses ‘postmodern’ to mean ‘the larger cultural shifts of a post-industrial, post-colonial era and “poststructural” to mean the working out of those shifts within the arenas of academic theory’, but isn’t averse to using the terms ‘interchangeably’ (1991: 4). More recently, the term ‘posthu­ manist’ has begun to be used. Derived in part from contemporary feminist thought, posthu­ manism contributes towards the critique of the humanist subject whilst also drawing attention to the complex relations individuals have with their material/natural surroundings (Bennett and Frow, 2008). Although post­ structuralism and posthumanism have differences, including various different foci as theoretical positions, they are both ‘work­ ing out’ – that is, struggling with the bedrock assumptions of modernity, including truth, certainty and stable identity. Both poststruc­ turalism and posthumanism offer us conceptual tools for challenging the central­ ity of the autonomous, rational subject. Thus in crude terms, poststructuralism highlights our enmeshment in discourse where what it means to be, for example, a child is produced within and as a consequence of discursive practices (Foucault, 2002). Poststructuralism also highlights our interdependence on lan­ guage where its endless chain of meanings (Derrida, 1981) frustrates the enterprise of capturing/mirroring what is ‘really happen­ ing’, including what is ‘really happening’ in the classroom. Posthumanism meanwhile works from a similar cartography as post­ structuralism in order to put further pressure on the slash that separates a number of hier­ archies including nature/culture, mind/body and the human and the non-human.

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Taking these thoughts across to the data, we can begin to consider how the researcher’s interest in brick play can be moved away from – yet never entirely break with – modernists’ concerns with development. As an example, we can begin to contemplate how the work might be located within a poststructuralist femi­ nist position. Here the observations would enable the researcher to deconstruct the classroom (Brown and Jones, 2001; MacNaughton, 2005) so that she gains a better feel for the way in which some dis­ courses predispose certain intelligible communities whilst frustrating the emer­ gence of others (Britzman, 1995). So, the occurrence of more boys playing with bricks is not treated as a ‘fact’ that is associated with and emerges from some spurious notion of essentialist masculinity (Butler, 2006); rather, it is one practice that is situ­ ated within a complex history. Thus the researcher’s weekly visits to the classroom are a necessary step in trying to unpick this history. A chief interest will be in practices that constitute what is ‘normal’, whether this is in terms of disposition (‘Which of the children are “normally” kind?’) or in prac­ tice (‘Why is it ‘normal’ in this classroom for more boys to play with bricks?’). It is by critiquing habitual and familiar notions of the child that the researcher can create the necessary conceptual space for thinking differently, outside of the canons of develop­ mental psychology, liberal humanism and so on.

POSTFOUNDATIONAL, POSTHUMANIST RESEARCH: THE ARTIFICIAL I/EYE In general, most poststructuralist accounts in relation to early years identity, play and learn­ ing lean to familiar research methods, such as field notes. However, if cutting-edge and future research is taking us towards the desire to produce different knowledge about young children and to produce that knowledge

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differently (St. Pierre, 1997: 175), how might we treat the data with degrees of difference? In the spirit of experimentation, this section of the chapter concerns itself with methodologi­ cal multiplicity and complexity, taken in order to move ourselves as researchers towards conceptual, analytical and interpretive spaces that can meet the needs of ever-changing edu­ cational practices (Koro-Ljungberg, 2012). It will be informed by our interests in multiple disciplinary combinations and in particular how ideas and methods juxtaposed by differ­ ent disciplines, for example across education, art and film practices, can become an effective means to creatively interrogate the intricacies of classroom cultures. Proust writes, ‘… The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new land­ scapes, but in having new eyes…’ (1932: 260). If our challenge is to have ‘new eyes’ when understanding something about chil­ dren’s play, it is interesting to contemplate how we (both researchers and practitioners) might see the same landscapes differently, because ‘[i]t is this banality that we seek to interrupt, in the hope of thinking, and mak­ ing, something new…’ (MacLure et al., 2010: 1). Dalke, Grobstein and McCormack (2006) suggest that interdisciplinarity ought to force us out of our own comfort zone of assumed truths, towards an experience of dis-ease, being at odds with ourselves in a rich terrain of other forms of exploration and understanding, beyond the borderlands of our individual disciplines, epistemolo­ gies and ontologies. Symonds and Gorard (2010) suggest that conceptualizing meth­ odology as a categorical entity is worrying as by nature it defines boundaries, which perceptions and activities are encouraged not to cross. This might infer that any thoughts of mixing research methods across disciplines, rather than enabling alternative ideas and methodologies to flourish, might only serve to stifle our will to ‘create!’, in part working to preserve method or disci­ pline schisms (Gorard, 2007: 1). Dalke, Grobstein and McCormack (2006), them­ selves straddling the disciplines of English

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and gender studies, biology and physics, argue that interdisciplinary conversations are exercises in explaining to one another the multiple ways in which we are ‘meta­ phorising’ our individual metonymic landscapes, seeking and articulating those schisms, the shape of the paths we may take through them and the habits we have formed to traverse them. They suggest we rearrange the territory, to use one another’s metaphors to alter our own metonymic landscapes. A ‘new object that belongs to no one’ is an intriguing thought in relation to engagement with data, with children as legitimate par­ ticipants in the classroom and with analysis. Floyd-Thomas et al. (2002) contend that researchers who practise interdisciplinarity are augmenting the promise of their own discipline’s knowledge about a subject by refusing those classical disciplines’ strict definitions, parameters and methods for studying a subject. So, being mindful of emerging interdisciplinary methodologies in a postfoundational, posthumanist landscape, we would argue that social scientific and other disciplinary practices can be produc­ tively harnessed in tension with one another, to problematize notions of data, participa­ tion, classroom truths, evidence, knowledge and representation and to challenge the deep familiarity that surrounds the ways we understand and respond to young children and their play. New methodological approaches to children’s play need to aim to ‘obliterate easy signification’ (Marks, 2000: 208), attempting instead to release a more open array of responses that are ‘less bur­ dened with the weight of prior assumptions, our own included’ (MacLure, 2010: 283). Taking into consideration St. Pierre’s (1997) desire to produce different knowledge and to produce that knowledge differently, together with Koro-Ljungberg’s (2012) call for researchers to ‘create!’, our data – alongside an emerging interest in interdisciplinarity – leads us to our focus on an emerging use of video in classroom research. Deleuze’s (1986, 1989) work on cinema has helped in terms of resisting banality and in so doing

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opened spaces to think differently (see MacLure, Holmes, MacRae and Jones, 2010). In an attempt to understand play as an ontological fugitive (Harker, 2005), rather than a stable entity with certain actors offer­ ing itself up for analysis, we consider how drawing from the discipline of the visual arts, and in particular film-making, can be a useful disruptive method to run with rather than capture play, and in so doing conjure different ways of ‘knowing’, ways that are not tied to cognition. This demands a further ontological and epistemological shift where individuals are no longer ‘distinct’ individu­ als in ‘an antagonistic relationship with their surroundings’ where mastery is the aim. Rather, posthumanists regard their own being ‘as embodied in an extended techno­ logical world…’ (Pepperell, 2003: 1). So whilst film could be used in analysing the type and frequency of brick play (Pellegrini et al., 2004), or could offer insights into the development of gendered behaviours and interactions (Goodwin, 2001; Evaldsson, 2003), we also suggest that it can tell us about our own embodiment with the ma­terial (Bennett, 2010), where such relationships produce new, molecular knowledge that isn’t predicated on predetermined cognitive goals. In turning to the data we want to run with this idea of embodiment with/in ‘an extended technological world’ where children, objects, the video camera, teacher, systems and structures are vibrant matter in molecular relations with one another (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Bennett, 2010). The video camera becomes a ‘screen’ that intervenes and produces something recognizable from this pulsating event: ‘… Like a formless elastic membrane… the screen makes some­ thing issue from chaos … even if this something differs only slightly…’ (Deleuze, 1992: 87). Returning to the data, we know that the brick play will move to the screen, where it will ‘issue from chaos’ (Deleuze, 1993: 67). As already inferred, ‘issues’ could

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include examples of ethical, diagnostic, sci­ entific, sociocultural discourses embodying cultural manifestations of gender and physi­ cal development and so on. But what if we (re)think this encounter between the two boys, the researcher, along with other incor­ poreal matter, in terms of their embodied connections within an event connected to other events? In such an account, we sug­ gest, the researcher is not a (dis)connected, external body. Rather, it is a swirling of mat­ ter, where her hand, eye, camera, lens are all caught within vibrating intensities. Amongst the building matter, ‘something’ in this framed moment moves beyond the frame, as the researcher’s matter makes connections, where affect swirls so that the clean line we like to impose between subject and object is no longer discernable. As the researcher’s extended, artificial eye plays across the chil­ dren’s bodies, affect happens, where sensation and feelings pass into molecular interactions, which, whilst evading language and cognition, nevertheless produce ‘some­ thing’ (awe? wonder?). Whilst we cannot know for certain what might happen, isn’t it possible to think of those moments when we have pushed our­ selves beyond our own comfort zones, where like the boys we have executed something outside of our habitual self? Isn’t it possible to imagine, appreciate, resonate with the ter­ ror, thrill and excitement of the tower, where the artificial eye goes directly to the researcher’s stomach, making it tighten as she wills the boys to go further, to take the risk of another brick, and another? Through her extended artificial eye she no longer stands outside but is one of the boys. She experiences the thrill of the climb, the temp­ tation to dare, the possibilities of balancing and then leaping. Her extended eye franti­ cally checks the classroom, scanning for the teacher, before it is pulled back. The data enters her body. Affect riddles her through and through, where fleeting memories of climbing intermingle with giddiness, antici­ pation, danger, risk, blood, bruises and badly damaged skin. Her extended, artificial eye

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enters into the boys’ play and they in turn enter into her, where her body ‘… is, for a moment at least, directly touched by the forces of chaos from which it so carefully shields itself in habit, cliché and doxa…’ (Grosz, 2011: 24). In this moment, thought seems to relate to her flesh and not her brain. Her body and flesh are out of joint with the sedate coding – a phrase that captures the closing down of possibilities, or even their elimination – that she already knows will frame this playful encounter. When the teacher calls ‘Be careful’, she feels herself returning to the schooled suspicions of risk.

Affect and Film: Getting at Bodily Parts That Other Methods Cannot Reach The final part of this section concerns itself with what we are learning, and what these methods are ‘revealing’ about children’s play and their learning. Our first point of interest is how these new methods are important to our learning about data, about play and about children, because it is only when working with them that we can reflect and understand that without them, we might only see what we already knew. Momentarily we want to return attention to the analysis above: Her body and flesh are out of joint with the sedate coding that she already knows will frame this playful encounter. When the teacher calls ‘Be careful’ she feels herself returning to the schooled suspicions of risk. Within the context of what we are learning from these new methods in relation to researching children’s play, the tensions in this sentence open up the borderlands of sedate/transgressive data and the complexi­ ties of coding difference. MacLure, reflecting on the use of coding in qualitative research, suggests that ‘the “grammar” always pre-exists the phenomena under investigation’ (cited in Coleman and Ringrose, 2013: 168), so how can we learn from what these new methods offer us in their disruption of this pre-existing gram­ mar inscribed throughout educational and

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qualitative research? Although our analysis above might incite responses such as ‘Where is the evidence that any of the events described are happening, to either the children or the researcher – the gut feelings, the risk, the suspense, the terror – are they imaginary projections?’, what becomes interesting is the suspicion levelled at a potentially overenthusiastic researcher’s imagination, a sense of exaggeration and flamboyance. On the contrary, there is also no evidence to suggest that these events were not going on. However, we seem less suspicious of a more sedate, coded analysis that holds data in its place; keeps the researcher at arm’s length from ‘her’ data; secures ethical protection, intact­ ness and autonomy of his (or her) own secret self (Miller 1988: 162); silently perpetuates illusions of mastery; and maintains a separa­ tion between a centred humanist subject and the docile objects of her attention (MacLure, 2012). We would argue that these new methods allow us the potential to sense affect, to see difference or something new and to explore notions of illogical representation in the classroom, amongst play and when working with young children. It is from these experi­ ences that we have learned stand-alone, straight-filmed accounts of the classroom have to be doctored where they carry a degree of chaos or anarchy, as well as the wherewithal for degrees of manipulation so as to interfere with ‘naturalistic’ videoed classroom footage. In order to touch the gut or stomach, elements of the queer and the uncanny have to have a presence.4 Thus, we have had to consider ways in which well-rehearsed responses could be delib­ erately jarred by including moving and still images that disrupted the viewer, causing shock, at times outrage, laughter and, for some individuals, tears.5 The result is a film that intentionally gives up any will to truth. Instead, it embraces fiction, composition, fantasy, event, where each time it is viewed it is a ‘becoming’, including a ‘becoming art installation.’ In turning back to the data, we can con­ template the idea of deliberately corrupting

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Studying Play through New Research Practices

the researcher’s video. Rather than Ms M. (or indeed the researcher or some other practitioner) immediately linking together the footage of the two boys building with bricks and her internalized coded reference points, leading her back to developmental psychology, the film would work at the ‘… disappearance of these two discernable points, the freeing from fixed form…’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 238). The children, researcher, materials, matter and play become less discernable sites, no longer protected or closed off but open to an outside – including art and film theory – thus offering multiple exits and openings from the usual territories of data analysis. Doctored in interesting ways, film can be used to dislocate us from our preferred or usual reading frames, as well as to loosen the grip of linear time. It can also offer opportunities for reappraising the body where docility is juxtaposed against anarchy, where risk and caution are inter­ woven, where notions of normality and the stable self are ‘thrown into upheaval’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 240). Film thus becomes a vehicle to produce sensa­ tions, affects and intensities in response to children’s play in ways that upset both the researchers’ and the audience’s attempts to code, classify and organize the data in pre­ dictable ways.

CONCLUSION Taking one example of data, we have tried to spin a number of different methodologi­ cal tales. Beginning with the ‘modern child’, we have alluded to the role of research as well as the role of play in supporting notions of reason, rationality, linear logic and progressive development. We have also briefly considered how poststructuralism challenges and resists universal truths, cer­ tainty and notions of linear progress. In turning to posthumanism we sought to move beyond Piaget’s observation that ‘[t]o know an object is to act on it’ (1997: 20). We also

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undertook a line of flight with the researcher suggesting that the artificial eye of the cam­ era offered her embodied possibilities for seeing, hearing, feeling and maybe even tasting and smelling, which, as Bennett sug­ gests, offers a ‘fuller range of the nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies’. As Bennett continues: ‘These mate­ rial powers call for our attentiveness, or even our respect’ (2010: xi).

NOTES 1. Both authors, together with Maggie MacLure and Christina MacRae, worked on an Economic and Social Research Council-funded ethnographic project entitled ‘Becoming a problem (BAP): how and why children acquire a reputation as “naughty” in the earliest years at school’ (2006–2008). A copy of the report is available at www.esri.mmu.ac.uk/resprojects/reports/becominga problem.pdf 2. ‘Change over time’ occurs when children move so as to begin working/playing on a different activity. 3. The ‘I’ was a member of the project team. 4. The film can be found at www.esri.mmu.ac.uk/resprojects/ project_outline.php?project_id=133 5. In trialling the film we showed it to a number of different audiences, including: academics; a Director of Children’s Services; a former head of Policy Development at the General Teaching Council; an educational psychologist/ consultant on behaviour and emotional issues; members of Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services; social workers; parents attending a mother and toddlers’ group; teachers who took part in the original BAP research project; early childhood teacher educators; students aged between 8 and 16 years from a comprehensive school and from a progressive independent school; and trainee teachers.

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Lather, P. (1991) Getting Smart: Feminist Research and Pedagogy within/in the Postmodern. London: Routledge. Lee, N. (2001) Childhood and Society: Growing up in an Age of Uncertainty. Buckingham: Open University Press. MacLure, M. (2010) ‘The offence of theory’, Journal of Education Policy, 25(2): 277–286. MacLure, M. (2013) ‘Classification or wonder? Coding as an analytic practice in qualitative research’, in R. Coleman and J. Ringrose (eds), Deleuze and Research Methodologies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. pp. 164–183. MacLure, M., Holmes, R., MacRae, C. and Jones, L. (2010) ‘Animating classroom ethnography: overcoming video-fear’, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 23(5): 543–556. MacNaughton, G. (2005) Doing Foucault in Early Childhood Studies: Applying Poststructural Ideas. Abingdon: Routledge. Marks, L. (2000). ‘Signs of the time: Deleuze, Peirce, and the documentary image’, in G. Flaxman (ed.), The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. pp. 193–214. Meire, J. (2007) ‘Qualitative research on children’s play: a review of recent literature’, in T. Jambor and J. V. Gils (eds), Several Perspectives on Children’s Play: Scientific Reflections for Practitioners. Antwerp, Belgium: Garant. pp 29–68. Miller, D.A. (1988) The Novel and the Police. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Mizen, P. and Ofosu-Kusi, Y. (2007) ‘Researching with, not on: using photography in researching street children in accra, Ghana’, in M. Smith (ed.), Negotiating Boundaries and Borders Studies in Qualitative Methodology: Volume 8. Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing Limited. pp. 57–81. O’Toole, T. and Gale, R. (2008) ‘Learning from political sociology: structure, agency and inclusive governance’, International Journal of Children’s Rights, 16: 369–378. Pellegrini, A. D., Blatchford, P., Kato, K. and Baines, E. (2004) ‘A short-term longitudinal study of children’s playground games in primary school: implications for adjustment to school and social adjustment in the USA and the UK’, Social Development, 13: 107–123. Pepperell, R. (2003) The Posthuman Condition: Consciousness Beyond the Brain. London: Intellect Books.

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Piaget, J. (1962) Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Piaget, J. (1997) ‘Development and learning’, in M. Gauvain and M. Cole (eds), Readings on the Development of Children. New York: W.H. Freeman. pp. 29–36. Proust, M. (1932) Remembrance of Things Past (Volume 5, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff). New York: NBM Publishing. Prout, A. and James, A. (1990) ‘A new paradigm for the sociology of childhood? Provenance, prospect and problems’, in A. James and A. Prout (eds), Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociology of Childhood. London: Falmer. pp. 7–33. Rogers, S. and Evans, J. (2008) Inside Role-Play in Early Childhood Education: Researching Young Children’s Perspectives. Abingdon: Taylor & Francis. Rogoff, B. (1990) Apprenticeship in Thinking: Cognitive Development in Social Context. New York: Oxford University Press. St. Pierre, E. A. (1997) ‘Methodology in the fold and the irruption of transgressive data’, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 10(2): 175–189. Sullivan, G. (2010) Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in Visual Arts. London: Sage. Symonds, J. E. and Gorard, S. (2010) ‘Death of mixed methods? Or the rebirth of research as a craft?’, Evaluation & Research in Education, 23(2): 121–136. Theis, J. (2007) ‘Performance, responsibility and political decision-making: child and youth participation in Southeast Asia, East Asia and the Pacific’, Children, Youth and Environments, 17(1): 1–13. Thomson, P. (ed.) (2008) Visual Research with Children and Young People. Abingdon: Routledge. Tisdall, E. K. M. (2008) ‘Is the honeymoon over? Children and young people’s participation in public decision-making’, International Journal of Children’s Rights, Special Issue (lead editor) 16(3): 343–354. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978) Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wang, C. C and Burris, M. A. (1994) ‘Empowerment through photo novella: portraits of participation’, Health Education Quarterly, 21(2): 171–186.

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PART II

Play and Learning in Pedagogy, Curriculum and Assessment Susan Edwards, Liz Brooker and Mindy Blaise

In the main introduction to this handbook we drew attention to the nature of the ‘situated knowledges’ (p. 3) about play and learning which each of the contributors presented. In Part I the theoretical positions in each chapter came from quite different disciplinary, geographical and cultural contexts, yet these chapters contribute equally to understanding how ideas about play and learning in early childhood have evolved. Part II, while adopting a tighter and more practice-oriented focus, similarly presents the reader with a variety of situated knowledges about young children’s play and learning. ‘Play and learning in pedagogy, curriculum and assessment’ is the aspect of children’s play that connects most readily with the provision of education in early years institutions, such as nurseries, day care settings, kindergartens and schools. Part II is grounded in the view that play historically informs curriculum and pedagogical provision in the early years. Theory, philosophical positions and research

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on play are identified as having influenced approaches to learning and teaching with young children across a range of cultural contexts, as early childhood education spread from its Western European base across many areas of the world. Global initiatives such as the Millennium Development Goals, as well as regional programmes, have placed early childhood education and care high on the agenda for nations in the Majority as well as the Minority world. The nature of that provision, and the place of play in that provision, is a global issue. Contributors to this section write from their locations in the Nordic countries and New Zealand as well as from the United Kingdom and United States. They are concerned not only with the theoretical and philosophical value placed on play but also with the evidence from recent research and thinking which often challenges assumptions about the ways in which particular ‘positions’ on play are likely to support and engage children with different ‘forms’ of learning.

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Elizabeth Wood engages directly with this argument in the opening chapter for this section (Chapter 12). She outlines a perspective on educational play that encompasses three predominant ‘modes’ of play evident in pedagogy and curriculum. ‘Mode A’ play represents a somewhat romantic vision of play as a freely chosen child-initiated activity. ‘Mode B’ play refers to the role of adultguided play in the articulation of an early childhood pedagogy that speaks to learning, whilst ‘Mode C’ play encompasses the technicist use of play in curriculum policy documents for formalising play as pedagogy. According to Wood, these modes of play overlap, but all can be understood according to four main questions. 1) What are the goals for pedagogy drawing on the mode of play? 2) What assumptions are in the minds of practitioners about the modes of play? 3) What is the purpose of the play and the interaction? 4) What are the assessed outcomes of the pedagogical interactions for the child? These questions echo through the chapters in this section, and in answering them many contributors challenge the view that play is the most appropriate medium for learning for all children in all contexts. In Chapter 13, Stuart Reifel discusses the developmentally appropriate practice guidelines as a significant curriculum informing early childhood education during the late 1990s and early 2000s. He then considers issues of gender, culture, language and socio-economic bias associated with the historical use of developmentally informed Mode A play in the USA. Reifel notes that in attempting to describe ‘play’ and ‘learning’ in early childhood classrooms, ‘we have a number of sticky concepts to disentangle’, because all these terms (including ‘classrooms’) carry different meanings for differently situated adults, whether parents or practitioners, policymakers or researchers. Meanwhile, in Chapter 15, James Johnson engages the considerable literature on curriculum developments which have sought to implement a play-based pedagogy. His account discusses both whole-curriculum approaches and specific interventions aimed

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at promoting children’s development through adult-supported play. Many of these initiatives work at the intersection between Mode A and Mode B play. As Johnson indicates, recent research about the relationship between children’s play and adult interactions in supporting children’s learning reflects a growing critique of the use of freely chosen play as the basis for curriculum provision. This concern provides a starting point for Ingrid Pramling Samuelsson and Niklas Pramling, who examine European perspectives on the pedagogical use of play (Chapter 14). Drawing on research conducted in Sweden over two decades, they identify the notion of ‘developmental pedagogy’ as an alternative approach to Mode A play, and in the process emphasise adult roles in supporting children’s learning by viewing play and learning as dialectical experiences for young children. In developing this construct, the authors describe in some detail the significance of ‘variation’ as a key resource for young children’s learning. Another Northern European approach is described by Pentti Hakkarainen and Milda Bredikyte in Chapter 20. These authors engage with the issue of children’s learning through a notion of ‘free play’, which derives from a very different cultural tradition from the free play of the United States. Hakkarainen and Bredikyte describe the history of the post-Vygotskyian cultural–historical approach associated with narrative and imaginative play, which has been a significant force in the scholarship of the region (in Russia, Finland, Norway, Denmark and Lithuania for instance). They argue for the use of ‘playworlds’, combined adult–child narratives in which the adult role includes presenting challenges that children are invited to solve in the context of the play situation. These very different conceptions of ‘free play’ clearly reflect the authors’ diverse backgrounds and how they understand the relationship between play and learning and its articulation with curriculum and pedagogy in the early years. Pedagogy is further discussed in Chapter 17, where Sharon Ryan and Kaitlin Northey-Berg,

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PLAY AND LEARNING IN PEDAGOGY, CURRICULUM AND ASSESSMENT

writing from the USA, highlight the scarcity of research associated with teacher perspectives on play. They argue that this lack of research extends to knowledge about how teachers are educated to use play during their initial teacher preparation. Their own investigation suggests that few university and college programmes in the USA devote serious consideration to the study of play as a form of pedagogy. Newer postdevelopmental discourses about the nature of play may serve to complicate this problem further. This is because there is no longer a stable and consensual knowledge base for instructing pre-service teachers in the theory and practice of play (see Part I of this volume). From a pedagogical perspective, Ryan and Northey-Berg argue that research would benefit from an increased focus on what teachers need to know about using play in practice, rather than a continued emphasis on different theories of play. Wood’s emphasis (Chapter 12) on the goals for pedagogy across the three modes of play establishes a starting point for the next set of chapters. In these chapters, the goal for learning is considered in terms of content know­ ledge, literacy, mathematical thinking and physical play. In Chapter 16 Helen Hedges reviews the evidence from a long-standing debate on teacher thinking about content knowledge in play. She finds repeated evidence, from different locations in the Englishspeaking world, of teachers’ reluctance to plan for play with specific content knowledge in mind. Against this background, she argues that existing socio-cultural conceptions of children’s ‘funds of knowledge’ can offer support to the concept of integrated pedagogies. Integrated pedagogies are approaches to learning through play that balance child-initiated knowledge, interests and play activity with adult-mediated access to content knowledge as described by Elizabeth Wood. The chapters by Pramling Samuelsson and Pramling and Hakkarainen and Bredikyte, in particular, may be seen as presenting examples of how such a pedagogical balance may be achieved. Johnson’s chapter also reviews the research literature concerned with achieving a balance

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between children’s interests and adult involvement in play. How children respond to the need for play in the absence of such a balance is illuminated in Chapter 19 by Genishi and Dyson. The research evidence presented by these authors vividly evokes a US environment where play in kindergarten is increasingly marginalised, and children’s play episodes can seem like acts of subversion in a context where literacy learning is confined to formal exercises in school-like classrooms. Play with the conventions of literacy – letters, sounds and multimodal expressions – is recognised here as children communicating their meanings through their own agency, producing a personalised form of expression leading to literacy practices that make sense within children’s self-generated play contexts. In Chapter 21, Michelle Tannock considers somewhat similar institutional attitudes to children’s physical play in educational settings, including the category known as ‘rough and tumble’, or R&T, play. Tannock demonstrates that some forms of play enjoyed by young children are often viewed by educators as ‘unsuitable’ and that children’s play can become so constrained by these views that even their covert attempts at agency can be difficult. In reviewing the research on children’s physical play, she problematises the status of rough-and-tumble play in early childhood education. Gender and litigation concerns predominate in some countries, where rough-and-tumble play is viewed as potentially risky and is not always associated with the range of important learning outcomes typically recognised in other forms of play. In contrast to the risk-averse conditions described in many studies in educational settings, Tannock points to the more hopeful evidence from the growing international movement for outdoor learning, including in Forest Schools. Mathematical learning in the context of play forms the focus of Chapter 18, by Anita Wager and Amy Noelle Parks. Here, play is understood to afford numerous opportunities for mathematical thinking in the broadest sense, and educational play such as using

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puzzles or block building is associated with children’s learning of geometry, number and patterning. Yet what remains under-researched is how children’s play in home and community settings localises their mathematical experiences. Like Hedges, Wager and Parks suggest such work is necessary to enable children’s existing mathematical funds of knowledge to be utilised more effectively in early learning settings. They contrast this argument with pressures associated with the academisation of mathematical learning in early childhood education. For Genishi and Dyson, and for Wager and Parks, the context of play matters because it is generated by children themselves as they play. In Chapter 22 Margaret Carr argues that the overlap between Wood’s three modes of play is significant for the evolution of assessment practices that are sensitive to the pedagogical use of play in early childhood settings. She argues that play should be assessed in early childhood settings because assessment makes visible the practices which are valued in the educational institution. Formative assessment (that which assesses for learning) is considered to be more closely aligned with pedagogical play than is summative assessment. This is because formative assessment is oriented towards providing feedback for children,

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families and educators that enhances the context of play. Useful formative assessment practices include feedback during conversations, documentation and narrative accounts of learning. Carr suggests that these practices can be embedded into playbased situations to extend and record learning. Since they are considered sensitive to the context of play they operate across Wood’s three modes, being respectful of A) child-initiated play; providing an avenue for B), adult interactions during play; and offering a documented response to the provision of play-based pedagogies in C), early childhood curriculum policies. Part II of this handbook provides an overview of how play has been understood and represented in relation to pedagogy, curriculum and assessment in early childhood settings. Wood’s three modes of play, outlined in the opening chapter, suggest that the various chapters may be read either in terms of their focus on a single mode or, as is the case for many of the chapters, as a response to the overlap between modes. In every instance, the authors’ own situated know­ ledge of disciplines and discourses, as well as their local knowledge of early childhood provision, contributes to their evaluation and presentation of children’s play and learning in classrooms.

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12 The Play–pedagogy Interface in Contemporary Debates Elizabeth Wood

INTRODUCTION In this chapter, the discourse of educational play is considered in terms of its historical origins, the main theoretical changes over time and the ways in which policy versions of play are constructed within curricular frameworks. The implications of this discourse for how play is positioned in relation to, and as a form of, pedagogy are examined. From this analysis, three modes of understanding the play–pedagogy interface are proposed, which indicate the choices that can be made about how play is constructed in different sites and the ongoing tensions between policy, theory and practice.

The Taming of Play The commitment to childhood play emerged during the late eighteenth century, in response to increasing industrialization and urbanization. Profound social changes laid the foundations of the child protection movement and created versions of childhood based on ideas

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about freedom, innocence and inherent goodness (Cunningham, 2006). The philosophical arguments that emerged from the liberalhumanist and Romantic movements emphasized freedom from oppressive work and freedom to play and develop naturally. Subsequently, support for play from the burgeoning disciplines of developmental psychology and psychoanalysis centred on the freedom to explore, invent, create, discover, but at the same time to learn culturally valued forms of knowledge, skills, dispositions and attitudes. The positioning of play as a universal source and driver of learning and development was elaborated during the twentieth century by observational and experimental research (Hughes, 2010; Smith, 2010), influenced by the work of Jean Piaget. This research resulted in the description of normative developmental stages for understanding the role of different types of play, and their contribution to progression. Several themes continue to be debated today: the definitions and functions of play, developmental characteristics, criteria for evaluating the quality of play

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and learning content knowledge, particularly in the fields of mathematics and literacy (Saracho, 2012). These ideological and empirical positions laid the foundations for the dominant EuroAmerican conceptualization of educational play, and for the pedagogic imperative of taming children and taming play. This imperative has been sustained in curricular frameworks because the qualities that make play free are significant for children’s learning, though not in the linear or predictable ways that have been conceptualized in developmental theory. Child-initiated, freely chosen play is closest to the ideological tradition of free play, based on the belief that children should be able to choose and control their activities in order to develop independence, autonomy and ownership. Although free play remains difficult to define, it is associated with self-actualization and existential qualities such as flow, which involves mood state, deep immersion, concentration, harmony between the task and the intentions and abilities of the player (Wood, 2010); a sense of wonder, creativity and inventiveness; harmony between the child and the natural world (Berger and Lahad, 2010) and the unity of affect and cognition (Holzman, 2009). The qualities of free play reflect the ways in which children drive their learning and development through self-initiated activity: making choices and decisions; expressing and following interests; exercising agency and ownership; and managing materials, self and others (particularly in sociodramatic play). Free play is undertaken for its own sake, and the goals that are formulated by the players emerge, or are planned, within the context of play. From a sociological perspective, the borders between play and social disorder have always been thinly drawn (Sutton-Smith, 1997) because many forms of play have the potential to disrupt, defile and disturb social conventions, rules, manners and routines. These are the very qualities that make play difficult to control and regulate in educational settings. As a result, the play–pedagogy interface remains

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problematic, especially where policy versions of play favour adults’ plans and structures (Wood, 2013a). The work of Vygotsky (1978) has been influential in addressing these tensions and shifting the field from Piagetian theories towards socio-cultural and cultural–historical interpretations (Fleer, 2010; Chen, Masur and McNamee, 2011; Hedges and Cullen, 2011). Key areas of interest include the cultural meanings of play and the importance of cultural tools and artefacts in relation to material and psychological functions; children’s agency and motivation; concept formation; and the significance of rules, imagination and symbolic activities (Edwards, 2010, 2011). Vygotsky’s concept of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD; 1978) has been used to construct a pedagogical framework for understanding children’s and adults’ roles. By comparing the relationship between play and development to the relationship between instruction and development, the ZPD is used to validate the play–pedagogy relationship on the grounds that young children benefit from adult scaffolding of imagination, pretence and subject knowledge (Bodrova, 2008; Fleer, 2010; Diachenko, 2011). Within Vygotskian interpretations, there are varying emphases on freedom, flexibility and structure, and on the mix of adult-directed and child-initiated play. Vygotskian theories have informed early childhood policy frameworks in many countries, based on expectations that play will contribute in particular ways to children’s learning and development, and particularly to their socialization (Pramling Samuelsson and Asplund Carlsson, 2008; Stephen, 2010; Brooker, 2011; Walsh et al., 2011). For example, in the United Kingdom, it is the concept of structured play, and the emphasis on adults’ pedagogical roles, that is appealing in current policy contexts. However, there are different pedagogical challenges for practitioners as they strive to integrate play into their practice in ways that align with curriculum goals. The developmental discourse of what play does for the child has been

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The Play–pedagogy Interface in Contemporary Debates

interpreted in the Early Years Foundation Stage in England (Department for Education, 2012) as what outcomes play can provide, what roles adults can perform in order to ensure these outcomes and what forms of pedagogic progression can be constructed from preschool to compulsory education. Furthermore, educational effectiveness research (Sylva et al., 2010) has aligned with international discourses of quality, standards, accountability and performativity, and has produced a technicist version of play as a means of delivering curriculum goals. Within this discourse, structured play is privileged because the focus has shifted away from the meanings that children construct for themselves towards the outcomes that can be assessed and evidenced by practitioners. Debates about what play is and what play does for the child have clear pedagogical implications, and have led to justifications for its inclusion in educational practice and the positioning of play as educational practice. It is argued that contrasting interpretations of play have emerged in the different sites of policy, theory and practice. For the purposes of analysing the play–pedagogy interface, three pedagogical modes are proposed: child-initiated (Mode A), adult-guided (Mode B) and technicist/policy-driven (Mode C). All are modes of educational play and there are some areas of overlap between them, based on different forms of pedagogic interactions between adults and children within and around play. Modes A and B incorporate some of the uncertain, openended qualities of play and playful learning as conceptualized by Broadhead and Burt (2012); Mode C represents a limited version of play because the educational purposes have been captured within policy sites. In each of these modes, the play–pedagogy relationship can be understood by posing four questions. 1. What are the goals for the pedagogy? 2. What assumptions are in the mind of the practitioner (beliefs about learning, about play, about the child)?

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3. What is the purpose of the play and what is the purpose of the interaction? 4. What are the assessed outcomes of the pedagogical interaction for the child, and for the practitioner?

These three pedagogical modes have implications for assessment, and question 4 is the focus of Margaret Carr’s work in this volume. How assessment is positioned within different policy frameworks also influences how play is constructed within practice. The following sections focus on the three modes and their main theoretical informants.

MODE A: CHILD-INITIATED PLAY Play in early childhood education and care settings is always influenced by the cultures, rules and practices which reflect the pedagogical beliefs of the practitioners, the material and spatial resources and the time that is available for freely chosen play. Even in relatively democratic pedagogical repertoires, adults usually define what choices are available, what degrees of freedom are allowed and what institutional rules and boundaries need to be placed on free play and free choice, as well as on behaviour (Millei, 2012; Wood, 2013b). So all child-initiated play is to some extent constrained, but may offer children opportunities for play that are not available in other contexts. Within these boundaries, child-initiated play has its own qualities, because the freedom to choose creates potential spaces for complex activities. It is assumed that child-initiated play reveals children’s interests, needs, dispositions and patterns of learning, all of which form the basis of the pedagogical decisions that practitioners make about their curriculum planning, provision of resources and interactions. The goals for pedagogy thus emerge from children’s activities (Wallerstedt and Pramling, 2012) and the forms of control exerted by practitioners are open-ended, with a focus on being emotionally present, supportive and responsive, particularly for young

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children (Cohen, 2009). Through close observation and assessment, practitioners build knowledge about children’s play repertoires and tune their provision to nurture, extend and challenge children’s interests. However, within this pedagogical space, the boundary between child-initiated and adult-directed play is easily blurred, particularly with regard to the content of children’s learning (Hedges, this volume). Although Vygotsky’s theories have been influential in justifying play as pedagogy, there are partial or misinterpretations of these theories which have resulted in their misapplication in the contexts of practice. Therefore some caution must be exercised when applying Vygotskian theories about the ZPD (1978) to play activities. The concept of the ZPD has been interpreted as a pedagogical and diagnostic space that is controlled by adults, predominantly in dyadic or control modes (Leung, 2011). However, what is ‘proximal’ for the child may not be immediately visible or consistent with adults’ plans and intentions. In contrast, Holzman (2009: 29) theorizes the ZPD in terms of potential development and as a ‘collective form of working together’ in which children are capable of doing more collectively than they would individually through processes such as creative imitation, observation and imagination. Play develops in social and symbolic complexity, often reflecting shared repertoires of competence (Broadhead and Burt, 2012). Play thus creates spaces for children to perform their ways into cultural and societal adaptation by means of activities that create their own potential. Holzman proposes that play enables children to learn and develop by ‘being able to do what is beyond them, to be who they are becoming even as they are who they are’ (2009: 18). Children actively drive their own development, and the ‘products’ of this activity are not outcomes, but part of the unity that is ‘process and product’ or ‘tool and result’ (Holzman, 2009: 20). Free, uninterrupted play also involves the exploration of possible selves, not just of

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materials and resources. Thus the purposes are embedded in children’s cultural routines and practices, and the meaning of their social interactions may be highly specific to the play. Sustained observations of play over time reveal how children build their repertoires of interest and participation: how these are acted out, played out, worked out also reveals cultural and individual diversities (Carr et al., 2009; Hedges, 2011). The concepts of power, autonomy, control and ownership take on different possible meanings for children as they manage their own play spaces, relationships and practices. Children learn to exert control over the emotional power of the imagination, as well as over events within their everyday lives, demonstrating unity between affect and cognition, learning and teaching, being and becoming (Holzman, 2009). Adults are often excluded from (or choose not to intervene in) these forms of play, because the agendas belong to the children. From the contrasting perspectives of proximal, potential and possible development, what is proximal for the child may relate directly to their choices and priorities, regardless of any alignment with practitioners’ intentions or curriculum goals. Detailed observations reveal that play is not one event but many events linked together over time: children step in and out of play as a means of organizing rules, roles and events and developing themes. Because child-initiated play provides children with opportunities to choose their activities, play partners and themes, what they learn, and what develops in peer-oriented contexts, centres on peer relationships and not adult–child relationships. Much of the excitement and energy of free play comes from affective and relational spaces and drives children’s actions and interactions. It is peer relationships that determine the child’s social status, their position within their peer groups, the influence they are able to exert on others and their strategies for withdrawal or contestation of adults’ rules (Skånfors et al., 2009; Wood, 2013b). The freedom to choose play activities and themes

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The Play–pedagogy Interface in Contemporary Debates

may, therefore, have particular relevance for children’s identities. Contemporary theoretical interpretations understand play from within children’s cultural repertoires, and offer alternative ways of understanding play from the traditional developmental discourse (Grieshaber and McArdle, 2010). Children benefit from play when relationships are symmetrical and the players achieve intersubjective understanding, particularly in socio-dramatic play. But power is also implicated in these relationships: play involves reputation and status in which children’s choices have implications for others in terms of who can participate, who may be excluded or marginalized (Ryan, 2005; Wood, 2013b). From a pedagogic perspective, child-initiated play is complex, fluid and dynamic, because children constantly adjust their actions and interactions to changing goals and circumstances. How these goals are accomplished will depend on dimensions of diversity, the funds of knowledge that children bring from their homes and the extent to which their knowledge can be used in play contexts (Brooker, 2011; Hedges, 2011). They may choose to enlist the support of adults to help them solve problems, or create props to use in their play. Equally they may use everyday resources in different (including unofficial) ways to represent knowledge and experience and to communicate with others through multimodal means, as evidenced in children’s early literacy (Wohlwend, 2011) and mathematics practices (Carruthers and Worthington, 2011). Evidence across international contexts docu­ ments the challenges that practitioners encounter in implementing curricula that combine freedom and structure (Broadhead, Howard and Wood, 2010; Hedges and Cullen, 2011; Walsh et al., 2011; File, Mueller and Wisneski, 2012). In addition, there are implications for how assessment is carried out, and for what purposes. In Mode A, approaches to assessment are likely to be narrative, holistic, emergent and culturally responsive, as conceptualized by Carr (in this volume). Ideally

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assessment narratives will be co-constructed through practitioners engaging with families and cultural communities. These practices enable formative assessment to accomplish some of the pedagogical construction work that connects across the play–pedagogy interface. However, as Kuschner (2012) argues, the ideal and the reality contain unresolved contradictions. Much research problematizes free play from a structural perspective, and identifies constraints such as policy frameworks, space, time, adults’ roles, rules, parents’ expectations and the push-down effects from the primary curriculum (Markström and Halldén, 2009; Wisneski and Reifel, 2012). Free play is always controlled (and tamed) within educational settings because of teachers’ beliefs and values, the different meanings they attribute to play (Sherwood and Reifel, 2010), the variations in curriculum enactment (Wood, 2010) and broader goals for children’s behaviour and classroom order (Millei, 2012). These are the conditions in which practitioners bring more specific forms of intentional pedagogical framing into educational play.

MODE B: ADULT-GUIDED PLAY In Mode B, adult-guided play, two assumptions are made: first that children’s free and spontaneous activities are intrinsically valuable for their learning and development (Hughes, 2010) and, second, that play can be structured, planned, resourced and managed by adults in ways that promote specific outcomes (Saracho, 2012). Walsh et al. (2011) describe this intersection as playful structure: the goals for the pedagogy are framed in relation to curriculum goals, but are responsive to the children, and playfulness is a characteristic of adult–child interactions. The degree of structure may differ according to the goals and the underpinning principles of different curriculum frameworks, with adult–child interactions oriented towards the accomplishment of specific knowledge, skills and dispositions. For example, Sandberg and Ärlemalm-Hagsér

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describe the goals in the Swedish National Curriculum as goals to strive for, not to achieve. The democratic principles include children’s rights, gender equity and education for sustainability (2011: 44), and these frame the ways in which pedagogic interactions and curricula are constructed from child-centred perspectives. In New Zealand, the goals in Te Whāriki (Ministry of Education, 1996) are indicative rather than prescriptive. The concept of learning dispositions encompasses learning orientation, habits of mind, learning power and working theories, all of which are closely tethered to content knowledge and domain-specific expertise (Carr and Lee, 2012). In contrast, the predominantly academic goals in the Early Years Foundation Stage (Department of Education, 2012) in England are prescriptive and focus on school readiness. Adult-guided play can be used in different ways and for different purposes. Considering the goals for pedagogy in Mode B, a distinction needs to be made between free play, guided play, playful orientations to teaching and the ways in which work may be disguised as play. Guiding play in emergent/ responsive ways towards children’s goals and intentions overlaps with Mode A. This is an important pedagogical space because what play is assumed to promote may not be achievable only through child-initiated activity, discovery and exploration. In contrast, guiding play in instrumental/directive ways towards defined learning goals strays closer to Mode C – a technicist version of play. The more closely the adults’ intentions are foregrounded, the less likely it is that the activity retains elements of play or playfulness, or attends to children’s purposes. Research on children’s views of play reports that they make clear distinctions between play and work, based on their ideas about choice, freedom and control (Howard, 2010). This is not to argue for a clear dichotomy between playful learning and work, because children often display similar dispositions across these contexts, such as involvement, engagement, concentration, perseverance, resilience and

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attention to means and ends. However, if play is considered to be valuable for developing learning dispositions, rather than for achieving predetermined curriculum goals, then its position remains vulnerable in a technicist discourse. This constitutes the ‘know­ ledge problem’ in early childhood curricula and in policy versions of play. A potential solution to the question of what and whose knowledges are evident in play is proposed by Fleer (2010), drawing on specific applications of Vygotskian cultural– historical theories to play, learning and development. Fleer proposes a dialectical model of conceptual play, which focuses on building theoretical knowledge so that children learn scientific or academic concepts during play. In this model, the teacher takes an active role in these processes: ... through analysing existing play activity (assessable moment) or critical moments in children’s development (zones of proximal or potential development) and through using these opportunities to conceptually frame the play so that conceptual development is foregrounded and children think consciously about the concepts being privileged (2010: 214).

This interpretation of adult-guided play constitutes a response to the knowledge problem because children engage with the forms of knowledge, or goals, in the curriculum, especially when practitioners resource play activities in intentional ways and link play with adult-directed activities. Fleer (2010) therefore goes some way to addressing the dilemma that what free play leads to may not bear a direct resemblance to the knowledge and skills that are taught by the adult, and may not be readily transferred from one context to another. Taking literacy as an example of subject-oriented learning, in adult-directed activity, the pedagogical mode may include direct instruction in technical and executive skills: phonics; the conventions of print; correct letter formation; grammar; and learning about different forms of text are types of ‘official’ knowledge reified in policy frameworks. However, emphasizing the technical

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The Play–pedagogy Interface in Contemporary Debates

and executive skills of reading and writing does not encompass literacy as a social and cultural practice. The pedagogical challenge is to ensure that literacy has situated relevance when transferred into play activities. Contemporary definitions of literacy as a social practice go beyond narrow policycentred definitions and embrace embodied and visual ways of producing signs as multimodal literacies comprising physical actions with bodies, objects, and images that represent and interpret ideas (Wohlwend, 2011). Children use multimodal literacies in ways that make sense and meaning in play contexts. For example, hastily scribbled signs can be interpreted as a recipe for a magic potion, a ransom note from a pirate, a prescription for medicine or a secret message. Chalk marks on a playground have symbolic power when they become maps to pirate treasure, giant snail trails or pathways for escaping the sharks. The overlap between Modes A and B constitutes a problem space for practitioners in how they manage to integrate children’s and adults’ plans and how they assess children’s learning. Considering play as goal-directed practice, Wallerstedt and Pramling (2012) propose that the point of interest is whether or not ‘free activities’ are unconnected with other forms of activity in the child’s day in the preschool or school and, if not, how does ‘free’ relate to the teacher’s fundamental task of developing children’s understanding and skills? The tension here relates to whether practitioners are concerned with the performance goals that are inscribed in curricular frameworks (proximal development), whereas children may be more concerned with goals that are of direct relevance to their play (potential and possible development). The former are more easily assessed, but the latter are not always visible without skilled observation and attention to children’s meanings and patterns of play. From this perspective, what is involved in free, child-initiated play can be educational but can be undervalued if the purposes and outcomes are not related to these fundamental pedagogical

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tasks, including how play is framed to foreground conceptual knowledge, as proposed by Fleer (2010). Therefore assessment practices need to produce a dual focus on the children’s goals (Mode A) and the goals that adults will have in mind when they plan for play and interact with children in different contexts (Mode B). Adult-guided play exemplifies the different ways in which the play–pedagogy interface has been captured within educational discourses, but at the same time indicates the complexities of integrating children’s and practitioners’ purposes (Saracho, 2012; Wood, 2013a). This complexity contrasts with Mode C, in which the technicist discourse constructs play as a form of pedagogy and as a means of curriculum delivery.

MODE C: TECHNICIST VERSION OF EDUCATIONAL PLAY The shift towards national policy frameworks for early childhood education has brought about significant changes in how play is understood and positioned within different curricular models (Hedges and Cullen, 2011; Leung, 2011; Sandberg and ÄrlemalmHagsér, 2011). In Mode C, what play does for the child has been reformulated within technicist, policy-driven discourses and by the findings from educational effectiveness research, so that play is expected to promote specific ways of learning and lead to defined learning outcomes and curriculum goals. The goals for pedagogy are more instrumental than Modes A and B, in that play activities will be planned with adults’ and not children’s goals in mind, will be oriented towards curriculum goals and may be peripheral rather than central to learning (Martlew et al., 2011). A technicist model of play has to be understood in specific socio-political contexts, because of the ways in which play has been captured in policy sites in different countries. Two examples from Hong Kong and England illustrate the policy capture of play. A version

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of technicist play is described by Leung (2011), who reports a project in Hong Kong to develop ‘eduplay’ – an attempt to align Western views of play and pedagogy with Chinese characteristics, focusing particularly on the development of social competence. Eduplay was designed to address a specific cultural–historical issue: Most Confucian educators were worried that play and a playful environment would divert children’s attention from serious study, but some liberal scholars… saw the usefulness and necessity of using sober and educational play to regulate and mould children (Leung, 2011: 537).

This study demonstrated cultural variations in Mode C, because the activities were based on instructional guidelines and programmed activities. Two major characteristics of the eduplay activities were clear instructions with goal-directed behaviour and powerful and meaningful reinforcers. Leung argues that eduplay activities created zones of proximal development for the children, but the evidence indicates that these were adultcreated zones, based on specific routines and outcomes, exemplifying the ZPD as a means of pedagogical control. A technicist model is exemplified in the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) in England (Department for Education, 2012) where the curriculum guidance documents reflect the findings from government-funded research on the effective characteristics of preschool provision (Sylva et al., 2010). Policy constructions of play as pedagogy are instrumental: the focus is on planned and purposeful play, and the forms of learning that are privileged reflect developmental levels and learning goals. Within the discourse of effective pedagogic interactions, the concept of ‘sustained shared thinking’ (SST) has been highly influential as a means of conceptualizing educative interactions between children and practitioners (Sylva et al., 2010). However, it is difficult to apply SST to play because these forms of interaction are typical in adult–child dyads, with clear instructional purposes, but are less typical of children’s collective activities in free play.

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Focusing on German preschools, König (2009) draws on SST to identify the key features of ‘effective’ pedagogic interactions in play. Through documenting classroom interaction processes between teachers and children during free play time, König’s findings indicate that the teachers’ interactions were highly adaptive and sensitive to the children, and mostly spontaneous, but the most frequently observed categories were ‘initiate/ follow-up’, ‘wait and listen’ and ‘react’. In contrast, the categories of ‘motivate’, ‘expand/differentiate’ and ‘delegate/challenge’ were observed infrequently (2009: 59), even though it might be assumed that this is where much pedagogic work would be necessary to advance children’s learning. These effectiveness studies contrast with research that indicates how children construct their own pedagogical routines and practices and the ways in which these operate, which is often around the rules formulated by the players in the context of play (Cohen, 2009; Markström and Halldén, 2009; Wood, 2013b). From this perspective, interactions make sense to children in the dynamic, imaginative flow of ideas and situated meanings but may not be amenable to structured interactions, especially when children strive to exclude adults from their play, and disrupt institutional order. The examples from Hong Kong and England indicate cultural variations in the policy capture of play and in the interpretation of Vygotskian theories. These in turn have implications for conceptualizations of play as pedagogy and for progression from play to formal learning. The limitations of Mode C centre on the contrast between play that is valued for children’s purposes and meanings and play that is used for structured pedagogic interactions that aim towards achieving defined goals for development and learning. In Mode C, intentional teaching is assumed to produce specific learning outcomes, by setting objectives for the play and for assessment. This mode may be appropriate in some contexts, such as teaching children the skills to play a game with rules or to

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access computer-based play programmes. Peer interactions can also include direct instruction in technical and play skills. However, if Mode C is the dominant form of pedagogic practice, then it is likely that the complex benefits of play will be lost, particularly the unity between affect and cognition and between process and product (Holzman, 2009). From a policy-compliant perspective, pedagogic progression in play is framed as a transition from child-initiated play to formal, adult-initiated activities, which reinforces the point that play is valued not for what it is but for what it leads to in educational terms. Vygotskian theories underpin this model of pedagogic progression based on the transition from play to learning as the leading activity, specifically formal learning and ‘school age formations of the mind’ (Bodrova, 2008). These findings are inscribed in the Early Years Foundation Stage Statutory Framework: educational play must serve age-related developmental purposes, but is gradually phased out during the Reception year (ages four–five) in order to ensure school readiness in Year 1 (ages five–six): As children grow older, and as their development allows, it is expected that the balance will gradually shift towards more activities led by adults, to help children prepare for more formal learning, ready for Year 1 (Department for Education, 2012: 6).

The transition between preschool and compulsory education occurs between the ages of five and seven years in different countries, which means that there is at least a two-year span during which children are expected to become ready for school and ready for adultled pedagogical approaches. Play is implicated within this transition zone, at whatever age this occurs, because the assumption is that children need less play. An alternative perspective is that children need more challenging forms of play that support progression towards social and symbolic complexity (Broadhead and Burt, 2012). Moreover, transition is not just an issue of different pedagogical and curriculum practices. Research

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shows that children learn to construct their identities in different sites, and accomplish this by learning strategies for participating in classroom life and dealing with the mixed messages that circulate in classrooms (MacLure et al., 2012: 461). Play continues to contribute to these processes, but may occur under the radar of the pedagogical gaze. Within these different pedagogic constructions children are caught between different subjectivities: pleasing the teacher through ‘approved’ play choices and contesting classroom discipline, rules and routines. As previously argued, how assessment is positioned within different policy frameworks influences how play is constructed within the sites of practice. In Mode C, technicist assessment practices are used to identify progress through developmental checklists and curriculum (performance) goals, which also enable practitioners to align their practices with effectiveness discourses and performativity measures. As a result, children are positioned at specific assessment points in relation to their achievement of the curriculum goals and their readiness for school. Mode C assessment exemplifies a diminished version of play and potential deficit views of children’s agency and competence. Assessment in Mode C diminishes Modes A and B because the complexities of play, and children’s meanings, are lost, and there is less imperative to engage with families about home-based learning and cultural practices. Discourses of effectiveness and performativity are here to stay, but these are not the way (or the only way) to address the tensions at the play–pedagogy interface. The forms of pedagogic guidance that emerge from some policy discourses aim towards complexity reduction, and sustain uncritical acceptance of universal and normative developmental theories. However, a counterbalance comes from recent shifts towards postdevelopmental and poststructural theories, which foreground issues of diversity and social justice as informants to more equitable practices.

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CONTEMPORARY DIRECTIONS: CONTAINMENT OR EXPANSION? In light of these three modes of understanding the play–pedagogy interface, a number of unresolved tensions continue to pose challenges to practitioners and researchers. Contemporary research constructs the play– pedagogy relationship as a problem space, but at the same time offers new insights and potential solutions. Many studies have broadened the field to include critical, postdevelopmental and post-structural theories (Blaise, 2010; Blaise and Ryan, 2012), which aim at troubling some of the universal assumptions about play and normative applications of child development theory (Grieshaber and McArdle 2010; File, Mueller and Wisneski, 2012). Critical and postdevelopmental theories (see Lenz Taguchi, Saltmarsh and Blaise, this volume) foreground children’s intentions, meanings and purposes and diversities (gender, ethnicity, language, culture, social class, ability/disability, sexualities), including the ways in which these intersect within children’s self-initiated activities and play choices. Brooker (2011) and Hedges (2011) question whose cultures, interests, goals and activities are privileged in the dominant discourses of educational play. As Sandberg and Ärlemalm-Hagsér (2011) argue, there are shifting understandings of the different knowledges that children need, in their present and future lives, which incorporate concerns with equity, sustainability, globalization and democracy. This is not an argument for downplaying the importance of content knowledge or the ways in which children enjoy using and applying such knowledge in their play activities. However, it is an argument for recognizing that some forms of knowledge need to be taught explicitly, as argued by Fleer (2010), but in ways that do not disrupt or interrupt play. The broader field of play scholarship draws on multi-theoretical perspectives to illuminate the complexities of play as a distinct form of human activity, including its

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cultural forms and purposes, and culturally situated beliefs and practices. But how can these contemporary ways of theorizing play address ongoing tensions at the play– pedagogy interface? It is impossible to define a pedagogical recipe in which there is a mix or balance between child-initiated and adultdirected play, because this will vary according to local contexts and cultural variations. The key to the play–pedagogy interface is integration of the different modes (Saracho, 2012; Wood, 2013a), but with the recognition that children’s goals and purposes may not align with those of adults. It is also important to question whether or not practitioners need to understand everything that children do in their play in terms of its educational and developmental purposes. What is ‘educational’ from the child’s perspective may not be recognized as such from the practitioner’s perspective. Children’s motivations for play may be to become more skilled players: they use the tools and knowledge of their cultures as the means for organizing and developing play, where the ends are about mastery of play. From these perspectives, the essence and meaning of play for children provide the conceptual lenses through which play is interpreted, and allow the smaller narratives of play to become visible. However, this is the point at which child-initiated play continues to be in tension with dominant policy narratives, especially those that privilege defined outcomes. The skills and dispositions that enable children to progress in their play do not align neatly with curriculum goals, particularly where assessment frameworks are designed to emphasize the child’s individual acquisition of goals, with an emphasis on cognitive development, as exemplified in the English Early Years Foundation Stage (Department for Education, 2012). In conclusion, it is argued that uncritical reliance on policy frameworks provides limited ways of understanding play. Directions in play scholarship and research are associated with understanding the play–pedagogy interface in new ways. Educational settings are

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seen not just as pedagogical sites for instruction and enculturation but also as sites in which children construct their own identities, friendships, rules, routines and meanings. These activities are imbued with children’s concerns with agency, power and self-actualization, as well as their motivations to learn. The challenge for the early childhood community is to maintain an expansive understanding of play and pedagogy, and to hold that space against reductionist policy discourses.

REFERENCES Berger, R. and Lahad, M. (2010) ‘A safe place: ways in which nature, play and creativity can help children cope with stress and crisis – establishing the kindergarten as a safe haven where children can develop resiliency’, Early Child Development and Care, 180 (7): 889–900. Blaise, M. (2010) ‘Creating a postdevelopmental logic for mapping gender and sexuality in early childhood’, in L. Brooker and S. Edwards (eds), Engaging Play. Maidenhead: Open University Press. pp. 209–19. Blaise, M. and Ryan, S. (2012) ‘Using critical theory to trouble the early childhood curriculum: is it enough?’, in N. File, J. Mueller and D. Basler Wisneski (eds), Curriculum in Early Childhood Education: Re-examined, Rediscovered, Renewed. New York: Routledge. pp. 80–92. Bodrova, E. (2008) ‘Make-believe play versus academic skills: a Vygotskian approach to today’s dilemma of early childhood education’, European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 16 (3): 357–69. Broadhead, P. and Burt, A. (2012) Understanding Young Children’s Learning Through Play: Building Playful Pedagogies. Abingdon: Routledge. Broadhead, P., Howard, J. and Wood, E. (eds) (2010) Play and Learning in the Early Years: From Research to Practice. London: Sage. Brooker, L. (2011) ‘Taking children seriously: an alternative agenda for research?’ Journal of Early Childhood Research, 9 (2): 137–49. Carr, M., Smith, A.B., Duncan, J., Jones, C., Lee, W. and Marshall, K. (2009) Learning in the Making: Disposition and Design in Early Education. Rotterdam The Netherlands: Sense Publishers. Carr, M. and Lee, W. (2012) Learning Stories: Constructing Learner Identities in Early Education. London: Sage.

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Carruthers, E. and Worthington, M. (2011) Understanding Children’s Mathematics: Beginnings in Play. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Chen, J.Q., Masur, A. and McNamee, G. (2011) ‘Young children's approaches to learning: a sociocultural perspective’, Early Child Development and Care, 181 (8): 1137–52. Cohen, L. (2009) ‘The heteroglossic world of preschoolers’ pretend play’, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 10 (4), 331–42. Cunningham, H. (2006) The Invention of Childhood. London: BBC Books. Department for Education (2012) The Statutory Framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage: Setting the Standards for Learning, Development and Care for Children from Birth to Five (www. e d u c a t i o n . g o v. u k / p u b l i c a t i o n s / s t a n d a r d / AllPublications/Page1/DFE-00023-2012). Diachenko, O. (2011) ‘On major developments in preschoolers’ imagination’, International Journal of Early Years Education, 19 (1): 19–25. Edwards, S. (2010) ‘Numberjacks are on their way! A cultural historical reflection on contemporary society and the early childhood curriculum’, Pedagogy, Culture and Society, 18 (3): 261–72. Edwards, S. (2011) ‘Lessons from “a really useful engine”™: using Thomas the Tank Engine™ to examine the relationship between play as a leading activity, imagination and reality in children’s contemporary play worlds’, Cambridge Journal of Education, 41 (2): 195–210. File, N., Mueller, J. and Wisneski, D. (eds) (2012) Curriculum in Early Childhood Education: Re-examined, Rediscovered, Renewed. New York: Routledge. Fleer, M. (2010) Early Learning and Development: Cultural-historical Concepts in Play. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grieshaber, S. and McArdle, F. (2010) The Trouble with Play. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Hedges, H. (2011) ‘Rethinking SpongeBob and Ninja Turtles: popular culture as funds of knowledge for curriculum co-construction’, Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, 36 (1): 25–9. Hedges, H. and Cullen, J. (2011) ‘Participatory learning theories: a framework for early childhood pedagogy’, Early Child Development and Care, 82 (7): 921–40. Holzman, L. (2009) Vygotsky at Work and Play. Abingdon: Routledge. Howard, J. (2010) ‘Making the most of play in the early years: the importance of children’s perceptions’, in P. Broadhead, J. Howard and E. Wood (eds), Play and Learning in the Early Years: From Research to Practice. London: Sage. pp. 145–60.

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Hughes, F.P. (2010) Children, Play and Development. (4th ed.) Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. König, A. (2009) ‘Observed classroom interaction processes between pre-school teachers and children: results of a video study during free-play time in German pre-schools’, Educational and Child Psychology, 26 (2): 53–65. Kuschner, D. (2012) ‘Play is natural to childhood but school is not: the problem of integrating play into the curriculum’, International Journal of Play, 1 (3): 231–49. Leung, C.-H. (2011) ‘An experimental study of eduplay and social competence among preschool students in Hong Kong’, Early Child Development and Care, 181 (4): 535–48. MacLure, M., Jones, L., Holmes, R. and MacRae, C. (2012) ‘Becoming a problem: behaviour and reputation in the early years classroom’, British Educational Research Journal, 38 (3): 447–71. Markström, A.M. and Halldén, G. (2009) ‘Children’s strategies for agency in preschool’, Children and Society, 21: 112–22. Martlew, J., Stephen, C. and Ellis, J. (2011) ‘Play in the primary school classroom? The experience of teachers supporting children’s learning through a new pedagogy’, Early Years: An International Journal of Research and Development, 31 (1): 71–83. Millei, Z. (2012) ‘Thinking differently about guidance: power, children’s autonomy and democratic environments’, Early Childhood Research, 10 (1): 31–9. New Zealand Ministry of Education (1996) Te Whaˉriki. He whaˉriki matauranga moˉ ngaˉ mokopuna o Aotearoa: Early Childhood Curriculum. Wellington: Learning Media Ltd (www.educate.ece.govt.nz/ learning/curriculumAndLearning/TeWhariki.aspx). Pramling-Samuelsson, I. and Asplund Carlsson, M.A. (2008) ‘The playing learning child: towards a pedagogy of early childhood’, Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 52 (6): 623–41. Ryan, S. (2005) ‘Freedom to choose: examining children’s experiences in choice time’, in N. Yelland (ed.), Critical Issues in Early Childhood. Maidenhead: Open University Press. pp. 99–114. Sandberg, A. and Ärlemalm-Hagsér, E. (2011) ‘The Swedish National Curriculum: play and learning with fundamental values in focus’, Australian Journal of Early Childhood, 36 (1): 44–50. Saracho, O. (2012) An Integrated Play-based Curriculum for Young Children. New York: Routledge.

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Sherwood, A.S. and Reifel, S. (2010) ‘The multiple meanings of play: exploring preservice teachers’ beliefs about a central element of early childhood education’, Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education, 31 (4): 322–43. Skånfors, L., Löfdahl, A. and Hägglund, S. (2009) ‘Hidden spaces and places in the preschool: withdrawal strategies in preschool children’s peer cultures’, Journal of Early Childhood Research, 7 (1): 94–109. Sylva, K., Melhuish, E., Sammons, P., Siraj-Blatchford, I. and Taggart, B. (eds) (2010) Early Childhood Matters: Evidence from the Effective Pre-school and Primary Education Project. Abingdon: Routledge. Stephen, C. (2010) ‘Pedagogy: the silent partner in early years learning’, Early Years: An International Journal of Research and Development, 30 (1): 15–28. Smith, P.K. (2010) Children and Play. Oxford: WileyBlackwell. Sutton-Smith, B. (1997) The Ambiguity of Play. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vygotsky, L.S. (1978) Mind in Society (trans. and ed. M. Cole, V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner and E. Souberman). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wallerstedt, C. and Pramling, N. (2012) ‘Learning to play in a goal-directed practice’, Early Years: An International Journal of Research and Development, 32 (1): 5–15. Walsh, G., Sproule, L., McGuinness, C. and Trew, K. (2011) ‘Playful structure: a novel image of early years pedagogy for primary school classrooms’, Early Years: An International Journal of Research and Development, 31 (2): 107–19. Wisneski, D. and Reifel, S. (2012) ‘The place of play in early childhood curriculum’, in N. File, J. Mueller and D. Basler Wisneski (eds), Curriculum in Early Childhood Education: Re-examined, Rediscovered, Renewed. New York: Routledge. pp. 175–187. Wohlwend, K.E. (2011) Playing Their Way into Literacies: Reading, Writing, and Belonging in the Early Childhood Classroom, (Language and Literacy Series) New York: Teachers College Press. Wood, E. (2010) ‘Reconceptualising the play–pedagogy relationship: from control to complexity’, in L. Brooker and S. Edwards (eds), Engaging Play. Maidenhead: Open University Press. pp. 11–24. Wood, E. (2013a) ‘Free play and free choice in early childhood education: troubling the discourse’ International Journal of Early Years Education, 22 (1): 4–18. Wood, E. (2013b) Play, Learning and the Early Childhood Curriculum. (3rd ed.) London: Sage.

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13 Developmental Play in the Classroom Stuart Reifel

INTRODUCTION This chapter explores the variety of ways in which play has been considered an important part of classroom experience in early childhood education. In particular, the chapter will focus on developmental views of classroom play, theoretically and/or ideologically driven views that privilege certain kinds of play (symbolic, pretend) as most appropriate for young learners as a foundation for later learning. The astute reader will note that already we have a number of sticky concepts to disentangle: what do we mean by play, and what do we mean by development and classroom learning? Some may also notice a term I have used that is, loaded with meaning too – classroom experience. When discussing developmental play in the classroom, we introduce all sorts of ideas about early childhood curriculum, teaching and the contexts within which they operate. The literature speaks with many voices on all these conceptual issues (VanHoorn, Scales, Nourot and Alward, 2003; Wisneski and Reifel, 2012).

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When we discuss classrooms for young children we encounter ideas about curriculum and teaching. How do teachers organize their classrooms and arrange activities? What guides their thinking about ways to view children’s progress in the classroom, and how might play connect with those views? Can play ‘be’ a curriculum, or at least a significant part of a curriculum? How might we consider play as linked to academic learning? The literature presents multiple ways to consider these questions, including positioning play as a learning process, a foundation for later learning and a way to organize classroom social relationships (Fernie, Madrid and Kantor, 2011; File, Mueller and Wisneski, 2012). There are also many ways in which professionals talk about play in early education, including ideas such as child-centred play, freedom/choice in play and the impact of social context on play. Such discussions include classrooms such as infant care rooms, child care for older children, preschool, kindergarten and primary grades.

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Further questions of interest for research and practice include ‘Are our classrooms attentive to each child, and how do we balance that attention with the entire group’s needs?’ If we put children and their needs first in our thinking, do their interests and ways of pursuing those interests have priority, and if so, does that automatically lead us to play as a natural process for honouring children’s needs? How might conditions outside the classroom, such as poverty, immigration, government policies or new technologies, influence what occurs in the classroom? In what way can any of these matters relate to play? The profession, as represented by statements and publications from major organizations such as the American National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), the Association for Childhood Education International (ACEI), the World Association for Early Childhood Education (OMEP) and the International Association for the Child’s Right to Play (IPA), has articulated a number of positions that illuminate contemporary thinking regarding the relationship between play and developmental curriculum. For example, the influential revised statement on develop­ mentally appropriate practice (DAP; Copple and Bredekamp, 2009) speaks extensively of the importance of play in programmes for young children. Amid the arguments for classroom play are many research-based features that are discussed in this chapter. For example: Research shows that child-guided, teachersupported play benefits children in many ways. When children play, they engage in many important tasks, such as developing and practicing newly acquired skills, using language, taking turns, making friends, and regulating emotions and behavior according to the demands of the situation. This is why play needs to be a significant part of the young child’s day–and part of a developmentally appropriate classroom (Copple and Bredekamp, 2009: 328).

Research supports each aspect of the DAP statement (for example, Elias and Berk,

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2002; Fantuzzo and McWayne, 2002). From a developmental perspective, DAP connects with many valued ideas about the role of play in young children’s learning. Each is also vague enough to allow for a range of interpretations and play practices. If one disregards the important role of teacher support, we can also see that the DAP quotation describes kinds of play that could just as easily take place outside of a classroom as in one. Significantly, DAP adds something important to make play uniquely relevant to the early childhood classroom: ‘Moreover, effective teachers take action to enhance children’s play and the learning that goes on in the play and the learning that goes on in the play context’ (Copple and Bredekamp, 2009: 328). This highlights how teachers make a difference between play inside and outside classrooms. Learning, an educational concern, is among the many things linked to play. Play is an activity that we need to understand in its own terms and in its related classroom context (Frost, Wortham and Reifel, 2012). There are many more questions than there are specific answers to our questions about play in the classroom. We have a number of general associations between play (which we have not yet defined) and correlates or outcomes (such as learning or social skills). There are implicit, non-specific linkages between play and classroom curriculum (for example, the assumption that young children should attend school to make friends, to learn to regulate themselves and to learn other things), although some of the linkages for play are not uniquely tied to classrooms.

WHAT IS PLAY? COMPETING CONCEPTIONS Play is one of those terms that everyone knows, but few reflect upon (Sutton-Smith, 1999; Sherwood and Reifel, 2010). How we think about play is complicated by the fact that all humans, at all ages, play in one way or another (Sutton-Smith, 1997). Play is

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many things in all cultures, for the young and the old. Some people associate play more with childhood, but not all who do so make distinctions between children’s play outside of the classroom and within the classroom (Reifel, 1999). With its connotations of frivolity and recreation, play is often considered inconsequential (Sutton-Smith, 1997). When we talk about play, we are dealing simultaneously with an abstraction, a cultural phenomenon, a very broad set of activities, states of mind and particular activities that each human has participated in over the course of a lifetime. All these levels of meaning for the word ‘play’ challenge our thinking before we even get to the early childhood classroom door. Decades of theory and research are available which tell us that play is important in childhood for a variety of reasons. Historically, play has been defined in abstract terms. Plato argued that childhood play provides knowledge that will be used later in life; John Locke saw childhood play as motivational; Immanuel Kant found the roots of imagination in play; while Friedrich von Schiller associated play with creativity. Friedrich Froebel identified play as central to the education of young children. He saw play as children’s natural way of learning about one’s place in the universe, including the physical world, and about nature and the arts. G. Stanley Hall (1911) theorized play as a necessary part of children’s recapitulation of human evolution, play being a way that young humans can undo their ‘primitive’ ways, to make children ready for the civilizing ways of schooling. Most of these ideas about play were primarily speculative, without data to support them (Reifel and Sutterby, 2009; Frost, Wortham and Reifel, 2012). By the 1930s, a growing body of empirical data from experiments conducted in laboratory classrooms provided more description of children’s play, often blurring any distinction between ‘natural’ play activity and the educational purposes that may have driven the play. John Dewey and his followers initiated

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research to show how young children in their classrooms can internalize their knowledge through play and draw on free choice in play to explore society and nature. Play practices in the classroom were described much more fully (Parten, 1932), and it was becoming clear that early educators were using the same term, ‘play’, to reflect competing conceptions. For example, Froebel’s systemic play with objects for natural learning; Hall’s immature play for making children ready for school; Dewey’s (1896) socially oriented play for internalizing knowledge; and play that optimizes development (Hill and Langdon, 1930; Jersild, 1933; Morgan, 1935; Hartley, Frank and Goldenson, 1952). Research described classroom play for children at different ages, providing adults with age-norms for tracking development. The child study movement also created a tautology in how we think about developmental classroom play: what researchers described as natural or normal was based on how laboratory classrooms operated, while the research was presented in a prescriptive way that would guide practice. Twentieth-century modernist theorists developed new ways to think about classroom play, even if their ideas were not tied to classroom practice. Sigmund Freud and followers such as Erik Erikson argued that play is developmentally important for integrating personality, an important aspect of education for those concerned with the whole child and emotional well-being (Erikson, 1963). His case studies of play demonstrated the social and emotional concerns that children confront as they pretend. Jean Piaget detailed the assimilatory face of play as children go through their first three stages of cognitive development, highlighting functional, symbolic and game play (Piaget, 1962). His detailed stage analysis of play actions at different ages illustrates how children’s types of play reflect developing cognition in the early years. Lev Vygotsky (1978) gave symbolic play a powerful role in early childhood concept formation. By showing how pretending creates a Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), he

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gives play a leading role in culturally based learning. These theories included play as an important part of developmental stages in childhood, where what came to be understood as ‘stage appropriate play’ contributed not just to current development but also to future stages. For example, Piaget’s research on the kinds of cognitive play contributed to the assumption by many early childhood programmers that symbolic play was appropriate for preschool and kindergarten-aged children (Schoonmaker and Ryan, 1996). Ideas from developmental science and theory merged in varying ways with earlier conceptions of classroom play to complicate what we might mean when we ask the question, ‘What is classroom play?’

WAYS OF THINKING ABOUT CLASSROOM PLAY ACTIVITY In reviews tying play to early education, scholars have used different ways to describe play and classroom practice. A common approach is describing particular ‘activities’ or ‘activity centres’ as characteristic of child development classrooms. For example, Mayer (1971) describes the ‘child development model’ of early education as including classroom areas for blocks, woodworking, housekeeping, arts, sand and water play, and other areas that seem very familiar to us. As children engage in activities in these areas, they have high levels of child–material interaction and child–child interaction, with less teacher–child interaction. Mayer argues that these forms of play meet objectives for social and emotional development. In an English study, Bennett, Wood and Rogers (1997) describe teacher thought about classroom play, and identify five areas where play has a role in early education. For Bennett et al., play is first a source for natural learning, for example of children’s ideas and interests, through exploration, ownership and selection of relevant activities. Second, children are understood to take control of their own learning, with the third area suggesting

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implications for the roles teachers take in the classroom (providing for play, observing and participating to support child-selected activity). Fourth, play can be linked to learning intentions and outcomes, such as personal, social and intellectual outcomes and thinking across subject boundaries. Finally, play is a way to assess children’s social, emotional and intellectual, or ‘whole child’, development. Bennett et al. made clear that teachers found constraints in classroom play practices, but in general described play as the way in which children do much ‘work’ in the classroom. Trawick-Smith (2012) argues that there are three common elements of developmental play-based curriculum: well-defined play centres in the classroom (e.g. dramatic play, blocks, manipulatives, math/science/cognitive); daily schedules that allow extended time for free play; and methods for teacher observation and facilitation of play. He elaborates the research base for these elements, then describes how they manifest themselves in three approaches that reflect varying philosophical and theoretical views: 1) trust-inplay (where children have more authority regarding their play); 2) facilitate-play (where teachers contribute to child-selected play); and 3) learn-and-teach-through-play (where teachers may direct play toward curricular outcomes). Like other authors (VanHoorn et al., 2003; Roskos and Christie, 2012), Trawick-Smith (2012: 277–8) links classroom practice with developmental ideas, whether social, emotional, intellectual or linguistic. He also reinforces a long-standing understanding of classroom play as requiring particular materials, organized into activity centres, with potential for choice, peer relationships and some degree of adult involvement, such as observation and assessment, planning, guidance, maintaining safety or participation. Sutton-Smith (1997), while not dismissing the possibility that play can have particular educational benefits for children, argues that what is most important about play will occur in those play settings where adults are not

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dominant, like the playground and neighbourhood, where children create their own play culture. In the context of peer culture, children confront and deal with social problems that do not arise when adults supervise, allowing children a learning opportunity that Sutton-Smith believes is not present in adultsupervised classroom play (Löfdahl, in this volume). Play may be a necessary setting for children to acquire social and cultural understandings that have meaning beyond what a curriculum can provide. Play activity in developmental classrooms includes what children do with materials and what they do with each other, and possibly with teachers. The materials are selected and arranged by teachers, and what children do with the materials may be considered play. Likewise, teachers or administrators are responsible for selecting the children in the classroom group, but children select who they interact with, and so establish their relationships with playmates. The developmental play classroom affords particular activities with certain classmates. What children do in the housekeeping area or block area will tell a teacher about each child’s initiative, interests, social skills, thinking skills and communication. Depending on how a teacher relates to children’s play, the play may be guided, or developed, towards child or adult goals and teachers can be more passive or active as they relate to play (Wood, in this volume). Activity areas in classrooms are tied to research findings about developmental progression (social, cognitive, independence), with a still vague sense of teacher involvement or guidance as part of classroom play. A look at some key writings in the field of early childhood education illustrates why the discourse on classroom play maintains its focus on materials, activity centres and vague notions about teachers’ roles. In the next section of this chapter, Froebel’s developmental kindergarten, the varying influences on early twentieth-century laboratory school play, the cognitive curricula of the 1960s and more contemporary views of the roles of classroom play are canvassed.

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KEY MOMENTS IN THINKING ABOUT DEVELOPMENTAL CLASSROOM PLAY Froebel’s Kindergarten: Childhood as a Play Stage Perhaps the most dramatic moment in our thinking was Froebel’s invention of kindergarten, when he translated Romantic-era notions about play, which he considered to be the natural mode of learning for young children, into a programme of education for young children. His classroom was stocked with particular play materials that he called ‘gifts and occupations’, for use in activities such as weaving with strips of paper, lacing outlines created by perforating cards, building with blocks, forming social circles for games and gardening. From these play activities children would naturally begin to develop larger notions of their place in the universe, including the physical world, knowledge of nature, the arts and spiritual and social understandings. Froebel explicitly tied each play material to nature or science, to how we document nature and to the arts, in particular to visual expressiveness. Playful learning was seen as supervised best by female teachers, who were viewed as ‘naturally’ predisposed to relate to young children (Froebel, 1897, 1902; Brosterman, 1997). Froebel went beyond his predecessors, such as Comenius, by arguing that children can develop as they manipulate concrete objects. He designated childhood as a stage in which children learn through their active play. He included in his classroom children of a variety of ages (possibly three to seven), without saying how they might relate differently to each other and materials. Play activities, reflected in the gifts and occupations, are how children relate to the universe at a level that they can understand. Froebel does not tell us details of how we can identify children’s educational progress, and it is not clear how a teacher will realize that a child is ready for a gift or has learned from it. Neither does he tell us how what a child has learned will be built on in later stages of life.

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There is much discussion of freedom in Froebel’s work, but it is not clear from his writings exactly how freedom is expressed in the classroom. Was Froebelian play what we would now call free play? Many of his interpreters, such as Susan Blow, argued that kindergarten teachers should guide play, while others such as G. Stanley Hall and Patty Smith Hill saw an argument for free play in his writing. The question arose of the degree of teacher involvement in play, and if play could be natural and free with adult intervention. Would Froebel call anything that children do with his gifts and occupations play? Or is it only play when children are guided in their activities with gifts? Perhaps it is the freedom and choice to engage with different gifts that marked kindergarten activity as play? Is play more about particular materials, or is it about the choice to decide which materials to use? The issue of free play emerged from these debates (Reifel and Sutterby, 2009). Froebel’s contribution to developmental play curriculum is multilayered and lingers in contemporary curriculum practice and theorization. According to Froebel, childhood is a stage at which play is a natural way of learning about the world; however, what this stage might be a foundation for is not clear. The curriculum is described in terms of play materials and activities that are linked to larger conceptions. In Froebel’s works play is not defined, but is sketched in relation to particular materials and activities. Beyond his specified gifts and occupations, Froebel offers what we might see today as vague generalities about classroom play and teacher guidance, both of which were seen by him as ‘natural’.

LABORATORY SCHOOL PLAY: CHILD STUDY In the early twentieth century both public and private preschool provision was developing across Europe and the United States, along with other early childhood group programmes

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affiliated with social services (Weber, 1969). This growth (May, 1997) required many additional teachers for kindergarten classrooms, who were prepared to get to know younger learners and the ideas that were appropriate for preschool programmes. Froebel’s kindergarten presented one view, with its play materials and ‘natural’ learning under the guidance of nurturing females. At the same time, there was a blossoming in academic studies on the growth of the child. New observational and interview methods and theory were used to replace prior speculation about children’s play and learning. To support scientific research, many universities and colleges established campus nursery school laboratories for research on children in ‘natural’ settings (Barbour, 2003). There were, of course, competing views of child development and of what classroom play might look like. Followers of Hall described stages of early play and growth, arguing that it was natural for young children to go through stages from immature to mature. Their research described children’s year-by-year progress in play-supportive classrooms. Development was associated with observed play landmarks that an adult could document each year (Rasmussen, 1920; Parten, 1932; Gesell, 1934). For example, Gesell (1934) provided teachers and parents with a year-by-year set of landmarks for the way children played with different materials. His work gave adults a way to see what was ‘normal’ for a two-year-old or a three-year-old, as the child played with blocks, interacted with age-mates or played in the sand. The foundation for an ‘ages-andstages’ view of play and development was established. While not rejecting a stage view of early play, Dewey and his followers situated classroom play in a socio-cultural context. Young children were considered part of a stage that was characterized by many needs, opening the door for the idea of the ‘whole child’. Symbolic or pretend play was an important avenue for children to use to express and explore their interests, where children can act

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an ‘idea out’ before ‘taking it in’ (Dewey, 1896/1972). Classroom play was presented as the way each individual child learned about herself, while negotiating relationships with others who may have differing ways of thinking. The social relationships of the play classroom took primacy, and materials, once the focus from a Froebelian perspective, were relegated to tools children could use for expression. Dewey (1916) further situated young children’s emerging social relationships in the domain of adult political philosophy. The freedom and choice of classroom play became a microcosm for the play of competing ideas that children would later encounter in a democratic society. Free play became a developmental foundation for participation in democratic society (Burk and Burk, 1920; Kuschner, 2001). To the notion of ‘ages and stages’ of classroom play was, therefore, added the idea of play as a process in which children socially construct their experience of the world. During this moment in history, we can also see the influence of psychoanalytic theory, with the writings of Sigmund Freud and his followers (A. Freud, 1946; Klein, 1955; Erikson, 1963; Axline, 1969). They refined a way of thinking about childhood play as a mechanism for personality development and psychological conflict resolution. Personality development became an important part of the ‘whole child’, with its connections to temperament, identity, selfconcept and gender identity. Classroom play in some laboratory schools, such as Bank Street (Biber, 1984), recognized how children’s play reflected their emotions and developing sense of self. Teachers could understand child growth by observing children’s choices in toys, playmates and adult models. An excellent example that illustrates thinking about play curriculum and its implementation is Lucy Sprague Mitchell’s Young Geographers (1934/1971). In her description of the development of geographical thinking, Mitchell analyses the stages children go through as they experience different levels of geographical thinking. One part of this is

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children’s drive to understand their world, allowing them to orient as they explore in different kinds of play. Mitchell tied her ages to stages, from preverbal to primary grades. Play drives children by motivating them and orienting them to different aspects of geography. Particular play materials such as blocks and clay are critical tools for both motivating children and allowing them to represent their thinking. Within each stage, Mitchell shows how children engage with their environment and use materials to represent understandings of the geographic world. Field trips and maps are the ultimate classroom activities that allow children to construct their neighbourhoods by symbolically recreating them in block play, drawing, dramatic play and clay modelling. Mitchell’s work reflects her era’s concern with developmental stages, psychological motivations and social learning. For example, playing with friends to understand more about their knowledge of who they are in their communities was considered important. She demonstrated how developmental stages, psychological motivations and social learning came together in what she calls symbolic play, leading to ‘chronological and spacial [sic] logic’ (20). Photos in Mitchell’s book are especially informative about how children play and how Mitchell makes sense of that play. Mitchell shows how children use block play to represent their neighbourhood streets and buildings. Children are shown representing mountains with clay. Play creations such as these are tied by Mitchell to the beginnings of mapping to orient towards the larger world. Scholars in the early twentieth century added many, often conflicting, layers to how we envision classroom play. During this time nineteenth-century notions about the naturalness of play and the developmental stagebased nature of play continued and were aligned with a focus on materials and natural development. However, the early twentieth century added theories, providing teachers with new frameworks for identifying and understanding children’s classroom play

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over time. These theories, elaborating on the work of Hall and Dewey, built on earlier thinking by empirically describing the natural, developmental progression of play, play for consolidating knowledge and teaching about society, and play as a tool for personality development. New materials such as unit blocks appeared that were seen as more aligned with children’s interests and needs (Pratt, 1948). Evidence from research (Mitchell, 1934; Gesell, 1934, Hartley, Frank and Goldenson, 1952) provided guidance for teachers as they selected materials and made their observations of children’s play.

COGNITIVE INFLUENCES Classroom play again became topical during the moment when various countries around the world began to implement interventions for young children, whether for socioeconomic status, language difference, cultural difference or disability (Smilansky, 1968; Spearritt, 1979; Zigler and Valentine, 1979). In the United States, Head Start and its variations was one such widely implemented example (Evangelou and Wild, this volume). Different approaches to early education ranged from an academic extreme (such as DISTAR) to a variety of play-based interventions (for example Bank Street and HighScope). With academic intervention as a major concern, the cognitive aspects of play took centre stage, heavily influenced by the work of Piaget, Bruner and, eventually, Vygotsky. These theorists were cited in research and teacher education resources (Evans, 1975; Day and Parker, 1977). They validated the centrality of play for early thinking, therefore supporting play as an important classroom tool for early academic success or, developmentally speaking, a foundation for that success. These cognitive play arguments harken back to Froebel and early debates on what classroom play could be. In one sense, early childhood itself is seen as a play stage in which preoperational children assimilate their

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thinking by means of symbolic play, so that classroom play is a consolidation of what is already learned. Another view suggests that children stand a head taller than themselves in pretend play, so that pretend play itself is learning for children. Yet another view suggests that children acquire problem-solving skills in the safety of self-directed play, so that exploratory play in the classroom provides a foundation for later learning. Cognition is manifested in early childhood in different forms of play, suggesting to many interventionists that classrooms should offer choice, opportunities and materials for pretending and child initiative rather than teacher direction. Rather than seeing the result of such play in Froebelian terms, cognitive theory allowed educators to see play as a necessary foundation for abstract thinking and a motivator for engaging the mind. For example, HighScope included many kinds of classroom play in its ‘plan-do-review’ strategy. Building on its version of Piaget, combined with other theorists, High-Scope had children think about their play by indicating their plans for classroom play; after doing play activities they would be asked to reflect on what they had done (Schweinhart and Weikart, 1997). The curriculum was both cognitive and metacognitive, with children exercising symbolic thinking in play and reflecting about that thought outside of play. Others have emphasized pretend play with aspects of Vygotsky’s theory. Paley (2004) draws on Vygotsky when she describes how self-initiated pretending is the foundation for children’s understanding and ownership of narrative and literacy arising from their sociodramatic play. Many of the Head Start play programmes appeared to be similar in practice, with the same play materials and areas in the classroom. Those similarities belied differing ways of thinking about the contribution of a cognitive play curriculum to children’s later success. The play curriculum might be empowering children’s own thinking, or it might be increasing awareness of their own thoughts. Whatever the educational outcomes, cognitive

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play curricula appeared to subscribe to constructivist beliefs that young children’s selfselection of activity is an appropriate route for building conceptual knowledge.

CONTEMPORARY VIEWS The latter years of the twentieth century brought scholarship that challenged the developmental ideas that had held sway for more than a century. Many classroom concerns, such as gender bias, cultural and language differences and violence, were not addressed by developmental views. New scholarship showed the import of issues such as bias in areas such as gender, ethnicity, class and language in the classroom. Some from the reconceptualist movement (Cannella, 1997) questioned if play had a privileged or unwarranted place in the classroom, taking time which might be better spent on other educational activities. Others (Carlson-Paige and Levin, 1988; Blaise, 2005; see Pacini-Ketchabaw, this volume) noted that play might have potential for dealing with bias and social issues. In the USA, much play debate was drowned out by discussion of standards-based teaching, focusing teachers on academic preparation and minimizing play. Government demands for accountability influenced teachers by setting expectations for academic skills in the early childhood years. When teachers spend time addressing skills and assessment, they necessarily have less time to think about classroom play (Brown, 2011). This standards-based movement coincided with academic awakening to the sorts of bias and equity issues discussed above. The play debate was overtaken by the standards-based teaching debate. There is some evidence that teachers and parents continue to value play (Brown, 2011), but it is not clear how the standards movement will affect play. Researchers have begun to explore how the sorts of issues that Sutton-Smith (1997) has put forward may be present in classroom play when adults let children manage their

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play relationships. Current research shows that in their classroom free play children may deal with peer culture issues, such as gender acquisition (Blaise, 2005), gender and ethnic bias (Grieshaber and Ryan, 2005), social competence (Elgas, 2011) and media culture (Galbraith, 2011). All of these areas are ripe for more research. Paley (1981, 1992, 2004) has described a number of issues which children address in classrooms through or as a consequence of play, including racial bias, social exclusion and gender exploration. Both developmental and non-developmental theories (Winnecott, 1971; Vygotsky, 1978; Csikszentmihalyi, 1990; Bateson, 2000; MacNaughton, 2005) have emerged and been applied to the analysis of classroom play in an effort to understand the various meanings that children encounter when given the opportunity (Reifel, 2007; Lobman and O’Neill, 2011). For example, Vygotsky (1978) has drawn attention to the social context of classroom play, and Bateson (2000) has related what goes on in play to the ‘outof-play’ world. Trawick-Smith (2012) and others have observed play in a variety of settings, such as Puerto Rico, and found how local customs and practices become reflected and expanded in pretend play. What occurs outside of the classroom comes into the classroom and is elaborated.

CONCLUSION Early childhood classrooms are interesting cultural settings, where educational purposes, cultural norms and traditions and individual experiences come together. The use of develop­mental play in classrooms is not necessarily natural in the way described by early philosophers and theorists such as Froebel, Hall and Gesell. Research and practice are beginning to reflect the particular, unique qualities of how play occurs (Paley, 2004; Reifel and Sutterby, 2009). The mix of children seen in one year may reveal a unique play community (Wisneski, 2011), and the appearance of a new television programme or

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toy may shape play that had not previously appeared (Galbraith, 2011; Marsh, this volume). The play we see in classrooms changes, and it is not in many ways like outof-classroom play, simply because of the social context of each classroom. Classroom play is a unique concept with a rhetoric of its own (Wisneski and Reifel, 2012). While it may be possible to find universal definitions or conceptions of play when we look at classroom practice, when we look at play curricula it appears to be necessary to look to the particulars of classroom pretend play to understand how children are learning. It is not enough to say that children are playing; that can mean too many different things. As classroom play has evolved over the decades, pretend play has emerged as the dominant kind of play we see in practice, and is supported by theory and research. In pretend play, teachers see how individuals and groups share their thinking and create opportunities for learning. Theory and research, both developmental and postmodern, have emerged over time to show us how to understand developmental play as something that promotes immediate learning, and as something that is a foundation for later school success. Developmental play can be a curriculum for young children when teachers provide time and materials for pretending (Trawick-Smith, 2012). While older notions of play may still ring true, we have newer, profound ways of understanding developmental play as a window into how individuals and groups acquire and construct knowledge in their classroom settings.

REFERENCES Axline, V. (1969) Dibs: In Search of Self. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Barbour, N.E. (2003) ‘The early history of child development laboratory programs’, in. B.A. McBride and N.E. Barbour (eds), Bridging the Gap Between Theory, Research and Practice: The Role of Child Development Laboratory Programs in Early Childhood Education: Volume 12: Advances in Early Education and Day Care. New York: Elsevier. pp. 9–29.

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Bateson, G. (2000) Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Bennett, N., Wood, L. and Rogers, S. (1997) Teaching through Play: Teachers’ Thinking and Classroom Practice. Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press. Biber, B. (1984) Early Education and Psychological Development. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Blaise, M. (2005) Playing it Straight: Uncovering Gender Discourses in the Early Childhood Classroom. New York: Routledge. Brosterman, N. (1997) Inventing Kindergarten. New York: Abrams. Brown, C.P. (2011) ‘Searching for the norm in a system of absolutes: A case study of standards-based accountability reform in pre-kindergarten’, Early Education and Development, 22(1): 151–77. Burk, F. and Burk, C.F. (1920) A Study of the Kindergarten Problem in the Public Kindergartens of Santa Barbara, California, 1898–1899. New York: Teachers College. Cannella, G.S. (1997) Deconstructing Early Childhood Education: Social Justice and Revolution. New York: Peter Lang. Carlson-Paige, N. and Levin, D. (1988) ‘Young children and war play’, Educational Leadership, 45(4): 80–4. Copple, C., and Bredekamp, S. (eds) (2009) Developmentally Appropriate Practice in Early Childhood Programs Serving Children from Birth through Age 8. (3rd ed). Washington, DC: National Association for the Education of Young Children. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990) Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper & Row. Day, M.C. and J. Parker, R. (1977) The Preschool in Action: Exploring Early Childhood Programs. New York: Allyn & Bacon. Dewey, J. (1896/1972) ‘Imagination and expression’, in John Dewey: The Early Works, 1882–1898: Volume 5: 1895–1898. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. pp. 192–201. (1st ed. Feffer & Simons) Dewey, J. (1916) Democracy and Education. New York: Free Press. Elgas, P. (2011) ‘A peer culture perspective of English language learners’ social competence’, in D. Fernie, S. Madrid and R. Kantor (eds), Educating Toddlers to Teachers. New York: Hampton Press. pp. 137–41. Elias, C. and Berk, L.E. (2002) ‘Self-regulation in young children: Is there a role for sociodramatic play?’, Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 17(1): 216–38. Erikson, E.H. (1963) Childhood and Society (rev. ed.). New York: Norton. Evans, E.D. (1975) Contemporary Influences in Early Childhood Education. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

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Fantuzzo, J. and McWayne, C. (2002) ‘The relationship between peer-play interactions in the family context and dimensions of school readiness for low-income preschool children’, Journal of Educational Psychology, 94(1): 79–87. Fernie, D., Madrid, S. and Kantor, R. (eds) (2011) Educating Toddlers to Teachers. New York: Hampton Press. File, N., Mueller, J.J. and Wisneski, D.B. (eds) (2012) Curriculum in Early Childhood Education: Re-examined, Rediscovered, Renewed. New York: Routledge. Freud, A. (1946) The Psychoanalytical Treatment of Children. London: Imago. Froebel, F. (1897) Mother’s Songs, Games, and Stories (F. and E. Lord, trans.) London: Rice. (1st ed., 1844.) Froebel, F. (1902) Education of Man (W.N. Hailmann, trans.) New York: Appleton. (1st ed., 1826.) Frost, J.L., Wortham, S. and Reifel, S. (2012) Play and Child Development. (4th ed.) Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson. Galbraith, J. (2011) ‘“Welcome to our team, shark boy”: Making superhero play visible’, in D. Fernie, S. Madrid and R. Kantor (eds), Educating Toddlers to Teachers. New York: Hampton Press. pp. 37–62. Gesell, A. (1934) An Atlas of Infant Behavior. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Grieshaber, S. and Ryan, S. (2005) ‘Transforming ideas and practices’, in S. Ryan and S. Grieshaber (eds), Practical Transformations and Trans­ formational Practices: Globalization, Post­mod­ernism and Early Childhood Education: Volume 14: Advances in Early Education and Day Care. New York: Elsevier. pp. 3–17. Hall, G.S. (1911) Educational Problems. Vol. 1. New York: Appleton. Hartley, R.E., Frank, L.K. and Goldenson, R.M. (1952) Understanding Children’s Play. New York: Columbia University Press. Hill, P.S. and Langdon, G. (1930) ‘Nursery school procedures at Teachers College’, Revue Internationale de L’enfant, 9(53): 398–407. Jersild, A.T. (1933) Child Psychology. New York: Prentice Hall. Klein, M. (1955) ‘The psychoanalytic play technique’, American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 25: 223–37. Kuschner, D. (2001) ‘The dangerously radical concept of free play’, in S. Reifel and M. Brown (eds), Advances in Early Education and Day Care: Volume 11: Early Education and Care, and Reconceptualizing Play. Oxford: JAI/Elsevier Science. pp. 275–93. Lobman, C. and O’Neill, B.E. (2011) ‘Play, performance, learning, and development: Exploring the relationship’,

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in C. Lobman and B.E. O’Neill (eds), Play and Performance: Play and Culture Studies. Vol. 11. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. pp. 7–17. MacNaughton, G. (2005) Doing Foucault in Early Childhood Studies. New York: Routledge. May, H. (1997) The Discovery of Early Childhood. Wellington: New Zealand Council for Educational Research Press. Mayer, R.S. (1971) ‘A comparative analysis of preschool curriculum models’, in R.H. Anderson and H.G. Shane (eds), As the Twig is Bent: Readings in Early Childhood Education. New York: Houghton Mifflin. pp. 286–314. Mitchell, L.S. (1934/1971) Young Geographers. New York: Bank Street College of Education. (1st ed., 1934.) Morgan, J.J.B. (1935) Child Psychology. New York: Farrar & Rinehart. Paley, V.G. (1981) Wally’s Stories. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Paley, V.G. (1992) You Can’t Say You Can’t Play. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Paley, V.G. (2004) A Child’s Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Parten, M. (1932) ‘Social participation among preschool children’, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 27: 243–62. Piaget, J. (1962) Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood. New York: Norton. Pratt, C. (1948) I Learn from Children: An Adventure in Progressive Education. New York: Simon & Schuster. Rasmussen, V. (1920) Child Psychology. London: Gyldendal. Reifel, S. (1999) ‘Play research and the early childhood profession’, in S. Reifel (ed.), Advances in Early Education and Day Care: Volume 10: Foundations, Adult Dynamics, Teacher Education and Play. Stamford, CT: JAI Press. pp. 201–11. Reifel, S. (2007) ‘Hermeneutic text analysis of play: Exploring meaningful early childhood classroom events’, in J.A. Hatch (ed.), Early Childhood Qualitative Research. New York: Routledge. pp. 25–42. Reifel, S. and Sutterby J. (2009) ‘Play theory and practice in contemporary classrooms’, in S. Feeney, A. Galper and C. Seefeldt (eds), Continuing Issues in Early Childhood Education. (3rd ed.) Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall/Merrill. pp. 238–57. Roskos, K. and Christie, J. (2012) ‘Four play pedagogies and a promise for children’s learning’ in A.M. Pinkham, T. Kaefer and S.B. Neuman (eds), Knowledge Development in Early Childhood: Sources of Learning and Classroom Implications. New York: Guilford Press. pp. 129–44.

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Schoonmaker, F. and Ryan, S. (1996) ‘Does theory lead to practice? Teachers’ constructs about teaching: Top-down perspectives’, in J. Chafel and S. Reifel (eds), Advances in Early Education and Day Care: Theory and Practice in Early Childhood Teaching. Volume 8: Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. pp. 115–51. Schweinhart, L. and Weikart, D. (1997) ‘Lasting differences: The HighScope preschool curriculum comparison study through age 23’, Monographs of the HighScope Educational Research Foundation (No. 12). Ypsilanti, MI: HighScope Press. Sherwood, S. and Reifel, S. (2010) ‘The multiple meanings of play: Exploring preservice teachers’ beliefs about a central element of early childhood education’, Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education, 31: 322–43. Smilansky, S. (1968) The Effects of Sociodramatic Play on Disadvantaged Preschool Children. New York: Wiley. Spearritt, P. (1979) ‘Child care and kindergartens in Australia, 1890–1975’, in P. Langford and P. Sebastian (eds), Early Childhood Education and Care in Australia. Melbourne: AI Press. pp. 10–38. Sutton-Smith, B. (1997) The Ambiguity of Play. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sutton-Smith, B. (1999) ‘The rhetoric of adult and child play theories’, in S. Reifel (ed.), Advances in Early Education and Day Care: Volume 10: Foundations, Adult Dynamics, Teacher Education and Play. Stamford, CT: JAI Press. pp. 149–62.

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Trawick-Smith, J. (2012) ‘Play and the curriculum’, in J. Frost, S. Wortham and S. Reifel, Play and Child Development. (4th ed.) Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson. pp. 245–83. VanHoorn, J., Scales, B., Nourot, P. and Alward, K. (2003) Play at the Center of the Curriculum. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill/Prentice Hall. Vygotsky, L.S. (1978) Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Weber, E. (1969) The Kindergarten: Its Encounter with Educational Thought in America. New York: Teachers College Press. Winnecott, D. (1971) Playing and Reality. New York: Basic Books. Wisneski, D. (2011) ‘Complicating the role of play in building classroom community’, in C. Lobman and B.E. O’Neill (eds), Play and Performance: Play and Culture Studies. (Vol. 11.) Lanham, MD: University Press of America. pp. 33–58. Wisneski, D.B. and Reifel, S. (2012) ‘The place of play in early childhood curriculum’, in N. File, J.J. Mueller and D.B. Wisneski (eds), Curriculum in Early Childhood Education: Re-examined, Rediscovered, Renewed. New York: Routledge. pp. 175–87. Zigler, E. and Valentine, J. (1979) Project Head Start: A Legacy of the War on Poverty. New York: Free Press.

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14 Children’s Play and Learning and Developmental Pedagogy Ingrid Pramling Samuelsson and Niklas Pramling

INTRODUCTION The notions of play and learning have constituted poles in a dialectic movement in discussions about children’s development and about how to organize for it in the form of early childhood education (ECE). In the words of Michael Billig (1996), we can say that play and learning constitute poles in a tradition of argumentation. Billig reasons that every argument, by necessity – explicitly or implicitly – is at the same time an argument against something else. This implies, for example, that a claim children’s understanding can only be studied contextually by implication argues against a position that children’s understanding can be studied in an acontextual manner. In a sense, the tradition of argumentation constitutes an example of the theoretical notion of variation (which is closely intertwined with developmental pedagogy, as will be presented below), which proposes that meaning springs from differences. Only in difference from

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something else can we argue our case. Hence, we suggest that play and learning can be seen as an example of this long tradition of argumentation. In this chapter we review the history of the play argument, beginning with Froebel, Pestalozzi and Comenius, and follow it to the present day. We do this in relation to Billig’s (1996; cf. Shotter, 1993) idea about argumentation and see these ideas about play as positioned in relation to arguments about learning and work in early childhood education. In the second part of the chapter we describe how we have engaged with concepts of learning and work in relation to play in the development of a theoretical perspective on play and learning in early childhood education, which we term developmental pedagogy. We trace the concept of developmental pedagogy from its theoretical roots in phenomenography, and describe subsequent empirical research that has informed the formation of this idea and its central concepts.

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A HISTORY OF EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION AS SEEN THROUGH THE CONCEPTS OF PLAY AND LEARNING Early childhood education as understood in this chapter encompasses institutional settings for children’s learning below the age of formal schooling, and varies substantially from country to country. In Western European traditions early childhood education has a history of more than 150 years. There are primarily two strands. One originates in the infant schools in Britain, the other in Froebel’s kindergarten in Germany, although one can trace the roots of both back to Pestalozzi and the philosophy of Comenius (see Bergen, in this volume). Although Comenius focused on school education, others came to link his ideas to early childhood education. The essence of his teaching was concrete instruction and dialogue as the main principles for didactics (Comenius, 1916). For Comenius, didactics was related to the questions of teaching what, how, when and through. To him, teaching was a question of carefully managing and supervising the child in a slow progression and developmental process based on an understanding of the nature of children and of their intellectual levels and needs. The goal for teaching was to attain an insight into God. Froebel’s ideas were fundamentally similar to those of Comenius (Dombkowski, 2001). He strove to cultivate human beings in the same way as plants were cultivated in nature. Early childhood education thus became infant school or kindergarten. Kindergarten, however, was seen as an alternative to school education, while infant school was perceived as a form of school. The main difference between these two historical strands of early childhood education is that infant schools were intended as the start of academic learning, while kindergarten grew from Comenius’ idea of Bildung. Still, both approaches viewed young children as different from older children and both institutions included play, although it is understood in

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different ways. The German concept of Bildung is, Hopmann (2007) argues, ‘hardly translatable to English’; ‘the word combines elements of education, erudition, formation, experience, and whatever else is used in English to denote the process of unfolding individuality by learning’ (115). Furthermore: Bildung is more than mastery of contents or development of competencies and abilities, more than ‘knowing something’ or ‘being able to do it’…The purpose of teaching and schooling is in this perspective […] the use of knowledge as a transformative tool for unfolding the learner’s individuality and sociability (2007: 115).

The infant school approach was developed in Scotland in the early nineteenth century by Robert Owen, and was intended to foster the development of children of working-class parents during the time of the Industrial Revolution. One could claim that this was the beginning of what we call daycare today, where society takes care of children while parents are working. Children attending could be between two and seven years old. The idea was that children were shaped intellectually and learned to know their place and their religion. Dancing, music and military-style exercises also had a central place in the curriculum. Books were not deemed important; instead, children learned from the common things surrounding them, such as animals, and were expected to be curious and ask questions. Infant schools rapidly spread to other countries. In the writing of Forsell (1835), a well-known teacher at that time, the metaphor of children as wax or clay is used to suggest that they are highly malleable. Teaching in infant schools took place in groups of 100–200 children sitting in an amphitheatre-like room, with short lessons of 20–30 minutes. Lessons were mainly about letters and numbers and children were taught to read, write and count by means of rote learning. It was recognized that children could not sit still or concentrate for long and needed to vary their activities. Play was restricted to breaks between lessons, when

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children were allowed to play unless they had failed to learn their homework. The teacher was expected to ‘teach with lightness and joyfulness, be lively and entertaining’ (Ekstrand, 2000: 53, our translation), for instance by teaching children multiplication with the help of songs. It could be argued that the infant schools prioritized children’s behaviour and the traditional school subjects. The Froebel tradition developed over the same period as the infant schools (Owen 1816 and Froebel 1837, respectively). Play, learning and work were all central to the kindergarten activities, which were intended to promote children’s learning and development. The German Romantic view of everyday life for children resulted in an interest in songs, fairy-tales, finger-games, groupgames and toys. Froebelian ‘gifts’ consisting of 20 tasks built on blocks were also developed (Manning, 2005). These mathematical tasks ranged from simple to complex problems in relation to the age of the child. A niece of Friedrich Froebel, Henriette Schrader-Breymann (1827–1899), was to have a great influence on the development of kindergarten pedagogy. She introduced what she called the ‘middle point of work’, which in some ways resembled today’s thematic work or centres of interest as a cross-disciplinary way of organizing curriculum content based on the real world rather than on school subjects. This organization of learning started with children’s experiences, which were followed up with songs, stories, craftwork, drama and discussions (Froebel, 2007). Alongside Pestalozzi, Froebel introduced play as a key notion for kindergarten pedagogy, by incorporating familiar activities such as cooking, sewing and gardening into the curriculum. He believed that children needed freedom to play and to process their experiences in play. But work was also important, since it meant that children were given responsibility, for example, for taking care of the flowers or the animals in the kindergarten. The intention was to create a harmonious balance between body and mind.

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EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION IN MODERN TIMES The two Western European approaches to early childhood education outlined above are based on similar ideas, including – most importantly – emphasizing play, activity and respect for the child. These ideas can be seen in various approaches to early childhood education today. One factor that has influenced education for young children is the discipline of psychology. When developmental psychology entered the field, specifically through the writings of Gesell and Ilg (1949), it provided a solid base for early childhood education. Like Froebel, these researchers believed in children’s natural development and thus in following the child’s cycle during the day, over time and from one age to another. This perspective led to a clear description of what was considered typical (normal) for a specific age group. Theoretically the identification of these typical patterns of development made it easy to be a teacher in early childhood education, since educators could work towards meeting children’s needs at a certain age by adapting activities to the child’s age and level of development. According to this perspective children were supposed to develop biologically before they could acquire ageappropriate knowledge (Gesell and Ilg, 1949). This approach was further refined as Piaget’s (1932, 1970, 1976) work became available. Then not only children’s behaviour but also their cognitive skills formed the basis for a pedagogical approach aligned with children’s age and development (Gruber and Vonèche, 1977). Internationally, this application of developmental theory resulted in the developmentally appropriate practice guidelines (Bredekamp and Copple, 1997) published initially by the National Association for the Education of Young Children and most recently updated (Copple and Bredekamp, 2009) to include social and cultural aspects of children’s learning (Reifel, this volume). Contemporary early childhood education is characterized by a range of approaches, such

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as Steiner Waldorf (Easton, 1997; Pope Edwards, 2002), HighScope (Schweinhart and Weikart, 1997) and Experiential Education (Laevers, 1997). More recently the pedagogical work in the Italian city of Reggio Emilia has resulted in the ‘pedagogy of listening’ (Rinaldi, 2006). In the Steiner Waldorf, HighScope and Experiential Education approaches and in the Reggio Emilia pedagogical response to children’s cultural experiences, play is an important dimension of early learning. These approaches vary both in their aims and in their methods for promoting learning. There is also variance in the object of learning (what they intend children to learn) and in the act of learning (how they understand how children learn; Pramling Samuelsson and Asplund Carlson, 2008). Even though the aims of these early childhood education approaches vary, they are located within the frame of the historical development of ideas outlined above. The two Western European views of play described above as a starting point for early childhood education were summarized by Bennett (2005) in a review of the role of play in early learning. In recent years, assumptions about how and what children learn through the form of play associated with these views have been questioned (Sommer, 2012), as the importance and role of context and culture in learning and development have been increasingly emphasized (Rogoff, 2003). This is evident in new theories as well as in policy documents. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reports Starting Strong I (2001) and II (2006) propose that play should be an important aspect of early childhood education, whether in the social–pedagogical (kindergarten) approach or the academic (infant school) one. In the social–pedagogical approach play is considered to be one of the main tools for children’s development, similar to the view we find in Sutton-Smith (1997). Play in the academic approach is perceived as separated from learning and therefore as enabling the children to concentrate and learn to read, write and count during short periods of

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teaching. Research has shown that children benefit from play-oriented early childhood education more than from academic education when it comes to later learning in school (Marcon, 2001). Preschool children participate in the early childhood setting that adults create for them. The actual setting depends on the theoretical and philosophical view of children as human beings, and whether or not they are perceived as competent and capable of learning and creating knowledge (Sommer, 2012). Although many educational approaches for young children view play as a main feature of the curriculum, the relation between play and learning, or the function of play, is seldom elaborated.

PLAY AND LEARNING AS INTEGRATED DIMENSIONS IN A PRESCHOOL APPROACH If we accept the notion that children are playing learning individuals, how does this affect practice? In a research study, Johansson and Pramling Samuelsson (2009) posed the following question: can play and learning be integrated in a goal-oriented preschool? In many countries, preschool is goal-oriented, since there is a curriculum for teachers to follow. Teaching, as we have already mentioned, is considered to be planned and directed by adults, whereas play is often conceived of as children’s own world of fantasy and joyfulness. From the theoretical perspective of a playing learning child, how does the relation between play and learning work out in practice? The above study, which lasted one year, included 30 teachers from nine groups with 180 children in the age range of two to nine years. Teachers participated in in-service training in which they had to study texts about the theoretical framework for the study, including the concept of the playing learning child. The aim of the project was to find out how play and learning could be intertwined in practice. The teachers’ work with children was video-recorded continuously. Data analysis involved identifying concepts emerging

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from phenomenology and developmental pedagogy, which were analysed in relation to concepts such as reality versus fantasy and power positions between peers and between children and teachers. Three categories of interaction between children and teachers were generated according to whether play and learning was integrated or not. In the category of explorative interplay, the teacher clearly intended to point something out to the children, but there was still room for each child’s contribution and for them to act from their experiences and perspectives. Children were able to play and fantasize at the same time as the teacher introduced notions and phenomena that she wanted the children to notice. The dialogue oscillated between reality and fantasy but there was a shared responsibility for what they talked about and it was possible for the children to play at the same time (for example when they talked about basic mathematical concepts). The teachers participated actively with the children. In the second category, narrative interplay, play and learning were also integrated. The dialogue and teaching situation turned into a long storyline where the teacher introduced new notions and provided suggestions for developing the play with animals. Here there could be a zoo with dangerous animals, or various pets with different habitats and all eating different kinds of food, and so on. children constructed fences and fantasized about the animals, but also told the teacher about real experiences. This means that there was room for both play and reality, because the teacher and the children shared power and possibilities for communication and developing the activity. The third category, labelled formalistic interplay, was characterized by the teacher guiding children to say or do what she had decided they should do or say. In this category there was a correct answer to the teacher’s question. An example could be when a teacher wanted a young child to paint a piece of wood. The teacher helped the child to turn the wood around so it could be

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painted on both sides, but there was no dialogue or fantasy about the wood or anything surrounding it. This approach was also common during circle-time, where the teacher posed questions for children to answer, leaving no room for play to take place (cf. Reifel, this volume). From this study several tentative conclusions can be drawn. One is that it is possible to integrate play and learning, by letting children bring their world of fantasy and ideas and act as partners in a dialogue. The main point is, however, that it is all a question of the teachers’ ways of relating to children and the learning situation. Johansson and Pramling Samuelsson (2009) also noted that the content made a difference. Some teachers had problems with this kind of interaction and with sharing responsibility for what happened when the content they were supposed to teach children involved aspects of traditional subjects from school, such as early mathematics or literacy.

DEVELOPMENTAL PEDAGOGY AND THE PLAYING LEARNING CHILD Theoretical Point of Departure: Phenomenography Developmental pedagogy has its theoretical basis in phenomenography. Marton (1981) states that phenomenography ‘aims at description, analysis and understanding of experiences’ (177). Hence, the focus of phenomenography is on systematizing how people experience phenomena in their world. In empirical studies of this kind ‘we have repeatedly found that phenomena, aspects of reality, are experienced (or conceptualized) in a relatively limited number of qualitatively different ways’ (Marton, 1981: 181; see also Marton and Säljö, 1976; Säljö, 1981). Hence, studying learners’ conceptions does not lead to the ‘personification’ of an individual child, by which we mean the description of a child in static terms as ‘being at a certain developmental level’. Instead we understand that

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every individual may hold several conceptions of the same thing and a group of children may hold many different conceptions, so the variation between them can be used as a pedagogical asset which enables children to become aware of additional ways to view a phenomenon. According to Marton, studies of learning from this perspective are always related to content or the ‘what’ of learning: As to our argument that learning should be described in terms of its content, it must be said that clearly no experiment on learning can be undertaken without some content. But content has, in practically all studies of learning, an instrumental function, i.e. it is used in order to find out some general properties of the process of learning and not from an interest in how the particular content is understood and learned (1981: 184).

The latter is, however, of primary importance in phenomenographic investigations: We would argue that these forms [of understanding phenomena] should not be considered as categories for classifying individuals, but as categories for describing ways of perceiving the world around us. In this way, the shift which we have discussed in the Piagetian research tradition would be reversed again; the perceived world, rather than the perceiving child, would become thematized (that is become the focus of attention) (Marton, 1981: 195).

Building on the theoretical framework of phenomenography, Pramling (1983) investigated children’s conceptions of the phenomenon ‘learning’ in the first study known to use this perspective with children. The focus was on how children understood what it means to learn. A total of 276 children (aged 2.9–8.8 years) were interviewed. The data were analysed with regard to the children’s conceptions of what and how they learn. Concerning what one learns, the children’s answers were categorized as learning ‘to do’, ‘to know’ and ‘to understand’. Concerning how one learns, the children spoke about ‘to do’ (not distinct from ‘to learn to do’), ‘to be able as a function of getting older’ and ‘through gaining experience’. Over these

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categories of understanding, the child’s conception of learning became less bound to a particular practical action and gained abstractness. In addition to describing the variation in children’s conceptions of learning, Pramling identified a developmental trend in this regard, because some understandings were more advanced than others. That they were more advanced in this case also meant that they were more powerful as strategies for learning. The reason for the latter claim was the finding that how the child conceived learning affected how he or she went about trying to learn, and consequently what he or she actually learned. Interestingly, another phenomenographic study (Dahlgren and Olsson, 1985) reported analogous findings concerning children’s conceptions of what it means to read. Children who regard learning to read as something they need to do in order to manage school do not develop as readers in the same positive way as those children who understand that the ability to read is important in their lives. Hence, children’s various conceptions of phenomena are of great importance to their actual learning. In a metastudy reviewing all the research conducted from a phenomenographic perspective since the early 1980s, Pramling Samuelsson and Asplund Carlsson (2008) reached the following conclusions: 1) That in situations of play and in situations of learning, children communicate on two levels; that is, they communicate in play and about play. In their play, this is something children do spontaneously. In organized learning situations, it is the teacher that usually introduces the second level of communication; that is, a meta-level. 2) Variation is the source of play and of learning. In order to learn something, where learning is understood as increased discernment (cf. Gibson and Gibson, 1955, Werner, 1973), something has to vary. Hence, meanings spring from differences rather than from similarities (Marton and Tsui, 2004). In play, even very young children spontaneously use variation; for example, varying objects that they try to spin (Lindahl and Pramling Samuelsson, 2002).

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3) The arts (aesthetic activities) and play were not the focus of this research literature. These activities had often been a part of the preschool day but they had not generally been made core to the investigation. In response to the latter realization, research into children’s play and art activities was subsequently undertaken.

These authors subsequently developed their findings into a theorized account of children’s learning in preschool called developmental pedagogy, which is presented in the next section of this chapter.

Developmental Pedagogy The name developmental pedagogy signals that it is an alternative to developmental psychology, because it is an experience-based rather than an age-based model of development that involves teachers and other support staff. This means that the experiences teachers offer to children are considered fundamental to the skills, insights and content knowledge they develop in the context of their educational experience. Developmental pedagogy includes a series of core concepts, including variation, metacognition, discernment, simultaneity, communicating on two levels, increased differentiation and integration and the playing–learning child. These concepts will now be discussed.

Variation A key notion of these theories is the concept of variation, which argues that only what varies can be discerned. The notion of variation must also be understood in relation to time. Marton et al. (2004) suggest that ‘to experience variation amounts to experiencing different instances at the same time’ (17). Some things will vary for the learner against the background of his or her previous experience, a form of variation that is referred to as diachronic simultaneity. Previous instances of a phenomenon are present in the mind of the learner at the same time as he or she encounters a new and different variant. Since

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learners have many experiences, diachronic simultaneity will always be a factor in a group of children. However, since children will have different experiences and levels of familiarity with a certain phenomenon, they will also have very different conditions for discerning what they encounter in a learning situation. In response to this, teachers can plan to provide certain patterns of variation in a situation. For example, if they want children to notice what distinguishes the geometric form of the triangle from other geometric forms such as the square or the circle, teachers can make sure these shapes are present at the same time and so facilitate the discernment of their differences. Having two or more instances present at the same time is referred to as synchronic simultaneity. The teacher can make sure that, regardless of children’s varying previous experiences of geometric shapes, all children are given the necessary means to be able to discern the triangle from the square and the circle. From this perspective, providing patterns of variation becomes of pivotal importance in organizing for children’s learning. Variation not only occurs spontaneously, through learners having previous experiences, but can also be used by teachers as a principle for the organization of learning in educational settings. It is important to realize that variation can be used with different kinds of learning outcomes in mind. In the example with the geometric shapes, the idea is to provide patterns for children to be able to discern what distinguishes the triangle from other forms. In this example, the learning outcome is the child discerning something specific in a certain sense. This is one valued goal of education. However, there are obviously other goals as well. Rather than promoting a certain understanding, teachers may want to promote children developing a richer repertoire of different ways of understanding something. An example of developing different ways of understanding is helping children learn ways to communicate to other children that they have lost their teddy bear and

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would like to get it back. Children would start to develop these understandings by telling others and making various signs, such as drawing or asking someone to write a message (Pramling Samuelsson and Asplund Carlsson, 2008). To promote children developing a variety of ways of understanding something or of solving a problem, the variation in understandings that naturally exist among a group of children could be used by the teacher as a pedagogical asset. For example, the teacher might invite children to share their ideas and communicate about these in order to make them conscious of these different perspectives.

Metacognition The last point is further intimately related to what is often referred to as metacognition (National School Improvement Network, Research Matters, 2001). Metacognition makes up one feature of a more general notion of meta-level talk. The latter concept refers to the finding that it is important to the child’s development that the teacher and the children not only talk in the frame of an activity but also talk about the activity. If teachers and children do not engage in such meta-level talk the chances are that what the children take with them from an activity will be entirely different from what the teacher intended for them to discern. Without such talk teacher–child intersubjectivity is often not established, leading to the teacher and children actually pursuing different activities while present in ‘the same situation’ (Rommetveit, 1974; Fleer, 2010).

Discernment and integration When presenting phenomenography, we mentioned that learning is conceptualized in terms of increased discernment. This is a rather different concept of learning from commonsense notions such as ‘learning as acquisition’ or ‘learning as knowledge construction’. Still, discernment is only one side

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of the coin in the perspective of developmental pedagogy. While discernment is critical to children’s learning, it is not in itself sufficient. It needs to be related to a concept of integration, which is about children making sense of what is discerned. This view of development can be explained by Heinz Werner’s (1973) division of development into three parts. At first, when a child encounters a new phenomenon, it is not differentiated from a background. Rather, the situation is experienced as a whole. With learning, the child comes to discern something from this initial wholeness, making a certain feature into a figure against a background. In her learning, the child becomes able to discern increasingly fine features of the phenomenon. Simultaneously there is a contrary process taking place in the child, discerning and reintegrating the features into a new wholeness which is more detailed than it was initially. We can illustrate this notion with the following example. A child who hears music for the first time will hear a tangled complex of sound. Through his/her listening, and also through talking about what he/she hears (Wallerstedt, 2011), the child will discern more and more features of this sound, such as certain instruments, timbre, tempo, dynamics and metre. However, he/she will hear not only one of these features of the music but all those making up the music, while being able to focus on, and thus make into a figure, one or other particular feature. Being able to do this is necessary when wanting to learn to sing or play a song. According to this reasoning, the song the child now hears will be richer than when first heard, because it now consists of more qualities. In fact, this experience can easily be tested even by adult listeners simply through listening to a piece of music from a culture that is significantly different from their own.

The playing learning child The notion of the ‘playing learning’ child has been developed from the metastudy of research into variation and discernment in

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play (Pramling Samuelsson and Asplund Carlsson, 2008). This is because children spontaneously do both these things in their play. It has also been noted that young children do not themselves distinguish play from learning (Einarsdottir, 2011) until they are socialized through schooling into doing so (Einarsdottir, this volume). If we examine empirical data on children’s activities, it makes little sense to try to distinguish between when they are engaged in learning and when they are ‘merely’ playing. Rather, they learn while playing and play while learning. In fact, even as they get older and attend school, where there are strict boundaries of time and space between learning and playing, children’s learning and playing can be intimately interrelated. This was shown in Wallerstedt and Pramling’s (2012) study of primary school children. The study reported on a music lesson in which the teacher introduced the notion of metre in music and engaged the children in various activities, such as listening to music, playing on drums and moving in time to the music, which – according to the principle of variation – varied between 3/4-time and 4/4-time. After the lesson, some of the children stayed in the room with the drums and proceeded to make their own music, encouraging the researcher to film them. Through documenting this process of music making it was possible to show how the learners used the notions introduced in structuring and coordinating their own and each other’s playing to achieve a joint musical performance. Hence, this study was able to show empirically and in detail the Vygotskian (1930/2004) notion of play as contingent on the child’s experiences (appropriated cultural tools) and not as something separate from this. Even these older children in school are playing–learning individuals.

CONCLUSION That play is considered to occupy a central place in the child’s world is recognized in Western European accounts of early learning

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that emphasize children’s participation. While play is recognized as historically important, it has in recent times undergone significant critique and discussion regarding its role in education (Wood and Broadhead, 2010). We have traditions of argumentation (Billig, 1996) spanning the whole range, from statements that play is quite distinct from learning to assertions that everything the child does when playing leads him/her to learn something (Johansson and Pramling Samuelsson, 2009). There are also many researchers who either argue that play should be used for children’s learning (Singer and Singer, 2001) or see learning as influencing the development of children’s play (Wallerstedt and Pramling, 2012). Additionally, there is a debate about the existence and value of ‘free play’ or if play is, in fact, ever free, since it is related to the context in which it takes place and the experiences of the children (Vygotsky, 1930/2004). Most children play whenever there is a chance. This implies that we should not prevent children from playing or teach them to play. The play mode is there in each child by nature (Sutton-Smith, 1997). However, the claim that ‘most children’ play when they have the chance implies that some children do not, and may therefore need assistance in learning to play. What we argue for in this chapter, in terms of ‘developmental pedagogy’, is an early childhood education practice where play and learning are related and are integrated with goal-directed teaching. The idea in developmental pedagogy is to focus children’s attention and make them aware of important aspects of their early learning (Pramling and Pramling Samuelsson, 2011). To be able to make sense of various aspects of the world, children need the freedom and support to be creative, communicative, imaginative, participatory and active. The pedagogy we are talking about is a question of seeing learning as wholeness, where play and learning are not separated but integrated and generate each other. The teacher’s own perspective on his/her own role in children’s meaning-making is of

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paramount importance. This is especially the case for how they understand play ‘as is’ and ‘as if’. We need to develop an approach that differs from the social–pedagogical and academic ones (Bennett, 2005), while retaining dimensions of both.

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Gesell, A. and Ilg, F. (1949) Child Development: An Introduction to the Study of Human Growth. (Vols 1–2.) New York: Harper & Row. Gibson, J. J. and Gibson, E. J. (1955) ‘Perceptual learning: Differentiation or enrichment?’ Psychological Review, 62(1): 32–41. Gruber, H. E. and Vonèche, J. J. (1977) The Essential Piaget. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Hopmann, S. (2007) ‘Restrained teaching: The common core of didaktik’, European Educational Research Journal, 6(2): 109–24. Johansson, E. and Pramling Samuelsson, I. (2009) ‘To weave together: Play and learning in early childhood education’, Australian Research in Early Childhood Education Journal, 16(1): 33–48. Laevers, F. (1997) ‘Assessing the quality of childcare provision: “Involvement” as criterion’, Researching Early Childhood, 3: 151–65. Lindahl, M. and Pramling Samuelsson, I. (2002) ‘Imitation and variation: Reflections on toddlers’ strategies for learning’, Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 46(1): 25–45. Manning, J. P. (2005) ‘Rediscovering Froebel: A call to re-examine his life and gifts’, Early Childhood Education Journal, 32(6): 371–76. Marcon, R. A. (2001) ‘Moving up the grades: Relationship between preschool model and later school success’, Early Childhood Research and Practice, 4(1). Marton, F. (1981) ‘Phenomenography – describing conceptions of the world around us’, Instructional Science, 10: 177–200. Marton, F. and Säljö, R. (1976) ‘On qualitative differences in learning I: Outcome and process’, British Journal of Educational Psychology, 46: 4–11. Marton, F. and Tsui, A. B. M. (eds) (2004) Classroom Discourse and the Space of Learning. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Marton, F., Runesson, U. and Tsui, A. B. M. (2004) ‘The space of learning’, in F. Marton and A. B. M. Tsui (eds), Classroom Discourse and the Space of Learning. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. pp. 3–40. NSIN (2001) ‘Learning about learning enhances performance’, NSIN Research Matters, Bulled No. 13, spring. London: National School Improvement Network. OECD (2001) Starting Strong: Early Childhood Education and Care Paris: OECD. OECD (2006) Starting Strong II: Early Childhood Education and Care: Education and Skills. Paris: OECD Piaget, J. (1932) The Language and Thought of the Child. New York: Harcourt, Brace.

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Piaget, J. (1970) Structuralism. New York: Harper. (Originally published 1968). Piaget, J. (1976) The Child’s Conception of the World. Paterson, NJ: Littlefield, Adams. (1st ed., 1926). Pope Edwards, C. (2002) ‘Three approaches from Europe: Waldorf, Montessori, and Reggio Emilia’, Early Childhood Research and Practice, 4(1). Pramling, I. (1983) The Child’s Conception of Learning (Göteborg Studies in Educational Sciences, 46). Göteborg, Sweden: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis. Pramling, N. and Pramling Samuelsson, I. (eds) (2011) Educational Encounters: Nordic Studies in Early Childhood Didactics. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer. Pramling Samuelsson, I. and Asplund Carlsson, M. (2008) ‘The playing learning child: Towards a pedagogy of early childhood’, Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 52(6): 623–41. Rinaldi, C. (2006) In Dialogue with Reggio Emilia: Listening, Researching and Learning. London: Routledge. Rogoff, B. (2003) The Cultural Nature of Human Development. New York: Oxford University Press. Rommetveit, R. (1974) On Message Structure: A Framework for the Study of Language and Communication. London: Wiley. Säljö, R. (1981) ‘Learning approach and outcome: Some empirical observations’, Instructional Science, 10: 47–66. Schweinhart, L. J. and Weikart, D. P. (1997) ‘Lasting differences: The HighScope preschool curriculum

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comparison study through age 23’, Monographs of the HighScope Educational Research Foundation (No. 12). Ypsilanti, MI: HighScope Press. Shotter, J. (1993) Conversational Realities: Constructing Life through Language. London: Sage. Singer, D. G. and Singer, J. L. (2001) Make-believe: Games and Activities for Imaginative Play. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Sommer, D. (2012) A Childhood Psychology: Young Children in Changing Time. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Sutton-Smith, B. (1997) The Ambiguity of Play. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978) Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (2004) ‘Imagination and creativity in childhood’, Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, 42(1): 7–97. (1st ed., 1930). Wallerstedt, C. (2011) ‘Didactic challenges in the learning of music-listening skills’, in N. Pramling and I. Pramling Samuelsson (eds), Educational Encounters: Nordic Studies in Early Childhood Didactics. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer. pp. 105–26. Wallerstedt, C. and Pramling, N. (2012) ‘Learning to play in a goal-directed practice’, Early Years, 32(1): 5–15. Werner, H. (1973) Comparative Psychology of Mental Development. New York: International University Press. Wood, E. and Broadhead, P. (2010) Developing a Pedagogy of Play. London: Sage.

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15 Play Provisions and Pedagogy in Curricular Approaches James E. Johnson

INTRODUCTION In the United States, the ‘No Child Left Behind’ legislation (2001) has had an impact on the role of play in early childhood education (ECE). In recent times there have been signs of a rebirth of play’s importance. One such sign is the recent intensity of scholarly attention given to the playing learning child, an expression coined by Scandinavian educators (Pramling and Johansson, 2006; Pramling Samuelsson and Pramling, this volume). Ideas related to the playing learning construct have been articulated in different ways by international researchers under the rubric of the pedagogy of play (Broadhead, Howard, and Wood, 2010; Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff, 2011; Rogers, 2011). A unifying goal is to find alternatives to, on the one hand, early childhood education classrooms that are child-centred but without learning challenges and, on the other, classrooms that are highly structured and target academic learning with little play. This direction seeks to create ECE classrooms rich in child-initiated play and

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experiential activities guided by teachers and focused on children’s learning (Miller and Almon, 2009). Among many factors motivating this increased effort to reconceptualize and restore play in ECE are recent studies suggesting a link between certain forms of mature play and indicators of school-readiness, such as self-regulation – including executive function, working memory, attention, and inhibitory control (McClelland et al., 2007) – socio-emotional competence and emergent literacy and numeracy (Johnson, Celik, and Al-Mansour, 2013). In addition, heightened awareness now exists that indicates it is time to develop and implement a sustainable alternative both to overly teacher-directed academic models of the ECE curriculum and to curricula too prone to cater to child wants and interests without learning value for the young child. Escaping this debate between play and learning foci requires meeting the challenge of constructing play-based curricula as avenues for fostering young children’s executive function, self-regulation and social competence, and

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doing so in ways that do not neglect important areas of children’s lives, such as their physical and emotional well-being, imagination and creative expression (Bodrova, 2008; Miller and Almon, 2009). Trying to use play as a medium for learning in such a careful and thoughtful manner is a tall order. It becomes even more complex when the play pedagogy instantiated in teaching practice includes balancing the teacher’s and child’s agenda, serving well both the cognitive and emotional needs of young children. Yet this is precisely what the new pedagogy of play aspires to by viewing the child as a playing learning child (Pramling Samuelsson and Pramling, this volume) and seeking to use arrangements and social opportunities in ECE settings that bring to the fore playful components in learning and learning components in play. This chapter presents an account of play provisions, teacher roles and intervention strategies to illustrate the new pedagogy of play in ECE. Here it is strongly believed that play benefits learning indirectly or directly, and further that there is a new direction or ‘third wave’ in ECE that is infinitely wiser than are the traditional child-centred or teacher-centred approaches which have dominated ECE for too long. This chapter therefore offers an overview of this pedagogy of play as it now stands and discusses the following topics: (a) conceptual schemes and common features with respect to play curricula and provisions; (b) teachers’ roles; (c) curriculum models and interventions; and (d) co-constructing play with children. At the end some closing remarks are offered about how play pedagogy fits with contemporary discourses in ECE, which may stimulate thinking that can serve to advance the field.

CONCEPTUAL SCHEMES AND COMMON FEATURES The pedagogy of play is marked by co-construction by teachers and children,

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and the use of child-initiated play together with teacher-guided and teacher-directed child’s play behaviours. For a long time ECE has embraced play and learning in words, and the pedagogy of play seeks to build upon this tradition with deeds. Two general ways to think about young children’s play and what is provided in ECE environments include, first, guiding conceptual orientations, and second, features pertaining to the use of materials, space and time that are commonly expressed across different settings.

Guiding Conceptual Orientations Within the literature on play and curriculum, various schemes have been proposed to illuminate a coherent way of relating ECE programme goals to teaching with play and learning during the early years. For example, Johnson, Christie, and Yawkey (1987) note that professionals, practitioners and parents teaching and nurturing young children are often divided over whether all, some or no play at all has educational value. Three models follow, which we can call the segregation, juxtaposition and integration models. The segregation model does not attempt to use educational play, only recreational play at recess or break-times. The juxtaposition model pairs play times with instructional times. In addition, some thematic connection is often made between the two, such as equipping play centres with props or content in line with ideas taught during formal lessons. The integration model only uses teachable moments during child-initiated play to guide learning and exploration and represents a blending of play and learning (Wood, this volume). In curriculum-generated play the teacher provides opportunities for play in accord with curricular goals. The curriculum and its educational objectives lead and the play follows. For example, a teacher may equip the classroom with a numeracy-enriched store centre to reinforce mathematics concepts taught more formally at another time during

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the programme’s daily schedule. It is important to note that this model allows for individualized as opposed to whole-class teaching. Needs-based instruction is given only to children who still need to learn the skills following play experiences. Academically enriched play centres, games and simulations are commonly employed in this model. The teacher ties their use to the overriding purposes of curriculum. A play-generated curriculum model contrasts with curriculum-generated play (Van Hoorn et al., 2011). Here play leads and curriculum follows. While playing, children can learn academic content from different subjects such as science and social studies by engaging in a series of events that are not set up rigidly in advance but are, rather, allowed to flow out of their playing and learning experiences. What they learn in play is more likely ‘caught’, not taught, although teachers can artfully orchestrate genuine learning encounters embedded within spontaneous child-initiated play. Here play is the source of the curriculum and shapes the curriculum. Much is demanded of the teacher: to carefully observe children at play, alone and with peers in different settings, and to elevate the play process through the support and scaffolding they can provide (Johnson, Christie, and Wardle, 2005). Trawick-Smith (2012) has also discussed play and the curriculum and has demonstrated how ECE classrooms have embraced or employed play programmatically. According to Trawick-Smith, there are three major variations in play-based curriculum models. These approaches are (a) the trust-in-play approach; (b) the facilitate-play approach; and (c) the learn-and-teach-through-play approach. The first approach is akin to the aforementioned ‘all play is good’ sentiment that relaxes distinctions between child well-being, development and learning and considers the child first and foremost holistically and in context. In this approach play is the curriculum and the teacher grants the child opportunities for unrestricted, open-ended, self-directed play

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activity. The teacher’s rationale is based on trust that children in free play will naturally select play activities that will help them to cope and master anxieties and to make progress with developmental tasks of one kind or another. Play benefits learning by giving strength to children’s self-worth and emotional stamina, enabling them to contend better with academic tasks and competition with peers. Accordingly, teachers keep their interactions with children at play to a minimum in this approach lest they risk lapsing into ‘didactic play bumblings’ (Sutton-Smith, 1990: 5). Adult interference in children’s play might interrupt the process of resolving conflicts and meeting children’s personal or peer culture needs. Second, the facilitate-play approach to the ECE curriculum is shown to be a valued and commonly endorsed alternative because the teacher deliberately intervenes to improve children’s play or to point it in new directions that can assist learning. Certain forms of play are targeted because they are believed to move the child along various developmental pathways, including self-regulation and emergent literacy and numeracy, among others (Wager and Parks, this volume; Genishi and Dyson, this volume). Perry (2001) values teachers helping children to exhibit sustained complex pretence and constructive play in both indoor and outdoor settings at school. Bodrova and Leong (2013) tout mature role play as critical to children’s development, based on Vygotskian ideas about the importance of symbolic thinking to children’s learning. Similar to Smilansky’s (1968) socio-dramatic play, such role play possesses the attributes of persistence, transformations, social interactions and the substitution of meaning and object. According to this approach, child-initiated play is insufficient for achieving ECE curriculum goals. There must be teacher-guided and directed play at times to attain the soughtafter outcomes. As with the two approaches discussed, the ‘learn-and-teach-through-play’ approach provides many opportunities for play in the

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curriculum. Here, the teacher considers play as an ideal context for promoting various important non-play concepts and skills, and less as a learning medium in its own right in the service of children’s needs, interests, rights and ability levels. Teachers may interrupt the ongoing play activity of children, disrupting the play frame, for the sake of group learning of teacher-determined goals. The teacher may impose, for example, a series of questions about categorizing and labelling while children are trying to role play shopping at a shoe store. Children have the ability to re-establish their own play frames after such teacher interventions. Relationally created experiences between children and teachers in co-constructed play pedagogy can be achieved with tea­ cher skill, artistry and sensitivity. Finally, all three approaches to play in the curriculum often reside side by side in a classroom, at different times and places over the school day. To illustrate, Paley (2004) combines child-initiated free play with teacher-guided play and teacher-directed play. Paley uses the child-authored story-telling/story-acting intervention as a curriculum insert, along with fantasy for the children in a plot originated and developed mainly by the teacher over the many months of the school year. Another example of the power of fantasy is provided by Tyrrell (2001) who, like Paley, used year-long teacher-generated pretending to connect with a community of young learners.

Features Pertaining to the Use of Materials, Space and Time Setting up ECE classrooms with play provisions involves a set of common elements. Trawick-Smith (2012) provides an excellent overview of these elements. Materials and space, centres, indoor environment design and time and scheduling are important to consider in arranging for play in ECE classrooms of differing orientations to play in the curriculum.

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Materials and space Typically materials and space are arranged in various play centres. These centres are thematically defined and labelled as the block area, writing centre, book area, art centre, dramatic play centre, music centre and so forth. They are designed to promote specific activity either with or without the participation of other children or the teachers. The quality of play depends in part on how well the centres are organized internally and in relation to each other over the layout of the room. For instance, centres likely to elicit more quiet play, such as in the book or small manipulative objects areas, would be located some distance from the large motor, blocks or dramatic play areas. Visual partitions help define play centres, with bookshelves, bulletin boards and other materials helping to divide indoor space. Play duration and intensity improves when partitions are used following an open-plan design (Moore, 2002). Centres divided on two or three sides but open and accessible on at least one side are better at supporting quality play. Lofts and other sheltered areas for more intimate and cosy play are also conducive to positive behaviours in the classroom. Practical recommendations include having a balance of types of play materials, such as complex versus simple and open-ended and closed-ended to afford type, quantity and variation of child uses. Consideration also needs to be given to the degree of realism versus symbolic abstraction in the materials, and to how many children can engage with the materials (Johnson et al., 2005). Another concern is to balance technological and other objects. Wang and Hoot (2006) urge planning to assure that children are challenged proportionately with physical materials such as three-dimensional blocks and computer-based materials such as electronic block-building programmes. In general, teachers’ criteria in making situational arrangements for play involve balance and variety of types of play opportunities, with special attention given to promoting collaboration,

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language use and creative expression. Always important is the safety and the developmental appropriateness of the materials and the play environment design.

Time Planning for play requires considering play times in relation to other parts of the daily schedule (Johnson et al., 2005). Having the beginning and ending of the school day dedicated to play can compromise quality since children can be arriving and departing differently, which can disrupt play in social groups. Younger children may need an hour at least in order for higher-quality play to emerge and stabilize. Some children spend a great deal of time planning and getting set up for play. If play periods are too short, regardless of the programme’s curriculum orientation, high-quality play will be precluded. In addition, the tempo and pattern of different activities across the daily schedule are important to consider – for example, more active times being broken up with more quiet times, such as free play and circle or community time, with snack and nap time. Free play or child-initiated activity is interspersed with teacher-led activities and small groups. The entire school day must be considered when evaluating the play potential of an ECE programme since there can be interactive effects among the different activities that are scheduled. For example, what happens during the structured teaching parts of the curriculum can benefit play, as when a unit on the sea stimulates socio-dramatic play involving content related to sea life.

Teacher Roles Years ago Miller and Dyer (1975) surmised that the play effects of an ECE curriculum are seen most clearly in the criteria for the selection of toys and materials. Given that play programming in ECE entails consideration of numerous features, certainly the glue that holds play programmes together would

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be the ways in which teachers enact their roles in the service of the playing and learning child. Teachers perform various roles to support children at play. Many are common across programmes, but they can take on special meaning in certain cases when ECE classrooms are operating from different orientations and in different cultural contexts. How teacher roles are performed varies according to the ECE programme even as the categories of teacher roles are similar. Teacher performance makes a difference to how well children play during the early years. The activities discussed above fall under the category of ‘teacher as stage manager’ according to the comprehensive classificatory scheme of teachers’ roles in children’s play proposed by Jones and Reynolds (1992). As with other experts on the topic (Smilansky, 1968; Van Hoorn et al., 2011), Jones and Reynolds state that carefully attending to what children do while playing is the foundation for all other teacher roles. Teacher observation and play assessment are key to helping children with their play in other ways. Jones and Reynolds (1992) examined these teacher roles at length, highlighting how teachers can assist children when peer conflicts happen during play or serve as a scribe by writing and drawing pictures of children at play and discussing their play with them later. The degree of teacher involvement in play deemed necessary or helpful to children has been a controversial matter. Smilansky (1968) discussed ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ play interventions using socio-dramatic play with young children with apparently under-developed play skills. Outside interventions (external to the play episode) occur when teachers provide background experiences related to the play theme, like taking the children on a field trip to the zoo so that they can enact the zoo theme later, as well as when teachers set up special props and play areas to support the socio-dramatic play theme. Inside interventions (internal to the play episode) refer to the use of teacher strategies to

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scaffold children’s enactments. As always, teacher observation is important to discern how to support and scaffold play. At times teachers’ parallel playing is enough to encourage children to play; at other times teachers can co-play with the children to provide more structure, or offer hints to advance play plots. Also teachers sometimes tutor play by directing the play episode, for example feeding the children lines to say while enacting a character (Johnson et al., 2005). Scaffolding is done dynamically in accordance with the child’s level of performance. Both teacher and child can learn how to become better play partners, with play being understood as relationally rather than intrinsically motivated (Bredikyte, 2012). Adult involvement in children’s play is justified when children can exhibit improved play skills with peers later on, independent of teachers’ presence. This may be because they have acquired play ideas and actions from empathic and playful adults who have sought to enrich and expand their play repertoires (Hakkareinen and Bredikyte, this volume).

CURRICULAR MODELS AND INTERVENTIONS Within Western European approaches to ECE there are a number of model curricula, most originating in Europe or the USA (Roopnarine and Johnson, 2013). Well-known models include Reggio, Steiner Waldorf, Tools of the Mind and HighScope. These models reflect theories of child development, as well as a range of philosophies and values related to childhood, teaching and learning. They all include play, but in different ways, with some granting more freedom to children than others. Model variations are expressed in curricular focus, roles of the teacher, the classroom structure, how children participate in learning and social interaction and how they play. As an example, the HighScope and Steiner Waldorf approaches can be compared in terms of beliefs about children, kinds of play encouraged and the roles of the teacher. In

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HighScope, a Piagetian-inspired cognitively oriented programme, children are viewed as people becoming more mature persons; they are engaged in educational play that serves learning goals, especially as embedded in the ‘plan–do–review’ cycle. The teacher is actively involved, asking questions and sharing information to foster primarily cognitive goals (Schweinhart and Weikart, 2013). In contrast, Steiner Waldorf teachers value children for their well-being in the present more than for their becoming a certain kind of person in the future. Play in a Waldorf programme uses natural materials, is child-centred and seeks enriching experiences for children more than educational ones. Waldorf teachers are role models nourishing children and gently shepherding them through life’s gateways into new personal, interpersonal, physical and spiritual worlds (Nicol and Taplin, 2012; Husek and Johnson, 2013). Another important model is the Reggio Emilia approach, which originated in Northern Italy but has evolved and spread throughout the world in recent decades (New and Kantor, 2013). Teachers adopting this approach help children experience meaningmaking in their artistic behaviours and other expressions, and foster peer collaboration and the play process itself. Time is freely granted for children to complete play-based projects and artwork. Teachers encourage symbolic representation and intellectual adaptation, and show the results of children’s activities in documentation panels. Much of what the children do is self-initiated or emerges in peer group activity guided by the teachers and can be viewed as forms of highlevel social-constructive and creative and symbolic play. Unlike HighScope teachers, the Reggio teachers do not structure and direct play or focus on cognitive learning, but instead celebrate the imagination of the young child. The Tools of the Mind approach rests on a Vygotskian theoretical perspective that supports the development of cognitive processes such as working memory, attention and selfregulation. An educational balance is sought

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between the child’s initiative and the teacher’s agenda in a rich play and learning environment set up for independent and group activity (Bodrova and Leong, 2013). Tools is known for the particular activities and materials used to foster self-regulation. Teachers encourage children during periods of play to stay with a chosen activity rather than switching or going to another play centre. Role playing is especially encouraged, and teachers use facilitation techniques and external mediators to support and scaffold play. Like HighScope, Tools is primarily focused on self-regulation and cognitive outcomes but places less emphasis on creativity and imagination than do teachers using Reggio and Steiner-Waldorf methods. Still, Tools encourages make-believe play, imagination and symbolic functioning.

Curricular interventions aimed at promoting play in ECE are distinctive forms of teacher-directed play pedagogies that do not define a particular programme as ECE curricular models do, but, rather, are embedded within an existing classroom in order to improve the quality of young children’s playing and learning experiences. Eight of these interventions are summarized in Table 15.1. First, Smilansky (1968) pioneered sociodramatic play (SDP) training targeting young children with apparent play and learning deficits. She developed SDP as a developmentally appropriate way to prepare lowincome immigrant preschoolers (three to six years) for formal schooling through its demands for symbolic and abstract thinking. SDP is verbal make-believe play in a group, lasting at least ten minutes. Children pretend

Table 15.1  Play pedagogies utilized as curriculum interventions Name

Description

Example

Source

A

Socio-dramatic play

Restaurant play

B

E

Thematic fantasy play Literacy-enhanced dramatic play Storytelling/story acting Playworlds

Everyday themes played out in interacting groups for ten minutes Enacting fairy tales

F

Workshop pedagogy

G

Improvisation, ‘Yes, and…’ Group games

Smilansky (1968) Saltz and Johnson (1974) Christie (1994) Paley (2004) Hakkarainen (2008) Trageton (1994) Lobman and Lindqvist (2007) Kamii and De Vries (1980)

C D

H

Use of environmental print; functional use of literacy props Child-authored story, teacher-recorded and group-enacted Fiction-based class dramatization Play, stories, drawings, sculpturing, writing Spontaneous acting based on what is at hand Teacher-directed or guided board games

Three Billy Goats Menus and pads for orders ‘I saw a horsey on the way to school…’ George and the Dragon Enacting a village Pretending bugs are coming to school! Checkers

Note: Primary Learning Associated with the listed Play Pedagogies: A = Symbolic Thinking and Abstracting; Language; B = Concept Learning; C = Literacy; D = Narrative Competence and Sense of Community; E = Narrative Competence; F = Literacy and Cognition; G = Social Intelligence and Creativity; H = Perspective-taking. All play pedagogies can improve other intellective-personality traits such as self-regulation and approaches to learning.

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they and their age mates are persons other than who they really are, while also imagining that they are in a pretend time and place frame and employing real, substitute or invented play props. Everyday events, such as going to the grocery store or doctor’s office, are content for SDP enactments. Teachers make sure that children are familiar with scripts and roles by first providing information about topics: taking children on field trips, bringing in guest speakers, reading books or having class discussions. Teachers set up play environments with props and other materials suited to the theme or topic. Observations of the children playing help teachers to decide which children need help to exhibit the qualities of SDP: verbal behaviours, symbolic transformations, social interactions and persistence. They foster SDP through modelling, making helpful comments, questioning and co-playing, gradually weaning the children off their support as children acquire skills to perform SDP independently. A second play pedagogy or intervention is thematic fantasy play (TFP), first used and evaluated by Saltz and Johnson (1974). TFP is similar to SDP, but the content is not life events but fairy tales. Young children first have classic European stories such as The Three Bears or The Three Little Pigs read to them. Teachers discuss the stories with the children, simplify the plots as needed and set up a space for enactment with suitable props on hand. Teachers assign roles can take on a role and usually serve as the play director. Third, teachers can use techniques similar to SDP and TFP, adding an emphasis on literacy (Christie, 1994; Roskos and Neuman, 1998). For literacy-enhanced play, centres are equipped with extensive materials for pretend writing and reading, such as pens and markers, paper, notepads, books and magazines. Environmental print, such as travel posters or advertising, is displayed. Teachers are active in displaying and encouraging the functional use of print within play enactments, such as using the menu or writing down an order for lunch at a pretend

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restaurant. Another play pedagogy targeting literacy, narrative competence and community building is Paley’s (2004) storytelling and story acting methods in which the teacher-as-scribe, at a story table set up during free play, records child-authored stories that are later enacted on a classroom ‘stage’. Two play pedagogies from the Nordic states are playworlds (Hakkarainen, 2008) and Workshop Pedagogy (Trageton, 1994). In Playworlds children are led by their teachers during group dramatizations of fictional events inspired by classical children’s literature and fantasy history, such as playing knights, castles and dragons. Academic school subjects become tied to the play as children follow projects and investigations related to the geography and history of themes, exploring maps and employing mathematics, science and reasoning skills as well as building cognitive and narrative intelligences (Hakkarainen, 2008; Hakkareinen and Bredikyte, this volume). In Workshop Pedagogy, the teacher uses play as a context and medium for learning diverse school subjects, academic content and cognitive and educational skills. Both of these play pedagogies lend themselves to incorporation in related activities involving various academic areas such as social studies, language, mathematics or science. Also practical for classroom and playbased use are the improvisational methods recommended by Lobman and Lindquist (2007) and the Group Games of Kamii and DeVries (1980). Taking a performance stance towards human development rooted in Vygotskian theory of creativity, symbolic play, speech and language, improvisation play pedagogy requires an openness to everchanging social realities and an attunement to others, as well as satisfying one’s own individual interests and needs for agency and creative expression. Play undertaken by teachers and children follows spur-of-themoment feelings and thoughts rather than deriving from prescripted content or plans. As such, this pedagogy of play complements some others discussed which require

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more structure and forethought for their successful execution in the classroom. Lobman and Lindquist (2007) note that the use of improvisation also adds a great deal to building and sustaining positive teacher– child relationships. Finally, Group Games is another play intervention strategy representing a contrast with the other pedagogies in its focus on constructive and game play. Kamii and DeVries (1980), influenced by Piagetian theories of play and cognitive development, urge the use of traditional games in the ECE classroom as a way to support children in learning rules and taking the perspectives of their peers and the teacher. The role of the teacher includes guiding children in problem-solving and conflict resolution as well as asking thought-provoking questions. The aim here, as with most play pedagogies, is to assist the play process itself as well as the learning benefits associated with the play.

CO-CONSTRUCTING A PEDAGOGY OF PLAY A pedagogy of play has been called for that includes children themselves in its co-construction. For example, Rogers and Evans (2008) argue for more learner-inclusive pedagogy. Their research involved focus groups of children which uncovered an ‘insider’s view’ of role play in the early childhood classroom. Their findings showed a huge discrepancy between the teacher’s formal curriculum and the one actually experienced by the children. For instance, they found that the child’s primary goal during free play was often to be with a certain child friend, even to the point of trying to trick the teacher in order to be with the favoured person (Einarsdottir, this volume). Elkind (2003) distinguishes the teacher’s functional perspective from the child’s experiential perspective on play in the ECE curriculum. Pramling Samuelsson (2012) agrees, noting how young children do not seem to separate playing and exploring from

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learning – they are just doing (Pramling Samuelsson and Pramling, this volume). These constructs exist only in adults’ cogitations about what the children are up to. Having play in early childhood classrooms is a complex and multilayered affair that tests the teacher’s empathy for young minds while underscoring the need for better communication with children. Co-construction of play pedagogy entails greater attention to the teachers and children interacting together and the child’s relation of playing and learning. Pramling Samuelsson and Pramling (this volume) articulate this process as occurring on two levels and resting on a conceptual undergirding involving developmental pedagogy and play didactics. The two levels that occur to make meaning, interaction and communication come from the teacher on one level and the child on the other level. The interplay of play and learning is a figure-and-ground problem in a taskcentred or play-centred learning encounter in the classroom, involving the teacher and children. From the children comes the playing. From the teacher come learning goals. Learning goals exist in the minds of the teachers and in the constructed environment and the experiential opportunities offered to the children by the teacher. The teacher needs to be skilled in focusing and maintaining the children’s interests and attention. Play and curriculum come together when there is good communication and coordination of teachers’ and children’s perspectives. Developmental pedagogy supports teaching practices with the playing and learning child. Teachers with an understanding of developmental pedagogy know a great deal of content to teach young children in the areas of mathematics, science, language literacy, democratic living, technology and so forth. They can combine their knowledge and deep understanding of content (which informs their teaching objectives that are instantiated in all kinds of situations in the classroom) with their ability to have ‘powerful interactions’ (Dombro, Jablon, and Stetson, 2011) with children. Powerful interactions are characterized by

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being present for children, being connected or mutually engaged with them and being able to extend their activity involving playing and learning (Dombro, Jablon, and Stetson, 2011). Astute and attuned teachers are able to capitalize on playful components in learning and learning components in playing by knowing how to communicate and put meaning into children’s experiences while they are engaged enthusiastically in different activities. This requires more than a developmental science-oriented perspective or a socio-cultural experience-oriented perspective. Blending these two is important, but mastery of what to teach and how to teach it must be added. The academic or developmental pedagogy orientation seen in play-based teaching and curriculum encourages imagination, representational thinking and concept formation in play because such processes are viewed as precursors to developing abstract understandings in the school years. The kinds of thinking required for moving in and out of social pretence situations, following rules and engaging in thinking about one’s thoughts are useful contributors to being able to work conceptually with content knowledge found in school subjects. Fleer’s (2011) theory of ‘conceptual play’ is a valuable framework to assist teachers in their play-based programmes during the preschool years. Teachers are learners in the process of improving the ways that they listen to children at play, support their play expressions, infer the playing and learning child’s internal mental and emotional states, enable the child to become and be a decision-maker at play and invite children to share power with them and participate in decision-making about their play opportunities. Although teachers seek to be flexible when implementing playbased classroom practices and often want to include children as decision-makers, ideologies and policies can stand in the way of teachers actualizing their intentions and understandings of pedagogies of play (Cheng, 2010; Dockett, 2010).

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CONCLUSION This chapter has surveyed and discussed information about play curricula, provisions, teacher roles and co-constructive play pedagogy. General orientations to the relation of the ECE curriculum with play reflect educational philosophies and the views of teachers concerning their roles in the play of young children. These frameworks (such as ‘trust in play’ and ‘learn and teach through play’) can and do influence how teachers use space, time, materials and their own energies to influence play. Moreover, in addition to common curricular features, these underlying conceptual models influence decisions concerning the use of specialized models of the curriculum (including HighScope and Tools) or play interventions (like SDP or TFP). Curriculum models and interventions can imply play and learning deficits. In the USA, one issue in ECE is the so-called ‘gap versus DAP’ debate, or how to have developmentally appropriate practices (DAP) and also reduce the achievement gap and schoolreadiness issues that exist between children from families with higher and lower human and material capital (Copple and Bredekamp, 2009). On one level the question is if there is and should be a double standard for ECE prescriptions on provisions for play because some children seem deficient or underdeveloped in their play and learning, and hence require more programme structure and teacher direction than do other children from more privileged backgrounds. This chapter ended with a discussion of coconstructed play pedagogy as reflective of a more recent trend in the literature and the field, signalling an attempt to establish a more symmetrical relationship between the teacher and the children in creating affordances and opportunities for play. Further work on informing play provisions in ECE to meet the needs, interests and rights of all children is required. Strategic dialogue with all stakeholders should commence with the whole child, in context, in mind. All dimensions of play and learning are valuable – motor, emotional, social, moral and

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cognitive. The whole child instantiates all dimensions in specific circumstances. There are as many pathways of learning, development and play as there are individual children. This is especially important to keep in mind in our era of global growth of immigration and diversity.

REFERENCES Bodrova, E. (2008) ‘Make-believe play versus academic skills: A Vygotskian approach in today’s dilemma of early childhood education’, European Journal of Early Childhood Education, 16(3): 357–69. Bodrova, E. and Leong, D. (2013) ‘Tools of the mind: The Vygotskian approach to early childhood education’, in J. Roopnarine and J. Johnson (eds), Approaches to early childhood education. (6th ed.) uppersaddle River, NJ: Pearson. pp. 241–60. Bredikyte, M. (2012). ‘Adult play guidance and children’s play development’, 26th ICCP World Play Conference, Tallinn, Estonia. Broadhead, P., Howard, J. and Wood, E. (2010) Play and Learning in the Early Years. Los Angeles, CA: Sage. Cheng, D. P. (2010) ‘Learning through play in Hong Kong: Policy or practice?’, in S. Rogers (ed.), Rethinking Play and Pedagogy in Early Childhood Education: Concepts, Contexts and Cultures. Abingdon: Routledge. pp. 100–12. Christie, J. (1994) ‘Play literacy interventions: A review of empirical research’, in S. Reifel (ed.), Advances in Early Education and Day Care (Vol. 6). Greenwich, CT: JAI. pp. 3–24. Copple, C. and Bredekamp, S. (2009) Developmentally Appropriate Practices in Early Childhood Programs Serving Children from Birth through Age 8 (Expanded ed.) Washington, DC: National Association for the Education of Young Children. Dockett, S. (2010) ‘The challenge of play for early childhood education’, in S. Rogers (ed.), Rethinking Play and Pedagogy in Early Childhood Education: Concepts, Contexts and Cultures. Abingdon: Routledge. pp. 32–48. Dombro, A., Jablon, J. and Stetson, C. (2011) Powerful Interactions: How to Connect with Children to Extend Their Learning. Washington, DC: National Association for the Education of Young Children. Elkind, D. (2003) ‘Thanks for the memory: The lasting value of true play’, Young Children, 58(3): 46–51. Fleer, M. (2011) ‘“Conceptual play”: Foregrounding imagination and cognition during concept formation

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in early years education’, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 12(3): 224–39. Hakkarainen, P. (2008) ‘The challenges and possibilities of narrative learning approach in Finnish early childhood education system’, International Journal of Educational Research, 42: 292–300. Hirsh-Pasek, K. and Golinkoff, R. (2011) ‘The great balancing act: Optimizing core curricula through playful pedagogy’, in E. Zigler, W. Gilliam and S. Barnett (eds), The Pre-K Debates: Current Controversies and Issues. Baltimore, MD: Paul Brookes Publishing. pp. 110–16. Husek, C. and Johnson, J. (2013) ‘The Waldorf approach to early childhood education’, in J. Roopnarine and J. Johnson (eds), Approaches to Early Childhood Education. (6th ed). New York: Pearson. pp. 379–403. Johnson, J., Christie, J. and Wardle, F. (2005) Play, Development, and Early Education. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon. Johnson, J., Christie, J. and Yawkey, T. (1987) Play and Early Childhood Development. Evanston, IL: ScottForesman Publishers. Johnson, J., Celik, S. and Al-Mansour, M. (2013) ‘Play in early childhood education’, in O. Saracho and B. Spodek (eds), Handbook of Research on the Education of Young Children. (3rd ed.) New York: Routledge. pp. 265–74. Jones, E. and Reynolds, G. (1992) The Play’s the Thing: Teachers’ Roles in Children’s Play. New York: Teachers College Press. Kamii, C. and DeVries, R. (1980) Group Games in Early Education: Implications of Piaget’s Theory. Washington, DC: National Association for the Education of Young Children. Lobman, C. and Lindquist, M. (2007) Unscripted Learning: Using Improv Activities across the K-12 Curriculum. New York: Teachers College Press. McClelland, M. M., Cameron, C. E., Connor, C. M., et al. (2007) ‘Links between behavioral regulation and preschoolers’ literacy, vocabulary, and math skills’, Developmental Psychology, 43(4): 947–59. Miller, E. and Almon, J. (2009) Crisis in Kindergarten: Why Children Need to Play in School. College Park, MD: Alliance for Childhood. Miller, L. and Dyer, J. (1975) ‘Four preschool programs: their dimensions and effect’, Monograph of the Society for Research in Child Development, 40: serial no. 162. Moore, G. (2002) ‘Designed environments for young children: Empirical findings and implications for planning and design’, in M. Gallop and J. McCormack (eds), Children and Young People’s Environments. Dunedin, New Zealand: University of Otago. pp.53–63.

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Play Provisions and Pedagogy in Curricular Approaches

New, R. and Kantor, R. (2013) ‘Reggio Emilia in the 21st century: Enduring commitments amid new challenges’, in J. Roopnarine and J. Johnson (eds), Approaches to Early Childhood Education. (6th ed.) New York: Pearson. pp. 331–54. Nicol, J. and Taplin, J. (2012) Understanding the Steiner Waldorf Approach: Early Years Education in Practice. New York: Routledge. Paley, V. (2004) A Child’s Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Perry, J. (2001) Outdoor Play: Teaching Strategies with Young Children. New York: Teachers College Press. Pramling, I. and Johansson, E. (2006) ‘Playing and learning: An inseparable dimension in preschool practice’, Early Child Development and Care, 176(1): 47–65. Pramling Samuelsson, I. (2012) ‘What can didactics based on play and learning look like?’, Keynote, 26th ICCP World Play Conference, Tallinn, Estonia. Rogers, S. (2011) Rethinking Play and Pedagogy in Early Childhood Education: Concepts, Contexts and Cultures. New York: Routledge. Rogers, S. and Evans, J. (2008) Inside Role-Play in Early Childhood Education: Researching Young Children’s Perspectives. New York: Routledge. Roopnarine, J. and Johnson, J. (eds) (2013) Approaches to Early Childhood Education. (6th ed.) New York: Pearson. Roskos, C. and Neuman, S. (1998) ‘Play as an opportunity for literacy’, in O. Saracho and B. Spodek (eds), Multiple Perspectives on Play in Early Childhood

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Education. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. pp. 100–15. Saltz, E. and Johnson, J. (1974) ‘Training for thematicfantasy play in culturally disadvantaged children: Preliminary results’, Journal of Educational Psychology, 66: 623–30. Schweinhart, L. and Weikart, D. (2013) ‘The HighScope model of early childhood education’, in J. Roopnarine and J. Johnson (eds), Approaches to Early Childhood Education. (6th ed.) New York: Pearson. pp. 217–39. Smilansky, S. (1968) The Effects of Sociodramatic Play on Disadvantaged Preschool Children. New York: Wiley. Sutton-Smith, B. (1990) ‘Playfully yours’, TASP Newsletter, 16: 2–5. Trageton, A. (1994) ‘Workshop pedagogy: From concrete to abstract’, The Reading Teacher, 47(4): 350–1. Trawick-Smith, J. (2012) ‘Teacher–child play interactions to achieve learning outcomes: Risks and opportunities’, in R. Pianta (ed.), Handbook of Early Childhood Education. New York: Guilford Press. pp. 259–77. Tyrrell, J. (2001) The Power of Fantasy in Early Learning. New York: RoutledgeFalmer. Van Hoorn, J., Nourot, P., Scales, B. and Alward, K. (2011) Play at the Center of the Curriculum. New York: Pearson. Wang, X. and Hoot, J. (eds) (2006) ‘Information and communication technology in early childhood education’, Early Education and Development, 17: 317–22.

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16 Children’s Content Learning in Play Provision: Competing Tensions and Future Possibilities Helen Hedges

INTRODUCTION Children’s learning of subject content knowledge is a common goal of education, leading to educational, social and economic benefits for individuals and societies. However, the link between children’s play and content learning has a contentious history within curriculum and pedagogy in early childhood education. Competing discourses have arisen regarding issues such as when adults might provide input into play, what the substance of that contribution might be and the framing for this input. This chapter considers the nature and origins of tensions that exist between child-centred and content-inclusive approaches to pedagogy. It suggests that reluctance to incorporate content in children’s learning arises from nonempirical traditions and ideologies. Recent research supports the view that play can provide a valuable medium for children to learn content knowledge, particularly when knowledgeable and skilful adults create and utilise opportunities to interweave play and

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content learning. The chapter proposes three conceptual constructs that offer a way forward to reconcile competing tendencies: 1) funds of knowledge; 2) pedagogical content knowledge; and 3) playful and integrated pedagogies.

CHILDREN’S MEANINGFUL KNOWLEDGE BUILDING IN EVERYDAY LIFE One important way in which children are motivated to learn is through observation and participation in a range of real-world experiences valued by families and communities. Children learn alongside adults and other children, purposefully collaborating in activities and events of interest. Learning of skills, knowledge and attitudes occurs meaningfully in the context of participation in these everyday activities. ‘Intent community participation’ (Paradise and Rogoff, 2009) describes processes of embedded learning and the ways in which support for such

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learning is incorporated spontaneously in a range of family and community practices and activities. During such learning, language is vital for knowledge sharing, exploration of ideas and negotiating understandings and expertise. In early childhood settings, children’s family and community understandings learned through observation and participation are often recreated and represented in children’s play. For example, through living in families and communities children naturally observe, gradually participate in and learn about preparing food for meals and other social and cultural activities (Cumming, 2003). Children’s interest in food preparation is evident in socio-dramatic scripts in play in early childhood settings where children act out family roles, going shopping, preparing pretend food with the props and utensils at their disposal and then sharing the food with others in culturally appropriate ways (Hedges, Cullen and Jordan, 2011). Through such activities in a range of settings children can learn elements of early content knowledge from subject disciplines, such as literacy, by writing shopping lists and reading recipes; mathematics, through weighing and measuring items, pricing and paying for goods and services; science, through the chemical processes involved in cooking and preparing food; economics, through choosing goods and services according to budget; and social sciences, through learning about values relevant to particular groups and learning to negotiate roles, solve problems and deal with conflict. This kind of disciplinary learning may be encouraged and highlighted by adults. Yet highlighting content possibilities in such a manner can create tensions for those committed to play-based pedagogies in early childhood settings. Some pedagogical approaches, such as creating projects with children, attempt to meld play and content orientations (Helm and Katz, 2001). However, some teachers committed to free play as a basis of pedagogy have found policies and curriculum documents difficult to reconcile

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with or counterproductive to their childcentred beliefs, sometimes leading to incorporation of teacher-directed inclusion of content learning (Fung and Cheng, 2012; Wood, 2013; Johnson, this volume). Maynard’s (1996) project in the United Kingdom researched a professional development programme offered to early years teachers on the introduction of a subject-based school curriculum in 1988. The teachers participating in Maynard’s project demonstrated three types of objection to subject content knowledge in children’s play-based learning that are largely consistent with the matters raised in this chapter. First, teachers were resistant to subject knowledge ideologically, as they felt it threatened child-centred approaches. Second, political objections to the demands of a subject-based national curriculum were raised and, third, personal objections became apparent when teachers recognised the gaps in their own subject knowledge base. In short, although teachers’ content knowledge may be able to perform an important role in the integrated nature of children’s play-based learning and in working towards any subject-based curricular outcomes, for various historical, political and ideological reasons, content knowledge may not always be specifically highlighted in teaching opportunities.

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES OF CONTENT LEARNING: LEARNING THROUGH PLAY While play is widely accepted as integral to children’s experiences, this volume illustrates the complexities and multiple interpretations of play possible in a pedagogical sense. In the eighteenth century, Rousseau promoted play as a natural form of children’s healthy development as playful, innocent and optimistic human beings. The role of education was to let these instinctive abilities unfold without adult interference. The type and extent of content knowledge learning developed in this apparently effortless way

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remained unspecified and Rousseau’s ideas were developed without any empirical basis (Grieshaber and McArdle, 2010). Yet these ideas have been the origins of a long-held child-centred ideology related to play as a spontaneous activity that ought not to be interfered with. A succession of later scholars, including Froebel, Steiner and Montessori, began to develop alternative perspectives about play and learning. While espousing often contradictory ideas, one common view appeared to be that, while play was considered a vital experience for children’s development, content learning resided in more formal experiences. In this way, long-influential distinctions between play and work were established that contributed to some binaries emerging between adult-initiated and childinitiated teaching and learning experiences. By the 1930s and 1940s, views about play and its potential for education began to take hold internationally (Bennett, Wood and Rogers, 1997). Views of appropriate provision since this time have included the image of a well-resourced and prepared environment offering a range of activities for children’s exploratory play (Wood, 2013). Meanwhile the concept of ‘learning through play’ has become prominent. This concept explained learning in relation to developmental dimensions: physical, social, emotional, cognitive, language and sometimes spiritual. During the mid-twentieth century, as noted by Burman (2008), developmental psychology became a strong theoretical force in early childhood education, influential in reinforcing child-centred pedagogies. In contrast, some scholars attempted to draw attention to the development of children’s content knowledge. While Dewey (1938) proposed that young children’s learning experiences be based on play, he noted that, in order to be educative, such experiences ought to lead to subject knowledge. Bruner argued that ‘any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development’ (1960: 33). Bruner’s claim is not that a child can learn anything at any age. Rather, he

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proposed that some subject content might be taught meaningfully, if children can relate it to their prior knowledge and it is presented in a pedagogically and contextually appropriate way. Bruner’s argument was evident in evolving approaches to play-based learning in the 1960s and 1970s when themes, projects and other integrated curricular approaches that had the potential to include content knowledge became popular. In the 1970s and 1980s, a new generation of researchers demonstrated that play can stimulate children’s content learning without adult contribution. For example, experimental research provided children with problemsolving tasks in the form of play activities (Sylva, Bruner and Genova, 1976; DeLoache and Brown, 1987). Children undertook these activities systematically, enthusiastically and productively and did not give up when their hypotheses failed. However, the theories of developmental psychology that accompanied the promotion of such activities in early childhood settings did not suggest any goals for play in terms of cognitive content, largely because psychology and education are viewed as having different foci. While rich curricular provision has the potential for children to construct content knowledge from exploratory and problem-solving play, related views of adults as resource providers do not promote adults undertaking active or intentional tasks during interactions with children. Such tasks might include suggesting or contributing ideas and interests, or using conceptual language in order to mediate content. In the UK, Hutt, Tyler, Hutt and Christopherson (1989) engaged in a range of experimental research studies over this period. First, they differentiated between epistemic (knowledge-related) and ludic (symbolic and imaginative) play. They proposed that children constructed knowledge during play through exploration and problem-solving with new, often specially designed play resources and equipment. Problem-solving play was commonly spontaneously followed by imaginative play. Both were important but epistemic play was more likely to promote

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cognitive development and ludic play to assist mastery of associated skills. Second, one study provided evidence that children’s attention and motivation were increased if playtime was uninterrupted and when an adult was present in areas of activity that children enjoyed. Adult input appeared most obvious in activities such as reading books and manipulating materials, such as painting and collage. Further, findings about children’s language development concurred with previous studies that found conversations were most lengthy when adults explored children’s thoughts and interests rather than simply responding to requests or giving instructions.

Debates about Positioning Subject Knowledge Hutt et al.’s (1989) findings suggested that, rather than mere presence, a more active role for adults in children’s learning might be envisaged. Bruner (1987) argued, the prevailing view that children required firsthand experience of the world, rather than having others mediate understandings with them, meant the important role of peers and adults as mediators may have been overlooked. He described this as the principle of ‘unmediated conceptualism’ (1987: 85), a principle that remained unchallenged until Vygotskian theories became widely accepted during the 1990s. Further, if adults are to successfully enact a more active role in play-based curriculum and pedagogy, they need a strong foundation of professional knowledge and pedagogical skill appropriate for the integrated learning context of early childhood education. However, the requirement for at least some staff to have a professional teaching qualification has been very uneven internationally. Reflecting this uncertainty between possible content knowledge development in play and the place of ‘subject lessons’, the early years field began to debate the topic of subject content knowledge and children’s play at the end of the twentieth century. In the

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United Kingdom, Rodger (1995) argued that a curriculum based on child development and play led to the omission of some kinds of knowledge in programmes for young children, specifically citing subject knowledge. Other writers have commented on the value of teachers’ subject content knowledge in the early years. Buckingham (1994), for instance, noted that specific knowledge about children’s drawing is crucial to teachers understanding and supporting children’s artistic and creative learning. However, in response to growing pressure from national curriculum policy promoting subject-based lessons for four-year-olds, prompted by the Education Reform Act of 1988, Hurst and Joseph (1998) asserted that a subject-based approach to the curriculum with specific and careful planning for subjects such as literacy, numeracy and science was contrary to the ways in which children think and learn, arguing in favour of cross-curricular themes, dimensions and skills. Similarly, Nutbrown pointed out that ‘in reality, young children do not think in subjects’ (1999: 110). While integrated and holistic approaches were conceptually appealing to many teachers and researchers, their contribution to children’s content learning and knowledge building had not yet been sufficiently investigated or justified to avoid teachers feeling pressured to adopt more didactic methods to achieve content goals. In addition, as researchers made better efforts to design approaches and methods that elicited young children’s understandings, evidence grew of children’s content knowledge in matters of interest and familiarity to them. Studies of children’s knowledge revealed that children may move from novice to expert in different subject, content, discipline or domain areas (Wellman and Gelman, 1992; 1998). It is likely that they may do this in an integrated or holistic manner when engaged in play in early childhood settings, but they also need confident and competent adults with professional knowledge to maximise these content possibilities. In summary, early childhood education in European-heritage settings has a long history

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of being underpinned by developmental psychology and ideologies of child-initiated, exploratory play. Over the past 30 years, developmental psychology as a sole foundation for early childhood pedagogy has been critiqued (Cannella, 1997; Burman, 2008). However, the continued influence of developmental theories and child-centred approaches in early childhood education creates potential tensions for decision-making about two important matters pertaining to content learning. The first is whether or not there is a place for provision of adult-initiated activities and attention to subject knowledge curricular requirements within those; the second is when adults might provide input into children’s spontaneous play, what the substance of that input might be and the pedagogical framing for such contributions. This chapter now turns to the second matter, which prompts a further critical focus on the knowledge and confidence of those in teaching roles who might negotiate these competing curricular and pedagogical discourses. The term ‘teacher’ is used for the remainder of this chapter to describe adults in educative roles in order to emphasise the critical role of professional knowledge.

CONTENT POTENTIAL IN EARLY CHILDHOOD PROVISION Teacher Knowledge and Confidence Research about primary and secondary teaching has cemented the importance of subject knowledge as crucial to successful teaching and learning (Shulman, 1987). Conversely, the knowledge base of early childhood teachers, from the Western perspective, has been influenced by developmental psychology and by constructs of childhood which promote notions of child-centredness. Content know­ ledge has only recently become a focus of research, particularly in countries that have developed curricular documents that include subject-focused goals. Recent international

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studies have suggested that the introduction of subject content in early years curricular documents in Sweden, Australia and Greece, in ways linked to later formal school curricula, has assisted professional identity and status for teachers and served to justify an active role in some content learning (Alvestad and Duncan, 2006; Sofou and Tsafos, 2010; Ortlipp, Arthur and Woodrow, 2011). However, Wood (2013) cautions that, while teachers can move fluidly between child-centred and teacher-initiated learning activities, the evidence is that teacher practice tends to adopt teacher-led approaches. Conversely, in countries where curricular documents are inexplicit about content and leave this to the discretion of the teacher, the risk remains that a child-centred approach which underemphasises content will be continued (Broström, 2013). Therefore, the nature and quality of the pedagogical approaches accompanying a range of early childhood curricula, the ways children learn such content and how these ‘active teacher roles’ and approaches achieve desirable curricular outcomes without using didactic approaches or derailing children’s interests remains under-researched (Wood, this volume). Given that teachers might need encyclopaedic knowledge to respond to the learning interests of children within integrated curricular approaches, it is unsurprising that studies in Australia and New Zealand have revealed a lack of teacher confidence in their content knowledge. However, a corresponding willingness to address this reported lack of confidence is also expressed by teachers (Ure and Raban, 2001; Hedges and Cullen, 2005). What may be of more concern is studies that found teachers whose high levels of confidence were not borne out by corresponding evidence of actual competence. For example, in Greece, Kallery and Psillos (2001) investigated the science content knowledge of teachers of five-year-olds revealed by teachers’ responses to children’s questions. Only 29 per cent of teacher responses demonstrated sufficient scientific conceptual knowledge. Clearly, it is a problem that without sufficient

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grounding in subject knowledge, teachers may promote inaccurate conceptual know­ ledge and thinking during interactions with children. Teachers’ beliefs about their own subject knowledge capability will also affect the activities they provide and their ability to effectively construct knowledge with children. Findings from an action research project in the United Kingdom involving mathematics (Anning and Edwards, 2006) support the notion that teachers who are confident about their subject knowledge are more likely to recognise and maximise potential mathematical learning in children’s play experiences. Conversely, early childhood teachers uncomfortable with their level of subject knowledge may rarely include some subjects in the learning environment they provide. While contested, it has been argued recently that teachers must be actively involved in play in order for higher-order learning, including content knowledge, to occur (Fleer, 2010; Edwards and CutterMackenzie, 2011). Recent shifts towards socio-cultural theoretical perspectives have encouraged such mediational thinking (Fleer, 2010; Hedges and Cullen, 2012). Fleer’s (2010) model of conceptual and contextual intersubjectivity provides a major contribution to current thinking about ways teachers can consider a dialectical relationship between play and content and support higher-order learning. Although it is acknowledged that no teacher can hold all the expert subject content knowledge necessary to teach in all domains of learning, this also cannot be an excuse to ignore content learning or to suggest that it is acceptable to know little and rely instead on looking for information when necessary. Teachers who lack subject knowledge also risk co-constructing flawed and limited enquiries. Krieg argues that a poststructuralist perspective enables a positioning of content knowledge as multidisciplinary and that ‘a lack of engagement with the concepts and methods of inquiry found in subject areas denies children the opportunities to use many

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of the ideas that might contribute to their understanding’ (2011: 51). She suggests that the concept of co-construction of knowledge can be drawn on to enquire into issues and interests and reposition teachers and children as co-learners and enquirers. A simplistic understanding may be risked, however, of the complex notion of co-construction as simply comprising teachers learning alongside children when teachers lack knowledge. Jordan (2009) provides a detailed and nuanced understanding and positioning of co-construction and how this approach can empower children’s content learning. However, Krieg’s (2011) positioning of knowledge and the roles of teaching and learning has potential for further research into integrated approaches to enquiry-focused learning in early childhood education. This is particularly the case when the processes of enquiry within different subject disciplines are taken account of, and the outcomes include content knowledge embedded in everyday learning.

Lingering Tensions Despite some recent attention to subject outcomes in many curricular documents and the growing acceptance of play-based pedagogy internationally, links between play and content learning remain contentious. Wood (2013) highlights the tensions that arise when policy versions of play in the United Kingdom concentrate on structured play and its educative role. Tensions between play, pedagogy and subject outcomes-driven curricula are also reported in Hong Kong and China (Fung and Cheng, 2012; Vong, 2012). Therefore, arguments continue to evolve internationally in relation to whether or not children might have some genuine choice about their play and learning activities, the extent to which children might be supported by teachers to construct content knowledge appropriate to their interests and current cognitive capabilities and how all of this might meet broader curricular outcomes. Much of this argument occurs because playbased learning involves largely open-ended,

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process-oriented, child-chosen activities that may promote or prioritise broad social aims over cognitive or epistemic ones. From this perspective, play risks becoming a vehicle for ‘smuggling in’ content knowledge, rather than content being learned authentically from real experiences of interest to children. In summary, teachers have been reluctant to teach content knowledge for ideological, pedagogical and professional knowledge reasons. Yet research suggests that teachers’ confidence in their subject knowledge makes a positive difference to children’s learning opportunities and outcomes. In the early twenty-first century, the long-held mantra of learning through play is developing a stronger evidence base linking children’s play and learning to teachers’ professional knowledge and skills. Further, research has begun to highlight the role teachers could have in engaging with children’s play and learning (Siraj-Blatchford, 2009; Fleer, 2010). Such notions include attention to children’s and teachers’ content knowledge. These ideas have potential if adopted in participatory approaches to learning and pedagogy (Hedges and Cullen, 2012) where teachers take an active role in children’s play-based education and position themselves alongside children as co-enquirers (Krieg, 2011).

RESOLVING THE PEDAGOGICAL TENSIONS BETWEEN PLAY AND CONTENT The second part of this chapter attempts to reconcile some of the issues raised. To resolve pedagogical tensions with regard to content knowledge and combine its social and cognitive goals, it is vital to have teachers who position themselves within play-based teaching and learning interactions. It is also essential to ensure these interactions are relevant to children’s lives and interests. In this way, the ideal of ‘free play’ may be reconceptualised and transformed. Play might be viewed as a child-focused interaction that at times involves teachers who can naturally and skilfully

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co-construct the kinds of learning valued by societies and cultures. Three concepts related to teacher knowledge, interactions and professional growth that might assist in resolving these pedagogical tensions are now presented. These are 1) funds of knowledge and links to content knowledge; 2) pedagogical content knowledge; and 3) playful and integrated pedagogies.

Funds of Knowledge and Links to Content Knowledge The concept of funds of knowledge (Moll, Amanti, Neff and Gonzalez, 1992) offers a springboard for, first, recognising and valuing children’s everyday experiences that are represented in their play and, second, providing a foundation for extension into academic content without pretension. Originally, research based on funds of knowledge was designed to explore literacy practices in everyday household activities in bilingual Mexican–Latino communities in order to recognise and incorporate such knowledge and practices in formal educational settings. The notion encompassed both the content of young children’s early learning and the processes of learning such knowledge through observation and participation in relationships with family members. Hence the concept of funds of knowledge is a credit-based notion of the diverse knowledge related to household functioning and wellbeing found in families. The concept has since been extended to other subject domains (Moll, 2000) and to include the wider influences of family and community members, such as siblings, friends, grandparents and teachers (Gregory, Long and Volk, 2004; Hedges et al., 2011). Funds of knowledge is now used to describe everyday knowledge of matters related to, for example, economics, household maintenance, literacy and the arts, that can be used as a foundation for making culturally relevant content knowledge provision in educational settings. Moll et al. (1992) proposed that teachers build on knowledge and practice that occurs in children’s homes.

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This proposal ensures that educational provision is relevant by drawing on children’s experiences and the expertise of families and communities rather than on unfamiliar knowledge and ideas. Leacock (1976) essentially came to such conclusions in researching play in African villages. Play formed a mechanism for children to relate to their environment and culture and had potential for formal learning. However, mission schools disregarded this prior knowledge, using methods which had no relevance to children’s experiences and understandings, such as learning academic knowledge by rote. The concept of funds of knowledge holds promise as a way to recognise children’s everyday culture, knowledge and experiences, to the benefit of children. This is because it both reduces possible disjuncture between children’s homes and educational settings and has the potential to make links between everyday and content learning. As noted earlier, children often learn informally and successfully through participation in cultural activity. Teachers can utilise funds of knowledge as a specific form of children’s foundational knowledge in order to make links to content knowledge authentically, rather than teaching prescribed knowledge didactically. At this point, we can return to the illustration used at the beginning of this chapter about children’s interest in meal preparation, an act that may be represented in children’s play internationally (Rogoff et al., 2003; Hedges et al., 2011). The ways in which children enact roles and responsibilities related to preparing food demonstrate their prior funds of knowledge. If teachers are familiar with the cultural knowledge of the range of the children in their setting, and if the family play environment and equipment in the educational setting mirror those found in children’s homes, children will view their knowledge as valid and valued and can competently enact their understandings (Gregory et al., 2004; Hedges et al., 2011). Teachers can then make authentic links to relevant concepts such as literacy, numeracy, science and social sciences during spontaneous interactions with

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children. However, if the setting and resources do not reflect children’s homes, children’s learning and content potential may remain unrealised. The notion of ‘pedagogical content knowledge’ described next provides another framing of ways in which teachers’ understanding of children might contribute to realising learning potential within play-based curriculum and pedagogy.

Pedagogical Content Knowledge Pedagogical content knowledge, or PCK (Shulman, 1987), presents a way to recognise the complexity and dynamic nature of the play-based learning and teaching interactions which teachers engage with. Teachers having subject knowledge is one matter; being able to explain it in a way that young children can understand and connects it with their prior knowledge and experiences requires further skill. When the context of the teaching is also taken into account, the importance of combining subject knowledge and pedagogical know­ ledge becomes evident. Utilising Shulman’s concept of pedagogical content knowledge highlights the confluence of three particular elements in relation to teacher knowledge and culturally valued learning: 1) knowing learners and utilising their prior knowledge and experiences in specific contexts well; 2) having subject content knowledge; and 3) developing a range of pedagogical techniques to draw on during planned and spontaneous interactions with children. In New Zealand, Hedges (2004) illustrated the potential of using the concept of PCK through examples offered in relation to children’s interests; in this case, sea creatures. Teachers talked with children and their parents to establish children’s understandings of different sea creatures; they then planned activities and interactions at a level appropriate to children’s interests and capabilities to expose children to related conceptual ideas. As a result, the children increased their knowledge of a range of early scientific ideas, such as classification of different species of sharks and whales, how sharks and

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whales breed and how penguins breathe while swimming. Learning orientations towards science and technology were also strengthened. Likewise, project work in Reggio Emilia emphasised children’s capacity to learn content when content was related to their prior knowledge and presented in a pedagogically and contextually appropriate way (Rinaldi, 2006). In the USA, Rojas (2008) used PCK as a construct to assess 52 teachers and explore ways it could be improved for the benefit of children. Initial findings indicated a teacher focus on children’s skills for learning and social–emotional considerations. A year-long professional learning programme followed, focusing on a mix of lectures, seminars, workshops and reflections on practice. The outcomes of the programme showed that attention to content could also be strengthened in teaching and learning interactions when teacher awareness, knowledge and confidence were supported. A recent Finnish study highlighted multidimensional pedagogical expertise. Happo and Määttä (2011) found that professional knowledge of context, co-operation, communication and pedagogy, coupled with metacognitive strategies such as reflection, is needed by teachers in order to fulfil educational expectations and achieve curriculum goals for young children. Happo and Määttä also argued that the notion of teacher expertise should be expanded from individual to shared expertise. These ideas could be extrapolated to enable teachers to teach from their own interests and strengths, to call on team members to fill gaps in expertise and to collaboratively develop new knowledge as needed. These studies all provide a way forward for teachers to develop individual and collective subject content knowledge and pedagogical expertise in matters related to children’s interests and enquiries.

Playful and Integrated Pedagogies Collaborative engagement between teachers and children in authentic enquiry, projects

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and content learning suggests that pedagogical strategies to teach through play might be encapsulated in Broadhead and Burt’s (2012) notion of ‘playful pedagogies’ and ‘playful learning’. This model illustrates ways for settings to incorporate child-initiated play, teacher-initiated pedagogical strategies and teacher attention into subjects such as literacy and numeracy within a play-based pedagogy. The key to these strategies is mutually enjoyable engagement in interesting and absorbing activities. Similarly, Wood (2010) draws attention to the notion of ‘integrated pedagogies’. Rather than teachers alternating between teacher-initiated and child-initiated strategies, Wood advocates a competent blending of these approaches. Wood also points out that integrated approaches can achieve multiple goals. First, integration retains the playfulness and joy of childhood. Second, such approaches allow children to take charge of play while, third, also enabling capable teachers to make judgements about when to blend in educative opportunities, such as content learning, rather than teach didactically. In this way, as Bruner, Jolly and Sylva (1976) argued earlier, play is able to ‘reduce or neutralise the pressure of goal-directed action’ (15). Content learning can therefore occur both through immersion in the curricular resources provided in a prepared environment and by the pedagogical mediation of knowledgeable teachers during child-initiated interactions. There are many examples of such blended opportunities in recent research. For example, Ring (2010) illustrates this insightfully with reference to children’s drawings and the important roles played by teacher knowledge of subject content and pedagogy relevant to young children. Fleer (2010) does so similarly in relation to children’s learning of science, as do Edwards and Cutter-McKenzie (2011) in relation to environmental education. McLachlan, Fleer and Edwards (2010) provide useful guidance in a range of scenarios that link subject content learning with play experiences. Much of the potential of these playful and integrated pedagogical models depends on

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teachers’ ability to recognise and act on possible links between play and content in a genuine way. This is in contrast to trying to slip content disingenuously into children’s play, emphasising content as if it were the only end-goal of play or teaching content didactically. Teachers also need to support children’s knowledge building through their own subject knowledge and skills, and the ability to be pedagogically involved in children’s play. Alongside interpretations of funds of knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge, Broadhead and Burt (2012) and Wood (2010) provide a framework for teaching that helps to reconcile children’s play and content learning in robust ways consistent with valuing children’s cultural knowledge and skills.

CONCLUSION This chapter has outlined historical and contemporary perspectives on the place of content knowledge in play-based learning in early childhood education. It has highlighted the competing pedagogical discourses about roles teachers might enact in developing children’s content knowledge through play. The early childhood field has at times appeared somewhat confused with regard to beliefs and practices about play and content knowledge. Historically, ideas about play as a natural form of learning have dominated discourses of play and education in European-heritage nations. Yet content learning can occur both through immersion in the curricular resources provided in a prepared environment and by the pedagogical mediation of knowledgeable teachers during child-initiated interactions. While influential writers such as Dewey (1938) and Bruner (1960) drew attention to the links between play and content, ways to integrate these two aspects of early learning have continued to evolve over the past halfcentury. It makes sense to talk about teaching young children subject content knowledge if this is done in a way consistent with the views expressed by Bruner (1960), Dewey

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(1938) and Shulman (1987). Children’s knowledge is based on their observation and participation in family and community experiences that contribute to their foundational or everyday knowledge, encapsulated in the concept of funds of knowledge. Such a notion recognises the diverse knowledge and expertise in families and cultures that can provide foundations for later conceptual learning. Through engaging with families and understanding their distinctive contributions to children’s knowledge building, teachers can mediate between homes and centre settings and involve families and communities in building culturally relevant knowledge that includes content knowledge. Recent research illustrates that it is both possible and desirable to engage with children and their families in such ways. Teachers can also support knowledge building through their own subject knowledge and skills. The concerns and contradictions that have arisen in discussion of links between play and content learning might be resolved in future teaching and research. Participatory learning theories provide theoretical guidance for pedagogies that can incorporate attention to content knowledge. The concepts of funds of knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge and playful, integrated pedagogies may enable teachers to have an active role in children’s content learning. These concepts can bring together childcentred and subject-focused curricular approaches and the supposed dichotomies of play and work, and adult- and child-initiated activities. Following Bruner (1960, 1987), teachers can utilise subject knowledge in play-based curricula to mediate and maximise children’s content learning in ways that are pedagogically appropriate and relevant to children’s prior knowledge, interests, enquiries and experiences. Further research into teachers’ mediation of children’s concept learning in play-based teaching and learning interactions will help to establish curricular approaches and pedagogical techniques that enable meaning making to include rich content possibilities.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Sincere appreciation is noted to Sarah Jones for assistance with the preparation of this chapter. Sarah provided sound and thoughtful feedback to help improve the clarity of the material and argument presented. Thank you also to the reviewers and editors for their attentive critique to further strengthen the chapter.

REFERENCES Alvestad, M. and Duncan, J. (2006) ‘“The value is enormous – it’s priceless I think!”: Preschool teachers’ understandings of the early childhood curriculum in New Zealand: A comparative perspective’, Inter­ national Journal of Early Childhood, 38(1): 31–45. Anning, A. and Edwards, A. (2006) Promoting Learning from Birth to Five: Developing Professional Practice in the Pre-school. (2nd ed). Maidenhead: Open University Press. Bennett, N., Wood, L. and Rogers, S. (1997) Teaching through Play: Teachers’ Thinking and Classroom Practice. Buckingham: Open University Press. Broadhead, P. and Burt, A. (2012) Understanding Young Children’s Learning through Play: Building Playful Pedagogies. Abingdon: Routledge. Broström, S. (2013) ‘Understanding Te Whaˉriki from a Danish perspective’, in J. Nuttall (ed.), Weaving Te Whaˉriki: Aotearoa New Zealand’s early childhood curriculum document in theory and practice. (2nd edn.) Wellington: New Zealand Council for Educational Research. pp. 239–57. Bruner, J. (1960) The Process of Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bruner, J. (1987) ‘The transactional self’, in J. Bruner and H. Haste (eds), Making Sense: The Child’s Construction of the World. London: Methuen. pp. 81–96. Bruner, J., Jolly, A. and Sylva, K. (1976) ‘Introduction’, in J. Bruner, A. Jolly and K. Sylva (eds), Play, Development and Evolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin. pp. 13–24. Buckingham, J. (1994) ‘Teachers’ understanding of children’s drawing’, in C. Aubrey (ed.), The Role of Subject Knowledge in the Early Years of Schooling. London: Falmer Press. pp. 133–67. Burman, E. (2008) Deconstructing Developmental Psychology. (2nd ed.) Abingdon: Routledge. Cannella, G. (1997) Deconstructing Early Childhood Education: Social Justice and Revolution. New York: Peter Lang.

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Cumming, J. (2003) ‘Do runner beans really make you run fast? Young children learning about sciencerelated food concepts in informal settings’, Research in Science Education, 33(4): 483–501. DeLoache, J. and Brown, A. (1987) ‘The early emergence of planning skills in children’, in J. Bruner and H. Haste (eds), Making Sense: The Child’s Construction of the World. London: Methuen. pp. 108–30. Dewey, J. (1938) Experience and Education. New York: Collier Books. Edwards, S. and Cutter-Mackenzie, A. (2011) ‘Environmentalising early childhood education curriculum through pedagogies of play’, Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, 36(1): 51–9. Fleer, M. (2010) Early Learning and Development: A Cultural-historical View of Concepts in Play. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fung, C.K.H. and Cheng, D.P.W. (2012) ‘Consensus or dissensus: Stakeholders’ views on the role of play in learning’, Early Years: An International Journal of Research and Development, 32(1): 17–33. Gregory, E., Long, S. and Volk, D. (eds) (2004) Many Pathways to Literacy: Young Children Learning with Siblings, Grandparents, Peers, and Communities. London: RoutledgeFalmer. Grieshaber, S. and McArdle, F. (2010) The Trouble with Play. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Happo, I. and Määttä, K. (2011) ‘Expertise of early childhood educators’, International Education Studies, 4(3): 91–9. Hedges, H. (2004) ‘A whale of an interest in sea creatures: The learning potential of excursions’, Early Childhood Research and Practice, 6(1). Hedges, H. and Cullen, J. (2005) ‘Subject knowledge in early childhood curriculum and pedagogy: Beliefs and practices’, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 6(1): 66–79. Hedges, H. and Cullen, J. (2012) ‘Participatory learning theories: A framework for early childhood pedagogy’, Early Child Development and Care, 82(7): 921–40. Hedges, H., Cullen, J. and Jordan, B. (2011) ‘Early years curriculum: Funds of knowledge as a conceptual framework for children’s interests’, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 43(2): 185–205. Helm, J.H. and Katz, L. (2001) Young Investigators: The Project Approach in the Early Years. New York: Teachers College Press and NAEYC. Hurst, V. and Joseph, J. (1998) Supporting Early Learning: The Way Forward. Buckingham: Open University Press. Hutt, S.J., Tyler, S., Hutt, C. and Christopherson, H. (1989) Play, Exploration and Learning. London: Routledge.

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Jordan, B. (2009) ‘Scaffolding learning and coconstructing understandings’, in A. Anning, J. Cullen and M. Fleer (eds), Early Childhood Education: Society and Culture. (2nd ed.) London: Sage. pp. 39–52. Kallery, M. and Psillos, D. (2001) ‘Pre-school teachers’ content knowledge in science: Their understandings of elementary science concepts and of issues raised by children’s questions’, International Journal of Early Years Education, 9(3): 165–77. Krieg, S. (2011) ‘The Australian early years learning framework: Learning what?’, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 12(1): 46–55. Leacock, E. (1976) ‘At play in African villages’, in J. Bruner, A. Jolly, and K. Sylva (eds), Play, Development and Evolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin. pp. 466–73. McLachlan, C., Fleer, M. and Edwards, S. (2010) Early Childhood Curriculum: Planning, Assessment and Implementation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maynard, T. (1996) ‘Teachers’ attitudes to subject knowledge’, in T. Cox (ed.), The National Curriculum in the Early Years. London: Falmer Press. pp. 34–47. Moll, L. (2000) ‘Inspired by Vygotsky: Ethnographic experiments in education’, in C. D. Lee and P. Smagorinsky (eds), Vygotskian Perspectives on Literacy Research: Constructing Meaning through Collaborative Inquiry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 256–68. Moll, L., Amanti, C., Neff, D. and González, N. (1992) ‘Funds of knowledge for teaching: Using a qualitative approach to connect homes and classrooms’, Theory into Practice, 31(2): 132–41. Nutbrown, C. (1999) Threads of Thinking. (2nd ed.) London: Paul Chapman. Ortlipp, M., Arthur, L. and Woodrow, C. (2011) ‘Discourses of the Early Years Learning Framework: Constructing the early childhood professional’, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 12(1): 56–70. Paradise, R. and Rogoff, B. (2009) ‘Side by side: Learning by observing and pitching in’, Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology, 37(1): 102–38. Rinaldi, C. (2006) In Dialogue with Reggio Emilia: Listening, Researching and Learning. Abingdon: Routledge. Ring, K. (2010) ‘Supporting a playful approach to drawing’, in P. Broadhead, J. Howard and L. Wood (eds), Play and Learning in the Early Years. London: Sage. pp. 113–26. Rodger, R. (1995) ‘Subjects in the early years curriculum?’, European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 3(1): 35–45.

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Rogoff, B., Paradise, R., Arauz, R. M., Correa-Chávez, M. and Angelillo, C. (2003) ‘Firsthand learning through intent participation’, Annual Review of Psychology, 54: 175–203. Rojas, R.L.M. (2008) ‘Pedagogical content knowledge in early childhood: A study of teachers’ knowledge’. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Loyola University, Chicago, IL. Shulman, L.S. (1987) ‘Knowledge and teaching: Foundations of the new reform’, Harvard Educational Review, 57(1): 1–22. Siraj-Blatchford, I. (2009) ‘Conceptualising progression in the pedagogy of play and sustained shared thinking in early childhood education: A Vygotskian perspective’, Educational and Child Psychology, 26(2): 77–89. Sofou, E. and Tsafos, V. (2010) ‘Preschool teachers’ understandings of the national preschool curriculum in Greece’, Early Childhood Education Journal, 37(5): 411–20. Sylva, K., Bruner, K. and Genova, P. (1976) ‘The role of play in the problem-solving of children 3–5 years old’, in J. Bruner, A. Jolly and K. Sylva (eds), Play, Development and Evolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin. pp. 244–57. Ure, C. and Raban, R. (2001) ‘Teachers’ beliefs and understandings of literacy in the pre-school: Preschool literacy project stage 1’, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 2(2): 157–68. Vong, K.I. (2012) ‘Play: A multi-modal manifestation in kindergarten education in China’, Early Years: An International Journal of Research and Development, 32(1): 35–48. Wellman, H.M. and Gelman, S.A. (1992) ‘Cognitive development: Foundational theories of core domains’, Annual Review of Psychology, 43(1): 337–75. Wellman, H.M. and Gelman, S.A. (1998) ‘Knowledge acquisition in foundational domains’, in D. Kuhn and R. Siegler (eds), Handbook of Child Psychology: Volume 2. (5th ed.) New York: John Wiley. pp. 523-573. Wood, E. (2010) ‘Developing integrated pedagogical approaches to play and learning’, in P. Broadhead, J. Howard and E. Wood (eds), Play and Learning in the Early Years. London: Sage. pp. 9–26. Wood, E. (2013) ‘Contested concepts in educational play: A comparative analysis of early childhood policy frameworks in England and New Zealand’, in J. Nuttall (ed.), Weaving Te Whaˉ riki: Aotearoa New Zealand’s Early Childhood Curriculum Document in Theory and Practice. (2nd ed). Wellington: NZCER. pp. 259–75.

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17 Professional Preparation for a Pedagogy of Play Sharon Ryan and Kaitlin Northey-Berg

INTRODUCTION Children’s play is contested terrain in the twenty-first century. Play is typically viewed as a child-initiated and child-determined creative activity. Most early childhood teachers begin curriculum-making with children and their developmental needs, therefore opportunities for play have also been a centerpiece of early childhood curriculum in many countries (Wood, 2009). However, policies in many countries now seek to use early education as one means to ensure improved learning outcomes for young children, and this increasing policy oversight has led to a questioning of the purposes of play in the early childhood curriculum. As policymakers want to see a return on their investments and ensure all young children enter formal schooling ready to learn, there is interest in how to use play to teach academic content, as well as the self-regulation skills children need to learn. For some play advocates, however, using early childhood programmes to ensure school readiness is

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leading in some societies to the eradication of play in favor of didactic teaching methods (Miller and Almon, 2009; Falk, 2012). Others argue that the dichotomy between play and academic learning can be resolved though the implementation of playful pedagogy (HirshPasek and Golinkoff, 2011), intentional teaching (Epstein, 2007), and new theories of play (Fleer, 2011) that allow the teaching of concepts through play-based programmes. Still others contend that trying to theoretically and practically reconcile academic learning goals with children’s play in early childhood classrooms overlooks the diversity of children’s experiences and backgrounds and fails to acknowledge the ways that play is culturally mediated, socially situated, and used by children as a site for identity politics (Long, Volk and Gregory, 2007; Wood, 2010; Grieshaber and McArdle, 2011). For this group of play scholars, the standardization of early childhood curriculum and play overlooks the need for a retheorizing of pedagogy to address the inequities children reproduce in and through their talk and action.

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Regardless of which argument one subscribes to, the focus of these debates is primarily on children and the potential costs and benefits of various views of play on their learning and development. Early childhood educators are by default implicated in these discussions but to date little research attention has been paid to what it is teachers need to know and be able to do to enact a pedagogy of play (Wood, 2009). Pedagogy is a teacher’s tool kit that encompasses her/his professional philosophy about teaching, learning, and the purposes of early education, a knowledge base that informs these beliefs, as well as a range of methods for putting these views into action (Katz 1995; Ryan and Hornbeck, 2007). A play pedagogical toolkit helps teachers to navigate competing definitions and purposes of play in the curriculum, informing their responses and actions in the classroom. This toolkit is developed through professional development opportunities that typically take the form of coursework and practica in teacher education programmes as well as on-site and off-site learning opportunities such as coaching, professional learning communities, workshops and the like. In this chapter, we review the empirical literature on what is known about preparing teachers to enact a pedagogy of play. Specifically, we explore what knowledge and understandings of play are presented in professional learning opportunities, the definitions and theoretical assumptions framing these learning opportunities, and what approaches are used to teach teachers about play. We contend that without more attention to teacher learning about play, the possibility of advocating for and including play in early childhood programs, and using play as a site for challenging and addressing issues of inequity, will increasingly become limited.

RESEARCH ON PREPARING TEACHERS TO ENACT A PEDAGOGY OF PLAY Research on teaching in early childhood education is a relatively new program of enquiry

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(Genishi, Ryan, Ochsner and Yarnall, 2001) and research on early childhood teacher education and professional development is limited (Hyson, Horm and Winton, 2012). Therefore locating studies that look at how and what teachers learn about children’s play in professional development and preparation programes to inform their practice is not an easy task. To conduct our search of the literature, we limited ourselves to empirical studies conducted over the past 10–15 years and began by inputting the search terms ‘play,’ ‘early childhood,’ ‘teacher education,’ and ‘professional development’ into various search engines including Educational Resources Information Center, ScienceDirect, and Academic Search Premier. This scan yielded a small number of studies, so we then turned specifically to research handbooks on early childhood education (Spodek and Saracho, 2006; Pianta, Barnett, Justice and Sheridan, 2012), other edited research volumes on play and early care and education (Moyles, 2010), as well as the reviews of play research that we could find located in journals (Cheng and Johnson, 2010) to identify potential studies. Unfortunately, many of the reviews of research that have been conducted on play focus on important topics like play environments and materials (Sutterby and Frost, 2006), or the uses of play to serve literacy learning (Roskos and Christie, 2001), but none focuses specifically on teachers and teacher learning about play. Therefore, we also combed specific journals centered on teacher education (Australian Journal of Teacher Education, Journal of Teacher Education, Teacher Education Quarterly), especially the Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education because of its direct focus on early care and education, to identify further research. Through this search process we identified two categories of enquiry that provide insight into the development of teachers’ understandings and capacities to incorporate children’s play in the early childhood curriculum. These categories are studies of

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teachers’ views of play and studies of early childhood teacher education and professional development offerings.

Teachers’ Views of Play Research on teacher thinking shows how teachers’ beliefs and their implicit theories of early childhood education mediate interpretations of new knowledge (Clark and Peterson, 1986; Genishi, Ryan, Ochsner and Yarnall, 2001). What teachers think and do is also shaped by the setting (such as preschool, infant-toddler (nursery) classroom or elementary (primary) school) and the socio-political contexts (for example, policies; Synodi, 2010) in which one works. As policy is shaping early childhood practices more explicitly than ever before, a number of studies (Logue and Harvey, 2009; Synodi, 2010; Hyvonen, 2011; Sandseter, 2012) look at early childhood teachers’ beliefs and theories about play in response to early childhood curriculum policies that emphasize learning outcomes. The aim of this body of work is to shed light on how those who educate the educators can provide responsive preparation and professional development opportunities that start with what teachers understand and/or do about play in their practice. These studies have been conducted in a range of countries, including Hong Kong, Finland, Australia, and the United States and, while varied in terms of the lenses, teachers, and settings studied, they illustrate how the tension between play-based curricular approaches and the teaching of disciplinary content is becoming an international concern. For example, several studies (Cheng and Stimpson, 2004; Hyvonen, 2011; Thomas, Warren and de Vries, 2011), mostly qualitative in design, examine how teachers negotiate the dichotomy between play-based learning and teaching for learning in elementary school contexts or in the year preceding school. For example, Hyvonen (2011) identified eight different play types after interviewing a small number (n = 14) of Finnish kindergarten and elementary teachers about school-based play.

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These play types afforded teachers the opportunity to take on three different roles, differentiated by the amount of authority the teacher had over the play. Teachers reported taking on the role of leaders in play that was curriculumfocused and aimed at supporting children’s learning and cognitive development, whereas play that focused on children’s social work (such as pretend play, free play, etc.) was where teachers allowed children to shape the type and quality of play that took place. Rather than assuming that teacher roles in children’s play are complementary, Thomas, Warren and DeVries (2011) used poststructural theory to examine the politics of different teacher identities allowed by the discourses of play and intentional teaching. Working in Australia, where teachers are expected to follow the national curriculum, the Early Years Learning Framework (Australian Government Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, 2009), Thomas et al. engaged two teachers in a conversational interview to elicit their views of children’s play and then used video of these same teachers interacting with mathematical materials with children to get them to reflect on their actions. They found that the teachers did not feel constrained to be the sole leader of the play when intentionally teaching through play but they, and the children, shifted agency and authority in the play depending on the event taking place. Interestingly, in the Hong Kong context, Cheng and Stimpson (2004) document how six early years teachers struggled with releasing some control of the curriculum to children despite a policy advocating play-based learning. This qualitative case study found that most of the teachers saw play as opposite to work, and academic activities taught through didactic instruction were the patterns of practice teachers held on to. Together these studies suggest that teachers feel a tension between play and teaching and this tension is navigated depending on the policy context. While the teachers in Hong Kong grapple with becoming more play-focused, the teachers in Finland and Australia seem to resolve

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the tension by recognizing that play can take different forms and teachers and children can shift their authority and responsibility in these different forms of play. The increasing expectation in many countries that preschool should be preparation for the first years of school has led some researchers (Logue and Harvey, 2009; Sandseter, 2012) to delve into the implications of such policies for teachers’ views of particular kinds of play. These researchers are deepening play debates by examining what kinds of play teachers perceive to be less allowable, given the drive for academic learning and school-readiness skills in preschool. For example, several researchers have looked at teachers’ perceptions and responses to risky play (Sandseter, 2012; Little, Sandseter and Wyver, 2012) such as rough-and-tumble play, climbing high, and using potentially dangerous equipment such as woodworking tools (Tannock, this volume). These studies find that cultural and regulatory contexts shape teachers’ beliefs about what is pedagogically sound. In one qualitative interview study (Little, Sandseter and Wyver, 2012) that compared Norwegian teachers’ beliefs about risky play to those of their Australian counterparts, it was found that Australian teachers worried more about acting in accordance with health and safety regulations. As one Australian child care teacher in this study stated, ‘the more regulations there [are] the less there is we can do with them’ (2012: 309). Similar concerns can be found in the United States, where Logue and Harvey (2009), in a mixed methods survey of 98 teachers, examined whether preschool teachers’ views of active dramatic play, especially rough-and-tumble play, are changing in light of the drive to teach academics. They were particularly interested in exploring whether fewer opportunities for active and physical play in the curriculum may be adversely affecting boys’ learning. Quantitative analyses illustrated that teachers prefer some kinds of rough-and-tumble play over other kinds and that the kinds of rough-and-tumble

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play teachers don’t allow, such as play fighting, are more likely to be preferred by boys. In all, 46 percent of teachers reported that their programme upheld a no-tolerance policy for any kind of rough-and-tumble play and, given that this kind of play occurs through the enactment of various play narratives, like superheroes, teachers reported that children do not get to engage in any kind of dramatic play during their daily programmes. While no firm conclusions can be drawn about the relationship between the prevalence of rough-and-tumble play and the emphasis on academic learning in preschool classrooms, this study does imply that if play is part of the curriculum, only certain kinds of play are validated and endorsed. Lillemyr (2009) argues that ‘what the preschool teacher knows about play forms an important part of the feeling of being a professional practitioner’ (163). Taken together, research reporting teachers’ views of play suggests that teachers don’t have the know­ ledge they need to assert their authority about the use and relevance of play in the early childhood curriculum. Teachers in these studies report that their co-workers, and the way teaching is undertaken in the settings in which they work, have a big influence on how they value and use play in the curriculum. For example, Emily and Fiona – the two least experienced and educated teachers in the Hong Kong study (Cheng and Stimpson, 2004) – while having previously learned about the importance of play, were so busy trying to learn about teaching in practice that they found it easier to accept didactic teaching as the norm. Similarly, in a survey and interview study of 61 first-year early childhood educators in the United States (Brashier and Norris, 2008), teachers reported that they were so busy dealing with classroom organization issues, as well as having to meet stringent state requirements, that they did not feel they could use the play-based strategies they learned in their teacher education program. These teachers also reported wanting to fit in with their colleagues. If their age-level teaching teams and principals verbalized some

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support for play, then these teachers reported feeling more confident to use what they had learned in their programes of professional preparation. In summary, while teachers in several of these studies (Cheng and Stimpson, 2004; Brashier and Norris, 2008; Logue and Harvey, 2009) report that coursework in teacher education is a significant influence on their beliefs about play, many teachers also identify regulatory contexts and their work environments as limiting their ability to allow certain kinds of play in the curriculum. While these studies are mostly small qualitative studies, and no extensive survey has been done of the relationships between types of play, teacher beliefs and practices and the policies of various countries, one implication from this work is that when teachers learn about play they also need to learn how to navigate, and contest, policies and work environments that counter the research-proven effects of play in the curriculum.

PLAY IN TEACHER EDUCATION AND PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT Across many countries, improving the know­ ledge and expertise of the early childhood workforce has been seen as a key strategy to ensure children experience a high-quality program. For example Australia (Rowley, Kos, Raban, Fleer, Cullen and Ellioyt, 2011), England (Nutbrown, 2012) and Scotland (Education Scotland, 2012) have recently released national reports on the early education workforce and in the United States there are a number of policies (Head Start Reauthorization Act, 2007) expecting teachers to obtain further qualifications. In response, there are a handful of policy-oriented studies that examine the coursework early childhood teachers receive in their programs of preparation or professional development that offer insights into what teachers learn about play for their professional practice. Complementing these larger quantitative studies is a small number of qualitative studies that examine

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up close teachers’ experiences of learning about play in various teacher development spaces.

Policy Studies of Teacher Education A number of studies confirm that teachers with higher educational qualifications and training are central to ensuring the quality of education experiences for young children (Whitebook, 2003; Sylva et al., 2004). Several survey studies conducted in the United States (Early and Winton, 2001; Maxwell, Lim and Early, 2006; Ray, Bowman and Robbins, 2006) have evaluated the content and experiences of early childhood programs in institutions of higher education to see whether or not teachers are accessing the knowledge they need to ensure children’s school readiness. A common finding across these studies is that students enrolled in an early childhood program at a two- or four-year institution of higher education are unlikely to receive coursework or related practice-based experience with regard to working with linguistically, culturally and ability-diverse pupils. Unfortunately, much less is known from these studies about what students receive in such programmes with regard to children’s play and the purposes and approaches to using play in early childhood programmes. These policyoriented studies do not identify play as a content area worthy of consideration in its own right, in part because national standards in the United States subsume play under broader categories like child development and learning environments. For example, the National Association for the Education of Young Children standards for initial and advanced licensure (Hyson, 2006) identify using content knowledge to build curriculum as a key standard, whereas play is subsumed under two other standards: using developmentally effective approaches and promoting child development and learning. A series of state-level studies conducted in the north east of the United States (Lobman, Ryan, McLaughlin and Ackerman, 2004;

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Lobman, Ryan and McLaughlin, 2005) specifically asked faculty and professional development providers about their play offerings. After surveying 29 institutions of higher education, it was found that teachers were likely to receive one or more complete classes devoted to child development or curriculum development, but much less of the curriculum is given to educating teachers about play. For example, in the universities granting four-year Bachelor’s degrees, over 90 percent of the programs offered an entire class devoted to learning about children’s development but only 28 percent of these same institutions had an entire class on play. In the two-year community colleges surveyed, only 6 percent had a standalone class on play in their programme of early childhood education. Similarly, when professional development agencies were surveyed about their play trainings, Lobman et al. (2004) found that the amount of learning about play varied by professional development provider and what that provider saw as the purposes of the early childhood curriculum. School district administrators who viewed education for four-year-olds as preparation for school focused the largest proportion of workshops on curriculum content. Only 15 workshops on indoor/outdoor play were offered across the 71 districts surveyed. Alternatively, the 17 regional resource and referral agencies that provide professional development to the child care community reported that play was the focus of 76 workshops across one year. Policy-capturing studies of teacher education and professional development programes are few in number and do not go into what takes place in the teacher education classroom or a professional development experience (Whitebook and Ryan, 2011). These kinds of studies make it clear what is present and absent in the curriculum offerings for teacher learning in a geographic space but they do not examine if the content and experiences teachers receive in these offerings are based on the latest research wisdom or relevant to the complexities of teaching young children in the twenty-first century (Whitebook, Austin,

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Ryan, Kipnis, Almaraz and Sakai, 2012). Therefore, while it would seem that teachers are not receiving a lot of support to develop a pedagogy of play, it is hard to tell exactly what teachers are learning about play in these studies. Qualitative studies that describe the curriculum of play in teacher education and professional development offer more nuanced insights into this issue.

QUALITATIVE STUDIES OF TEACHERS’ LEARNING ABOUT PLAY Despite the field’s long-term commitment to play in the early childhood curriculum, only a handful of studies describe how those responsible for teachers’ learning approach educating teachers about play as a pedagogy. All of these studies are qualitative in orientation, and take as a starting point that play itself is an important pedagogy for teacher learning about play. One Australian study (Lord and McFarland, 2010) describes how prospective teachers in a class entitled ‘Early Childhood Environments for Play and Learning’ participate in weekly play sessions with children and parents held on the university campus. As part of the class, students take over planning and facilitating the play sessions, which also involves implementing projects with children ranging in age from infancy to five years old. A focus group interview with several students who were studying to be teachers of older children highlighted how these students felt underprepared to use play and children’s interests in the curriculum because of their tertiary training, which was focused on meeting state standards in various subject matters. Lord and McFarland argue that, without the inclusion of play content and practical experiences in the elementary teacher education curriculum, it will continue to be difficult for teachers in the early years of school to incorporate playbased educational experiences. Several studies (Lobman, 2005a, 2005b; Bredikyte and Hakkarainen, 2011) draw on the work of Vygotsky and others (Holzman,

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2000) to argue that play is a social and joint meaning-making activity, in which teachers must be involved as co-players with children. These play researchers assert that the focus on the impacts of play on children’s learning and development, or the use of play as a means to teach academic content and skills, overlooks the way that play creates a space for development. Teachers need to learn how to work in this space with children to create new and higher forms of development. Viewing play as joint creativity and improvisation, Bredikyte and Hakkarainen (2011) describe how they prepare student teachers to intervene in and extend children’s play. Similar to the play sessions described by Lord and McFarland (2010), Bredikyte and Hakkarainen use a play lab associated with three early childhood classes, ‘Pedagogy of Under Three Year Olds,’ ‘Pedagogy of Play,’ and ‘Guiding Learning in Early Childhood.’ The play labs require students to spend four hours of practical activity with children ranging in ages from three months to five years who come to the campus to participate in a creative play club. This club or lab is located in a house on campus and has a number of rooms and materials set up solely for the purpose of adults and children playing together. Students pre-plan the play curriculum with professors, implement the curriculum, and spend part of their classwork reflecting on the play activities that occurred. Students also collect data in the play lab by videorecording the play and taking field notes on the talk and action taking place. After analyzing 12 play sessions over a semester, Bredikyte and Hakkarainen (2011) identified 7 characteristics that contribute to successful teacher intervention in children’s play. First, students must be able to share and accept children’s play themes even when adults may not feel comfortable with the theme (for example, themes involving some danger, such as play fighting). Second, adults must enter into a role in the play if they are to co-create with children and this requires the third characteristic, some emotional

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investment on the teacher’s part. A fourth characteristic is that adults listen and hear children’s ideas, using them, not their own ideas, to drive the play narrative. Related to these characteristics is the ethos of cooperation between adults and children so that the play is a dialogic interaction. There also needs to be a coherent and mutually engaging storyline so children and adults can create the drama together. Finally, successful play interventions require that the adults know how to handle critical turning points in the play. When the narrative became repetitive or boring, successful interventions involved adults anticipating the need for a new turn, such as introducing a new event or character. Bredikyte and Hakkarainen (2011) advocate educating student teachers in creative drama and improvisation techniques so that they know how to construct a playworld with children which allows for shared experiences that lead to new kinds of learning in the classroom (see Hakkarainen and Bredikyte, this volume). In the United States, Lobman (2005a, 2005b) pioneered the use of improvisation techniques as a tool for educating teachers to be more open to the knowledge, experiences and offers children bring to the classroom. To pilot her ideas, Lobman developed and implemented a professional development programme for seven child care teachers to see if learning and trying out improvisational skills would enable teachers to be more creative in their work with young children. A series of six weekly workshops were facilitated by two professional improvisers on-site at the child care center where the teachers worked. These workshops involved a series of games, scene work and exercises to help them learn to work as a collective. Lobman (2005b) also writes of a specific improvisational technique known as ‘yes and’ taught to participants, which involves always accepting an offer from another person no matter how silly or unusual that offer may be. Culminating interviews with participants conducted several weeks following the conclusion of the workshop series highlight how

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this experience helped several of the participants to rethink their approach to play with young children. As Louise, a teacher in the study, stated of play, ‘it’s not just something that they [the children] do, but it’s something that you could do with them, not just as an observation but as a participant’ (2005a: 268). Other teachers spoke about how creating with each other in the workshops had contributed to them taking more risks in the classroom. Similarly, two other teachers spoke about how the improvisation activities had taught them to listen carefully before responding to children so that they did not start with their own agendas. Lobman argues that the findings of this study suggest teachers need more experience of learning pedagogies of play by playing and that the tools of improvisation offer one way to help teachers do this. This handful of studies provides a glimpse into the use of performance and play experiences in the curriculum of teacher education and professional development. Given that the larger policy-capturing studies indicate that play content tends to be embedded within broader categories of child development, these studies offer an important and different way of thinking about the teaching of play in professional learning opportunities for early childhood educators. As Lobman (2005a) argues, ‘early childhood teacher education programs teach prospective teachers about the importance of play for children’s development but rarely do they teach the importance of co-creating playful environments with young children’ (252). However, this promising line of enquiry does not attend to how teachers use their developing skills as players and performers when working in educational contexts that do not support play as pedagogy. Moreover, viewing play as a socially mediated and joint meaning-making activity is presented in these studies as teachers and children collaborating equally without any attention to the power relations at play. Critical studies of play (Blaise, 2005; Ryan, 2005; Wood, 2010) would suggest that play

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is never truly equal or free for all players but the knowledges spoken into action by adults and children as co-players position some participants more vulnerably.

CONCLUSION: TOWARD A PEDAGOGY OF PLAY The research reviewed in this chapter highlights the contestation of play as pedagogy for teaching young children. Studies of teachers’ views and uses of play illustrate the challenges teachers face in navigating differing purposes of play in the curriculum. Similarly, research on teacher education and professional development opportunities suggests that the prominence of play as a pedagogy is changing, as few studies foreground play as a topic worthy of study in its own right and very few offer insights into how and what teachers are learning about play. Thus, despite decades of research on children’s play, the many forms it takes, and the many ways it benefits children’s learning and development, very little is known about what it is that early childhood educators need to be able to know and do to enact a pedagogy of play. The glaring lack of research on preparing practitioners to teach in and through play may be due to the field’s ongoing commitment to using knowledge of children’s learning and development as a starting point for curriculum-making (Ryan and Grieshaber, 2004). If, as many in the field assume, play is a child-initiated and child-sustained activity, then practitioners need to understand play and its role in children’s development but little attention has to be given to issues of teaching. However, the trouble with this logic is that without a pedagogy of play, teachers do not have the knowledge and skillset they need to be able to negotiate the politics of play. The politics of play takes place at two levels. The first of these is at the level of children (Grieshaber and McArdle, 2011) in terms of who is allowed to play and the various meanings that are given prominence

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and value in children’s play. Critical studies (see Grieshaber and Ryan, 2006 for a review; Pacini-Ketchabaw, this volume) have shown time and again that play enables children to maintain and reproduce dominant stereotypes of what it means to be ‘normal.’ Without a pedagogy of play that enables teachers to intervene and challenge these meanings, teachers become onlookers to play and complicit in enabling children to enact power relations that will continue to marginalize particular ways of knowing and being. The second level at which this politics takes place is evident in the studies reviewed in this chapter. Teachers in a number of countries are grappling with policies and organizational contexts that view school readiness as the purpose of early education. As a consequence, teachers either find a way to use play for this academic purpose, hence only certain kinds of play become valued, or opportunities for play may be eradicated. The fact that the field has persisted in advocating for children’s play but has done little to document what teachers need to know and do to be able to use play in the curriculum in meaningful and relevant ways allows others, such as policymakers, to use play as a site for their own interests. If teaching and play are to be seen as mutually inclusive terms then there must be a reconceptualization of play to include teaching, teachers, and the politics of play work. Teacher educators and professional development providers have to be key actors in this reconceptualization as it is they who help prepare and facilitate the ongoing learning of the early childhood workforce. Foregrounding a pedagogy of play will require several actions on the part of teacher educators and professional development providers working in collaboration with other members of the field. A first and much-needed action is the development of a coherent research agenda on teaching and play. Aside from the few considerations of the roles teachers take in children’s play (Baumer, Ferholt and Lecusay, 2005; Jones and Reynolds, 2011), or the handful of empirical studies that show

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how teachers respond to children’s emergent conceptual learning during free play (e.g. Wilcox-Herzog and Kontos, 1998; Ginsburg, Seo and Pappas, 2001), teachers just aren’t foregrounded in play research; nor is play foregrounded in studies of teacher learning. To be sure, the promising work of those using creative drama and improvisation (Lobman, 2005a) is one avenue that seems to be bringing play, teaching, and teacher learning opportunities together, but for the most part the field of teacher education and professional development is left somewhat directionless with the current research base. Expanding the research base on play and pedagogy so that the best research know­ ledge can shape policy and practice will necessitate moving beyond the accumulation of qualitative studies here and there to the implementation of a research agenda that examines in depth what teachers understand about play and how they approach play in practice, as well as the relationships between teacher learning opportunities, what teachers do in their classrooms, and child outcomes. A second and related action is the need for play researchers, teacher educators, professional development providers, and associations who work on behalf of early education to come together and begin to consider what is needed to foreground teachers and teaching in play. There is no one definition of play and there is no one right way of enacting a pedagogy of play. While research may help to tease out some of the important things every early years educator needs to be able to know and do in a particular context, foregrounding teachers in play discussions also requires position statements that provide direction for the field. These position statements can be inserted into policy discourses by international organizing groups such as Organization Mondiale pour l’Education Prescolaire (OMEP) or the World Organization for Early Childhood Education and national early childhood organizations in various countries such as the American Association of Early Childhood Teacher Educators, and in doing so can help shape conversations about play in the early childhood curriculum

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that do not only implicate teachers but also position them front and center. In addition to these large-scale initiatives, those whose job it is to develop the early childhood workforce must begin reconceptualizing play to include pedagogy within their own local sites of practice. This work might begin with a mapping of teacher learning opportunities about play within a given region that includes an examination of the content being offered, the meanings given to play, and the experiences practitioners have in practicing play learning. This mapping might also include some research on how, and if, teachers are using knowledge from their various learning opportunities in practice and the challenges they face in their everyday play work with children. This kind of mapping work, if conducted by those responsible for workforce development, will at the very least provide a sense of the patterns of knowledge and practice that characterize play in specific locations, and in doing so can provide an evidentiary starting point for a rethinking of how to prepare teachers for a pedagogy of play in their own local arena of action. In the twentieth century, the field of early childhood education was developed by building a careful and detailed research base on children’s learning and development (Reifel, this volume). More recently, the research base has begun to shift to include studies of programs and curriculum and to incorporate a range of theoretical perspectives other than child development. The field now needs to focus its research and practice lenses on teachers (Ryan and Goffin, 2008) and to begin carefully and collectively to conceptualize what it is that teachers need to know and be able to do to enact practices that address the politics of play at all levels of their work.

REFERENCES Australian Government Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (2009) Belonging, Being and Becoming: The Early Years Learning Framework for Australia. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia. Retrieved from www.docs.

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education.gov.au/system/files/doc/other/belonging_ being_and_becoming_the_early_years_learning_ framework_for_australia.pdf Baumer, S., Ferholt, B. and Lecusay, R. (2005) ‘Promoting narrative competence through adult–child joint pretense: Lessons from the Scandinavian educational practice of playworld’, Cognitive Development, 20: 576–90. Blaise, M. (2005) Playing it Straight: Uncovering Gender Discourses in the Early Childhood Classroom. New York: Routledge. Brashier, A. and Norris, E. (2008) ‘Breaking down barriers for 1st-year teachers: What teacher preparation programmes can do’, Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education, 29(1): 30–44. Bredikyte, M. and Hakkarainen, P. (2011) ‘Play intervention and play development’, in C. Lobman and B.E. O’Neill (eds), Play and Performance: Play and Culture Studies: Volume 11. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. pp. 59–83. Cheng, M. and Johnson, J.E. (2010) ‘Research on children’s play: Analysis of developmental and early education journals from 2005 to 2007’, Early Childhood Education Journal, 37, 249–59. Cheng, Pui-Wah D. and Stimpson, P. (2004) ‘Articulating contrasts in kindergarten teachers’ implicit knowledge on play-based learning’, International Journal of Educational Research, 41: 339–52. Clark, C. M. and Peterson, P. L. (1986) ‘Teachers’ thought processes’, in M. C. Wittrock (ed.), Handbook of Research on Teaching. (3rd ed.) New York: Macmillan. pp. 255–96. Early, D. and Winton, P. (2001) ‘Preparing the workforce: Early childhood teacher preparation at 2- and 4-year institutions of higher education’, Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 16(3): 285–306. Education Scotland (2012) Making the Difference: The Impact of Staff Qualifications on Children’s Learning in Early Years. Livingston, Scotland: Education Scotland. Epstein, A. (2007) The Intentional Teacher: Choosing the Best Strategies for Young Children’s Learning. Washington, DC: National Association for the Education of Young Children. Falk, B. (ed.) (2012) Defending Childhood: Keeping the Promise of Early Education. New York: Teachers College Press. Fleer, M. (2011) ‘“Conceptual play”: Foregrounding imagination and cognition during concept formation in early years education’, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 12(3): 224–40. Genishi, C., Ryan, S., Ochsner, M. and Yarnall, M. (2001) ‘Teaching in early childhood education: Understanding practices through research and theory’, in V. Richardson (ed.), Handbook of Research

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on Teaching. (4th ed.) Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association. pp. 1175–210. Ginsburg, H. P., Pappas, S. and Seo, K. (2001) ‘Everyday mathematical knowledge: Asking young children what is developmentally appropriate’, in S. L. Golbeck (ed.), Psychological Perspectives on Early Childhood Education: Reframing Dilemmas in Research and Practice. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. pp. 181–219. Grieshaber, S. and McArdle, F. (2011) The Trouble with Play. New York: Open University Press. Grieshaber, S. and Ryan, S. (2006) ‘Beyond certainties: Postmodern approaches and research about teaching young children’, in B. Spodek and O. Saracho (eds), Handbook of Research on the Education of Young Children. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. pp. 533–54. Hirsh-Pasek, K. and Golinkoff, R.M. (2011) ‘The great balancing act: Optimizing core curricula through playful learning’, in E. Zigler, S. Barnett and W. Gilliam (eds), The Preschool Education Debates. Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co. pp. 110–15. Holzman, L. (2000) ‘Performative psychology: An untapped resource for educators’, Educational and Child Psychology, 17(3): 86–103. Hyson, M. (ed.) (2006) Preparing Early Childhood Professionals: NAEYC’s Standards for Programmes. Washington, DC: National Association for the Education of Young Children. Hyson, M., Horm, D. and Winton, P. (2012) ‘Higher education for early childhood educators and outcomes for young children: Pathways toward greater effectiveness’, in B. Pianta (ed.), Handbook of Early Education. New York: Guilford Press. pp. 92–110. Hyvonen, P. (2011) ‘Play in the school context? The perspectives of Finnish teachers’, Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 36(8): 65–83. Improving Head Start for School Readiness Act of 2007, Pub. L. No. 110–134, 121 Stat. 1363. Jones, E. and Reynolds, G. (2011) The Play’s the Thing: Teachers Roles in Children’s Play. (2nd ed.) New York: Teachers College Press. Katz, L. G. (1995) Talks with Teachers of Young Children: A Collection. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Little, H., Sandseter, E. and Wyver, S. (2012) ‘Early childhood teachers’ beliefs about children’s risky play in Australia and Norway’, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 13(4): 300–15. Lillemyr, O. F. (2009) Taking Play Seriously: Children and Play in Early Childhood Education: An Exciting Challenge. Charlotte, NC: Information Age. Lobman, C. (2005a) ‘Improvisation: Postmodern play for early childhood teachers’, in S. Ryan and S. Grieshaber

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(eds), Practical Transformations and Transformational Practices: Globalization, Postmodernism, and Early Childhood Education: Advances in Early Education and Day Care, 14: 243–272. Stamford, CT: JAI/Elsevier Science. Lobman, C. (2005b) ‘“Yes and”: The uses of improvisation for early childhood professional development’, Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education, 26(3): 305–19. Lobman, C., Ryan, S. and McLaughlin, J. (2005) ‘Reconstructing teacher education to prepare qualified preschool teachers: Lessons from New Jersey’, Early Childhood Research and Practice, 7(2). Lobman, C., Ryan, S., McLaughlin, J and Ackerman, D. J. (2004) Educating Preschool Teachers: Mapping the Teacher Preparation and Professional Development System in New Jersey. New York: Foundation for Child Development. Logue, M. E. and Harvey, H. (2009) ‘Preschool teachers’ views of active play’, Journal of Research in Childhood Education, 24(1): 32–49. Long, S., Volk, D. and Gregory, E. (2007) ‘Intentionality and expertise: Learning from observations of children at play in multilingual, multicultural contexts’, Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 38(3): 239–59. Lord, A. and McFarland, L. (2010) ‘Pre-service primary teachers’ perceptions of early childhood philosophy and pedagogy: A case study examination’, Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 35(3): 1–13. Maxwell, K. L., Lim, C. I. and Early, D. M. (2006) Early Childhood Teacher Preparation Programmes in the United States: National Report. Chapel Hill, NC: FPG Child Development Institute, University of North Carolina. Miller, E. and Almon, J. (2009) Crisis in the Kindergarten: Why Children need to Play in School. College Park, MD: Alliance for Childhood. Moyles, J. (2010) The Excellence of Play. New York: Open University Press. Nutbrown, C. (2012) ‘Foundations for quality: The independent review of early education and childcare qualifications: Final report’. Runcorn: Department for Education. Pianta, B., Barnett, W. S., Justice, L. M. and Sheridan, S. M. (eds) (2012) Handbook of Early Education. New York: Guilford Press. Ray, A., Bowman, B. and Robbins, J. (2006) Preparing Early Childhood Teachers to Successfully Educate all Children: The Contribution of Four-year Undergraduate Teacher Preparation Programs. Chicago, IL: Erikson Institute. Roskos, K. and Christie, J. (2001) ‘Examining the play– literacy interface: A critical review and future research’, Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 1(1): 59–89.

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Rowley, G., Kos, J., Raban, B., Fleer, M., Cullen, J. and Elliott, A. (2011) ‘Current requirements for tertiary qualifications in early childhood education: Implications for policy: final report’. Canberra, Australia: Australian Government Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations with ACEReSearch. Ryan, S. (2005) ‘Freedom to choose: Examining children’s experiences in choice time’, in N. Yelland (ed.), Critical Issues in Early Childhood. Maidenhead: Open University Press. pp. 99–114. Ryan, S. and Goffin, S. G. (2008) ‘Missing in action: Teaching in early care and education’, Early Education and Development, 19(3): 385–95. Ryan, S. and Grieshaber, S. (2004) ‘It’s more than child development: Critical theories, research, and teaching young children’, Young Children, 59(6): 44–52. Ryan, S. and Hornbeck, A. (2007) ‘Pedagogy’, in R. S. New and M. Cochran (eds), Early Childhood Education: An International Encyclopedia: Volume 3. Westport, CT: Praeger. pp. 596–8. Sandseter, E. B. H. (2012) ‘Restrictive safety or unsafe freedom? Norwegian ECEC practitioners’ perceptions and practices concerning children’s risky play’, Child Care in Practice, 18(1): 83–101. Spodek, B. and Saracho, O. (eds) (2006) Handbook of Research on the Education of Young Children. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Sutterby, J. A. and Frost, J. (2006) ‘Creating play environments for early childhood: Indoors and out’, in B. Spodek and O. Saracho (eds), Handbook of Research on the Education of Young Children. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. pp. 305–22. Sylva, K., Melhuish, E., Sammons, P., Siraj-Blatchford, I. and Taggart, B. (2004) ‘The effective provision of preschool education (EPPE) project: final report’. London: DfES/Institute of Education, University of London.

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Synodi, E. (2010) ‘Play in the kindergarten: The case of Norway, Sweden, New Zealand and Japan’, International Journal of Early Years Education, 18(3): 185–200. Thomas, L., Warren, E. and deVries, E. (2011) ‘Playbased learning and intentional teaching in early childhood contexts’, Australian Journal of Early Childhood, 36(4): 69–75. Wilcox-Herzog, A. and Kontos, S. (1998) ‘The nature of teacher talk in early childhood classrooms and its relationship to children’s play with objects and peers’, The Journal of Genetic Psychology, 159(1): 30–44. Wood, E. (2009) ‘A pedagogy of play’, in A. Anning, J. Cullen, and M Fleer (eds), Play and Learning in the Early Years. London: Sage. pp. 27–39. Wood, E. (2010) ‘Reconceptualizing the play–pedagogy relationship: From control to complexity’, in L. Brooker and S. Edwards (eds), Engaging Play. Maidenhead: Open University Press. pp.15–27. Whitebook, M. (2003) Early Education Quality: Higher Teacher Qualifications for Better Learning Environments: A Review of the Literature. Berkeley, CA: Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, University of California. Whitebook, M. and Ryan, S. (2011) Degrees in Context: Asking the Right Questions about Preparing Skilled and Effective Teachers of Young Children. New Brunswick, NJ: National Institute for Early Education Research, Rutgers University. Whitebook, M., Austin, L., Ryan, S., Kipnis, F., Almaraz, M. and Sakai, L. (2012) By Default or Design? Variations in Higher Education Programmes for Early Care Teachers and their Implications for Research Methodology, Policy, and Practice. Berkeley, CA: Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, University of California.

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18 Learning Mathematics through Play Anita A. Wager and Amy Noelle Parks

INTRODUCTION Play [1] is incompletely functional in the context in which it appears; [2] is spontaneous, pleasurable, rewarding, or voluntary; [3] differs from other more serious behaviors in form (e.g., exaggerated) or timing (occurring early in life before the more serious version is needed); [4] is repeated, but not in abnormal and unvarying stereotypic form (e.g., distressed rocking, pacing); and [5] is initiated in the absence of acute or chronic stress (Burghardt, 2011: 17).

The Burghardt (2011) definition of play is provided to differentiate the view of play held by the authors of this chapter from those definitions that suggest engagement with play materials in controlled research or assessment settings counts as play. That is, if researchers in structured interviews are asking children to build with blocks, this is not play. Although these studies may provide a window into what is possible with play, the goal of this chapter is to discuss the scholarship on the mathematics children

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engage with in play. Historically, research on mathematical learning has not been heavily emphasized in scholarly work about play; however, mathematical concepts were intertwined with many early educators’ efforts to teach young children in playbased environments. For example, Froebel’s gifts, which included yarn balls and wooden shapes, and Montessori’s materials, which included stacking blocks and varyingly sized cylinders, encouraged children to explore concepts related to both geometry and number (Dockett and Fleer, 1999). Current work looking at the role of play in mathematical learning continues to emphasize children’s engagement with a variety of physical objects. The research presented in this chapter is organized in three sections: what mathematics children learn in play, how adults (teachers and parents) support that learning, and equity issues related to children’s opportunities to learn mathematics in play.

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Learning Mathematics through Play

MATHEMATICS LEARNING THROUGH PLAY In describing the mathematics embedded in children’s play and daily activities, Ginsburg (2006) used the term ‘everyday mathematics’ to refer to the informal mathematical experiences that children engage in as they go about their lives, both in relation to play and in other daily tasks, such as sharing snacks or tapping out rhythms to songs. He argued that mathematics emerged both in play that contained explicitly mathematical terms, such as counting to compare the height of block towers as well as in play that supported the development of mathematical ways of thinking without being explicit, such as a child negotiating how close she can get to a book. In discussing these activities, Ginsburg wrote that ‘the objects and events are not themselves mathematics, but they afford mathematical thinking’ (Ginsburg, 2006: 146). In an empirical study of the frequency and kinds of everyday mathematics occurring in children’s play in preschool, Seo and Ginsburg (2004) found that 88 percent of the children they observed engaged in some kind of mathematical play. The most common kind of mathematical activity during play involved engagement with patterns and shapes (such as creating a pattern by stringing beads on a necklace or building a symmetrical structure with blocks), followed by work with magnitudes and enumeration (such as counting or comparing various toys). Ginsburg defined mathematical activity broadly, including all activities that drew on mathematical concepts such as enumeration and positioning, whether or not children were explicitly focused on the mathematics at the time they engaged in the activity. In looking at mathematical play in out-ofschool contexts, Tudge and Doucet (2004: 26) defined mathematical activity more narrowly, saying that ‘if mathematics were not the focus of the activity, no mathematical activity would be recorded.’ This difference

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of opinion on what ‘counts’ as mathematical play produced different claims in the study, with Tudge and Doucet finding mathematical play to be less frequent in the homes than Seo and Ginsburg found in preschool classrooms. Because work on mathematics and play is relatively new, these differences in definitions have not been explicitly taken up by the field. However, they have the potential to shape both methodological decisions and conversations about the role of instruction and ‘mathematizing’ experiences and language in preschool mathematics curricula designed to build on children’s informal experiences (Ginsburg, Greenes, and Balfanz, 2003; Clements and Sarama, 2007a).

MATHEMATICS STRANDS IN PLAY CONTEXTS Although research documenting the role of play in mathematics learning is not as expansive as work examining the role of play in developing literacy and social skills, researchers have documented the ways play supports the learning within multiple strands in mathematics, including geometry, number, and patterning.

Geometry and Visual Reasoning Studies involving block play are the most well-documented and longest-established site for researching the relationship between play and mathematical learning, particularly in relation to geometry and visual reasoning. In 1934, Guanella created a taxonomy for describing the complexity of the structures children built during block play, from ‘pre-organized,’ where no structure is built, to piles and rows, to solid forms that include closed spaces, to three-dimensional structures. Researchers continue to use similar classification systems. For example, Gregory, Kim, and Whiren (2003) evaluated student structures based on three broad

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categories: the complexity of the building, the complexity of arches, and the number of dimensions (use of points, lines, and planes) in the finished structures. A variety of studies have demonstrated relationships between children’s block play and mathematical thinking more broadly (National Research Council, 2009). In a study of 80 children in a Japanese preschool, Kamii, Miyakawa, and Kato (2004) found that as children grew older, their block play showed increasingly sophisticated logicomathematical knowledge, such as avoiding triangular blocks when attempting to create a tower or combining two triangular blocks to make a square. The authors suggested that block play allows children to uncover spatial relationships for themselves. Similarly, Caldera and colleagues (1999) found that children’s unstructured block play was related to children’s abilities to solve embedded figures tasks, where children had to recognize a figure in a larger design. However, interest and involvement in free block play was not related in the study to performance on block design tests, which required children to reproduce a given structure. Participation in art play did positively correlate with performance on the block design tests. It is worth noting that, like many studies of mathematics and play, the play observed in both of the previously mentioned studies occurred in artificial contexts, with children being taken to separate rooms and being told to build with blocks. Few studies of play have been undertaken in natural contexts in relation to geometric and spatial learning; however, studies of more formal measures suggest that this may be a promising area for exploration. For example, Wolfgang, Stannard, and Jones (2001) found that four-year-old children’s performance on a block measure was positively correlated with their mathematics achievement in seventh grade and high school, even when results were controlled for measures of IQ. The same group of researchers found a similar relationship when they examined the impact of play with Lego

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blocks on later mathematics achievement (Wolfgang, Stannard, and Jones, 2003). The literature related to spatial learning through play with puzzles is far more scarce than that on block play, although some studies have described the ways in which puzzles support geometric thinking such as mental rotation (Levine, Vasilyeva, Lourenco, Newcombe, and Huttenlocher, 2005) and composition and decomposition of figures (Parks and Blom, 2013). Most puzzle studies involve children’s performance in assessment, instruction, or laboratory-like settings, particularly with geometric puzzles (Clements, Wilson, and Sarama, 2004; Marshall, 2004; Evans, Feenstra, Ryon, and McNeill, 2011). Few studies have examined puzzle play in informal contexts or with common commercially available puzzles. However, one recent study documented naturally occurring puzzle play at home with puzzles which families already owned (Levine, Ratliff, Huttenlocher, and Cannon, 2012). The researchers found that about half of the 53 observed children, who ranged in age between 26 and 46 months, engaged in puzzle play at least once over the course of six observation sessions and that these children who played with puzzles performed better on tests of spatial skills given at 54 months than those who were not observed playing with puzzles. The authors note that their study found puzzle play predicts later achievement on tests of spatial ability, but does not indicate the relationship is causal.

Number and Counting While puzzles and blocks have been the toys primarily associated with learning about geometry and space, games have been key in studies of play and number. This is perhaps unsurprising given that some of the earliest examples of play and mathematics date back to board and dice games of ancient times (Zaslavsky, 1991). In their body of work, Siegler and Ramani (2008, 2009) and Ramani and Siegler (2008) demonstrated that playing games promotes number development in

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young children. Focusing on low-income children in the United States, Siegler and Ramani found that playing linear board games for brief periods of time – as little as four 15-minute sessions – improved children’s abilities to complete number line estimation tasks, count, and make comparisons. Studies in other contexts have found similar results, including a study of Scottish children that found playing both linear number board games and number card games improved children’s performance on assessments of early numeracy skills (Whyte and Bull, 2008); a study of linear game board playing in Hong Kong (Wang and Hung, 2010); and a study of the impact of games and numberrelated books on diverse children in New Zealand (Young-Loveridge, 2004). Like most of the studies related to puzzles, these studies of game playing took place in formal conditions, where children met with an individual researcher or teacher. However, Ramani and Siegler (2008) did find that children’s performance on numerical assessments was correlated with the frequency with which children played board games at home, particularly traditional counting games such as Snakes and Ladders (or the commercial Chutes and Ladders). Interestingly, performance on these assessments was not correlated with frequency of play of card games and video games. Based on their body of work, Ramani and Siegler argue that play with board games provides important preparation for early numeracy. In their ethnographic study of early numeracy practices, Anderson and Gold (2006) point out that even ‘cheating’ at games like Chutes and Ladders provides opportunities for adults to learn about children’s mathematical know­ ledge, describing a child who intentionally miscounted to achieve a desired outcome. Looking broadly, in a study of 90 diverse children’s use of mathematics during preschool free play, Seo and Ginsburg (2004) found that 12 percent of the observed mathematical play involved enumeration, including counting, subitizing, and reading numbers. Children engaged in enumeration while playing with

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beads and other small toys, talking about their lives, and comparing toys. Beyond noting that such counting and comparison goes on, little work has been done to explore numeracy practices throughout children’s play in a variety of contexts. A few studies point toward possible avenues of investigation, including Anderson’s (1997) study of mathematics involved in parent–child book reading and van Nes and van Eerde’s (2010) study that included numeracy in block building.

Patterning and Algebra Almost no work has been done examining the role of patterning and algebraic thinking in children’s play, beyond brief mentions in other studies. In their study of play, Seo and Ginsburg (2004) found that 21 per cent of observed play involved pattern and shape. This was the largest percentage of any category, but it included practices such as identifying shapes and finding geometric relationships, in addition to creating and identifying patterns. Seo and Ginsburg did observe some children making alternating patterns with blocks and other toys. Although not an empirical study, Taylor-Cox (2003) suggested that children encounter patterns through their play, including in chants, songs, and rhythm games. Similarly, Warren and Miller (2010) found that Indigenous children in Australia entered kindergarten with some understanding of patterning, which would indicate that children do have some experiences with patterns in informal contexts. More studies are certainly needed to document the kinds of mathematical play that children may engage in related to patterning and quantitative modelling, as well as the ways in which educators might draw on that play in formal lessons.

THE ROLE OF THE TEACHER Historically, public support for mathematics learning through play has been influenced by perspectives on play broadly and by cultural

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shifts between preferences for studentcentered or teacher-directed mathematics instruction. Today, there is growing interest in the role of adults, particularly teachers, in research about mathematical play. Within mathematics education, much of the work on play has seen play from an instrumental perspective, that is in terms of the extent to which play does or does not promote mathematical learning (Ginsburg, Lee, and Boyd, 2008; National Research Council, 2009), and the role of adults has been seen as making the mathematics of play explicit for children (van Oers, 2010). Typically, research has found that teachers do not do as much as they could to make connections between mathematics and play, either because they spend little time observing children’s play (Seo and Ginsburg, 2004), lack knowledge of the range of mathematics embedded in play (Moseley, 2005), or find their interactions with children during play constrained by prescriptive curricula (Parks and BridgesRhoads, 2012). To address these concerns, researchers have designed a number of mathematics curricula for preschool classrooms that aim to include play-like tasks, such as games, puzzles, and block building, in an effort to both engage students and support the intentional learning of mathematics (Ginsburg, Greenes, and Balfanz, 2003; Sophian, 2004; Clements and Samara, 2007b). Although the design and implementation of these curricula has been widely reviewed, these texts have not been treated in great depth here because the tasks, while engaging, lack some of the defining characteristics of play (for example, freely chosen, self-directed). However, in looking particularly at free play, some research in mathematics education has demonstrated that adults can effectively spotlight mathematics for children without disrupting the play (Seo, 2003; Eisenhauer and Feikes, 2009). For example, Gregory, Kim, and Whiren (2003) designed an experimental study to examine the role of adults in scaffolding complex construction with blocks in United States of America

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classrooms, while working to preserve the play context. To do this, the researchers asked student teachers in experimental classrooms to sit in the block corner and encourage students to play with blocks by building themselves. The student teachers were asked to avoid directing play, but to pose problems with the phrasing: ‘I wonder if…’ and to make leading statements such as ‘sometimes people use a block to join a structure…’ (123). Gregory, Kim, and Whiren found that children who played with blocks in the experimental classroom built more complicated structures than children who did not have similar adult interactions. Similarly, Casey and colleagues (2008) found that when teachers told stories that encouraged students to build more complicated block structures, performance on a variety of measures of spatial skills went up. In Korea, Hong (1996) found that when teachers read mathematics-related story books, children’s frequency of mathematical play increased. Several studies have found that when teachers engaged in brief teacher-initiated introductions to concepts, children later took up these ideas in play (Klibanoff, Levine, Huttenlocher, Vasilyeva, and Hedges, 2006). In a study of ‘pre-prep’ (three to four-year-old) Indigenous students in Brisbane, teachers and researchers worked together as they examined videotapes of the teachers’ classrooms to identify play (Thomas, Warren, and deVries, 2011). In reflecting on the videos of the children during free play, the teachers noted that the children were able to transfer their mathematical knowledge to other pupils in the classroom and that children brought the ideas raised in teacher-directed introduction of activities to their play. Teachers then reflected on their own pedagogical practices to consider how to further support children’s learning. In a year-long case study observing how a preschool teacher supported children’s mathematics learning in a play-based classroom, Wager (2013) similarly found that children took up mathematical activities introduced by the teacher. In a review of literature on the role of adults in scaffolding

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mathematical learning in preschool, Anthony and Walshaw (2009) found evidence that ‘the most effective settings for young learners provide a balance between opportunities for children to benefit from teacher-initiated group work and freely chosen, yet potentially instructive, play activities’ (117).

ISSUES OF EQUITY AND DIVERSITY IN RESEARCH ON MATHEMATICS AND PLAY One of the most interesting issues in work around difference in relation to mathematics and play is how frequently and for how long gender has been an object of attention, without any widespread agreement being produced on the role of gender in the kinds of play children choose or the impact of that play on their mathematical learning. Studies have found both significant differences in relation to gender (Newcombe and Sanderson, 1993; Levine, Huttenlocher, Taylor, and Langrock, 1999) and relatively few differences (Seo and Ginsburg, 2004; Jordan et al., 2006). However, often when findings about gender are reported, evidence of difference rather than similarity seems to be emphasized. For example, the National Research Council report (2009) on mathematics in early childhood cites two studies to document claims that boys engage in more construction and spatial play. The report goes on to say that ‘such differences may interact with biology to account for early spatial skill advantages for boys’ (National Research Council, 2009: 182). This sentence is followed with a parenthetical statement that some studies have found no gender differences, after which five studies are cited in which no gender difference has been found, which undermines the previous claim of significant difference. In her study of girls and mathematics in the UK, Walkerdine (1998) discusses a similar phenomenon, saying that her previous study on play, which found only a marginal difference between the amount of construction versus creative play that girls

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and boys did, was reported as evidence boys did more constructive play than girls, making the data – in Walkerdine’s words – ‘say exactly what they do not say’ (1998: 62). This framing of gender to emphasize difference, when contradictory evidence is widely available, is problematic because it works to reinforce stereotypes of girls as unfit for certain kinds of mathematics. Certainly, there is some evidence for gender difference in block play. For example, a review of research found that children who engaged in ‘masculine play’, such as blocks, performed better on measures of spatial reasoning and other mathematics skills (Tracy, 1987). Summaries of literature indicate that boys express a greater preference for block play than girls (Kersh, Casey, and Young, 2008) and that boys do better on spatial tasks related to block play such as rotations and transformations (Levine, Huttenlocher, Taylor, and Langrock, 1999). However, the number of studies that have found little to no differences suggest the story of gender difference is not as clear as it is commonly portrayed. For example, Caldera and colleagues (1999) found that boys and girls played with blocks in similar ways, with girls using more unique shapes and boys building more structures. In addition, girls and boys in their study did not differ in their performance on tests of visual–spatial skills. They also found that art, an attractive play activity for both boys and girls, was related to spatial skills. Recent work seems to indicate that gender differences related to mathematics and play are subtle and must be described with nuance. For example, Levine, Ratliff, Huttenlocher, and Cannon (2012) found that boys and girls did roughly equal amounts of puzzle play in their homes, but the quality of puzzle play (which included parent engagement, parent spatial language, and puzzle difficulty) was higher for boys. In addition, although Caldera and colleagues noted no significant differences between boys and girls in terms of block structures or performance on assessments, teachers did rate boys as more strongly

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preferring manipulative toys. Studies like this suggest that closer examinations of gender in play are necessary. There have been fewer studies examining the role of race, ethnicity, and class than of gender in relation to mathematics and play. As with gender, some of this work has documented significant differences along these lines of difference, while other work has found more similarities than differences. In their survey of mathematical play at preschool, Seo and Ginsburg (2004) found no significant differences between the time spent in mathematics play among low-income, middle-income, and upper-income children. In fact, in their study low-income children spent slightly more time on math-related play. In earlier work, less focused on play than on some play-like tasks, Ginsburg and Russell (1981) also found no significant differences in performances related to race or social class. When Tudge and Doucet (2004) studied mathematical play in the homes of 39 three-year-olds they found similar results, noting that some children did engage in a great deal more mathematical play than others, but this finding could not be explained by race or class. In contrast, other work has noted significant differences between children based on class and race. Although much of this work has focused on children’s performances on assessment tasks, some has considered the role of play. For example, as part of a broader study of young children’s early mathematical learning, Saxe and colleagues (1987) interviewed mothers about mathematics-related activities in which their children participated at home and found that, while mothers reported all children brought numbers into their play at least once a week, middle-class mothers engaged in more complex mathematical interactions with their children. Based on a phone survey, Blevins-Knabe and Musun-Miller (1996) report that Euro-American and African American parents report roughly similar amounts of mathematical activity but, while the increased frequency of some activities correlates with achievement

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on standardized mathematics tests for the White families surveyed, it does not for the Black families. Research with Indigenous children in Australia has shown that teacher intervention in play-based programmes may reduce some of these early differences between groups of minority and majority students as teachers begin to consciously incorporate mathematical language into their play with children (Warren, Thomas, and DeVries, 2011). Beyond describing difference, Starkey and Klein argue that ‘the home and preschool environments of impoverished children provided limited learning opportunities in mathematics’ (2000: 661) as a warrant for their proposed intervention with working-class parents of preschoolers. This characterization of the research on early mathematics learning and play is offered in a variety of intervention and curriculum studies (Starkey, Klein, and Wakeley, 2004; Clements and Samara, 2007b). To make these claims, these studies often describe those referred to in the preceding paragraphs, which found relatively modest or no differences in the early mathematical experiences of young children. Just as with the scholarship on gender, there seems to be a tendency to emphasize differences, and often deficits, rather than similarities. The relatively small differences reported about frequency of mathematical activity in play in the homes and preschools of young children of diverse race and class backgrounds stands in contrast to children’s performance on many measures of mathematical achievement once they enter school. Anderson and Gold’s (2006) ethnographic study of four minority children attending an urban preschool may shed some light on this phenomenon. The researchers observed children’s mathematical play both at home and at school and found that teachers tended to overlook mathematical strengths or failed to recognize competencies students developed at home. Tudge and Doucet (2004: 23) hypothesize that the varying results on the relationships between mathematics, play, race, and class may result from ‘the fact that the methods of collecting

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data are very different.’ They argue that phone and interview studies may miss mathematical interactions that were unobserved or unrecognized by parents. Similarly, in examining research about the impact of class on school readiness for mathematics in the United Kingdom, Street, Baker, and Tomlin (2008) argue that many of the assessments used rely on knowledge of school language and as such are more descriptive of children’s knowledge of the discourse of school than of their early mathematics experiences. The theoretical perspectives and ethical commitments framing these studies seem equally important to consider. Theories that minimize social context or power relations may make it difficult to recognize mathematical activity that does not look like the mathematics produced in mainstream public school classrooms. Similarly, the question of whether researchers seek to name difference and discrepancies so they can be remediated in preschool or kindergarten intervention programmes, or to highlight previously unrecognized funds of knowledge in children’s homes means they are likely to produce different results. There are few other ethnographic studies of children’s mathematics learning and play outside of school. Out-of-school mathematical practices are well documented in older children (Abreu, Bishop, and Presmeg, 2002) but the study of play and mathematics outside of school with younger children is limited. Those scholars who have focused on these practices note the varying experiences and support levels children received from adults. Focusing on observations of the interactions and discourse in out-of-school settings, Aubrey, Bottle, and Godfrey (2003) examined preschool children’s mathematical development. They found that children experienced varying levels of mathematical discourse and play-oriented approaches to learning in their homes. They raise these issues as potential barriers to learning when the children arrive at formal schooling. These findings are similar to those of LeFevre, Skwarchuk, Smith-Chant, Fast, Kamawar, and Bisanz (2009) who, through parent reports on surveys of informal home

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numeracy practices, identified wide variances in the types and frequency of mathematical activities in which they engaged with their children. In another study of home practices, Bjorklund, Hubertz, and Reubens (2004) extended Siegler and Ramani’s (2008) scholarship on board games to understand how the social context of game playing influenced the number and frequency of strategies used by five-year-olds while playing Chutes and Ladders. These studies suggest that an important aspect of mathematizing children’s play includes considering the cultural context in which play develops and understanding the variety of multiple mathematical practices that occur in children’s homes.

CONCLUSION A review of literature on mathematics and play would be incomplete without addressing current pressures and tensions regarding the ‘academization’ of early childhood mathematics. Although the research presented in the previous section provides evidence of the many ways in which children learn mathematics through play, two phenomena are driving recommendations for teaching practices that are incongruent with what is known about the importance of play in early childhood. Several recent studies found that success in early mathematics is positively linked to later learning (Duncan et al., 2007; Jordan, Kaplan, Ramineni, and Locuniak, 2009; Romano, Kohen, Babchishin, and Pagini, 2010). These studies, and political pressure to raise achievement, are driving an increased focus on teacher-directed instruction (Zigler and Bishop-Josef, 2006; Fleer, 2011) despite scholarship in early childhood that confirms children learn best in a play-based environment (Bredekamp, 2004; Bodrova, 2008). To find convergence between these two ideologies, scholars have suggested identifying those practices that bridge the two (Anthony and Walshaw, 2009; Fleer, 2011; Johnson, this volume).

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The current research on mathematics and play is plagued by two key shortcomings: a dearth of studies in natural settings and the framing of results of studies on equity. Addressing these shortcomings is critical in order to effectively participate in policy and education discussions about increasing teacher-directed instruction in preschool and in building relationships between schools and families. In this chapter, evidence of the meaningful mathematics which young children are capable of has been discussed. Many of the studies have occurred in formal contexts, either in the classroom or a lab, which assess a child’s potential in those particular settings but do not explore the possible learning opportunities in natural settings. To truly understand what and how children learn mathematics through play, they need to be observed as they engage in play in their school, home, and community. Ethnographic studies are needed that identify the spaces in which mathematics emerge spontaneously in play, in order to provide teachers and the field with explicit examples of when children engage in mathematics and how teachers can respond in ways that support mathematics learning. These studies are particularly critical in the current setting, in which advocates for maintaining developmentally appropriate playbased learning environments are being challenged by global efforts to increase formal instruction in early childhood mathematics.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The writing of this chapter was supported in part by grants from the National Science Foundation (1019431; 844445). The opinions expressed in this chapter do not necessarily reflect the position, policy, or endorsement of the National Science Foundation.

REFERENCES Abreu, G. de, Bishop, A. J. and Presmeg, N. C. (eds) (2002) Transitions between Contexts of Mathematical Practices. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer.

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Clements, D. H., Wilson, D. C. and Sarama, J. (2004) ‘Young children’s composition of geometric figures: A learning trajectory’, Mathematical Thinking and Learning, 6(2): 163–84. Dockett, S. and Fleer, M. (1999) Pedagogy and Play in Early Childhood Education: Bending the Rules. Sydney: Harcourt Brace. Duncan, G. J., Dowsett, C. J., Claessens, A., Magnuson, K., Klebanov, P., Pagani, L. S., Feinstein, L., Engel, M., Brooks-Gunn, J., Sexton, H., Duckworth, K. and Japel, C. (2007) ‘School readiness and later achievement’, Developmental Psychology, 43(6): 1428–46. Eisenhauer, M. J. and Feikes, D. (2009) ‘Dolls, blocks, and puzzles: Playing with mathematical understandings’, Young Children, 64(3): 18–24. Evans, M. A., Feenstra, E., Ryon, E. and McNeill, D. (2011) ‘A multimodal approach to coding discourse: Collaboration, distributed cognition, and geometric reasoning’, International Journal of ComputerSupported Collaborative Learning, 6(2): 253–78. Fleer, M. (2011) ‘“Conceptual Play”: Foregrounding imagination and cognition during concept formation in early years education’, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 12(3): 224–40. Ginsburg, H. P. (2006) ‘Mathematical play and playful mathematics: A guide for early education’, in D. G. Singer, R. M. Golinkoff and K. Hirsh-Pasek (eds), Play = Learning: How Play Motivates and Enhances Children’s Cognitive and Social-Emotional Growth. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 145–65. Ginsburg, H. P. and Russell, R. L. (1981) ‘Social class and racial influences on early mathematical thinking’, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 1–69. Ginsburg, H. P., Greenes, C. and Balfanz, R. (2003) Big Math for Little Kids. Parsippany, NJ: Dale Seymour Publications. Ginsburg, H. P., Lee, J. S., and Boyd, J. S. (2008) ‘Mathematics education for young children: What it is and how to promote it’, Social Policy Report: Giving Child and Youth Development Knowledge Away, 22(1), 3–22. Gregory, K. M., Kim, A. S. and Whiren, A. (2003) ‘The effect of verbal scaffolding on the complexity of preschool children’s block constructions’, in D. E. Lytle (ed.), Play and Educational Theory and Practice. Westport, CT: Praeger. pp. 117–33. Hong, H. (1996) ‘Effects of mathematics learning through children’s literature on math achievement and dispositional outcomes’, Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 11: 477–94. Jordan, N. C., Kaplan, D., Oláh, L. N. and Locuniak, M. N. (2006) ‘Number sense growth in kindergarten: A

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longitudinal investigation of children at risk for mathematics difficulties’, Child Development, 77: 153–75. Jordan, N. C., Kaplan, D., Ramineni, C. and Locuniak, M. N. (2009) ‘Early math matters: Kindergarten number competence and later mathematics outcomes’, Developmental Psychology, 45: 850–67. Kamii, C., Miyakawa, Y. and Kato, Y. (2004) ‘The development of logico-mathematical knowledge in a block-building activity at ages 1–4’, Journal of Research in Childhood Education, 19(1): 44–57. Kersh, J., Casey, B. M. and Young, J. M. (2008) ‘Research on spatial skills and block building in girls and boys: The relationship to later mathematics learning’, in O’Neil, J. M. and Egan, J. (eds), Contemporary Pers­ pectives on Mathematics in Early Childhood Education. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. pp. 233–51. Klibanoff, R. S., Levine, S. C., Huttenlocher, J., Vasilyeva, M. and Hedges, L. V. (2006) ‘Pre-school children’s mathematical knowledge: The effect of teacher “Math Talk”’, Developmental Psychology, 42(1): 56–69. LeFevre, J., Skwarchuk, S., Smith-Chant, B. L., Fast, L., Kamawar, D. and Bisanz, J. (2009) ‘Home numeracy experiences and children’s math performance in the early school years’, Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science/Revue Canadienne Des Sciences Du Comportement, 41(2): 55–66. Levine, S. C., Huttenlocher, J., Taylor, A. and Langrock, A. (1999) ‘Early sex differences in spatial skill’, Developmental Psychology, 35(4): 940–9. Levine, S. C., Ratliff, K. R., Huttenlocher, J. and Cannon, J. (2012) ‘Early puzzle play: A predictor of preschoolers’ spatial transformation skill’, Developmental Psychology, 48(2): 530–42. Levine, S. C., Vasilyeva, M., Lourenco, S. F., Newcombe, N. S. and Huttenlocher, J. (2005) ‘Socioeconomic status modifies the sex difference in spatial skill’, Psychological Science, 16(11): 841–5. Marshall, J. A. (2004) ‘Construction of meaning: Urban elementary students’ interpretation of geometric puzzles’, The Journal of Mathematical Behavior, 23(2): 169–82. Moseley, B. (2005) ‘Pre-service early childhood educators’ perceptions of math-mediated language’, Early Education and Development, 16(3): 385–96. National Research Council (2009) Mathematics Learning in Early Childhood: Paths Toward Excellence and Equity. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. Newcombe, N. S. and Sanderson, H. L. (1993) The Relation Between Preschoolers’ Everyday Activities

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and Spatial Ability. New Orleans, LA: Society for Research in Child Development. Parks, A. N. and Blom, D. C. (2013) ‘Helping young children see math in play’, Teaching Children Mathematics, 20(5): 310–17. Parks, A. N. and Bridges-Rhoads, S. (2012) ‘Overly scripted: Exploring the impact of a scripted literacy curriculum on a preschool teacher’s instructional practices in mathematics’, Journal of Research in Childhood Education, 26(3): 308–24. Ramani, G. B. and Siegler, R. S. (2008) ‘Promoting broad and stable improvements in low-income children’s numerical knowledge through playing number board games’, Child Development, 79(2): 375–94. Romano, E., Kohen, D., Babchishin, L. and Pagini, L. S. (2010) ‘School readiness and later achievement: Replication and extension study using a nation-wide Canadian survey’, Developmental Psychology, 46: 995–1007. Saxe, G. B., Guberman, S. R., Gearhart, M., Gelman, R., Massey, C. R. and Rogoff, B. (1987) ‘Social process in early number development’, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 52(2): 1–162. Seo, K. H. (2003) ‘What children’s play tells us about teaching mathematics’, Young Children, 58(1): 28–34. Seo, K. H. and Ginsburg, H. P. (2004) ‘What is developmentally appropriate in early childhood mathe­matics education? Lessons from new research’, in D.H. Clements and J. Sarama (eds), Engaging Young Children in Mathematics: Standards for Early Childhood Mathematics Education Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum pp. 91–104. Siegler, R. S. and Ramani, G. B. (2008) ‘Playing linear numerical board games promotes low-income children’s numerical development’, Developmental Science, 11(5): 655–61. Siegler, R. S. and Ramani, G. B. (2009) ‘Playing linear number board games – but not circular ones – improves low-income preschoolers’ numerical understanding’, Journal of Educational Psychology, 101(3): 545–60. Sophian, C. (2004) ‘Mathematics for the future: Developing a Head Start curriculum to support mathematics learning’, Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 19(1): 59–81. Starkey, P. and Klein, A. (2000) ‘Fostering parental support for children’s mathematical development: An intervention with Head Start families’, Early Education and Development, 11(5): 659–80. Starkey, P., Klein, A. and Wakeley, A. (2004) ‘Enhancing young children’s mathematical knowledge through a

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pre-kindergarten mathematics intervention’, Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 19(1): 99–120. Street, B., Baker, D. and Tomlin, A. (2008) Navigating Numeracies: Home/School Numeracy Practices. New York: Springer. Taylor-Cox, J. (2003) ‘ALGEBRA in the Early Years?’, Yes! Young Children, 58(1): 14–21. Thomas, L., Warren, E. and deVries, E. (2011) ‘Playbased learning and intentional teaching in early childhood contexts’, Australian Journal of Early Childhood, 36(4): 69–75. Tracy, D. M. (1987) ‘Toys, spatial ability, and science and mathematics achievement: Are they related?’, Sex Roles, 17(3): 115–38. Tudge, J. R. H. and Doucet, F. (2004) ‘Early mathematical experiences: Observing Black and White children’s everyday activities’, Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 19(1): 21–39. van Nes, F. and van Eerde, D. (2010) ‘Spatial structuring and the development of number sense: A case study of young children working with blocks’, The Journal of Mathematical Behavior, 29(3): 145–59. van Oers, B. (2010) ‘Emergent mathematical thinking in the context of play’, Educational Studies in Mathematics, 74: 23–37. Wager, A. A. (2013) ‘Practices that support mathe­ matics learning in play’, in L. English (ed.), Recon­ceptualising Early Mathematics Learning. New York: Springer. pp. 163–82. Walkerdine, V. (1998) Counting Girls Out. (Volume 8.) London: Routledge. Wang, Z. and Hung, L. M. (2010) ‘Kindergarten children’s number sense development through board games’, The International Journal of Learning, 17(8): 19–31. Warren, E. and Miller, J. (2010) ‘Indigenous children’s ability to pattern as they enter kindergarten/pre-prep settings: An exploratory study’, in L. Sparrow, B. Kissane, and C. Hurst (eds), Shaping the Future of Mathematics Education: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Mathematics Education Research Group of Australasia. Fremantle, Western Australia: MERGA.pp. 594–601. Warren, E., Thomas, L. and DeVries, E. (2011) ‘Engaging indigenous children in mathematical learning in an early childhood setting’, International Journal of Pedagogies and Learning, 6(2): 97–107. Whyte, J. C. and Bull, R. (2008) ‘Number games, magnitude representation, and basic number skills in preschoolers’, Developmental Psychology, 44(2): 588–96. Wolfgang, C. H., Stannard, L. L. and Jones, I. (2001) ‘Block play performance among preschoolers as a predictor

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of later school achievement in mathematics’, Journal of Research in Childhood Education, 15(2): 173–80. Wolfgang, C., Stannard, L. and Jones, I. (2003) ‘Advanced constructional play with Legos among preschoolers as a predictor of later school achievement in mathematics’, Early Child Development and Care, 173(5): 467–75. Young-Loveridge, J. M. (2004) ‘Effects on early numeracy of a program using number books and games’, Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 19: 82–98.

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Zaslavsky, C. (1991) ‘World cultures in the mathematics class’, For the Learning of Mathematics, 11(2): 32–6. Zigler, E. F. and Bishop-Josef, S. J. (2006) ‘The cognitive child vs. the whole child: Lessons from 40 years of Head Start’, in D. G. Singer, R. M. Golinkoff and K. A. Hirsh-Pasek (eds), Play = Learning: How Play Motivates and Enhances Children’s Cognitive and Social-Emotional Growth. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 15–35.

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19 Play as the Precursor for Literacy Development Celia Genishi and Anne Haas Dyson

INTRODUCTION We begin with a fictionalized illustration of children’s need for play, of their abilities to make time and space for imaginative action. Those we have in mind are the children of ‘picture brides’ who emigrated from Japan to the United States in the early 1900s, whose children invent scenes in a context that is dominated by work. In Julie Otsuka’s (2011) novel The Buddha in the Attic, an omniscient narrator describes the trying lives of Japanese women in California whose first aim and obligation is to marry Japanese men. Once the obligation is fulfilled, many couples have children, who join their parents in large agricultural fields as soon as they are able. About the working children, the narrator recounts: They hauled water. They cleared brush. They shoveled weeds. They chopped wood… Many complained. They had stomachaches. Headaches… (Otsuka, 2011: 64).

About the parents’ bleak circumstances as recent immigrants, the narrator declares,

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‘Not once did we have the money to buy them a single toy’ (65). Then listen to what follows: And yet they played for hours like calves in the fields. They made swords out of broken grape stakes and dueled to a draw beneath the trees. They made kites out of newspaper and balsa wood… They made twisted up dolls out of wire and straw and did evil things to them with sharpened chopsticks in the woods. They played shadow catch shadow on moonlit nights in the orchards, just as we had back home in Japan. They played kick the can and mumblety-peg and jan ken po [rock, paper, scissors] (Otsuka, 2011: 65).

In short, ‘they’, the children, showed agency, without a single store-bought toy. We open with these excerpts to argue that many children’s worlds throughout history have not been ‘child-centred’; yet children have persistently invented scenes in which environmental objects like wooden grape stakes become powerful symbols, as do ephemeral shadows on a moonlit night. Adults in contemporary early childhood

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settings may forbid sword play or turn their gaze away from edgy doll play, but they would recognize that children, including those younger than Otsuka’s fictionalized ones, need to create their play spaces, whatever the regulated task at hand. In short, play has continually accompanied children’s activities, including the work that is often referred to as school learning. It is as natural within children’s repertoires as any activities or behaviours could be, since it thrives without instruction. Now to the basics of definition: we focus on young children from birth to about eight years of age, the range defined by the United States’ National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC). By play we mean activity, observable or not, that is grounded in children’s understanding and use of symbols, things that stand for other things and that develop in complex ways controlled by children (Vygotsky, 1978). We assert that young children’s play is interwoven with their agency, their ability to choose their actions and the direction of their actions without others’ instruction. Agency can include the way an individual regulates herself or himself and the ways individuals express themselves through a variety of symbolic means (Rogoff, 2003). Moreover, agency can be both individual and collective, especially in cultures in which participating in and contributing to group activity or progress is valued, where combining one person’s agency with another’s or others’ is culturally appropriate or even expected (Rogoff, 2003; Adair, 2012). Children’s play quickly comes to mind as an example of individual or collective agency embedded in social enterprises that children lace with complex symbols (Paley, 2004).

CHILDREN AT PLAY AND AT WORK: A COMPLICATED DICHOTOMY In this section we provide an overview of contemporary early childhood settings in different parts of the USA, from pre-kindergarten

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(preK; children aged three–five), where children are still observed to play, to grade 2 (children aged seven–eight), where work dominates in the form of lessons and seat work. There is no need to turn to novels to find examples of children creating their own play spaces: we can walk through a nearby park or a classroom or centre on the other side of the globe (Corsaro, 2011; Gupta, 2011). But the example from fiction makes us question what early childhood educators aim to do, why the curriculum is as it is when, on their own, children take to play ‘like calves in the fields’. Young children remind adults that, with or without permission or store-bought toys, they are agents of play, resisting an all-work curriculum. Researchers in varied settings illustrate children’s resistance or agency when they show increasing, not decreasing, numbers of imaginative behaviours in Head Start classrooms (Sparks, 2012) and the capacity to play in a literacy-dominated environment. Wohlwend (2011), for example, argues that play is a literacy that incorporates multiple modes or representations and reflects kindergartners’ capacities to design and dramatize classroom events. Unsurprisingly, they demonstrate these capacities in an atypical kindergarten where the teacher makes time and space for play. Given a bit of time and space, young children play not only in the fields but also across the psychological domains of development. Singer, Golinkoff, and Hirsh-Pasek (2006) amply affirm that children develop and learn as they participate in storytelling narratives, recess, math events, and computer- and video-based play, activities that are becoming scarce in US kindergarten through grade 2 settings (see also Rogers, 2011, for an international perspective). In these settings educational aims are reflected in the traditional curriculum – that is, what teachers or curriculum writers intend to be taught, rather than whatever unfolds in the classroom between and among children and teachers. These aims have evolved into a workand not play-based curriculum. For at least a decade the early primary years, for five– seven-year-olds, have been marked by a shift

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to academics, so that both kindergarten teachers and teacher educators may say that ‘kindergarten is the new first grade’. And because first grade has traditionally been the year in which children learn to read, kindergarten teachers now feel pressured to achieve that goal (Genishi and Dyson, 2009). Prekindergarten teachers are generally less pressured than their primary-grade colleagues to devote designated times of the day to literacy learning, but pre-kindergarten teachers too have fallen within the pale of academic pushdown (Genishi, Yung-Chan, and Stires, 2000). Other intrusions on children’s agendas and timelines include the disappearance of recess (Elder and Obel-Omia, 2012). Further evidence of ‘pushdown’ in the USA is the handbook entitled Teaching the Common Core Standards for English Language Arts, PreK–2 (Morrow, Shanahan, and Wixson, 2013). In short, the capture of pre-kindergarten by advocates of academic curricula in all subject areas is nearly complete, as most of the United States adopts common curricular standards. Moreover, since 2010 the set of United States education policies known as Race to the Top has directly affected the rate of adoption, because individual states increase their chances of receiving federal funding when they adopt these standards (Lewin, 2010; see also Kee, 2011, for Singaporean parents’ perspective on the pressures of academic standards). A review of state standards for pre-kindergarten reveals a number of ‘child-centred’ guidelines, for example ‘Actively and confidently engages in play as a means of exploration and learning’ (New York State Education Department, 2012: 10; for similar sentiments, see Illinois State Board of Education, 2013). However, anecdotal evidence and research on early literacy practices document many more phonics lessons than play episodes (Neuman and Roskos, 2005). Why then, with official permission granted to include play in the early childhood curriculum, is play absent in many schools? Is one answer the historic dichotomy between work and play and the adult need to abide by

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a work ethic? We propose that a work ethic and academic pushdown are not the only sources of pressure to transform classrooms into work sites. A deeper source may be childism (Pierce and Allen, 1975; YoungBruehl, 2012), an overarching term for a range of prejudices against children resulting in child abuse and neglect, treatment as ‘property’ or ‘trophies’ or, we would add, treatment as small adults without the everyday right to behave like children.

PLAY AS THE TERRAIN OF SYMBOLIC LEARNING And yet, whether on farms after the work day ends or in lessons between curricular objectives, children continue to play. Indeed, no matter where one goes in the world, if there are children, there is likely to be play. As Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (cited in Dargan and Zeitlin, 1990: 28) writes, play ‘is an arena of choice in many contexts where life options are limited’. In this arena, young children use their bodies’ movements, their voices, and material artefacts – and eventually lines and curves on a page – to create imaginary worlds in ‘settings that they did not build and over which they may have relatively little control’ (see Lester and Russell, this volume). How does such world-creating begin? Ironically, given its assigned place as antonymic to school learning, play provides the terrain for children’s symbol development, including that of written language. To explain the foundational role of play, we draw on socio-cultural theories of symbol use (Vygotsky, 1978) and of childhood interactions (for example, Corsaro, 2011; Goodwin and Kyratzis, 2011). For very young children, meaning resides in objects and in the recurrent activities that give them meaning (Parker-Rees, this volume). Children’s actions, then, initially are constrained by the material situations of their everyday lives. Krauss’s (1952) book A Hole Is to Dig captures these relations between

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meaning and objects, and meaning and actions, perfectly. A hole is to dig, just as a door is to open, a box is to fill, a window is to look out and spoons are to eat with. Things have, in Vygotsky’s words, a ‘motivating force’ (1978: 96). In play, though, things lose that singular force. Wilful children learn that ideas can transform the mundane, the seemingly set world. That is, through play, children are motivated not by the material situation, but by its assigned meaning. Imagine, for example, a young child, or maybe a couple, who climb into a big box. One begins to steer. With that steering, the box becomes a car, and the children become travellers down the road – all by themselves! No adults needed! Maybe the other child picks up a smaller box and rocks that box back and forth, telling the other one ‘shhh’. With that rocking and shushing, the box becomes a baby, the child a caring parent as well as a traveller. In that imagined vignette, the box is not yet a symbol for a baby, nor is the bigger box a symbol for a car, because their meanings depend on child action. For Vygotsky, play is a ‘pivot’ (1978: 98) that helps children detach meaning from an object (an actual car, a real baby) so that it can be recreated in another situation, an imaginary one that allows them to manipulate and examine their world. Children thus enter the realm of abstract thought and, in the process, gain some measure of freedom, even as they follow the rules of their worlds (mothers do not throw babies out the car window). In Otsuka’s (2011) book, a broken grape stake could become a sword because it could be used by duelling children in an imagined scene. Indeed, work tasks themselves could be reimagined, as when the chore of making packing crates became a contest of speed, the children themselves becoming athletes in a unique competition. Imagine now those two children travelling down the road in their car. One notices that a corner of the box has been crunched in. ‘Oh no’, the child says to her companion. They have had an ‘accident’. Symbolically, their

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behaviour is now more complex. Not only is the box now a symbol for the car but also that symbol is the basis for another symbol – a crunched-in section of the box symbolizes the after effects of an ‘accident’. This is second-order symbolism – one symbol serves as the basis for a second. It develops first in play, said Vygotsky, but it is also the basis for written language, in which one symbol (a graphic word) symbolizes another (a spoken word) (Vygotsky, 1978: 109). In this account of playful action, we want to underscore children’s language use, particularly their talk with other children. During the preschool period, when children’s coordinated nonverbal play gives way to more elaborate use of language, children may use their talk to establish the play frame (for example: ‘pretend I’m the mother’), to name the transformed identities of people, objects and places (‘this is our car’), and to carry the narrative forward (Franklin, 1983; Goodwin and Kyratzis, 2011). Children can stay within the play frame itself to construct that narrative. Within their particular cultural landscapes, they assume roles and appropriate relevant actions and voices – the language – for those roles. In Otsuka’s story, when children played mama and papa, they knew the sounds of love-making (‘like you’re dying’ [65]); when they played fortune teller, they knew the language of foretelling (‘one day you will take a long journey on a train’ [65]). It is this language use that helps account for the importance of play for language development itself, including the socio-linguistic flexibility to change one’s language with the situation (Minks, 2006; Goodwin and Kyratzis, 2011). In Vygotsky’s view, drawing builds on play and is part of the pathway to written communication. He argues that drawing begins with playful gestures, a view shared by Matthews (1999), a scholar of children’s visual art in varied cultures. A very young child gestures and, as a result, a mark is formed on a page. Soon, the child is exploring how different actions yield

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different marks. Such actions are a form of play, separating actual movements and objects from their adaption to the concrete world. A child might make a car driving to somebody’s house, although all one may hear is the child’s sound effects, all one may see is the child’s hand – and a line – making an arc on the page. In time, and with experience, children may deem certain marks as representations of objects, as speech, movement and objects literally play off each other (Wolf, 1989). Moreover, if children are sitting by each other, they may collegially influence each other and, sometimes, even collaboratively play on paper (Dyson, 1990, 2013). Based on his studies of young children drawing together, Matthews (1999) describes how children’s evolving productions could be linked through their talk. Children seemed attuned to peers as well as to the possibilities and constraints of the page. Thus, their symbol-making became a ‘spatio-temporal theater of symbolic play’ (Matthews, 1999: 9–10). Within this semiotic theatre, children from literacy-infused environments sometimes begin to write – letters or words, especially their names. Their actions are often fluid, exploring visual and letter symbolism as their meanings evolve (Eng, 1931; Dyson, 1982). Among preschoolers and kindergartners, a letter p might be reimagined as a person whose hair is on one side of her head; the first letter of a name might be placed in a house, indicating the person; the letters of sports teams might show up on a drawn football field, along with the associated visual image. Eventually, thought Vygotsky, children must learn that they can draw speech – voices, as it were, not just objects (Vygotsky, 1978: 105). Vygotsky imagined a linear line from playful gesture to drawn line to written language, all means for articulating ideas. In our examples, it is clear that children’s play may encompass many symbolic tools, all in the same event. To be composers in contemporary times, when multimodal texts

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proliferate, children must learn to differentiate and access the power of symbolic media. Moreover, it is also clear that the agency and control children gain through play can be shared with other children. Mutual cultural knowledge, be it of media figures, myths (like Santa Claus) or the rhythms of daily practices, allows children to invent worlds together. Play, of course, does not necessarily involve others, but in shared places of work and play, children are at least observant of others and knowledgeable of valued play practices. Indeed, work and play can merge, as we illustrate in the sections to come.

CHILDREN TALKING THEIR WAY INTO PLAY We continue to imagine children travelling down the road together, this time in a preK classroom for four-year-olds, within a Head Start center where many of the children hear and speak Spanish or the indigenous Mexican language, Mixteco, at home. Luisa is one of these multilingual children, with her own unique timeline of becoming a language user and dramatic player (Genishi and Dyson, 2009). She spent the previous year in the three-year-old room rarely talking, but in the middle of her fourth year she seemed to burst into speech. By the end of that year, she was still viewed as a quiet child, though she could be impressively creative with language, as she demonstrated once with her friend Rebeca as they played in an imagined house. On a sunny day when Luisa pretended that it was raining hard, she built a house in her imagination that she wanted to share with Rebeca in the classroom book area. Luisa repeatedly locked the door to the house with a pretend key – apparently locking herself and her friend in. The door, however, remained invisible to Rebeca, who kept walking right through it. Luisa adapted to her friend’s actions and dropped the imagined door from her script. Inside the house, Luisa

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then instigated collaborative play with her friend – and with language itself: Luisa:  Está mucho raining! [It’s raining a lot!] Rebeca:

It’s raining.

Together:

Mucho raining! Mucho raining! [Raining a lot! Raining a lot!]

The two girls shriek ‘mucho raining’, which becomes ‘mucha raining’, as they chant for several minutes. Later they take out the Eensy Weensy Spider puzzle, which does have ‘mucho’ rain washing the spider out, as readers may recall. Luisa:  Está mucha raining. [It’s raining a lot.] Rebeca:  (sings) The eensy weensy spider went up … (Genishi and Dyson, 2009: 63)

Indeed Luisa and Rebeca, who typically spoke Spanish with each other, had created a situation through which they examined and verbally constructed a part of their social and linguistic worlds, displaying multiple interactional skills. In the process they freed themselves from some practical requirements, speaking the rain into existence while an imagined house protected them from it. Clever Luisa changed her script so that her friend wouldn’t have to walk through an imagined door, thus following a real-world rule (people cannot walk through solid objects). The two friends then collaboratively moved the narrative forward, manipulating an invented and unconventional grammatical structure, ‘Está mucho raining’. (The back story: Luisa had been heard earlier saying ‘Está lluviendo’ [‘It’s raining’], demonstrating that she knew how to say it in Spanish: she was deliberately using Spanish and English in the same playful line. The conventional way of saying ‘It’s raining a lot’ is ‘Está lluviendo mucho)’. Later, for some reason, the girls changed mucho to mucha, marking the word as feminine according to

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their own evolving rules. In short, the girls wilfully and playfully code-switched between Spanish and English in a complex, fun- and laughter-filled duet in a pre-kindergarten classroom with time and space for childshaped curriculum. Playfully boisterous language was not always part of Luisa’s repertoire, as she took about a year to move from extreme quietness as a three-year-old to enthusiastic talk in her fourth year. Thus her developmental timeline was neither rapid nor straight, since once she turned four her spoken language seemed to grow in spurts, and by year’s end she was once again characterized as a quiet child. The next chapters in Luisa’s life in school, however, from kindergarten to second grade, took on a completely different texture from prekindergarten, starkly contrasting with this unusual duet of bilingual language play. Indeed, Luisa showed little interest in print or books in her fourth year, while she demonstrated clear engagement with and understanding of first-order symbolism, in which spoken words in Spanish and English stood for things (such as rain). In the dual language programme of her public school kindergarten, there were limited daily opportunities for play and its foundation of oral language. Yet Luisa soon took up the script of being a good student, learning without difficulty how printed symbols work. She seemed to follow a straight Vygotskian developmental line, as she reproduced the curves and lines of written words. These symbolized familiar spoken words (secondorder symbolism – that is, one symbol system building on another). By the time Luisa was in second grade she was ‘on level’ in reading and was consistently referred to as an ‘excellent student’ (Falchi, Axelrod, and Genishi, 2013). Thus her playfulness went underground, at least in the classroom, where her experiences were framed by the teacher’s rules and those embedded in the dominant balanced literacy curriculum (Calkins, 2003). In short, Luisa in school took on the identity of worker, so that most of her behaviours fell outside a lens of play.

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CHILDREN SQUEEZING PLAY ON THE TERRAIN OF WORK In first and second grade at Luisa’s school, there was very limited time and space for play. Even in kindergarten there were times when children could not participate in choice time (such as play) if their work was not done. By second grade, the culture of the classroom was so task- and work-oriented that few examples of playful talk were observed. Rule-oriented talk, on the other hand, was evident, as when one of the second-grade teachers reviewed the rules to be followed when a substitute teacher comes (Falchi, field notes, 1/7/10): 1. Don’t get out of your seat. 2. Do all of your work. 3. Trabajar en silencio (Work in silence).

Children’s cheerful willingness to talk once the substitute arrived, however, showed that some rules are meant to be broken. Luisa was not in this teacher’s class, but we guess that she would have found it easy to follow these rules. Some of the second-grade children who were her pre-kindergarten peers squeezed in play or playful talk around the rules in less constrained settings, where their second-grade teacher was not present. For example, Falchi (field notes, 1/7/10) observed that when the second-graders went to art class, the art teacher read The Snowy Day (Keats, 1962/1976) and told the students to create their own cut-paper images, modelling them on Keats’ illustrations. Rebeca and Mia did what was asked, cutting out tree trunks and leaves, but later shifted to cutting out hearts, stepping away from the prescribed task and toward symbols of affection. Similarly off-task or multitasking, peers Miguel and Ahmed talked about video games and wrestlers. Miguel offered, ‘M… (a wrestler) sucks’. The two debated who was stronger than whom in a world very distant from this classroom. At the same time, attending to the task of creating images from The Snowy Day, the boys cut out circular shapes for clouds. Then, in a deliberate

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way, Miguel created a collage, a car or other vehicle, of red and blue paper. Meanwhile, Mia made a snowflake, returning to the theme of Keats’ book. Then both girls made more hearts. Rebeca made two pink hearts and exclaimed, ‘Aay, muchacha!’ (‘Ooh, girl!’). She then made a bigger pink heart and showed it to Mia, after writing ‘Para mi mamá’ (‘For my mom’) on her paper. Mia and Rebeca also included Xiomara in their play by making a game of handing their cutout hearts, back and forth, to her and to each other. Next Mia cut out a shape from purple paper, a small bikini top. She laughed and put it over Rebeca’s chest. Rebeca complained about the glue on her hands, and observer Falchi helped her peel some of it off her fingers. The activity came to a close when it was time to clean up. Rebeca and company engaged in multimodal play at a point when they had learned how a range of symbols work. Talk can be about the world of video games; cut-out and drawn snowflakes stand for snowflakes they might encounter in winter; hearts, especially pink ones, stand for love; letters stand for spoken words full of meaning (‘Para mi mama’). These second-graders showed themselves to be composers in contemporary times, creating multimodal texts as they demonstrated that the agency they gain through play can be shared with other children in fluid and pleasurable ways. Yet note that it is only in the art room where we saw multiple symbols and topics that animated the children. In the regular classroom written alphabetic symbols dominated, and particular topics to read and write about came from the teacher via a mandated curriculum. In the next section, this curriculum links Rebeca and her friends to children in classrooms hundreds of miles away.

CHILDREN WORKING THE BASICS OF WORK AND PLAY The Midwest kindergarten and first-grade classrooms attended by kindergartner Alicia

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and first-grader Lyron made official use of composing programmes very similar to those in place in Luisa and Rebeca’s classrooms. Indeed, the kindergarten used the very same commercial writing curriculum, one with scripted and district-mandated lessons; it had no official play or ‘choice time’ at all. In both rooms, children were to quietly do their own work, thereby mastering ‘the basics’ – the letters and their sounds, punctuation marks, standard grammar and brief but detailed ‘stories’, especially ‘true’ stories. Nonetheless, in their respective rooms, Alicia and Lyron, both African American, were players in the unofficial worlds that accompanied official ones during composing time. The children and their peers thus illustrate how symbolic play may not only accompany but, indeed, may also be the substantive stuff of learning to use written language.

Alicia and ‘Sounding It Out’ Unlike Luisa and Rebeca, kindergartner Alicia had not attended preschool; she initially did not seem to grasp the importance of classroom rules, as she liked to wander around the room. Moreover, she showed no evidence of understanding the second-order nature of the written system. She was highly social, however, and knew most of the children in her class. Her ‘best’ friend was Willo. Indeed, Willo helped her gain insight into how writing worked. By week five of the school year, the kindergarteners were to be ‘sounding’ out their ‘words’ to come up with their own spellings. In response, Alicia drew what writing looks like, making letters, letter-like shapes and wavy lines, sometimes to accompany a drawing. She might then read her writing, loudly sharing her essay about how pretty and nice her closest friends were. Willo, though, did not like having her name misspelled, and so she used a magnetic letter board to teach Alicia to spell her whole name – WILLO and her family name. One day in May, when Alicia was drawing her family, Willo announced, ‘I’m your

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sister’. ‘I can put you in with my mama and my dada’, Alicia replied, and she added another figure to her hand-holding line of schematic people with hearts on their heads. ‘We’re playing sisters, on paper’, said Willo joyfully when Anne asked about the picture. After this representation of her family, Alicia quickly wrote letters on each of four lines, ending each line with Willo’s name. When her teacher came by, Alicia read her piece (which, officially, was to be a letter to her mom for Mother’s Day): ‘Mom, you is me and Willo mommy. I see Willo in my dreams. Her is my best sister’. ‘Hey,’ said Willo. ‘There’s no two “Willo,”’ and she read her name repeatedly, pointing to each of the four lines where it was displayed. Alicia had read her name two times, but Willo’s name was in the piece four times. ‘No,’ replied Alicia. ‘This you’ (pointing to a figure in her picture) (Genishi and Dyson, 2009: 95).

Willo was pointing out that W-I-L-L-O was not just representing an object called Willo’s name. The letters were representing a spoken word. Each time the word was written, it needed to be read. This was Willo’s explanation of what we would term second-order symbolism. But Alicia was not quite clear yet. The drawn figure was Willo – the letters were her name. Over time, in interaction with her teacher and with peers, Alicia’s understanding of written language grew (Genishi and Dyson, 2009). Unfortunately, the commercial program was not grounded in an understanding of play or of symbolism. The teacher was to tell the children to ‘sound your words out’, as if all the kindergarteners understood about ‘sounds’, ‘words’ and ‘letters’. Alicia would do this in time, but at the beginning, that instruction was just another confusing directive. Moreover, the teacher was to move the children away from drawing to writing, but figuring out these modes’ respective natures and strengths was central to learning written

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language. Still, like Rebeca and her peers, Alicia’s desire to play on paper with her friends kept her engaged, interacting and manipulating written graphics on the page. Her teacher was far too busy guiding individual children to expend the energy it would have taken to silence them… and this was to Alicia’s benefit.

Lyron and ‘Adding Details’ Across time and space, in the first grade, conventional basics were also taking shape in the child-constructed context of play. For our purposes here, we focus on Lyron, Manny, Tionna and the first-grade basic of writing texts with ‘details’. The children called the play context The Pine Cone Wars. This game began on the playground as a team chase game, with minimal language, maximal physical action and straightforward, direct symbolism; from there, it developed as a textual game involving complex secondorder symbolism (the full story of this play is presented in Dyson, 2013). Out on the playground The Pine Cone Wars had no ‘good’ guys, no ‘bad’ guys. There were though projectiles – pine cones and wood chips tossed at the other ‘team’ (never referred to as ‘armies’). One day, though, the children were not allowed to walk, much less run, in the playground’s open field as it was deep in snow. Everyone had to stay on the blacktop (tarmac) area. So two avid players of The Pine Cone Wars, Lyron and his friend Manny, transformed the chase game into one involving manipulatives. Their teams did not consist of children running wildly about but of small wood-chip ‘men’ stuck in their respective ‘castles’, represented by snow mounds (the linguistic move to ‘men’ eliminated girl warriors). During battle, each boy hurled projectiles at the other team’s men. This symbolic transformation of The Pine Cone Wars yielded a greater role for narrative turn-taking during play (for each boy to say what was happening, since the teams no longer moved under their own power). Such a

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shifting of symbolic media is common among young children; it allows them to examine both experience and semiotic possibilities (Dyson, 1989; Kress, 1997; Matthews, 1999; Pahl, 2005). Herein, such multimodal movement is an aspect of the prehistory of a childhood literacy practice. Soon after the manipulative play, the war game took shape during composing time. The boys’ wood-chip ‘men’ became tiny stick figures on paper and the castles were rendered as large structures with towers, each castle usually topped with a flag marked with a boy’s initials. The battles unfolded in a cartoon-inspired alien land, where men fought with swords, bombs and lasers and flew about in helicopters and rocket ships that came from and soared into outer space. The oral narration continued, but it now accompanied the unfolding drawn action. Indeed, a collaborative improvisation was enacted. Each child had to take into account the ongoing story and, more particularly, the just completed move of the other child before making their own next move. The children did this, of course, in dramatic play, but their representation was no longer in physical action but, rather, in narrative talk and in the ‘deliberate semantics’ of graphic action (Vygotsky, 1962: 100; Vygotsky, 1978). For example, after Lyron called Manny’s attention to how his own ‘men’ were battling Manny’s, Manny replied, ‘Well, I still got men up here on Earth. Lyron, look it!’ and called his friend’s attention to the invading men from Earth taking shape on his page. Details of the graphic play were realized in visual conventions related to direction and movement – arrows to indicate path, multiple lines at the back of rocket ships to indicate energy and motion and dense scribbles to convey chaotic action. The children’s writing, though, was quite perfunctory, with minimal details. Since their teacher Mrs Kay tended to model the writing of ‘true’ weekend plans, the children wrote plans, too. They planned to play war, and each planned to win, as in Lyron’s piece:

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Manny I [and written over I] are going to have a war I am going to /winn [win] Manny is goin [going] to los [lose] I am going to winn [win].

As this new version of the game spread throughout the room, Tionna, who sat at the same table as Lyron and Manny, wanted to play. Lyron objected, as he only played with ‘men’, as it were. Tionna, and her girl army, took on the boys. She appropriated the drawing style of the boys. However, when the perfunctory text took shape on the page, she inserted herself in the composition, answering the boys’ prose with her own. She literally wrote herself into dramatic existence in response to the boys’ narrative moves. Tionna thus became a woman warrior leading her ‘tofe [tough] girls’. Her writing was not only about plans to play war; it was a detailed, dialogic argument for why her team would win – and thus led to more detailed writing on the part of the boys too. The boys wrote that they would win, but Tionna countered that that there was ‘no way the boys can bet [beat] the girls’ because the boys did not have enough things. Manny wrote that ‘We have two big casle [castles]. They have ten little tents’. But, wrote Tionna, ‘[t]hay oldy [only] have one tent we have a lot of cacle [castles]’. And on the play went. From a simple chase game, involving the use of running bodies and of pine cones to directly represent ‘war’, The Pine Cone Wars game was evolving as complex, secondorder, multimodal play. Despite the furious burst of writing, this day marked the end of textual war. Mrs Kay, responding to an ethical concern of her own, decided to summarily ban texts about war play. The social ramifications of turning a playground game into an officially displayed, publicly read text were their own lesson (Dyson, 2013). For our purposes, though, the way in which different media mediated – and shaped – the play was informative. The children’s writing did not capture the qualities of action evident in the drawings but, when the female warrior joined the play, it

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did capture the emotional tension that drove the narrative forward. And forward is where the narrative would have continued, but for Mrs Kay’s social conscience. Still, the dramatic rendition of a socially negotiated scene, evident in the play of four-year-old Luisa, can ultimately provide narrative sense, dialogic attunement to the other and a compelling reason to exercise agency and corral those alphabet letters into the service of play.

CHILDREN RECASTING THE CURRICULUM: PLAYFUL AGENTS OF SYMBOLIC LEARNING Luisa and Rebeca at age four collaboratively imagined a house that protected them from ‘mucho raining’, making language itself the material of play as they simultaneously displayed a sense of narrative and gleeful attunement to each other. The play orientation of their Head Start center allowed them to be agents of play – indeed, to shape their own curriculum – before the curriculum of the primary grades required them to corral letters and words into the service of scripted school work. Unlike the Head Start children, the Pine Cone Warriors and the fictional children of Otsuka’s (2011) ‘grape stake duels’ needed to squeeze their playful epics into and around their work days. Deeply needed play came to life as children moved their ideas forward via provocative objects and embodied, mobilized, spoken, drawn and written symbols, corralled, so to speak, by multiple modes. Language was only one of them: battle symbols could be drawn or appropriated from classroom manipulatives and transformed into projectiles as effective as wooden grape stakes. In the more protected venue of the classroom, determination to play was often channelled into words and/or on to paper. Thus Lyron insistently wrote in his weekend plan, ‘I am going to winn’; kindergartner Alicia wrote to her and Willo’s ‘mommy’; and first-graders Rebeca and friends communicated affection with their

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pink cut-out hearts. The motivating force of friendship mixed with affection and competition compelled these children to become agents in their own dramas. What is clear is that, given even a small curricular space and a wedge of time, child agents will play, transforming the symbols at their disposal into movements, facial expressions and eventual dramas with or without words. Without these symbols and the company of peers or others who help invest them with meaning, learning remains a static and often inaccessible goal.

CONCLUSION In closing, we advocate a view of learning that incorporates play as a standard, not an ‘activity’ that is allowed only for students whose lessons are well completed. Play as a standard for the early childhood curriculum works against childism (Young-Bruehl, 2012) – that set of prejudices which leads to everything from abusing children to treating them like property to depriving them of rights to live like children. Children need to play – if not like ‘calves in the fields’, then like imaginative beings with ideas to symbolize and narratives to share. What a small thing to ask – to let children play. What potentially huge benefits – children as playful agents, whose literacy ‘work’ becomes another symbolic mediator of their need and their right to play. Just imagine.

REFERENCES Adair, J.K. (2012) ‘Towards capability: Agency and the education of young children’. Paper presented at the Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Education Conference, Pennsylvania State University, PA. Calkins, L. M. (2003) Units of Study for Primary Writing: A Yearlong Curriculum. Portsmouth, NH: FirstHand. Corsaro, W. (2011) The Sociology of Childhood. (3rd ed.) Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. Dargan, A. and Zeitlin, S. (1990) City Play. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

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Dyson, A. Haas (1982) ‘The emergence of visible language: Interrelationships between drawing and early writing’, Visible Language, 16: 360–81. Dyson, A. Haas (1989) Multiple Worlds of Child Writers: Friends Learning to Write. New York: Teachers College Press. Dyson, A. Haas (1990) ‘Symbol makers, symbol weavers: How children link play, pictures, and print’, Young Children, 45: 50–69. Dyson, A. Haas (2013) ReWRITING the Basics: Literacy Learning in Children’s Cultures. New York: Teachers College Press. Elder, C. A. and Obel-Omia, M. C. (2012) ‘Why bother with recess?’, Education Week, 31(30): 27. Eng, H. (1931) The Psychology of Children’s Drawings. London: Kegan Paul. Falchi, L., Axelrod, Y. and Genishi, C. (2013) ‘“Miguel es un artista” – and Luisa is an excellent student: Making time and space for children’s multimodal practices’, Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, (published online). Franklin, M. (1983) ‘Play as the creation of imaginary situations: The role of language’, in S. Wapner and B. Kaplan (eds), Toward a Holistic Developmental Psychology. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 197–220. Genishi, C. and Dyson, A. Haas (2009) Children, Language, and Literacy: Diverse Learners in Diverse Times. New York: Teachers College Press and Washington, DC: National Association for the Education of Young Children. Genishi, C., Yung-Chan, D. and Stires, S. (2000) ‘Talking their way into print: English language learners in a prekindergarten classroom’, in D. S. Strickland and L. M. Morrow (eds), Beginning Reading and Writing. New York: Teachers College Press. pp. 66–80. Goodwin, M. H. and Kyratzis, A. (2011) ‘Peer language socialization’, in A. Duranti, E. Ochs and B. B. Schieffelin (eds), The Handbook of Language Socialization. Malden, MA: Blackwell. pp. 365–90. Gupta, A. (2011) ‘Play and pedagogy framed within India’s historical, socio-cultural and pedagogical context’, in S. Rogers (ed.), Rethinking Play and Pedagogy in Early Childhood Education: Concepts, Contexts and Cultures. Abingdon: Routledge. pp. 86–99. Illinois State Board of Education (2013) Early Learning and Development Standards. Springfield, IL: Illinois State Board of Education. Keats, E. J. (1962/1976) The Snowy Day. New York: Puffin. Kee, C. (2011) ‘When my child does not do well in school’, SMA News, February 20–22. Krauss, R. (1952) A Hole is to Dig. New York: Harper Collins. Kress, G. (1997) Before Writing: Rethinking the Paths to Literacy. London: Routledge.

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Lewin, T. (2010) ‘Many states adopt national standards for their schools’, New York Times, 21 July. Matthews, J. (1999) The Art of Childhood and Adolescence: The Construction of Meaning. London: Falmer Press. Minks, A. (2006) ‘Mediated intertextuality in pretend play among Nicaraguan Miskitu children’, Texas Linguistic Forum (SALSA), 49: 117–27. Morrow, L. M., Shanahan, T. and Wixson, K. K. (2013) Teaching with the Common Core Standards for English Language Arts, PreK–2. New York: Guilford Press. Neuman, S. B., and Roskos, K. (2005) ‘Whatever happened to developmentally appropriate practice in early literacy?’, Young Children, 60(4): 22–6. New York State Education Department (2012) ‘Domain 1: Approaches to learning’, ‘Engagement’, point 1, Prekindergarten Foundation for the Common Core. Albany, NY: New York state Education Department. p. 10. Otsuka, J. (2011) The Buddha in the Attic. New York: Knopf. Pahl, K. (2005) ‘Narrative spaces and multiple identities: Children’s textual explorations of console games in home settings’, in J. Marsh (ed.), Popular Culture, New Media, and Digital Literacy in Early Childhood. London: RoutledgeFalmer. pp. 126–45.

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Paley, V. G. (2004) A Child’s Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Pierce, C. M. and Allen, G. B. (1975) ‘Childism’, Psychiatric Annals, 5: 266–70. Rogers, S. (2011) (ed.) Rethinking Play and Pedagogy in Early Childhood Education: Concepts, Contexts and Cultures. Abingdon: Routledge. Rogoff, B. (2003) The Cultural Nature of Human Development. New York: Oxford University Press. Singer, D. G., Golinkoff, R. M. and Hirsh-Pasek, K. (2006) Play = Learning: How Play Motivates and Enhances Children’s Cognitive and Social-Emotional Growth. New York: Oxford University Press. Sparks, S. D. (2012) ‘Study: Children now are more imaginative’, Education Week. Vygotsky, L. S. (1962) Thought and Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978) Mind in Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wohlwend, K. (2011) Playing their Way into Literacies: Reading, Writing, and Belonging in the Early Childhood Classroom. New York: Teachers College Press. Wolf, D. (1989) ‘Artistic learning as a conversation’, in D. Hargreaves (ed.), Children and the Arts. Buckingham: Open University Press. pp. 23–39. Young-Bruehl, E. (2012) Childism: Confronting Prejudice Against Children. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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20 Understanding Narrative as a Key Aspect of Play Pentti Hakkarainen and Milda Bredikyte

INTRODUCTION In psychology, a ‘narrative turn’ has been connected to the study of the development of self and identity. A story, or ‘narrative’, is a tool for making sense of our lives and organizing memories (Bruner, 1987, 1992). Strawson (2004, 2010) mounted an attack on narrativity, claiming that the descriptive psychological and ethical narrativity theses were both false, but the arguments and evidence supporting his claim are problematic. Strawson explains, ‘I take it that the fundamentals of temporal temperament are genetically determined, and that we have here to do with a deep “individual difference variable”, to put it in the language of experimental psychology’ (Strawson 2004: 431). He ends up explaining individual variation with a dichotomist time style – episodic and diachronic – which is directly connected to narrative and non-narrative life experience. Strawson analyses his own episodic style as an example. We think Strawson’s arguments represent an earlier stage in the development of human

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sciences, with its strict division between genetics and culture. In our approach we trace the historical roots of the ‘narrative mechanism’ in play, starting from Schiller’s (1980) aesthetic interpretation and Vygotsky’s emphasis on sense making. Vygotsky writes: ‘Action in a situation that is not seen, but only conceived on an imagined level and in an imagi­ nary situation, teaches the child to guide his behavior not only by immediate perception of objects or by the situation immediately affecting him but also by the sense of this situation’ (1977: 87).

Our ‘genetic experiments’ aim at moving the boundaries of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) of play. For this purpose, joint play-worlds, including those of adults and children, are constructed and adults’ analytic abilities, improvisation skills and role construction competence are promoted. In other words, we have invested in educational interaction and relationships. This is different from the individual life stories and self-experience Strawson is referring to.

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Understanding Narrative as a Key Aspect of Play

CULTURAL–HISTORICAL ‘NARRATIVE’ APPROACH The close relationship between stories and children’s play is pointed out in many theoretical texts on play. One of these is Zaporozhets’ (1986) work. He compared the structure of a fairy tale and that of a children’s play and found the only difference between them was in terms of abstractness. According to Zaporozhets (1986), a fairy tale requires children to imagine the whole story: the events, physical environment, persons, their relations and their emotional states. But in pretend play, peers and the use of concrete props and tools support story construction. Zaporozhets describes the narrative essence of play by emphasizing the changes taking place when a child is three and four years of age. This occurs with the appearance of the child’s ability to act mentally in imaginary circumstances (an ‘imaginary situation’ according to Vygotsky, 1977). Clear composition, dramatic events and rhythmical movement of the events help the child to step into the circle of imaginary circumstances and mentally assist the characters of the story (Zaporozhets, 1986). In classic folk tales and joint play there are always several interpretations and points of view, making it possible to participate in the same play in different positions and roles. The narrative turn in play theory began in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century with the work of Schiller (1980). It might be more correct to call this turn in play research ‘cultural–aesthetic’. Zen’kovski (1923/2013) picked up Schiller’s idea of the close relation between children’s play and their emotional experience, or ‘living through’ (perezhivanie). At the same time as Zen’kovski’s original writing, in 1925, Vygotsky’s thesis analysing an aesthetic reaction to the arts was defended. Zen’kovski elaborated his theory of play as the space of fantasy and emotions, using the term fabula for the soul of play, which reveals emotion to the child. Vygotsky (1977, 2004), together with El’konin (2005a; 2005b), elaborated a new

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research programme, in which he described the tasks of the new theory of play. We argue that Vygotsky’s intention was to elaborate a narrative theory of play, for two reasons. First, his analysis of aesthetic reactions in the psychology of art describes the emotional ‘living through’ of play events (perezhivanie). This concept later became the essence of Lindqvist’s (1995) play-world pedagogy. Second, Vygotsky’s theoretical play analysis focuses on the child’s differentiation of the visual and sense fields in play. According to Vygotsky this is possible in advanced narrative pretend play only, where ideas (sense making) dominate and replace realistic visual perceptions. In other words, children start to use and create play narratives. The play theory of Piaget (1962) emphasizes the biological and individual nature of play, arguing that the development of children’s individual symbolism is central, and the socialization of the child takes place later. The cultural mechanism of development in the cultural–historical approach operates with narrative forms because a central contradiction exists between the ideal and the real, present forms of behaviour. Thus play and imagination play a central role in development (Vygotsky, 1977; 2004). El’konin and Zinchenko (2002: 3) interpreted Vygotsky’s idea, describing development as ‘drama unfolding around the relationships of real and ideal forms, their mutual transformations and transitions’. Ideal forms are quite often expressed in narratives, which children may transform into play activity. In cultural development, learning associated with play has a different function and quality due to this drama unfolding around the relationships of real and ideal forms. Sutton-Smith (1995) also discusses the different functions of learning in play compared to result-oriented (school) learning. He refers to Heidegger’s idea that the imaginative act of playing is the first step in the process of willing. The term ‘conative enactment’ is used about learning in play. The same idea is expressed in El’koninova and

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Bazanova’s (2004: 100) article in a more radical form: pretend role play based on classic tales is the school of will. This claim is based on analysis of the impact of the hero of classic tales on children’s volition.

Narrative Competence – Play Competence A close, sometimes almost identity relation is supposed to exist between play and narrative competence. Sutton-Smith and his colleagues in the 1970s and 1980s intensively studied the structural characteristics of children’s storytelling (e.g. Sutton-Smith et al. 1976; Botvin and Sutton-Smith, 1977; Magee and Sutton-Smith, 1983). Pellegrini (1985) continued this research by correlating children’s symbolic play with their stories. These studies led Fein (1995) to focus on children’s narrative competence, which she defined as ‘the ability to com­ prehend and produce decontextualized information’ (151). However, Pellegrini’s (1985: 80) definition is more concrete: he writes that children’s narrative competency is their ‘ability to produce and comprehend stories, to understand story events and characters’ actions as temporally sequenced and causally motivated’. In the cultural–historical approach to narrative play, the promotion of children’s imagination and narrative competence was enhanced in order to raise the quality of children’s storytelling and play. Children were taught first to model the storyline of a folktale, and then to draw a graphic model of the story and retell it using the model (Venger, 1978; Dyachenko, 1996). Simple wooden puppets, made of a cylinder with a ball for a head, were used as a stimulus for the play story (Gasparova 1985). One of the attempts to elaborate narrative competence consisted of using graphical modelling of storylines to enhance children’s narrative competence and its transfer to pretend play. Children were instructed to identify episodes from a story, draw a dynamic model of each episode and form a

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sequence of consecutive episodes. After training in this method, the children started to plan by modelling their own stories and pretend play sessions. In other words, the model of the story or pretend play was constructed first, and then a concrete story or play event, based on the model, was developed (Venger and Dyacenko, 1989; Artemova, 1991; Grigoryan, 2008). According to Zaporozhets and Markova (1980), there is a need to enhance children’s narrative or modelling competence because children have to be taught to play. However, graphic or structural or dynamic models mainly emphasize the cognitive aspects of play guidance and miss the more important aspects. Children’s play skills and the quality of their joint play does not depend solely on knowledge. The modest results of such experimental research may be explained by the failure to acknowledge the emotional emphasis of play. Bodrova and Leong (2007) adapted the cultural–historical approach for the Western world in the form of the Tools of the Mind preschool programme. In this programme children are asked to model the plot of joint pretend play in advance, by means of a verbal description, pictures or a combination of both. It was found that paper-and-pencil advance planning of pretend play raised preschool children’s self-regulation compared to a control group who did not use paper and pencils to preplan their pretend play (Diamond et al., 2007). In a further example, El’koninova (2001) attempted to stimulate play activity by dramatizing classic folk tales. According to her, ‘An integral and vivid enactment of a story occurs at about the age of five because children of this age are best able to establish a balance between their experience of the reality of the story and their experience of the make-believe quality of what takes place in the performance’ (2001: 86). In her experiment she followed the way in which children aged from three to seven played out stories familiar to them, keeping to a canonical plot. First the story was read to the children and then

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Understanding Narrative as a Key Aspect of Play

they were asked to dramatize the story together with an adult. In all, 60 kindergarten children took part in the experiment. The main conclusion was that even with the help of adults, preschool children were unable to construct the whole structure of a classic folk tale by means of joint play, but children between the ages of four and five and a half managed best.

Narrative Mode and Play The analysis of narrative forms and competences focuses on a child’s performance, measured with the help of tests and tasks, but more essential is the role of narrative forms in carrying out psychological functions. We assume that the narrative construal of reality is a relevant concept for understanding play, as shown in Bruner’s account of two modes of thinking: There appear to be two broad ways in which human beings organize and manage their know­ ledge of the world, indeed structure even their immediate experience: one seems more special­ ized for treating of physical ‘things’, the other for treating of people and their plights. These are conventionally known as logical-scientific thinking and narrative thinking (1996: 39).

Play and learning are often understood as separate phenomena, but there is a part of play research that combines playfulness with school learning. Both research and theory increasingly argue against dichotomous thinking about play and learning (Bamberg, 1997; Saracho and Spodek, 1998; Fireman, McVay and Flanagan, 2003). We have defined learning in play as ‘free learning’ because play does not have any defined learning goals. Narrative learning is based on narrative logic, which is different from the rational logic of traditional school learning (Fisher, 1984). In traditional schooling, children seldom have an opportunity to select their own problems and assignments. In play learning, the challenges are not defined in advance and no exact criteria of truth exist. Children may reveal their own individual understanding

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without fearing mistakes. There is an essential difference of motivation between narrative and factual learning. Play is described as demonstrating intrinsic motivation because no concrete products are produced as a result (Leont’ev, 1995). In narrative Playworld projects (Lindqvist, 1995; Hakkarainen, 2002, 2006), two types of learning environments and assignments are used. The first is a ‘free narrative learning environment’, because no explicit tasks are presented. A classic tale or story is presented and children have an opportunity to identify with the activities of the hero or heroine, which usually involve helping other people (El’koninova and Bazanova, 2004). The task is open and children may or may not choose to identify with or imitate the hero. In the Playworld projects, adults as equal play partners can create new problems, challenges and obstacles in the play, which have to be solved before the tale can continue. In a narrative Playworld environment, all the children’s solutions are correct. Their task in ‘free narrative learning’ has two stages. First, the players have to negotiate the nature of the problem embedded in the plot, and then they must figure out how it can be solved by using narrative logic. Narrative learning environments are also designed in school settings, where literacy, maths and physics teaching have taken place in imaginary Playworlds. In these environments, tasks and assignments are embedded in the storyline by transforming the learning content and concepts into elements of children’s journey in a playworld. An essential aspect of these tasks is boundary-crossing between the real and imaginary worlds. Tasks form part of the imaginary plot but realistic solutions to design problems are found in the classroom, and are then moved back into the playworld (e.g. the spell has turned all the halls of the castle upside down, but children’s correct solution of the task of each hall turns them back; Hakkarainen, 2006). Careful enactment of these boundary-crossing rituals is very important for children.

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Transfer of Narrative Learning There is evidence that many new abilities and skills appear first in play situations, and only afterwards in daily contexts (e.g. Zaporozhets’ research group, 1986). A radical claim, which is not supported by empirical evidence, is that play forms the basis of all human creative activity (Huizinga, 1949; Vygotsky, 2004). El’konin’s (2005a, b) play theory argues that transfer also takes place in the opposite direction, from daily life to children’s play. We think it would be better to talk about a transfer between free learning situations at preschool age. Zaporozhets’ research group experimentally demonstrated the power of narrative. Individual discussions about helping younger children were carried out with 24 six-yearold preschool children. All the children answered that they understood what helping means and claimed they were ready to help others. After this discussion, the children were taken in pairs to a play room where a three-year-old child was trying to solve a difficult puzzle. The pair started to play and after ten minutes the experimenter asked them to help the younger child because he or she was tired. Out of the 24 children (12 girls and 12 boys) who participated in this study, only 2 interrupted their own play and started helping the younger child. After a week the children saw a film of the tale The Wonderful Adventures of Nils by Selma Lagerlöf. The children discussed the characters and agreed to participate in play based on the tale. The experimental setting was as previously, but the request for help referred to the following narrative: ‘The little hamster picks berries and nuts. He or she is still small and tired, but mother is far away’. Of the 24 six-year-olds, 20 actively helped and took care of him. On a third occasion, the narrative frame was eliminated. Now 17 of the children ignored the invitation to help and 7 helped for a while. A comment from a playmate, such as ‘let him do it by himself’, often stopped children from helping (Strelkova, 1986).

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In this experiment children had to cope with two separate tasks: playing together with a peer and helping a younger child. On the second occasion, the narrative frame united the tasks and helping was a part of the narrative play. On the third occasion, the tasks were again separated and the helping motive proved to be weaker than the motive of playing with a peer. Children’s preferences can be explained with reference to sense making. Leont’ev (1995) claimed that in play, children break apart the connection between sense and meaning in the adult world and give a new sense to phenomena, for instance by substituting objects, things and people. Zaporozhets’ (1986) research group also carried out empirical research on development of the emotional regulation of children’s actions and brain functions. A general conclusion from the long-term empirical research was that decentration is not a purely cognitive phenomenon, but is based on a reconstruction of the motivational–emotional sphere of personality. Research suggests that the content and compositional structure of a story promotes preschool children’s co-action and co-experiencing (soperezhivanie) with the protagonist, but some children are not yet able to experience genuine emotional involvement by following a story. In order to comprehend the story and experience its sense, these children need to reconstruct the plot and relations between the characters in a concrete form during dramatized play. New positive emotions and feelings are born, and old ones are restructured (Strelkova, 1986). The Tools of the Mind programme has been shown to have a significant impact on preschool children’s self-regulation (Diamond et al., 2007), but its emphasis is on the characteristics of self-regulation. Play intention is a separate stage of play planning, and such features of play as explicit and implicit rules, symbolic props, extended time frames, extensive use of language and imaginary scenarios are not supported in planning. In our work,

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Understanding Narrative as a Key Aspect of Play

we focus more on the joint play elaboration of adults and children through live improvisation (Lindqvist, 1995; Hakkarainen, 2008; Bredikyte, 2011), in which a story frame is created to enhance children’s free narrative learning.

NARRATIVE INTERVENTION IN CHILDREN’S PLAY Creating a Narrative Basis for Joint Play In today’s Western world young children encounter many visual narratives that were unknown at the time of the birth of cultural– historical psychology in the early 1930s. At the age of three children may engage with visual media for at least three hours a day, and some day care settings frequently use digital media for educational purposes. As a result children may pick up play themes from TV programmes and other digital media. In one study, our observations demonstrated that child-initiated play reflects recent TV programmes, but only a few children have the same viewing experience and are able to play together (Bredikyte and Hakkarainen, 2010). We gave the participants, who were students of our in-service further education course in early education (working with groups of four–six-year-olds), the task of writing down all the themes of children’s self-initiated play episodes, or attempts to start a joint pretend play, during one calendar week. We got approximately 280 play themes or children’s proposals from 27 day care centres during the same week. During the next session we compared the themes with the same week’s TV programmes. The majority of the themes had a connection with the TV programmes, but only a few children have the same viewing experience and are able to elaborate a joint pretend play based on the theme. We also found that children are readier to engage in joint make-believe play in early education institutions with a play emphasis (Bredikyte and Hakkarainen, 2010).

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We concluded from our observations that only the intensive joint emotional experience of all children and educators can ignite joint narrative pretend play. In addition, we should support children in learning how to transform an exciting theme into joint play structure and actions. Earlier experience had shown that indirect adult guidance is the only possible method of supporting children’s play constructively. In other words, adults must take roles in the play. Our approach combines Lindqvist’s (1995) playworld environment with additional guided support for transforming themes and ideas into child-initiated joint play. In practice, we have combined activity corners and thematic playworlds. From this perspective, activity corners aim to concretize playworld themes and make them visible. Children’s self-initiated play and developmental transitions were the final goal of our curriculum, which we called play-generating narrative curriculum. The curriculum was constructed in the form of a story about some important themes corresponding to a child’s vision of the world (Bredikyte, 2011). Such play challenges each child to take individual steps in development. Adults cannot force children, but they can demonstrate their own perezhivanie, or emotional experience, while participating in joint play with children (Hakkarainen and Bredikyte, 2008). We took the following steps in narrative play interventions towards children’s ‘free’ play.

Stage 1 Unifying theme (fabula). Observing children’s play behaviour and activities reveals their interests. The selection of a theme is based on observations. General themes introducing basic human values (safety and danger, helping and friendship, coping with fears, cheating or telling the truth, breaking the rules, fighting for leadership, etc.) are planned during the year.

Stage 2 Story is used as a tool for ‘opening’ and clarifying the theme. Stories raise questions and

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aggravate contradictions. There are always dramatic collisions in a good story, some exciting events to which children respond. Story works as an integrating tool: story form creates a frame, an ‘imaginary world’, a context and a background for the events. A well-chosen story provides emotional involvement, motivation and a safe environment to explore frightening phenomena.

Stage 3 Projects in different activity centres help to clarify specific aspects of the theme. Children can freely choose between their own ideas and the projects in different centres. In projects new materials and tasks are introduced, particular skills are developed or children’s own ideas are supported.

Stage 4 Child-initiated free play. Children develop the theme further and new subthemes emerge. Children’s independent play activity is a space for self-development, growth, creativity and learning. The child’s ‘problems’ are best revealed in independent play. Observing children in free play, the teacher can see how children apply the knowledge and skills they were aiming at. Children need to have enough time and space for their independent activities. Vygotsky’s idea about the role of a group was important in our approach. Instead of trying to develop individual play skills, we tried to develop playgroups and interaction. Vygotsky wrote: In contrast with Piaget, we believe that develop­ ment proceeds not towards socialization, but towards converting social relations into mental functions. For this reason, all of the psychology of the group in child development is presented in a completely new light. The usual question is how one child or another behaves in a group. We ask how does the group create higher mental functions in one child or another (Vygotsky, 1997: 107).

The goal of our intervention was to form playgroups of several children and adults around attractive themes. At the beginning,

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adults (teacher education students) took the initiative and invited children to participate, and then children’s initiatives were encouraged and supported.

Adult Play Help and Support Traditional Scandinavian play pedagogy emphasizes children’s ‘free’ play, a concept that has restricted adult help and guidance mainly to organizing play opportunities and resolving conflicts. The Finnish early childhood education and care guidelines recommend ‘educators allow freedom to children who are engaged in play, but to be successful, children’s play also often needs to be guided directly or indirectly’ (Heikkilä et al., 2005). How and when to help is left to adults’ intuition. The following short description demonstrates how the traditional idea of play guidance works. The tale of Sleeping Beauty was read to four girls, all four years old. They are dressed in dress-up clothes, have decided upon the roles they will play and listen to the story again. During the reading Anna declares that she wants to be the princess, in spite of what was previously decided. After reading, the teacher asks, ‘What happened then? Anna was an elf’. Anna:

I am the princess!

Teacher: What happened then? Reetta was? Please, continue! Anna: We are just sitting. Who was the king? You could be the queen and you an elf and Sanna will be an elf and I am the princess. Please, do something! Don’t stand like a snowman! Reetta:

But what shall we do?

Anna:

Play the fairy tale of course.

Reetta:

Play the fairy tale, but how?

Teacher:

What happened?

Anna: You have to sit on the throne [pushes the king towards the throne]. This is your seat.

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Understanding Narrative as a Key Aspect of Play

Reetta But you are still very small. Lie down [to Anna]: here! Anna: Who is the mean elf? Sanna could be for while and then she would become good. Others:

What shall we do?

Anna: Don’t stand like snowmen! Give me the presents! Give me the presents or I’ll fall asleep and take my day nap. Then there will be no ‘Sleeping Beauty’. Give the presents or I’ll be furious! Are you afraid or what? (Hakkarainen, 1990: 176).

Reading the story did not work here as an emotionally exciting experience and the teacher’s questions did not help the children to understand the message of the tale. In our approach at Kajaani play laboratory, in Finland, we dramatized the story, paying attention to the dramatic quality of the presentation and using children’s emotional involvement as the main criterion. Teacher education students prepared a dramatized presentation (10–15 minutes) as part of their studies. The story was presented as a drama, a puppet show, sometimes as parallel telling (in roles) and through painting. The functions of the story presentation include the following. 1. To introduce important topics and themes which would stimulate play. All participants, both children and adults, share the experience. 2. To offer a cultural interpretation of the topic by presenting a ‘cultural’, or ‘ideal’ point of view, which might differ from the children’s interpretation. In this way the intentional collision of different opinions is created: subjective – what I think; everyday, ‘realistic’ – what others (adults and peers) think and do; and cultural or ‘ideal’ – how one is expected to think (morally). This contradictory situation creates a favourable ‘developmental tension’ which might be the starting point for a creative or developmental act, which marks the beginning of personality development. 3. To invite children to express their opinions, to give advice; sometimes they are asked for help and have to resolve difficult situations.

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Such forms of presentation we call dialogical improvisation. 4. To introduce different forms of cultural activities to the children in a meaningful way.

The general aim of the story presentation was to raise a problem that stimulates productive creativity on all possible levels: comments, dialogues, creative play, drawing, etc. The story worked as a model of thinking: it enacts an idea in a dramatic form and involves the participants in the process of identification, invites responses or starts a discussion. Story presentation stimulates children’s thinking and presents a model of dialogical communication. The goal is creative communication with the world, with each other and with oneself through collective narration (storytelling).

Adults Participation in Role-Play A first step towards serious play intervention in academic play research was taken by Kelly-Byrne (1989), who started to play as the partner of her research participants in order to better understand play. No special intervention tools were developed in this play project based on child-initiated pretend play. Mikhailenko and Korotkova (1997, 2001, 2002) were concerned about the poor quality of play plots in the pretend play of children aged five–seven, and argued that plot enrichment should be the main goal of adult intervention. Their approach was based on Propp’s (1979) morphology of the folk tale, but instead of 31 elements only 6 main elements were used. Individual sessions were not lessons but voluntary playful discussions about possible interesting new stories between an adult and a child. No findings have been published from these interventions. El’koninova’s (2001; El’koninova and Bazanova, 2004) project demonstrated that preschool children experience great difficulty in constructing dangerous situations or dramatic collisions in their play based on folk tales. In our playworld approach, teacher education students selected roles through

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which they were able to help children to create collisions or dangers. Dramatic tension creates the conditions for more advanced storylines and role relations. An example of creating dramatic tension was the joint ‘ship play’ of four teacher education students and five children. After building a ship, the players lifted the sails and started their journey. ‘Sailing’ before student intervention consisted of daily routines such as lifting the sails, fishing, preparing and eating lunch. The active student intervention started when the lookout observer saw a pirate ship with his telescope. He shouted that a pirate ship was approaching very fast and preparing for an attack. The captain (a student) took his sword and gave an order to hide, so the children hid under blankets. The students formed two parties: captain and helmsman on the one side and two attacking pirates on the other. The captain, sword in hand, asked the pirates: ‘What do you want from our ship?’ ‘We want the ship’s money, give us the money!’ [The students changed their voices to deep pirate’s voices]. ‘We do not have any money on the ship. Leave the ship or fight!’ answered the brave captain. The pirates were frightened, and withdrew. The children, who were hidden, did not see the events, but they heard the dialogue between the captain and the pirates. The children later repeated the event several times in their self-initiated play. They took turns in playing the role of the captain and helmsman chasing the attacking pirates from the ship. A remarkable character of these interchanges between the defenders and the attackers was that it was possible to recognize the tone of the students in the children’s role talk.

FUTURE CHALLENGES OF NARRATIVE PLAY THEORY AND PRACTICE The narrative approach to children’s play has a close kinship with the cultural–historical approach in psychology. It is a paradox that cultural–historical psychology did not use the

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concept of ‘narrative’ in spite of the factual narrative emphasis of the approach. A general explanation of cultural–historical psychology is that ideal cultural forms of behaviour are first presented to children in tales and stories. Bredikyte (2011) added living adult models to this explanation. A child confronts adults’ real and ideal behaviour. Children are often puzzled by the contradictions between the ideal behaviours put forward in classic tales and stories and in contemporary media, and real behaviours. Play offers an opportunity, or invitation, to experiment with transforming ideal into real forms of behaviour without overwhelming responsibility (play is just play). El’konin and Zinchenko (2002) described these ideal forms as ‘invitations of culture’. In narrative play the ‘invitations’ are the ‘ideal forms of behaviour’ of the characters. The child decides whether to accept the invitation or not. The challenge is to know what the ideal cultural forms of behaviour are, and how they will be presented in narratives in the future. Compared to the first half of the twentieth century, when the idea of ideal and real forms was presented in psychology, the present situation is radically different. Digital media and the commercial production of children’s visual narratives have partially replaced books and oral stories in daily life. Quite often children spend their media time without adults. According to some researchers (Bodrova and Leong, 2003, 2007; Mikhailenko and Korotkova, 2001), increasing numbers of children fail to develop mature forms of narrative play before school age. The results of an international survey in 16 countries (Singer, Singer, D’Agostino and DeLong, 2008) confirm that children’s imaginative play is decreasing and is often replaced by media use (games, TV programmes, DVDs). There is an apparent inconsistency in the interpretations of ideal cultural forms in cultural–historical and Western play theories. Ideal cultural forms are reflected in concrete form in elaborating the plot of play. El’konin (2005a, b) listed three levels.

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1. The plot includes the operations of a character with certain tools in one or several imaginary situations. 2. The plot includes several characters and their actions in imaginary situations. They exchange actions or act in the same frame. 3. The plot defines social relations between the characters. An example might be of the hero or heroine of the folk tale who is ready to give unselfish help to others (El’koninova and Bazanova 2004).

A growing tendency is the use of play as an auxiliary tool in learning. Different play forms are combined with a variety of learning objectives, producing the concept of ‘playful learning’ (Singer, Golinkoff and Hirsh-Pasek, 2006; Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff, Berk and Singer, 2009; van Oers, 2012). Often ‘playful’ means the addition of elements of play (game, toys, singing, role characters, etc.) to school lessons. Holistic narrative play structures are seldom used. The partial use of play elements indicates that ‘playful learning’ is dominated by learning objectives, whereas holistic narrative play structures might result in permanent qualitative changes in children’s develop­ ment at the same age (Hakkarainen, 2007; Bredikyte, 2011). How can the difference be explained? Cultural–historical play theory has explained it with the help of actions and objectives. Play actions are different from real actions. Real actions bring about concrete changes in objects, but such changes do not take place in play. Play actions instead construct the plot of play. If the same operations are used in both, play uses only the external physical image or a symbolic reference of it (Mikhailenko, 1980). An essential difference is between the objectives and children’s involvement in the activities. In play children set the goals, decide the narrative structure (the ‘fabula’ or plot) and organize the activity. A space for children’s creativity is opened, which is rarely possible during school lessons. Researchers and practitioners are unanimous about the role of play in child development (Pellegrini, 2009), but general

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agreement is not enough if concrete explanations are limited. The Tools of the Mind programme aims to scaffold children’s development of make-believe play, and a comparative study of self-regulation between a Tools of the Mind group and a control group shows clear evidence of its effectiveness (Diamond et al., 2007). A future theoretical challenge is to examine the concept of self-regulation by studying children’s intentions, motives, goals and orientations rather than by proposing binary alternatives in self-regulation. The same problem is met in the evaluation and ‘scaffolding’ of make-believe play (Leong and Bodrova, 2012). The play stages (first scripts, roles in action, roles with rules, mature roles, dramatization) and play characteristics (plan, roles, props, extended time frame, language, scenario) are described formally. The aim is of course the highest stage of make-believe play, but the programme developers have ignored the theoretically central difference between play content and formal characteristics that El’konin (2005a, b) emphasized. This means that the Tools of the Mind programme fails to consider the narrative basis of children’s play.

CONCLUSION Narrative ideal forms of human behaviour help us to explain in a new way Vygotsky’s (1978) general genetic law of higher mental functions. Usually the focus has been on the second step – how individual higher mental functions are internalized – but the first step – the interpsychological genesis of mental functions – should be explained as well. Material from our playworld projects demonstrates how the joint play of adults and children creates collective higher mental functions. Our focus has been on the interpsychological level of development – how abilities and skills are jointly elaborated and used: for instance, a group of children mastered reading and writing in joint play, but no child was individually competent at the beginning of the long-term

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play project (Hakkarainen, 2002). Our narrative playworld approach has demonstrated how children’s free learning in play environments moves the boundaries of the Zones of Proximal Development of both children and teacher education students at the same time (Bredikyte, 2011).

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Schiller, F. (1980) ‘Uber die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen’, in F. Schiller, Werke in vier Bänden. 4: 558–634. Herrsching: Pawlak. Singer, D., Golinkoff, R. M. and Hirsh-Pasek, K. (2006) Play = Learning. New York: Oxford University Press. Singer, D., Singer, J., D’Agostino, H. and DeLong, R. (2008) ‘Children’s pastimes and play in sixteen nations: Free-play declining?’, The American Journal of Play, 1(3): 2–7. Strawson, G. J. (2004) ‘Against narrativity’, Ratio, 17(4): 428–53. Strawson, G. J. (2010) ‘Narrativity and nonnarrativity’, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 1(6): 775–80. Strelkova, L. P. (1986) ‘Usloviia razvitija empatii pod vlija­ niem hudozhestvennogo proizvedenija [Conditions for the development of empathy under the influence of a literary work]’, in A. V. Zaporozhets and Y. Z. Neverovits (eds), Razvitie sotsialnyh emotsii u detei doshkol’nogo vozrasta. Moscow: Pedagogika pp. 70–89. Sutton-Smith, B. (1995) ‘Conclusion: The persuasive rhetorics of play’, in A. D. Pellegrini (ed.), The Future of Play Theory. New York: SUNY Press. pp. 275–96. Venger, L. A. 1978 Syuzetno-rolevaya igra I psikhiceskogo razvitie rebenka [Make-believe play and psychological development of the child] In Igra I yeye rol' v razvitii rebenka doshkol'nogo vozrasta. Moscow: Pedagogika. pp. 32–36. Venger, L. A. and Dyacenko, O. M. (eds) (1989) Igry i uprazneniya po razvitiyu umstvennyh sposobnostei u detei doshkolnogo vozrasta [Plays and exercises for developing intellectual abilities of preschool chil­ dren]. Moscow: Prosveshtshenie. Vygotsky, L. S. (1977) ‘Play and its role in the mental development of the child’, in M. Cole (ed.), Soviet Developmental Psychology. White Plains, NY: M.E. Sharpe. pp. 76–99. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978) Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (1997) The Collected Works (Volume 4, ed. R. W. Rieber). New York: Plenum Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (2004) ‘Imagination and creativity in childhood’, Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, 42(1): 4–84. Zaporozhets, A. V. (1986) Izbrannye psikhologicheskie trudy [Collected psychological works]. (Volume 1) Moscow: Pedagogika. Zaporozhets, A. V., Markova, T. A. (1980) Osnovy doshkol’noi pedagogiki [Basis of Preschool Pedagogy]. Moscow: Pedagogika. Zen’kovski, V. V. (2013) ‘The psychology of childhood’, Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, 51(1): 3–91 (originally published 1923).

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21 Physical Play and Development M i c h e l l e Ta n n o c k

INTRODUCTION When we think of young children at play, we often have images of physical actions such as running, chasing, and climbing. Such images seem the wholesome expression of childhood. However, when we consider research on the physical development and play of young children, it becomes more difficult to ascertain such clear representations. Individuals engaged in the study of young children bring with them a rich history of childhood experiences which directly influence their perceptions of childhood. Whether we were climbers or runners or builders of forts, each experience has contributed to our own values and beliefs, and is typically recognized as something we hope for the children of today. The study of young children stems from individual perceptions of children and childhood. As with many disciplines, early childhood researchers follow a need to solve problems, resolve riddles, and enhance understanding to improve the experience of young children and

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more clearly support their growth and development. Issues which are not at the forefront as a concern, at an individual or policy level, may be neglected or overlooked. Such is often the case with the physical development and play of young children. While physical play is often considered a natural experience for young children, research into young children’s physical play has been somewhat sparse. Research in early childhood has tended to focus on more academic considerations such as language and cognition, although, as Stegelin argues (2005: 83), ‘play with others is necessary for the development of social competence, and… in turn has a direct relationship to success in school’. The history of scholarly awareness of the play of preschool-age children has addressed general and specific areas of interest such as gender differences (Evans, 1998), creativity (Singer and Singer, 1985), pretend play (Paley, 1988), and play entry skills (TrawickSmith, 1988) but less attention has been given to physical play in early childhood.

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PHYSICAL PLAY AS AN AVENUE FOR LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT In early childhood, play is central in daily experiences and as an avenue for developing concrete cognitive awareness of the world in which children live. Young children’s play occurs in various spaces including parks, homes, shopping malls, beaches or forested lands. Within these settings, a range of social–emotional, physical, and cognitive learning occurs. For example, when children chase one another, physical and social learning occurs, as they discover how their bodies move, how their playmates might respond to shifts in the development of the game, how to problem-solve if their playmates want to change the rules or accidentally fall down, and how to use language to express their reactions and opinions to others (Tannock, 2008). Physical play, or contact between players, may support sensory development, which is of particular importance for young children who are seeking increased physical interaction through deep pressure, reaching muscles and joints. For some children a heightened interest in large body activities and use of muscles is a focus, while others may gravitate towards small muscle actions. Both large and small muscle expressions are important developmentally; however, space considerations and indoor limitations of classroom settings more readily support small muscle pursuits, whereas large muscle or full body play is more acceptable in outdoor environments. The large body movements of physical play not only serve to develop muscle and bone strength but also help children with skills such as balance and coordination, which then assist with gaining a sense of mastery over the environment as children physically alter spaces during their play. Outdoor play spaces with manipulative large materials – such as logs, rocks, or planks of wood – which children can adjust and reconfigure within their play experiences add play value and alternative interactions with their environment.

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In addition to physiological and neurologically based variations in children, other factors that influence individual differences include gender, temperament, early childrearing experiences and related relationships, and culture (Tannock, 2010). In some areas of research, a distinction is made between cultures favouring close physical contact and those preferring non-contact (Remland, Jones, and Brinkman, 1995). For example, in some cultures widespread physical contact or loud laughter, which may be common in physical play, is discouraged, while other cultures embrace more vigorous physical play demonstrations. Yawkey and AlverezDominques (1984) identified differing play behaviours among Hispanic and AngloAmerican children. These researchers noted Hispanic children’s play is more realistic in nature than that of Anglo-American children; Anglo-American children engage in more fantasy play than Hispanic children. Yet cultural conditions can also influence play behaviours. For instance, Montare and Boone (1980) noted that boys from Puerto Rico displayed more aggression in team sports than American boys, although American boys with absent fathers displayed more aggression than teammates with actively involved fathers. Slaughter and Dombrowski (1989: 290) recognized that ‘cultural transmission regulates the expression (the amount, content, breadth or range, mood, meaning) of this play.’ As children enter their preschool years, play, including the social dimensions and opportunities for learning, takes on an increasingly central role in their lives. Parents in many affluent societies enrol their children in preschool and daycare, and in structured sports, drama and music courses. With each undertaking, children have opportunities to expand their skills while also gaining a degree of independence from their family. Young children continually develop socially as they become increasingly aware of their peers and are exposed to a variety of play connections with other children. Connections with peers may occur in more structured environments

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such as preschool, or within more casual settings such as the local playground or park (Scarlett, Naudeau, Salonius-Pasternak, and Ponte, 2005; Miller, 2007). These early social interactions with peers not only provide children with enjoyment and exercise but might also be fundamentally essential for social and emotional learning. When they engage in physical play with peers, children learn not only about their world but also about the social expectations of others. Similar-aged children play an important role in social learning, as peers may offer parity in a more egalitarian relationship than is possible with older children or adults. These early peer relationships afford occasions to explore a range of social experiences, including conflict, collaboration, competition, and aggression, which may not be experienced in comparable ways in relationships with adults (Hartup and Moore, 1990). The cognitive abilities of children serve as a foundation for the social elements of play. Children physically interact with objects and individuals within their environment when they engage in play. The manipulation of objects and growing understanding of others enhances their cognitive skills. Physical play has benefits in the development of social skills such as taking turns and playing by the rules (Kranowitz and Miller, 2006). Physically interactive play, including ‘rough-and-tumble’ (R&T) play, is seen across cultures and in animal research. For example, Pellis and Pellis (2007) conducted research exploring the impact of R&T play among young rats in connection with brain development, paying close attention to social cognition. The findings, while conducted in animal research, hold implications for human development due to similar developmental norms. Specifically, young rats were either accorded opportunities to engage in R&T play or were denied such experiences. This research emphasizes a need for R&T play as a component of normative development in rats, which relates to brain development in humans. In this study, when

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young rats were denied opportunities to engage in social R&T play, the results indicated organizational changes in their brains. Pellis and Pellis make a link to the importance of R&T play for young children, claiming ‘it may not be the case that the more socially competent children engage in more play fighting, but rather that the play fighting may promote the development of social competency’ (2007: 97). Another study noted similar results examining rats that engage in R&T play, principally at 32 and 40 days of age (Scott and Panksepp, 2003). Young children’s engagement in R&T play is more apparent at the age of seven years (Humphreys and Smith, 1984), which reflects the peak of engagement by rats when adjusting for lifespan time frames. Through the study of animal behaviors, researchers are able to recognize similarities in humans, including the consequences for children who are denied opportunities to engage in big body play (Power, 2000). For example, children who do not engage in physical play can be fearful in their reactions to friendly physical play initiations by peers.

PHYSICAL PLAY IN RESEARCH Educators are placed in complex positions as they navigate between safeguarding young children and ensuring they are exposed to a wide range of physical activities. Indeed, in an effort to promote optimal growth and development, educators can find themselves balancing a desire to expose children to a myriad of experiences while considering influential social perspectives that state safety must be the primary focus. The acceptance of positive physical contact, such as the social cognition benefits of R&T play, presents challenges for educators seeking to understand this form of play. R&T play has been considered a ‘neglected aspect of play’ (Pellegrini and Smith, 1998: 577). While R&T play has recently become a topic of growing interest to more researchers,

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further consideration in terms of how this form of play is interpreted by educators is needed in order to specifically address the challenges that it holds in early childhood settings. As detailed by Reed (2005: 69), ‘research of day care and school personnel’s attitudes and values toward R&T play needs to be assessed’. The research on R&T play has mainly involved elementary school-aged children, primarily focusing on boys (Pellegrini and Smith, 1998; Reed and Brown, 2000). As a result, Reed (2005) noted the need to understand the R&T behaviors of both young boys and girls. While there is an obvious gap in the research literature on the perspectives of educators and how they interpret and respond to R&T, it might be concluded that the extent to which R&T play is encouraged or discouraged in early childhood settings is dependent upon how educators interpret and value the R&T play of children, both boys and girls. There are multiple definitions of play and they include a variety of behaviors. Physical play is defined as fun, socially interactive behavior that includes running, climbing, pouncing, chasing and fleeing, wrestling, kicking, open-handed slapping, falling and other forms of physical and verbal play fighting (Pellegrini and Smith, 1998; Freeman and Brown, 2004). Freeman and Brown (2004) and Lagacé-Séguin and d’Entremont (2006) divide R&T play into two forms, ‘contact forms (play fighting) and non-contact forms (chasing)’ (464). This physical mastery of skills is incorporated into the social interactions of the young child during the development of play. Using these descriptors as a working definition, physical play can be accepted within the play of young children in a variety of early childhood settings. While the play may be recognized as physical, the settings in which the children are at play may be vastly different. Each educational setting is unique and the background and characteristics of the children different. These differences present challenges for educators as they develop a curriculum to guide the activities and programme. The philosophies, education, and

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training of educators, and society or public policy, will also have an impact on different kinds of curriculum and their support across early childhood settings (Goffin and Wilson, 2001). For example, an educator with a personal philosophy of play-based learning might find him- or herself in a position of influence in a program with a direct instructional model. Though the educator’s personal philosophy may contradict the dominant philosophy of the program, the curricular choices of the educator will undoubtedly influence the program approach. As educators seek to create a curriculum that reflects the interests of the children, they need to develop a level of acceptance and understanding of all features of play, including physical play.

PURPOSES OF PHYSICAL PLAY There are multiple functions of physical play and they include the health and cognitive benefits of exercise, the socialization of adultlike behaviors, the development of friendships and bonding with others. Pellegrini and Smith (1998) presented two opposing perspectives on the functions of physical play. First, they claim that one function of physical play is for children to learn and practise skills they see among adults; second, that the play itself holds immediate benefits separate from learning opportunities. Pellegrini and Smith (1998) identified the need for exercise as a possible function of physical play: ‘during the preschool/primary school years children engage in substantial amounts of exercise play’ (579), with health benefits for those who regularly engage in vigorous games and sports. The development of endurance and strength may be a benefit of physical play in two ways. First, the play can lead to increased responsiveness as children are energized and excited through play; this in turn supports the second benefit as ‘exercise play might, by breaking up cognitive tasks, provide spaced or distributed practice rather than massed practice’ (Pellegrini and Smith, 1998: 584).

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This dispersed practice might, according to these authors, help children attend to cognitive tasks. If children are given opportunities to exercise at some point near the middle of a period of completing cognitive tasks, the assertion is that their ability to attend to these is improved. When children engage in R&T play, it may outwardly appear that they are either fighting or being aggressive towards their friends. However, Reed and Brown (2000) recognized that R&T play is also a venue for the physical expression of care and friendship among players. R&T play is not only a form of physical activity but also a means through which children – and this might be seen as important for some boys – can express emotional connections in a socially acceptable manner, often through physical contact. The expression of caring behaviors among children is often thought to vary by gender. For example, those taking an essentialized or biological view of gender believe that boys and girls have different perspectives on physical relationships, including the ways in which care is physically expressed (Reed and Brown, 2000). Within this framework, according to Freeman and Brown (2004), R&T play may be one of the few socially acceptable ways for boys to express care and intimacy for other boys, with exchange and mutual consent distinguishing R&T from real fighting, aggression, or bullying.

EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATORS AND PHYSICAL PLAY IN CHILD CARE SETTINGS Several factors can shape attitudes to and management of play in early childhood settings. Educators often find physically active play to be a concern and a pattern of play which continues to exist despite efforts to eliminate it. Perceptions and attitudes towards physical play may include the gendered perspectives of predominantly female educators when big body players are often young boys. As noted by Carlson, ‘without

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understanding why rough play is necessary for young children’s development and that its risks can be managed, teachers – especially female teachers – are likely to shut it down to protect the children in their care’ (2011: 2). Educators are often concerned about injury and have difficulty determining children’s enjoyment of physical play, which often reflects aggressive actions; they must navigate different attitudes towards varied types of play from an educational perspective. Such concerns are likely to continue as a result of increased caution due to liability issues related to child injuries within educational settings, especially in countries such as the United States (Sutterby and Frost, 2002). Educators are influenced by suggestions and guidelines promoting techniques for guiding children’s behaviors in the classroom, which are often concentrated on the eradication of physically interactive play (Powell, Dunlap, and Fox, 2006). Freeman and Brown (2004) considered a common dilemma for female early childhood educators who, on the one hand, want to support individualized opportunities for play choices among the children and, on the other, desire to avoid perpetuating genderbiased stereotypes that only boys enjoy physically active play. One factor related to this dilemma is that female and male educators often hold contrasting views on play and display differences in the nature of the play in which they participate with children. For example, Sandberg and Pramling Samuelsson (2005) interviewed 10 female and 10 male preschool teachers in Sweden. Participants generalized their own childhood play as stereotyped in relation to gender. The researchers recognized that male early childhood educators are more willing to engage in physical play with children, noting that ‘female preschool teachers emphasize the importance of social development in play while male preschool teachers accentuate the significance of physical development’ (2005: 304). When asked to describe the play of young children, the male educators would depict how boys use

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games with rules while the female educators portrayed how girls use role play. The interviews revealed that females were less enthusiastic in their play with children when compared with male educators. Further, male educators were found to spend greater periods of time at play with children and used play as a method to enhance their relationships with children. This differing perspective is particularly dominant when considering physical play. The limited understanding of predominantly male forms of play warrants further consideration to support all children’s physical play (Tannock, 2008). Male educators engaging in physically active play with children in early childhood settings stand a risk of being criticized for participating in the activity. Particularly for male educators, social expectations and concerns can be raised when adults and children are physically interactive. Johnson (1997) recognized the limitations sometimes placed on physical interactions between children and educators as part of a greater social concern about predator intent. With ‘no touch’ policies increasingly prominent in some educational settings, educators meeting young children’s nurturing and developmental needs through touch may find themselves responding to these needs cautiously out of concern for how physical interactions may be interpreted. The limitations placed on educators as a result of social or moral panic need to be studied further to determine the influence and impact on young children’s development. This is not a vindictive act on the part of society or educators; rather, concerns are often based on misunderstanding. Educators have different styles of interacting with and supporting young children and young children have varied needs for support, including physical connections, which need opportunities for inclusion in an effort to provide optimal experiences for children. Differing styles of play can be considered from the position of the gender identity of the children themselves. Clark and Paechter (2007) discuss gender identity in relation to physical education and play.

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While opportunities for girls to engage in physically active play have increased, particularly in the past century, barriers, including gender, continue to restrict acceptance and encouragement of physically active females. Investigations into the participation of girls in football (Clark and Paechter, 2007), traditionally a sport for boys, noted that fewer than 10 per cent of players were girls and those girls who chose to participate were subsidiary to the game and did not realize the same level of skill as many of the boys. The authors also observe that the role of physically active play holds implications for gender identity for both boys and girls in relation to social norms. For boys, physical games such as football are linked with masculinity, connected with gendered expectations, while for girls, playing football was viewed as infringing on ‘male “rights” to the game’ (2007: 274). The authors conclude that an inclusive and supportive environment, which may require directed coaching and opportunities for girls to engage in the play without boys, is needed to aid in moving beyond gendered ideology. Physically active play for boys and girls becomes a complex issue for educators seeking to support equity in opportunity. Not only do male and female educators hold gendered perspectives on play but also the children themselves bring perceptions regarding their abilities, limitations and identification of what boys and girls should and should not be able to do. Equally, educational spaces can be gendered in terms of provision of resources and rules (Paechter and Clark, 2007). Educators need to encourage boys and girls to interact with materials and participate in activities which may hold gendered social expectations. As with gendered perspectives and social norms, cultural interpretations of physically active play need consideration. Pellegrini and Smith (1998) demonstrated that boys tend to engage in physically active play more often than girls despite cultural differences, which include the gendered meaning

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of participation in varied play forms, social support, socio-economic status and family customs, beliefs and values. However, adult support for physically active play, particularly R&T play, varies among cultures. In cultures such as that of the United States, where independence, assertiveness, competition and aggressive play are valued, fathers engage in more R&T play with their infant children. Conversely, in cultures where interdependence is valued, R&T play is less prevalent (Roopnarine, Ahmeduzzaman, Hossain, and Riegraf, 1992).

CONCERN FOR SAFETY Although the positive benefits of physical play may be recognized by some educators, the question of injury during play is often a concern (Dockett and Tegel, 1996). There is frequently a connection drawn between physical play and children being injured or a fear that physically active play, particularly R&T play, may intensify or lead to aggression. Coupled with this is the educator’s concern surrounding children who want to engage in superhero, war or fighting incidents derived from viewing movies, television or computer games (Reed, Brown, and Roth, 2000). However, while play may involve imitation of experienced or viewed events, injury is no more prevalent in this form of play than with other experiences including organized sports. Injury, to some degree, is inherent in early childhood as young children test their limits, practice new skills or play in unfamiliar environments. The wariness that many educators might feel in countries such as the United States often reflects concern for the legal consequences of an injury, rather than the injury itself. The outdoor environment is often the site for physically active and boisterous play. Based on interviews and dialogues with early childhood educators, Copeland, Sherman, Kendeigh, Kalkwarf, and Saelens (2012) determined that a child’s only available time for outdoor play may be while they are in an

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educational setting. Outdoor play can include more gentle elements such as running or jumping, yet also much more vigorous play such as R & I or superhero play where children may be at a greater perceived risk of injury. However, as Agbenyega (2011) recognized, children’s play is related to how safe they perceive a space to be. Children who feel safe in outdoor spaces engage in positive play behaviors, ‘whereas unsafe spaces constrain, frustrate and disengage children’ (2011: 163). Both the complexity and the enjoyment of play sequences is related to, and to a degree dependent upon, the children’s interpretation of a space as safe or unsafe. Thus, it is important for educators to include children in planning for outdoor spaces. During the development of play episodes the nature of the physical and verbal interaction may change, with new physical activities introduced, additional children or adults joining, and verbal exchanges or vocalizations changing. As with most play, physical play episodes are therefore not inert events but a vibrant process that is changing over time. Concerns by educators appear to circulate around the apprehension that physical play may escalate into injury. The concern that play may result in injury can become a focus, infusing an atmosphere of overprotectiveness by parents and educators and leading to the introduction of precautionary programes (Schwebel et al., 2006). There is a need to fully understand how educators in early childhood settings recognize and interpret physical play, along with their opinions about behaviour management, before a determination can be made on how they manage such types of play. If educators do not know how to appropriately manage or govern physical play, this will remain an ongoing challenge. Some qualitative research into the area of educators’ perceptions has been conducted in relation to R & T play, which has shown that educators identify inherent aspects of value in such play, including the development of social competency, self-confidence and cooperation. They also support the capacity R&T play has for

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enabling children’s emerging judgements about adapting their play to the ability of others, controlling impulses and aggression (Tannock, 2008). However, additional research is needed to fully understand educators’ different perspectives and how physically active play can be supported in early childhood settings. Equally, as noted by Agbenyega (2011), more research is needed that includes the perspectives of young children on their play and the form and use of their play spaces.

THE EARLY CHILDHOOD SETTING Young children in many societies spend increasing amounts of time outside their homes as they attend a range of childcare programes. This early connection with formal programing may have an impact on their play opportunities with other children. Hewes (2007) found that children who attend early childhood programes spend less time at play compared to children who do not attend such programes. Hewes contended that early childhood education programes focus more on academic educational opportunities and less time on recreational activities including physical play. In order to benefit from time and settings dedicated to free and spontaneous play with others, children need opportunities, sufficient time and wide-open space to play outside the classroom (Reed and Brown, 2000). Preschool and elementary educators have an important role in supporting young children’s involvement in play by providing opportunities within multiple contexts for young children at play (Reed and Brown, 2000). Early childhood educators influence young children’s play through their support for or discouragement of different forms of play. Indeed, educators influence young children’s play simply through their presence on a playground (Fabes, Martin, and Hanish, 2003). For children to become proficient players, the support of both parents and educators for active play is needed.

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Educator Materials and Professional Development Research has demonstrated that physical play is essential for young children’s health and well-being (Frost, Wortham, and Reifel, 2012). Educators participate in professional development opportunities which address physical play opportunities for children. However, there remains a need for current and relevant research which can be applied in early childhood settings to aid educators in promoting physical activity. This is particularly so given recent concerns regarding rapidly ‘increasing rates of childhood obesity and weight-related health problems [that] are exacerbated by physical inactivity and sedentary routines’ (Stegelin, 2005: 79). Educators need to be cognizant not only of current trends and ‘best practices’ but also of a more holistic developmental approach in their daily interactions with young children. Ward (2010) recognized that childcare settings hold a unique role in supporting lifelong activity levels because early exposure to physical activity can be encouraged and supported by educators. This may aid in children adopting a positive view of being physically active, which may be held even as they move into adolescence and adulthood. Research focused on promoting physical activity with the premise of obesity prevention has reported limited success (Hannon and Brown, 2008; Trost, Fees, and Dzewaltowski, 2008). However, as noted by Trost (2011), the availability of playground equipment and professional development for educators on incorporating activities into their curriculum leads to increased physical interest and pursuits among the children in their care. Clearly, educators who plan for physical activity within their programmes can greatly enhance and expand experiences for young children.

Outdoor Classrooms and Consideration of Physical Play The emergent curriculum advocated by proponents of the Reggio Emilia approach

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focuses on the intrinsic interests of young children and providing opportunities for exploration of points of curiosity through ‘curriculum planning that guides experiences of joint, open-ended discovery and constructive posing and solving of problems’ (Edwards, Gandini, and Forman, 1998: 7–8). Educators serve as resources and guides for young children and their emerging understanding through sensitive and careful listening, observation/documentation and reflection with other adults (Rinaldi, 2001). Rather than dictating content or knowledge to be absorbed, the emergent curricular design of Reggio Emilia affords opportunities not only in the classroom but also within the greater environment, including outdoor spaces, where physical activity typically flourishes. Often recognized for its curriculum and the image of the competent and capable child, Reggio Emilia also has views about outdoor spaces. The ways in which this approach considers the environment in relation to physical activity are often overlooked and are worth examining in more detail. Just as the ideas related to emergent learning through projects and seeing the child–educator relationship as one of partners in learning have proved valuable indoors, emergent learning in the outdoor environment within a partnership merits investigation. Encouragement of physical activity which is not, at the outset, limited by gendered expectations or fear of injury, but, rather, is explored within a framework of generating knowledge about individual abilities and impact on the social and physical environment, is a worthwhile goal for development. The notion of an environment which accepts and supports the physical play needs and desires of young children may appear to be a common understanding. Yet in an effort to heighten test scores, recess (outdoor free play) in US public schools is often viewed as time to focus on structured learning rather than on opportunities for physical activity and play (Frost, 2007). This movement away from unstructured outdoor free play opportunities is merging into early

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childhood settings; yet as Copeland et al. note, ‘the time in child care may be the child’s only opportunity for outdoor play’ (2012: 267). As spontaneous outdoor play disappears from city neighborhoods, providing opportunities for self-directed or free play may increasingly become the responsibility of formal educational settings (Frost, 2007). When considering young children’s need to be physically active in connection with societal trends towards inert activities, educators seeking programing designs more readily aligned with children’s development can look to alternative methods for guidance. An example of this from the perspective of supporting physical play is the outdoor classroom approach. Outdoor classrooms are becoming a common experience in Scandinavian countries and in the United Kingdom, as demonstrated by the Forest School movement (Fjørtoft, 2001; Maynard, 2007). ‘Forest School fits well both with traditional views of “good” early childhood education and more recent curriculum frameworks in England and Wales, while also addressing current cultural concerns about children’s increasingly sedentary and managed lifestyles’ (Maynard, 2007: 1). The premise of children spending a majority of their day outdoors, with nature serving as both the backdrop and canvas for learning, is of interest to the wider field of early childhood education. Physical play in its most natural form is predominantly an outdoor experience. Outdoor classrooms provide an ideal setting for physical expression and mastery of skills (Kernan, this volume). Outdoor classrooms provide a unique occasion for researching educational opportunities for young children. Play outdoors is more self-directed than play indoors due in large part to the expanse of space and multiple environmental stimulants, including the earth, boulders, wind, rain, snow, temperature changes and living entities, such as insects and vegetation. Equally, educators and parents tend to allow for louder voices and larger body movements among children, supporting less restricted

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behavior and encouraging freedom of selfexpression, not always available indoors. Educators and researchers need to explore the impact of the inherent freedoms of outdoor spaces and corresponding opportunities for physical play from an educational and developmental perspective. The very nature of the freedom of outdoors combined with a naturally sculptured ground and environment promotes learning in general, and is particularly beneficial for physical development. For example, Fjørtoft (2001: 111) claims ‘natural environments represent dynamic and rough playscapes that challenge motor activity in children’. The movement towards a more naturalistic environment for young children will prove beneficial in various physical play possibilities for children. For young children, the opportunity to engage in more robust forms of play, such as R&T play, in a more accepting environment can be critical when considering the development of social cognition. Clearly the freedom inherent in outdoor adventures can enhance early childhood environments and physical play experiences for young children.

CONCLUSION Young children engage in a variety of forms of play. Physical play has been neglected to some degree in early childhood research, perhaps partly due to the naturalistic nature of the play and the seeming disconnect from cognitive skill development. This may be due to the somewhat rambunctious or R&T appearance of the play and educators’ misunderstanding of its developmental importance. It may also be connected to a limited understanding of the developmental role of physical interaction, including sensory awareness and emerging social cognition, through the social nature of physical play. Continued research on the developmental role and academic benefits of physical play is needed, particularly within the contexts of emergent curricular design and the utility

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of outdoor classrooms. Through increased awareness derived from the application of future research findings, early childhood educators will be more readily prepared to incorporate and recognize the value of physically active play displayed by young children in their care.

REFERENCES Agbenyega, J. (2011) ‘Researching children’s understanding of safety: An auto-driven visual approach’, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 12(2): 163–74. Carlson, F. M. (2011) Big Body Play: Why Boisterous, Vigorous, and Very Physical Play is Essential to Children’s Development and Learning. Washington, DC: National Association for the Education of Young Children. Clark, S. and Paechter, C. (2007) ‘“Why can’t girls play football?” Gender dynamics and the playground’, Sport, Education and Society, 12(3): 261–76. Copeland, K. A., Sherman, S. N., Kendeigh, C. A., Kalkwarf, H. J. and Saelens, B. E. (2012) ‘Societal values and policies may curtail preschool children’s physical activity in child care centers’, Pediatrics, 129(2): 265–74. Dockett, S. and Tegel, K. (1996) ‘Identifying dilemmas for early childhood educators’, Australian Research in Early Childhood Education, 1: 20–8. Edwards, C. P., Gandini, L. and Forman, G. E. (1998) The Hundred Languages of Children: The Reggio Emilia Approach: Advanced Reflection. (2nd ed.) Greenwich, CT: Ablex. Evans, K. S. (1998) ‘Combating gender disparity in education: Guidelines for early childhood educators’, Early Childhood Education Journal, 26: 83–8. Fabes, R. A., Martin, C. L. and Hanish, L. D. (2003) ‘Young children’s play qualities in same-, other-, and mixed-sex peer groups’, Child Development, 74(12): 921–32. Fjørtoft, I. (2001) ‘The natural environment as a playground for children: The impact of outdoor play activities in pre-primary school children’, Early Childhood Education Journal, 29(2): 111–17. Freeman, N. K. and Brown, M. H. (2004) ‘Reconceptualizing rough and tumble play: Ban the banning’, in Reifel, S. and Brown, M. (ed.), Social Contexts of Early Education, and Reconceptualizing Play (II): Volume 13: Advances in Early Education and Day Care. Bingley, West Yorkshire, England: Emerald Group Publishing. pp. 219–34.

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Frost, J. L. (2007) ‘The changing culture of childhood: A perfect storm’, Childhood Education, 83(4): 225–30. Frost, J. L., Wortham, S. C. and Reifel, S. (2012) Play and Child Development. (4th ed.) Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson. Goffin, S. G. and Wilson, C. S. (2001) Curriculum Models and Early Childhood Education: Appraising the Relationship. (2nd ed.) Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Hannon, J. C. and Brown, B. B. (2008) ‘Increasing preschoolers’ physical activity intensities: An activity-friendly preschool playground intervention’, Preventive Medicine, 46: 532–6. Hartup, W. W. and Moore, S. G. (1990) ‘Early peer relations: Developmental significance and prognostic implications’, Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 5: 1–17. Hewes, J. (2007) ‘The value of play in early learning: Towards a pedagogy’, in T. Jambor and J. V. Gils (eds), Several Perspectives on Children’s Play: Scientific Reflections for Practitioners. Antwerp, Belgium: Garant. pp. 119–32. Humphreys, A. P. and Smith, P. K. (1984) ‘Rough-andtumble in preschool and playground’, in Smith, P. K. (ed.), Play in Animals and Humans. Oxford: Blackwell. pp. 241–66. Johnson, R. (1997) ‘The “No Touch” policy’, in Tobin, J. (ed.), Pleasure in Early Childhood Education. Ann Arbor, MI: Edwards Brothers. pp. 101–18. Lagacé-Séguin, D. G. and d’Entremont, M. R. L. (2006) ‘The role of child negative affect in the relations between parenting styles and play’, Early Childhood Development and Care, 176: 461–77. Maynard, T. (2007) ‘Forest schools in Great Britain: An initial exploration’, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 8(4): 320–31. Miller, D. F. (2007) Positive Child Guidance. (5th ed.) Clifton Park, NY: Thomson Delmar Learning. Montare, A., and Boone, S. (1980) ‘Aggression and paternal absence: Racial-ethnic differences among inner-city boys’, Journal of Genetic Psychology, 137: 223–32. Paley, V. G. (1988) Bad Guys Don’t Have Birthdays: Fantasy Play at Four. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Pellegrini, A. D. and Smith, P. K. (1998) ‘Physical activity play: The nature and function of a neglected aspect of play’, Child Development, 69(3): 577–98. Pellis, S. M. and Pellis, V. C. (2007) ‘Rough-and-tumble play and the development of the social brain’, Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16(2): 95–8.

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Powell, D., Dunlap, G. and Fox, L. (2006) ‘Prevention and intervention for the challenging behaviors of toddlers and preschoolers’, Infants and Young Children, 19(1): 25–35. Power, T. G. (2000) Play and Exploration in Children and Animals. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Paechter, C. and Clark, S. (2007) ‘Learning gender in primary school playgrounds: Findings from the Tomboy Identities Study’, Pedagogy, Culture and Society, 15(3): 317–31. Reed, T. L. (2005) ‘A qualitative approach to boys rough and tumble play: There is more than meets the eye’, in F. F. McMahon, D. E. Lytle, and B. Sutton-Smith (eds), Play: An Interdisciplinary Synthesis. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. pp. 53–71. Reed, T. and Brown, M. (2000) ‘The expression of care in the rough and tumble play of boys’, Journal of Research in Childhood Education, 15(1): 104–16. Reed, T., Brown, M. and Roth, S. A. (2000) ‘Friendship formation and boys’ rough and tumble play: Implications for teacher education programs’, Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education, 21(3): 331–6. Remland, M. S., Jones, T. S. and Brinkman, H. (1995) ‘Interpersonal distance, body orientation and touch: Effects of culture, gender, and age’, The Journal of Social Psychology, 135(30): 281–97. Rinaldi, C. (2001) ‘The pedagogy of listening: The listening perspective from Reggio Emilia’, Innovations in Early Education: The International Reggio Exchange, 8(4): 1–4. Roopnarine, J. L., Ahmeduzzaman, M., Hossain, Z. and Riegraf, N. B. (1992) ‘Parent–infant rough play: Its cultural specificity’, Early Education and Development, 3(4): 298–311. Sandberg, A. and Pramling Samuelsson, I. (2005) ‘An interview study of gender differences in preschool teachers’ attitudes toward children’s play’, Early Childhood Education Journal, 32: 297–305. Scarlett, W. G., Naudeau, S., Salonius-Pasternak, D. and Ponte, I. (2005) Children’s Play. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Schwebel, D. C., Summerline, A. L., Bounds, M. L. and Morrongiello. B. A. (2006) ‘The stamp-in safety program’, Journal of Pediatric Psychology, 31(2): 152–62. Scott, E. and Panksepp, J. (2003) ‘Rough and tumble play in human children’, Aggressive Behavior, 29: 539–51. Singer, J. L. and Singer, D. G. (1985) Make Believe: Games and Activities to Foster Imaginative Play in Young Children. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman. Slaughter, D. T. and Dombrowski, J. (1989) ‘Cultural continuities and discontinuities: Impact on social and pretend play’, in M. N. Bloch and A. D. Pellegrini (eds),

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The Ecological Context of Children’s Play. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. pp. 282–310. Stegelin, D. A. (2005) ‘Making the case for play policy: Research-based reasons to support play-based environments’, Young Children, 60(2): 76–85. Sutterby, J. A. and Frost, J. L. (2002) ‘Making playgrounds fit for children and children fit on playgrounds’, Young Children, 57(3): 36–42. Tannock, M. T. (2008) ‘Rough and tumble play: An investigation of the perceptions of educators and young children’, Early Childhood Education Journal, 35(4): 357–61. Tannock, M. T. (2010) ‘Rough and tumble play in early childhood settings: Challenges for personnel training’, in E. Nwodah (ed.), Play and Culture Studies (Vol. 10). Lanham, MD: University Press of America. pp. 143–64. Trawick-Smith, J. (1988) ‘“Let’s say you’re the baby, OK?” Play leadership and following behavior of young children’, Young Children, 43(5): 51–8.

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Trost, S. G. (2011) ‘Interventions to promote physical activity in young children’, in R. E. Tremblay, M. Bolvin and R. De V. Peters (eds), Encyclopedia on Early Childhood Development. Montreal, Quebec: Centre of Excellence for Early Childhood Development and Strategic Knowledge Cluster on Early Child Development. pp. 1–6. Trost, S. G., Fees, B. and Dzewaltowski, D. (2008) ‘Feasibility and efficacy of a “move and learn” physical activity curriculum in preschool children’, Journal of Physical Activity & Health, 5(1): 88–103. Ward, D. S. (2010) ‘Physical activity in young children: The role of child care’, Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, 42(3): 499–501. Yawkey, T. and Alverez-Dominques, J. (1984) ‘Comparisons of free play behaviors of Hispanic and Anglo middle-class SES five year olds’. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New Orleans, LA.

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22 Play and Playfulness: Issues of Assessment Margaret Carr

INTRODUCTION This chapter surveys some of the conceptual frameworks and formative assessment practices that have been designed to make ‘play’ visible and worthy of strengthening in early years educational settings. I write ‘play’ in parenthesis; this handbook has illustrated that there are many definitions and theoretical approaches to the notion of play, and therefore many purposes deemed to be playrelated targets for assessment practices. The chapter in this volume by Elizabeth Wood on the play–pedagogy interface in contemporary debates is relevant here. Wood introduces three ways in which this interface can be conceptualised: child-initiated, adultguided and technicist/policy driven. The first two of these, she points out, incorporate some of the uncertain, open-ended qualities that make play so complex. My experience of play-based curriculum discussions began in the early 1990s during the design of the New Zealand early childhood curriculum, Te Whāriki Lee, Carr,

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Soutar and Mitchell, 2013; (Nuttall, 2013). One of the 18 goals for facilitating educational environments in that curriculum is ‘Children experience an environment where their play is valued as meaningful learning and the importance of spontaneous play is recognised’ (New Zealand Ministry of Education, 1996: 84). There are six learning outcomes for children attached to this goal. These refer to: the children’s ability to set their own problems, the attitude that being uncertain is part of the process of being a good learner, an expectation that they take responsibility for their own learning, the knowledge that curiosity and trying things out are important ways of learning, increasing confidence and a repertoire for symbolic pretend or dramatic play and the knowledge that playing with ideas and materials, with no objective in mind, can be an enjoyable, creative and valid approach to learning. In this goal, play is the outcome (as ability, attitude, expectation, repertoire of practice and knowledge), not the means to another goal. As set down in the Te Whāriki curriculum, then,

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these outcomes can be sited in a range of pedagogies: child-initiated, adult-guided and/or policy-driven. Technicist pedagogies, as Wood (this volume) so cogently argues, are another matter. They lead directly to a positioning of play as a mediating device or vehicle for the teaching of other, often narrowly defined and readily measurable, outcomes. This chapter is structured around play, playing and playfulness as outcomes or learning of interest. The chapter structure is provided by five domains of learning that are of interest in play contexts: • • • • •

identities and thinking skills and knowledges social relationships attunement to play as an opportunity to learn key competencies and learning dispositions.

It is acknowledged that there is considerable ambiguity about what play is (Sutton-Smith, 1997), and there are good social justice and equity arguments for troubling the notion that play is always valuable (Grieshaber and McArdle, 2010). Pentti Hakkarainen (2006: 184) points out that play has an especially privileged status in early childhood education programmes in the Nordic countries. He quotes from the National Curriculum Guidelines on Early Childhood Education and Care in Finland: ‘All that is visible in the play is meaningful to the child, but not all that is meaningful to the child is visible in the play’. Hakkarainen elaborates: ‘Play is an intrinsically motivated process, with results and developmental effects that are not immediately visible’ (185). He emphasises the holistic, contextual, multilevel nature of play. Add this to the above list of outcomes of play in Te Whāriki – as ability, attitude, expectation and repertoire of practice and knowledge – and assessment discussions will be complex. However, and this is the central subtext here, if we don’t assess the outcomes we value, reifying them in ways that make them visible, then we can be sure that they will not survive. Assessing them in formative ways, as assessment for learning rather than the more summative assessment of learning,

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ensures that the assessment sits inside the pedagogy – at the play–pedagogy interface, as Wood suggests – and works to strengthen the role of play in an early years setting. A useful definition of formative assessment practice comes from research by Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam (1998a). Writing about school pupils, here redescribed as ‘children’, they say that in their project, ‘assessment’ refers to all those activities undertaken by teachers and children which provide information to be used as feedback to modify the teaching and learning activities in which they are engaged. They add: ‘Such assessment becomes “formative assessment” when the evidence is actually used to adapt the teaching work to meet the needs’ (1998a: 2). An underlying assumption of this chapter is that if we want to protect and enhance learning of interest in play contexts then we should know what it looks like, document it in some way that is accessible to the learners (and to families) and use that documentation to make a difference to the teaching and learning. Black and Wiliam further advise that ‘self-assessment by pupils, far from being a luxury, is in fact an essential component of formative assessment’ (1998b: 10). They add that an essential element is teachers providing the stimulus and help for children to take active responsibility for their own learning. Stig Broström (2006: 223) also outlines the argument for integrating children’s perspectives into all aspects of educational planning and implementation, and Pamela Moss writes about the role of assessment in offering positional identities and agency to learners: We need to acknowledge and study the way in which assessment offers learners identities and positions and presupposes aspects of their identities in the situations where they are assessed. From a sociocultural perspective, the differences in these affordances would be expected to influence opportunities for learners to develop positional identities, possibly learning to act with the kinds of agency they are afforded when they are assessed (2008: 239).

Here, the examples of assessment practices are those that are apparently designed to

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offer agency to learners and to make a difference to the teaching and learning. There are five assessment practices attached to categories of learning of interest in play contexts; for this purpose, the play contexts are childinitiated, often open-ended, and offer at least a sharing of agency:

behavior in play, let us pursue the ways in which their teachers might follow them up the ladder, starting at the first rung, which, as every child knows, is fantasy play (2004: 3).

LEARNING OF INTEREST: IDENTITIES AND THINKING

This is reminiscent of the literature on ‘possible selves’ (Markus and Nurius, 1986). Possible selves and identities are accompanied by privileged cultural discourses and self-scripts. Paley’s books describe how the children develop their own self-scripts by dictating their stories to her, the teacher, and then acting them out at the end of the day. The process is described in detail in The Boy Who Would Be a Helicopter (Paley, 1990). Assessment practice is embedded in pedagogy, in responsive relationships and mutual exploratory conversations. Children also ‘try out’ their ideas with an audience of peers. Here is an example, from Paley’s book A Child’s Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play:

Assessment Practice: Feedback in Conversations

'Peter Rabbit is a robber, you know' says five-yearold William, as Theresa, age four, pours two cups of tea. 'But I don’t think I drink tea if I’m a robber'.

The first example, an excerpt from an episode of pretend play, comes from Vivian Gussin Paley, whose books over many years have provided ideas about learning of interest in the early years and how to respond to them. In 1997 Paley commented: ‘Kindergarteners are passionate seekers of hidden identities and quickly respond to those who keep unraveling the endless possibilities’ (4). As targets for learning, a discussion by Patrick Hughes and Glenda McNaughton (2001) emphasises that identities are multiple, contradictory, and dynamic; they are a complex objective, and their trajectories are uncertain. For Paley (2004) the fantasy or pretend play focus is about ‘trying out’ a new self, differently gendered, differently powerful, differently competent. There is a hint at a socio-cultural theoretical stance on ‘assessment’ when she describes her view that ‘play is the work of children’:

Theresa pushes a cup closer to William. 'You could have it because it’s chamillia-willia tea. That means it’s for you because you’re a William'.

• • • • •

feedback in conversations autotelic materials checklists supplemented by other documentation mosaics of documentation artefacts learning Stories.

Finally, this chapter sets out some issues and challenges that are likely to inform the area of play and assessment in the future. That section argues in defence of playfulness.

If, as Lev Vygotsky, the Russian psychologist, informs us, children rise above their average

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'But I’m a robber. They don’t drink tea'. 'Peter is not a robber. Oh no'. 'He steals the lettuce, so he is a robber'. 'Mr. McGregor is mean. So it’s okay for Peter to do that. And I’m your mother. You can’t be a robber if I’m waiting for you'.

Paley, the teacher, adds: This has been a conversation of great merit. The logic is clear: robbers do not have mothers who wait for them and give them tea. As to whether or not it is acceptable to steal from a mean person, the issue will arise again now that the idea has been introduced, stimulating new conversations (Paley, 2004: 58).

Everyday conversations are typically the assessment practice of choice for teachers in the early years. Dylan Wiliam (2011) writes about this kind of ‘embedded formative

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assessment’ from extensive research in schools. He emphasises feedback and uses the analogy of the work of athletic coaches who see schools as ‘talent incubators’ and ‘see their job not as just identifying talent, but also nurturing it, and even producing it, often getting out of athletes more than the athletes believed they could achieve’ (2011: 120). Feedback works as formative assessment only if it reaches the learner, and makes a difference. Wiliam adds: If I had to reduce all of the research on feedback into one simple overarching idea, at least for academic subjects in school, it would be this: feedback should cause thinking. All the practical techniques discussed here work because, in one way or another, they get the students to think, rather than to react emotionally to the feedback that is given (2011: 127).

Black and Wiliam emphasise that ‘The dialogue between pupils and learning… should be conducted so that all pupils have an opportunity to think and to express their ideas’ (1988a: 12).

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space if they had not completed the process to their satisfaction. Teachers take photographs and write commentary for the children’s portfolios. Isabella and Kim are revisiting the photographs of Isabella making a mosaic tile, an activity that she had returned to on a number of occasions. During this conversation, Kim’s apparent intent is for Isabella to rehearse what she has learned of the mosaic process. Her feedback includes occasional ‘conversational oil’ or phatics (Wood and Wood, 1983), together with some targeted questions and the provision of information. Isabella says that she has been practising. Kim: So what did you practise? Isabella: A butterfly (points to the photos) and (pause) I did the red outside and then I did the blues and then the yellow (continues to point to the photos) and the purple and after that I let it dry, didn’t I? (looks up at Kim) Kim: (nods head) Mmm you did. (smiles) Isabella: A little bit and then I put that other tile (pointing to the photo), didn’t I? (looks up at Kim) Kim: (nods head) Yes, you did. (Short pause)

LEARNING OF INTEREST: SKILLS AND KNOWLEDGES Assessment Practice: Feedback in Conversations The next three sections provide three examples of assessment practice when the learning of interest is ‘skills and knowledges’: feedback in conversations, autotelic materials and checklists supplemented by other documentation. This first example, assessment as feedback in conversations, is an excerpt from the transcript of a conversation between Isabella, a four-year-old, and Kim, a teacher (Carr, 2011: 9–10). At the kindergarten (a programme for three and four-year-olds) a table was set up for child-initiated mosaic work, as was a table for construction with beads, another favourite play space for Isabella. The children could use these materials at any time during the session and there was storage

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Kim: And why did we let it dry? Isabella: Because it was a little bit sticked down (puts her finger tips together) wasn’t it? (looks up at Kim) Kim: (nods head) Mmm. Isabella: After the glue. And that’s when we um let it dry out (pointing to photo) and then we put things on it, didn’t we? Kim: (nods) We did. We did. Isabella: That’s when I’m practising (pointing to photo) and that’s when I did the tile things (pointing to more photos) and then after that we let it dry (pause, looks at Kim) Kim: Mmm. Isabella: (Fingers moving) When we finished and then I let it dry (folds arms) and then we put that stuff on (joins hands together and wiggles fingers) on the top and then we let it dry after that didn’t we? (big smile).

As Isabella talks Kim through the process, Kim keeps the conversation going by nodding, saying ‘Mmm’, ‘You did’, ‘Yes, you

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did’, shifting to the first person plural (we) to ask Isabella if she can remember the reason (‘And why did we let it dry?’ – perhaps reminding her that she, Kim would be able to assist with the correct answer), adding another nod and then continuing with the first-person plural in the collaborative ‘We did’. The conversation continues: Kim: (laughs) We did. Do you remember what that stuff was called? Isabella: No (looks puzzled) Kim: It was grouting. Isabella: Oh yes!

The photographs were a key mediating device for the conversation, providing cues for both participants and enabling agency to be shared. Kim then asks Isabella what she will do next; Isabella describes her plan to make two more mosaic tiles.

Assessment Practice: Autotelic Materials and Activities This learning of interest, skills and know­ ledges is also exemplified by a Montessori early childhood programme, where the emphasis is on sensory materials and the targeted learning includes skills and know­ ledge about shapes, letter formation, writing, mathematics and so on. A key feature of Montessori materials is that they are frequently autotelic: the materials inform the learners if they have correctly mastered the required educational skill. In most Montessori programmes, once the children have been taught the appropriate use of the materials, their choice of activity is child-initiated. However, this is pushing the boundary of ‘play’ a little, since it is not usually possible for children to use the materials in ways other than those specified. For example, a Montessori materials catalogue (Nienhuis Montessori, no date) includes photographs of the following: ‘Complete set of bead material for the square and cube of numbers from 1–10 consisting of the square cubes, cube

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and square chains of each number’ (74); ‘Trinomial Cube; box containing cubes and prisms for building (a + b + c)3 for sensorial and mathematical exercises’ (75). Cylinder blocks are ‘sensorial material to aid the visual exploration of the equipment and the acquisition of the ability to discriminate dimensions’ (12–3). Many early childhood materials are designed, like the Montessori materials, to teach and to assess-for-mastery at the same time. Jigsaws and form boards are classic examples. There are other ways in which children can self-assess their learning, aided by materials. A number of examples are included in a resource collection of 20 books on formative assessment in early education prepared for the Ministry of Education and published on their website (New Zealand Ministry of Education, 2004, 2007, 2009). Book 4, Children Contributing to their Own Assessment, includes the following exemplars of childinitiated and open-ended activities in which the children have positioned themselves as self-evaluators: Dom remaking a construction using a photograph of his work on a previous day (he checked the rebuild against the photograph); Lauren screen-printing and recognising from her first over-printing attempt that her achievement did not match her intention (‘Oh no! That’s not right!’) while the materials enabled her to make the correction; Louie, a baby, manoeuvring himself across the floor and out the door – sliding on his tummy and using his arms to pull himself along, he ‘smiled with great delight’ when he had achieved his aim; Olivia telling a story to a teacher and giving the instruction ‘I know, you could write all this down’.

Assessment Practice: Checklists Supplemented by Other Documentation Some Montessori schools use assessment checklists for teachers to note the mastery of materials for each child and indicate which materials would be appropriately introduced next. Checklists of graded skills are often

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features of early intervention programmes for children with disabilities, to provide the platform for new skills to be taught. The teaching and learning assumption here is that sequences of increasingly complex skills provide an appropriately ordered programme for each child with learning difficulties and do not threaten any other significant learning outcomes. These sequenced arrays are logical and instrumental, but they can deny the role in learning of affect (especially interest), the socially valued context (what other children are doing), the cultural (the experiences and knowledge that children bring from home) and the opportunity for agency. Additional documents may, however, accompany more quantitative assessments. In an early years research project in New Zealand, the individual Intervention Programme (IP) meetings included stories about the learning in context, keeping the ‘learning whole’ (Perkins, 2009). Many families often feel unqualified to contribute to IP meetings, and these documented stories enabled the parents to have a voice: This project revealed that Learning Stories enabled parent opinions to be heard at the IP meeting. Parents read their stories and offered insights into their child’s learning: One of my child’s learning styles is games. That is how my child learns. Also when things are familiar my child learns. One parent had the confidence to say: It’s interesting that you say that his confidence has increased, I don’t see it but it’s good to get another perspective. The other parent said: When I share stuff about my child with others, it’s good (Lepper, Williamson and Cullen, 2003: 21).

One of the early intervention specialists made a comment about the value of multiple voices in assessment: ‘I felt as though I learnt more about [the child] because everyone shared what they saw as important. You also get to know more about the person who wrote it [the assessment] and what is important to that person. We are working better as a team now’ (2003: 22). Bernadette McCartney, writing from a parent’s point of view, commented that early inter­ vention assessments tend to focus on gaps:

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What I find of most concern is when people focus on what Maggie isn’t doing rather than what she is doing. As a parent, talk that comes from that perspective is deflating. I feel that they don’t really know or respect my child for who she is and what she has achieved’ (2002: 21).

The family as an audience for assessments represents a gap in the assessment literature on formative assessment practices when the context is school. We know, however, that parental expectations are central to children’s learning, especially but not only in the early years (Filer and Pollard, 2000; Siraj-Blatchford, 2010), and it is appropriate for all families to have the opportunity to contribute to the assessments and to discussions about the way forward.

LEARNING OF INTEREST: SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS AND WAYS OF LEARNING Assessment Practice: a Mosaic of Document Artefacts Sarah Merritt and Anne Haas Dyson (1992) include the following example from Sarah’s first grade classroom in a chapter entitled ‘A social perspective on informal assessment’: Justin was always in charge… Justin would set up chairs as if they were seats in a car. ‘OK,’ he would say, ‘pretend I’m really nice and I’m gonna take all you kids to the store to get whatever you want’. (Even children who were not playing in the store game stopped to listen to Justin as he set the scene.) Justin would then make himself a wheel and drive that car to a store 100 miles away. He would talk to his ‘kids’ about their behavior and ask his wife to get out the sandwiches and sodas for the kids (1992: 115).

Merritt and Dyson (1992: 94) illustrate ‘the complex interactions among the social and the academic and the goals of groups and individuals of children and their teacher’, using the metaphor of a teacher as an archaeologist who explores the meaning of what is going on by using pictures, messages, displays and records: the artefacts that are embedded in the social life of a classroom community. Sarah

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(Merritt), the teacher, makes anecdotal notes, tape-records the children’s reading and collects the written messages that the children make as they interact with each other (writing letters or notes to each other is common practice in this classroom). The authors comment that the emerging skilfulness in writing that these messages represent is only part of the story. They want the artefacts to add to their understanding of the children’s ways of learning (Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger and Tarule, 1986; Boaler and Greeno, 2000), commenting that: We must somehow use our artifacts to uncover the voices that lay buried within them and, thus, to come to know the individual behind the tumbled words and the classroom relationships that gave birth to those words (Merritt and Dyson 1992: 95).

They highlight the importance of taking a social perspective on informal assessment. Asking ‘What is this informal assessment for?’, they set out their assumptions: human relationships are central to what individual children learn in classrooms, to the kind of classroom communities we build and to the kind of future we imagine for ourselves and the children. They set out three purposes for assessment (Merritt and Dyson 1992: 96):  (i) promoting/identifying individual children’s interests, their understandings about the social and physical world and their ways of using the tools of learning, including talk, writing and reading (ii) understanding individual children’s behaviours from the perspective of their own (the children’s) emerging social goals (iii) monitoring the progress of the classroom community as a whole (1992: 96). The social life of the classroom provides an important window through which to view academic development, because each child’s ease or discomfort and sense of competence or failure, of alienation or acceptance, is affected by how school figures in relationships with other people, including parents, teachers and, as we stress here, friends (Merritt and Dyson 1992: 99).

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With a similar philosophy, the Reggio Emilia schools in Italy collect documentation that underpins their reflexive approach to pedagogy. Referring to an example from Reggio of three babies constructing learning together, the following comment is made: As the story of Matteo and his friends reminds us, groups can provide a powerful context for learning, even for the youngest among us.… Yet in American schools, most aspects of instruction and virtually all assessment practices are focused on individual performance and achievement. In this book we argue that systematic and purposeful documentation of the ways in which groups develop ideas, theories and understandings is fundamental to the metacognitive activity that is critical to the learning of individuals as well as of groups (Reggio Children and Project Zero, 2001: 16).

They point out the documentation makes the learning visible, and that, itself, makes making a difference possible. The valued learning is reified, able to be revisited, as the example of Isabella illustrated earlier. Plans for adapting the teaching and learning following the assessment can be developed together, as part of the social relationships.

LEARNING OF INTEREST: ATTUNEMENT TO PLAY AS AN OPPORTUNITY TO LEARN Assessment Practice: The Assessment Itself is Part of the Opportunity to Learn Linked to the above section is an emphasis on the ‘opportunity to learn’ (Moss, Pullin, Gee, Haertel and Young, 2008) as a key focus for education. Describing this as a socio-cultural/ situative perspective, Diana Pullin sums up the theoretical assumptions about assessment, equity and opportunity to learn as ‘the result of activities and interactive experiences between learners and the mediating influences of other people and the tools of their environment’ (2008: 335). She adds that ‘the relationship between assessment, learning, and OTL (opportunity to learn) is complex,

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highly contextual and continually evolving in any educational setting and for each learner in that setting’. When the target of interest is the opportunity to learn, the context, then assessment is part of that context. It takes an active role, shaping the learning in many ways. This point, that assessment shapes ‘not only how we see ourselves but also how, and why, we learn’, is a key assumption in Gordon Stobart’s book Testing Times (2008: 171). Stobart argues that assessment has over-reached its legitimate roles, often with ‘toxic consequences for individual identities and teaching and learning’ (172). He suggests that assessments must include the cultural context of the teaching and learning environment, the opportunities to learn. The outcome for children here is an attunement to the opportunity to learn. Lauren Resnick (1987), commenting on the disposition to be a good thinker, pointed out that a significant aspect of that disposition is learning to recognise, and even search for, opportunities to apply one’s capacities. David Perkins and colleagues (1993) outlined a three-part analysis of thinking dispositions as inclination, sensitivity to occasion, and ability. Hakkarainen (2006: 189–90) argues that play increases children’s opportunities to actively produce and experiment with new hypotheses and opportunities for children to do something together. Assessments that include an attunement to or recognition of those opportunities have the power to become richly formative, referring to the interactions between the learner and an affording environment and how they can be improved.

LEARNING OF INTEREST: KEY COMPETENCIES AND LEARNING DISPOSITIONS Assessment Practice: Annotated Narratives of Learning In New Zealand the early childhood curri­ culum summarises learning outcomes as learning dispositions and working theories

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(New Zealand Ministry of Education, 1996: 44). In the 2007 New Zealand school curriculum, the five strands of outcome in the early childhood curriculum are aligned with five key competency domains at school. ‘Key competencies’ (Rychen and Salganik, 2001; 2003) are very similar to the learning dispositions in the early childhood curriculum, providing a nice cross-sector trajectory of learning and teaching. Helen Haste, in an early collection of papers on key competency for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), commented that, in her view, competency ‘implies effectiveness not only in performance, but in the interpretation of context and meaning’ (2001: 94). Franz Weinert, in the same volume, says that action competence is a key competency, and adds: Unlike conceptualisations of competence that accentuate either cognitive or motivational aspects, action competence includes all those cognitive, motivational, and social prerequisites necessary and/or available for successful learning and action (2001: 51).

Learning dispositions are complex combinations of knowledge, skills, attitudes, values and attunement to opportunity; they emphasise ways to approach learning and participation in learning communities. They appear in the literature under various names, and in various guises, as: mindsets (Dweck, 2006); habits of mind (Costa and Kallick, 2000); thinking dispositions (Perkins, Jay and Tishman, 1993; Ritchhart, 2002); learning dispositions (Bloomer and Hodkinson, 2000); learning power (Claxton, 2002); and key competencies (Rychen and Salganik, 2001, 2003). In response to the Te Whāriki emphasis on learning dispositions in local cultural and social contexts, assessment practices were developed as narrative documentation, or Learning Stories (Hatherly and Sands, 2002; Carr and Lee, 2012). The story of the learning in context is told, often in collaboration with the children, and an analysis will include learning dispositions, defined broadly. Many

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of these Learning Stories are stories of play; the analysis focuses on the five domains of outcome required by the curriculum: belonging, well-being, exploration, communication and exploration. A number of schools are now trialling Learning Stories, enabling a wide range of educational outcomes to be highlighted: key competencies using descriptors such as leadership, imagination, collaboration and kindness, for instance, integrated with the skills and knowledges in subject areas. One teacher, Yvonne, includes Learning Stories of children’s learning during scheduled ‘free play’ periods in the school classroom for just this purpose. She comments: Using Learning Stories as a form of assessment is for me the simplest and best way of showing learning, both what is learned and how. They get easier as you get more practice. You can equate the relationship between key competencies and the learning area. They are like clasped hands with the fingers intertwined: they fit closely with each other and you need both for good learning to occur (Smith, Davis and Molloy, 2011: 19).

The learning is analysed for both the key competencies and the learning (or subject) area (see examples in Carr and Lee, 2012: 17, 27, 43). Claxton, Chambers, Powell and Lucas (2011: 92–6) have described this as ‘split-screen’ or ‘dual-focus’ teaching, and they emphasise the value of including learning dispositions in assessments. A key aspect of this narrative documentation is that it makes very clear the audience for the assessment practice: the learners themselves, the teachers, and the families. The portfolios travel from the centre to the home, and are revisited and discussed by parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts and uncles; in some early childhood centres, Learning Stories are written in the home language. They are designed to widen the targeted outcomes and to widen the community. This assessment practice goes some way to include families and to shift mindsets and expectations from deficit positioning to an acknowledgement and nurturing of interests and learner identities.

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CHALLENGES AND ISSUES: IN DEFENCE OF PLAYFULNESS This chapter has been framed to emphasise that the relationship between assessment and play centrally hinges on what is valued and/ or targeted in children’s play during the early years. Assessment is a powerful mediator of learning and curriculum directions and, in many countries, these are testing times (Stobart, 2008). One policy response to a changeable and uncertain world is to reach for measurable outcomes, added-value calculations and the associated narrow definitions of literacy, numeracy and learning outcomes. These approaches undermine open-ended curriculum goals, spaces for play and the opportunities for thoughtful conversations about learning provided by genuinely formative assessments (Wiliam, 2011: 127). But in uncertain times there is even more urgency for an aspect of play that can be described as playfulness. Brian Sutton-Smith (1997: 148) writes about the ‘playful’ as disruptive of expectations and as ‘play that doesn’t play within the rules but with the rules, doesn’t play within frames but with the frames’ (150). From education comes the notion of adaptive expertise as a learning of interest: ‘flexible knowledge and dispositions that facilitate effective navigation across varied settings and tasks’ (Nasir, Rosebery, Warren and Lee, 2006: 490). Flexible knowledges and dispositions include being inclined to embrace and make meaning of the uncertain, and being alert to new possibilities and unusual solutions. In the words of the psychologists, playfulness in this sense is similar to mindfulness (Langer, 1989, 1997). Ellen Langer (1989) defines a mindful approach to any activity as having three characteristics: the continuous creation of new categories; openness to new information; and an implicit awareness of more than one perspective. These features are developed in mindful and open-ended educational communities that value surprise and the playful. So assessments will be embedded in the

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social community and the opportunities to learn. Kathryn Ecclestone and John Prior (2003) comment: Those moments when the ambitions of formative assessment appeared to be best realised were those at the divergent end of the spectrum. These moments seemed to occur when teachers and learners collaborated to produce a more even distribution of power. Within the settings researched, this did not mean that teachers’ and learners’ ideas were symmetrical, but, rather, that both parties were open to the ideas of the other. During these interactions, meaning was constructed through dialogue, where teachers were intellectually curious about the understandings of the learners, and in turn, learners were receptive to teachers’ feedback (2003: 482).

Carlina Rinaldi (2006) writes from Reggio Emilia about the value of documentation as a collection of documents of learning in process. In New Zealand early childhood centres, this documentation is contained in the portfolios of Learning Stories that are designed to describe progress as ‘negotiable chains of episodes’ and to protect the connection with dialogue and context (Carr and Lee, 2012). Playfulness is found in these portfolios, nurturing and valuing the imagination: possible worlds and possible selves. Eisner (2005) has argued that the combination of imagination and art often found in playfulness can create aspirations worth stretching for: Imagination is no mere ornament; nor is art. Together they can liberate us from our indurated habits. They might help us to restore decent purpose to our efforts and help us create the kind of schools our children deserve and our culture needs. Those aspirations, my friends, are stars worth stretching for (2005: 214).

This chapter suggests that adding imagination, playfulness and adaptive expertise to the list of valued and targeted outcomes in the early years will invite assessment practices that embed these outcomes in communities that value the imagination and adaptive expertise in visible ways. Indeed, the assessment practices will define and construct just such a community.

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REFERENCES Belenky, M. F., Clinchy, B. M., Goldberger, N. R. and Tarule, J. M. (1986) Women’s Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice and Mind. New York: Basic Books. Black, P. and Wiliam, D. (1998a) ‘Assessment and classroom learning’, Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy and Practice, 5(1): 7–74. Black, P. and Wiliam, D. (1998b) Inside the Black Box: Raising Standards through Classroom Assessment. London: King's College and GL Assessment. Bloomer, M. and Hodkinson, P. (2000) ‘Learning careers: Continuity and change in young people’s dispositions to learning’, British Educational Research Journal, 26(5): 584–98. Boaler, J. and Greeno, J. G. (2000) ‘Identity, agency and knowing in mathematical worlds’, in J. Boaler (ed.), Multiple Perspectives on Mathematics Teaching and Learning. Westport, CT: Ablex. pp. 171–200. Broström, S. (2006) ‘Children’s perspectives on their childhood experiences’, in J. Einarsdottir and J. Wagner (eds), Nordic Childhoods and Early Education. Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing. pp. 223–55. Carr, M. (2011) ‘Young children reflecting on their learning: Teachers’ conversation strategies’, Early Years, 31(3): 257–70. Carr, M. and Lee, W. (2012) Learning Stories: Constructing Learner Identities in the Early Years. London: Sage. Claxton, G. (2002) Building Learning Power: Helping Young People Become Better Learners. Bristol: TLO. Claxton, G., Chambers, M., Powell, G. and Lucas, B. (2011) The Learning Powered School. Bristol: TLO. Costa, A. L. and Kallick, B. (2000) Discovering and Exploring Habits of Mind. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Dweck, C. S. (2006) Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. New York: Random House. Ecclestone, K. and John Pryor, J. (2003) ‘Learning careers or assessment careers?: The impact of assessment systems on learning’, British Educational Research Journal, 29(4): 471–88. Eisner, E. W. (2005) Reimagining Schools: The Selected Works of Elliot W. Eisner. Abingdon: Routledge/ Taylor & Francis. Filer, A. and Pollard, A. (2000) The Social World of Pupil Assessment: Processes and Contexts of Primary Schooling. London: Continuum. Grieshaber, S. and McArdle, F. (2010) The Trouble with Play. Maidenhead: Open University Press.

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Hakkarainen, P. (2006) ‘Learning and development in play’, in J. Einarsdottir and J. Wagner (eds), Nordic Childhoods and Early Education. Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing. pp. 183–222. Haste, H. (2001) ‘Ambiguity, autonomy, and agency: Psychological challenges to new competence’, in D. S. Rychen and L. H. Salganik (eds), Defining and Selecting Key Competencies. Gottingen, Germany: Hogrefe & Huber. pp. 93–120. Hatherly, A. and Sands, L. (2002) ‘So what is different about Learning Stories?’, The First Years: Nga Tau Tuatahi: New zealand journal of Infant and Toddler Education, 4(1): 8–12. Hughes, P. and MacNaughton, G. (2001) ‘Fractured or manufactured: Gendered identities and culture in the early years’, in S. Grieshaber and G. S. Cannella (eds), Embracing Identities in Early Childhood Education: Diversity and Possibilities. New York: Teachers College Press. pp. 114–30. Langer, E. J. (1989) Mindfulness. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Langer, E. J. (1997) The Power of Mindful Thinking. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Lee, W., Carr, M. Soutar, B. and Mitchell, L. (2013) Understanding the Te Whaˉriki Approach. Abingdon: Routledge. Lepper, C., Williamson, D. and Cullen, J (2003) ‘Professional development to support collaborative assessment’, Early Education, 33(Spring/Summer): 19–28. Macartney, B. (2002) ‘Maggie-Rose: A parent’s story’, The First Years: Ngaˉ Tau Tuatahi: New Zealand Journal of Infant and Toddler Education, 4(2): 29–31. Markus, H. and Nurius, P. (1986) ‘Possible selves’, American Psychologist, 41(9): 954–69. Merritt, S. and Haas Dyson, A. (1992) ‘A social perspective on informal assessment: Voices, texts, pictures, and play from a first grade’, in C. Genishi (ed.), Ways of Assessing Children and Curriculum. New York: Teachers College. pp. 126–62. Moss, P. (2008) ‘Sociocultural implications for Assessment I: Classroom assessment’, in P. Moss, D. C. Pullin, J. P. Gee, E. H. Haertel and L. J. Young (eds), Assessment, Equity and Opportunity to Learn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 222–58. Moss, P., Pullin, D. C., Gee, J. P., Haertel, E. H. and Young, L. J. (eds) (2008) Assessment, Equity and Opportunity to Learn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nasir, N. S., Rosebery, A. S., Warren, B. and Lee, C. D. (2006) ‘Learning as a cultural process: Achieving

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equity through diversity’, in R. K. Sawyer (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 489–504. New Zealand Ministry of Education (1996) Te Whaˉriki. He Whaˉriki Maˉtauranga moˉ ngaˉ Mokopuna o Aotearoa: Early Childhood Curriculum. Wellington: Learning Media. New Zealand Ministry of Education (2004, 2007, 2009) Kei tua o te pae. Assessment for Learning: Early Childhood Exemplars. Wellington: Learning Media. New Zealand Ministry of Education (2007) The New Zealand Curriculum. Wellington: Learning Media. Nienhuis Montessori (n.d.) Catalogue of Montessori Apparatus. Zelhem, The Netherland: A Nienhuis NV. Nuttall, J. (ed.) (2013) Weaving Te Whaˉriki. (2nd ed.) Wellington: NZCER Press. Paley, V. (1997) The Girl with the Brown Crayon: How Children Use Stories to Shape their Lives. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Paley, V. (2004) A Child’s Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Paley, V. G. (1990) The Boy Who Would be a Helicopter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Perkins, D. (2009) Making Learning Whole. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Perkins, D., Jay, E. and Tishman, S. (1993) ‘Beyond abilities: A dispositional theory of thinking’, MerrillPalmer Quarterly, 39(1): 1–21. Perkins, D., Tishman, S., Ritchhart, R., Donis, K. and Andrade, A. (2000) ‘Intelligence in the wild: A dispositional view of intellectual traits’, Educational Psychology Review, 12(3): 269–93. Project Zero and Reggio Children (2001) Making Learning Visible: Children as Individual and Group Learners. Reggio Emilia: Reggio Children. Pullin, D. C. (2008) ‘Assessment, Equity, and Opportunity to Learn’, in P. Moss, D. C. Pullin, J. P. Gee, E. H. Haertel and L. J. Young (eds), Assessment, Equity and Opportunity to Learn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 333–51. Resnick, L. (1987) Education and Learning to Think. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. Rinaldi, C. (2006) In Dialogue with Reggio Emilia: Listening, Researching and Learning. Abingdon: Routledge. Ritchhart, R. (2002) Intellectual Character: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How to Get It. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Rychen, D. S. and Salganik, L. H. (eds) (2001) Defining and Selecting Key Competencies. Gottingen, Germany: Hogrefe & Huber. Rychen, D. S. and Salganik, L. H. (2003) Key Competencies for a Successful Life and Well

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Functioning Society. Gottingen, Germany: Hogrefe & Huber. Siraj-Blatchford, I. (2010) ‘Learning in the home and at school: How working-class children “succeed against the odds”’, British Educational Research Journal, 36(3): 463–82. Smith, Y., Davis, K. and Molloy, S. (2011) ‘Assessment of key competencies, literacy and numeracy: Can these be combined?’, Early Childhood Folio, 15(2): 15–19. Stobart, G. (2008) Testing Times: The Uses and Abuses of Assessment. Abingdon: Routledge.

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Sutton-Smith, B. (1997) The Ambiguity of Play. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press. Weinert, F. E. (2001) ‘Concept of competence: A conceptual clarification’, in D. S. Rychen and L. H. Salganik (eds), Defining and Selecting Key Competencies. Gottingen, Germany: Hogrefe & Huber. pp. 45–65. Wiliam, D. (2011) Embedded Formative Assessment. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree Press. Wood, D. and Wood, H. (1983) ‘Questioning the preschool child’, Educational Review, 35(2):149–62.

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PART III

Contexts for Play and Learning L i z B r o o k e r, M i n d y B l a i s e a n d S u s a n E d w a r d s

Following the review of theoretical approaches to play and learning in Part I, and of their place in early childhood curriculum and pedagogy in Part II, this final section of the handbook explores the many ways in which play is understood in the world outside educational settings. The chapters in this section exemplify two major shifts in the study of play in recent years: first, a broadening of approach, from a traditional psychological mode into the range of cross-disciplinary modes alluded to in Part I; and, second, a simultaneous broadening of the arena of study, out from the early childhood playroom into all the spaces for play which contemporary children encounter. The 11 chapters in this section offer a cross-disciplinary perspective on play which sees children’s playful behaviours as situated in the micro and macro contexts of their lived spaces and relationships. Taken together, they offer a complex and multifaceted picture of the phenomenon that is play in the twenty-first

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century, viewed always through the ‘situated’ lens of the authors. This introduction highlights some of the themes which inform this picture. It is clear, first of all, how emergent fields of research prompt a continuing re-examination of the images of the child, and of childhood, which inform them. Traditional versions of children and childhood have tended to see children either as passive subjects of socialisation and recipients of learning and skills, or as innocents encountering a world of experience (Hendrick, 1997). Childhood itself, since the days of Rousseau and Froebel, has often been viewed as a time for unfettered play and pleasure, protected from the contaminating influences of the adult world, untouched by the hard facts of economics and politics and by the rise in technological and commercial endeavours. This peculiarly Western, minority-world view is now seen to derive from a very narrow understanding of childhood, which ignores the extent to which

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the lives of most children in the world have historically been shaped by poverty, work and responsibilities. Outside the ‘playroom environment’ which characterised most early research on play, children have relied on their own ingenuity, curiosity and agency to acquire knowledge and life-skills and to develop a ‘playful’ disposition towards their lives and circumstances. Still the notion of a ‘good childhood’ based on Rousseauesque principles persists, so that social and technological changes are often seen as a regrettable threat to childhood or even the end of childhood itself. The continuing tension between Romantic views of childhood and children’s lives in the present is a feature of many of the chapters which follow, including work by Cook (Chapter 23), Lester and Russell (Chapter 24), Stephen and Plowman (Chapter 27), Kernan (Chapter 32) and Marsh (Chapter 33). As Daniel Cook concludes, adults may regard the rapidly changing world with ‘fear and ambiguity’, while children reach for new opportunities with open arms. At the same time, as evidenced here, contemporary play research has increasingly broadened its scope. As Margaret Kernan suggests (Chapter 32, p. 392), ‘For much of the twentieth century, the majority of play research about children in the early childhood years focused on play in indoor environments and through the analytical lens of developmental psychology, child development and ECEC’. However, she continues noting, in the twenty-first century ‘work from researchers from the fields of urban planning, public health, landscape architecture, environmental psychology, sociology of childhood, developmental psychology and ECEC’ has contributed to enlarging the field of play scholarship. To this list we can add the fields of popular media culture, consumer culture, new technologies, children’s rights and advocacy, equality and diversity and peer cultural studies. Simultaneously, our understanding of spaces for play is itself enlarging. While the physical environments experienced by

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children, including homes and neighbourhoods, indoors and outdoors, continue to shape their play, the wider societal, commercial and cyber environments which they also inhabit can no longer be ignored as spaces for play. New spaces generate new forms of play, just as young children’s play helps to shape those spaces. Despite philosophical debates regarding the nature of childhood in contemporary times, research from most disciplinary perspectives continues to point to the significant roles of adults in supporting and securing young children’s play and learning. Two chapters in this section focus particularly closely on the enactment of these roles in infancy and in the toddler years. In Chapter 30, Rod ParkerRees reviews the evidence for the power of play in early adult–child interactions. Here, lighthearted face-to-face encounters generate the pleasure and familiarity which is considered essential to children’s growing understanding of relationships with caregivers and others. As intersubjectivity develops between caregivers and children, this awareness extends from the person to the objects which interest and occupy that person, enabling children to notice and engage with objects in the world around them. Likewise, Jennifer Sumsion and Linda Harrison (Chapter 25) discuss the research from traditional/psychological and crossdisciplinary perspectives which reveals children’s growing sociability and agency as they gain the physical and social skills required to engage in playful episodes with peers and adults. They argue that infants and toddlers develop strong individual and collective ideas of what kind of play they enjoy and what types of play they choose to engage in. As children grow into new environments, the range of ways in which adults can deliberately or unintentionally facilitate play also broadens. Christine Stephen and Lydia Plowman (Chapter 27) show the importance of parents and educators in scaffolding children’s encounters with digital technologies. The popularly conceived notion of children as ‘digital natives’ means that such encounters are sometimes assumed to be intuitive

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CONTEXTS FOR PLAY AND LEARNING

and transparent. This chapter shows how playing with technologies is located within children’s experiences with others and the meaningful use of technologies in the family home. Parents may have more time to help their children access these technologies than busy educators do. Such parent support for play with technology in the home is just one dimension of the complex construct of the ‘Home Learning Environment’, which is discussed by Maria Evangelou and Mary Wild in Chapter 31. Other dimensions include more traditional activities such as sharing books, singing rhymes, engaging with letters and numbers or participating in children’s selfchosen play. The quality of the Home Learning Environment is found to have a significant impact on children’s preschool learning and on their readiness to make a smooth transition to school. This finding, along with evidence on the role of play in enhancing children’s cognitive development, forms the basis for the early interventions discussed in this chapter. Evangelou and Wild report on projects aiming to improve children’s life chances by influencing their home environment and the ways in which their parents support their play. To this end, their chapter describes projects using different strategies to involve parents in their children’s learning by sharing in play activities and learning to value their own role in their child’s development. The attention here to Home Learning Environments as a site of developmental benefits for the ‘future child’ rather than for the ‘present child’ is a reminder once more of the situated nature of the knowledge(s) presented by chapter authors. Play interventions which aim to change family practices are characteristic of countries, like the United Kingdom and United States, where social inequalities prompt the search for educational remedies. They have a lower priority in the Nordic countries, represented in this section by Sweden and Iceland, where research more frequently focuses on children’s own perspectives on their play and in which the pleasures and pains of the child’s life in the present are foregrounded. Both

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Johanna Einarsdottir (Chapter 26) and Annica Löfdahl (Chapter 28) identify the adult role in supporting and facilitating children’s own play intentions. At the same time they argue that adults must ensure that inequalities and injustices are not perpetrated by children against each other on the grounds of age, ethnicity, popularity or other kinds of child cultural capital (such as privileged access to popular culture and/or digital media). Both of these chapters recognise the power of peer cultural relationships to enhance children’s agency and pleasure in play, including through collective attempts to resist adults’ intentions and plans. Einarsdottir’s discussion includes the conditions which children regard as essential to play activity, as opposed to adult-directed activity. Meanwhile Löfdahl elaborates on how children use their peer culture membership to produce and reproduce the characteristics, behaviours and norms of those cultures. Both chapters demonstrate a concern with respect for children’s own rights and perspectives. Both also demonstrate that play is not necessarily fun for children who are excluded by their peers, and that even very young children are capable of constructing power hierarchies which subjugate some children or groups to others. While Einarsdottir and Löfdahl review research on children’s behaviour in peer group settings, in Chapter 24 Stuart Lester and Wendy Russell argue for children’s right to play across the whole field of public and private spaces. They offer examples of children’s spontaneous play in ‘adult’ spaces as evidence that ‘children are very good at playing anywhere and with anything... within and between the everyday rhythms of life’ (p. 294). For Lester and Russell, play can be recognised as a ‘state of positive arousal to engage with the world in a certain manner’ (p. 295), in accordance with children’s own embodied desires. These authors see the adult responsibility as recognising and securing the conditions in which children can play, enabling them to satisfy their needs for relationships with people and objects. The playful episodes cited in this chapter show children seizing every

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opportunity available to engage playfully with others. They demonstrate that rather than designing special spaces for play, adults must protect the spaces which children carve out for themselves, and the activities which fulfil their craving for engagement. The power of relationships with adults and children during play is identified in many of the research studies cited by Jennifer Keys Adair and Fabienne Doucet in Chapter 29. This chapter presents evidence of how structural inequalities deriving from race and ethnicity are reflected and reproduced in children’s play activities. It describes the many ways in which children from minority groups acquire low status through the unintended discriminatory practices of adults, and the ‘invisibility’ of children’s own exclusionary play practices within their peer groups. Adair and Doucet report on how culturally based assumptions held by teachers interact with their expectations of play according to the diversity of children’s backgrounds. Their analysis of evidence from cross-national studies offers readers an important reminder that play enacted within the peer group can be a site for discrimination, with long-term consequences for children’s identity and achievement. Responsible adults, they advise, should be aware and ready to intervene in children’s play in such circumstances. One way of understanding how children call on resources for their play – whether on peers, adults, spaces, toys, tools or technologies – lies in the concept of affordance, which enters the discussion in many forms in these chapters. Following Gibson (1979), the affordance of objects, people and environments is seen to lie in the relationship between the characteristics of the resource itself (someone to play with, something to throw and catch, somewhere to run and jump) and the characteristics of the child and her/his perception of the resource. As Parker-Rees argues in Chapter 30, ‘Babies do not come to know about a separate, external environment; rather they come to know about their own, felt experience of acting in the environment. Objects are known in terms

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of their affordances... not objective properties which are equally available to anyone but specific relationships between their features and the child’s own personal abilities’ (p. 370). This means that at every stage in a child’s early development he or she will perceive new affordances in familiar people, objects and spaces. Objects which start out as affording mouthing and sucking may later afford rolling, building, sorting or naming; low steps which afford sitting and standing may later afford jumping games or superhero play. In infancy, such affordances are mediated by close relationships with caregivers, but as children grow older they may also discover the affordances of their environments through self-initiated experiment. Jackie Marsh, in Chapter 33, describes the role of children’s media culture in enabling new affordances for play. She emphasises, for example, the affordances supported via new technologies, such as video replays, instant-access downloads and peer interactions and play in online spaces. Marsh reviews studies of children’s play over a 50-year period to show that despite the impact of new media, many continuities are evident in children’s playful engagement with popular media cultures. In a similar vein, Daniel Cook (Chapter 23) argues that children continue to find creative applications for the commodities associated with growing up in consumer cultures. Despite, or because of, their exposure to mass advertising related to toys and games, food and clothing and leisure activities, children perceive new affordances in the ways they deploy their possessions. They make their own meanings from consumer products in ways which sometimes defy the intentions of manufacturers. From the perspective presented by Marsh and Cook, concerns about the ‘end of childhood’ and ‘childhood innocence’ are based on a failure to recognise children as creative agents who produce their own childhoods and cultures through play. The concept of affordance is particularly salient in research on children’s outdoor play. Margaret Kernan, in Chapter 32, highlights

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the large range of affordances available for play in natural and outdoor environments. She argues that the outdoor world affords a rich array of play possibilities which expand in potential as children develop mobility and agility. Ground textures and loose parts (to be transported and assembled), as well as structures for climbing, sliding and jumping, support children’s imaginative play as well as their physical development and arguably their mental health. The key message from this perspective is that both parents and educators need to act to secure children’s access to such play opportunities. The two shifts in research approaches which were described above – into multidisciplinary work and into newer ‘spaces’ for play – inform all the ‘contexts’ for play referred to in this section’s chapters. Children’s play and learning are situated in all the spaces they inhabit in their everyday lives, rather than simply in the traditional playroom of earlier research. Context matters because the physical and social spaces in which play occurs influence how the play is enacted and experienced. In terms of social context, the tension between children’s initiatives and adults’ responsibilities runs as an issue through these chapters, sometimes favouring the child’s role in play, sometimes that of the adult. Even where children are viewed as competent members of their social

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group, capable of making choices and taking responsibility, a role remains for adults in promoting play that is equitable, enjoyable and satisfying for children. The chapters in this section suggest that the nature of this role lies in the close and attentive relationships which develop between children, family members and other caregivers and educators: in the playful interactions of earliest infancy, in educational settings such as schools and preschools and in the public realm of parks, museums, galleries and civic spaces. Children produce and reproduce their cultures through play, as Löfdahl demonstrates. However, they do not do it alone or in a vacuum, but in a complex and negotiated relationship with places, people and objects. As the chapters in this section illustrate, play scholarship has indeed benefited from a broadening of research enabling different ways of thinking about these relationships.

REFERENCES Gibson, J. J. (1979) The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Hendrick, H. (1997) ‘Constructions and Reconstructions of British Childhood: An Interpretative Survey, 1800 to the Present’. In A. James and A. Prout (eds), Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood. London: Falmer Press. pp. 34–62.

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23 Whose Play? Children, Play and Consumption Daniel Thomas Cook

INTRODUCTION Children’s play stands in dynamic tension with market value generally and with consumer culture in particular. On the one hand, many writers define children’s play as existing beyond the necessarily polluting effects of commerce; on the other, it is evident that the practices, materials and contexts of children’s play, such as toys and entertainment, continue to be enmeshed in commercially generated meaning and value. It is a tension without firm or final resolution, but one which informs moral discourses about children’s play, the nature and role of commerce, and the changing, tenuous relationship between commercial entertainment and education. Most recent writing on the subject tends to favor the former perspective, invoking – to greater and lesser degrees of explicitness – the idea that children’s play has become deadened, tamed, or otherwise corrupted over the course of the past 150 years, particularly in the Anglo-European nations of what is now called the Global North. For a number of observers, the world of commerce – particularly now in the form of electronic media – stands as the

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culprit in this scenario, wherein economic value and the profit motive necessarily invade children’s play, override its ‘positive’ qualities, and thereby diminish its ‘natural’ benefit to children. Notably, many of those who warn of the demise of children’s play under the rule of market life reproduce uncritical notions about children and childhood, about the nature of play and about the effects of commerce. Until relatively recently, few scholars sought to examine how children may make productive use of branded and commercial goods in their play, preferring to presume a priori that particular, negative, effects follow directly from play when it is ‘consumed.’

TOYS INTO COMMODITIES In historical terms, children’s play and commerce commingle most explicitly and regularly in the form of the toy. Often castoff items from adults or miniature versions of adult tools, toys for children have existed for millennia in different forms (Ariès, 1962; Brewer, 1980). Scholars pinpoint the lateVictorian era as the point when toys began to

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be manufactured with children in mind to be sold to British and American middle-class families, with dolls, small mechanical devices, pedal vehicles, and miniature watches among the offerings (Formanek-Brunel, 1983; Cross, 1997). Initially a seasonal item (for Christmastime), usually given temporary placement on a store shelf or two (as opposed to an aisle or entire department) in dry goods stores (Leach, 1993), toys’ large-scale manufacture and uptake in the USA was hindered in part by a lingering Protestant-inspired skepticism about the value of ‘frivolous pursuits’ such as play and entertainment, coupled with low levels of disposable income. It was not until the twentieth century and after World War I that the toy industry in the USA came into its own. Urban department stores, most notably Macy’s in New York, purposefully cultivated the now tight connection between Christmas and the giving of gifts to children. During this time the figure of Santa Claus came into popular use as a way to mollify the association between personal, parental gifts and mass-manufactured commodities (Leach, 1993; Nissenbaum, 1996). Prior to the 1930s, a handful of children’s toys and dolls had their origin in popular culture figures or properties, with little indication that parents or others became alarmed about, for instance, the likes of Buster Brown, Kewpie dolls, or the Campbell’s Soup kids, or about Kate Greenaway’s children’s book illustrations serving as inspiration for girls’ dress designs. Scholars point to the 1930s as a transitional decade in children’s consumer and play culture when major industries such as clothing (Cook, 2004), toys (Cross, 1997), and film (Sammond, 2005) found receptive child and parent audiences/markets by way of two, somewhat divergent, paths: character dolls and educational toys. To a certain extent, this division mirrored ongoing concerns about ‘mere’ amusement without purpose. Emergent notions about child development, coupled with social (that is, middle-) class aspirations and anxieties, made for a small yet ultimately influential market of parents for children’s playthings (Cross, 1997).

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Despite (or perhaps due to) severe economic depression, film and radio made significant headway as forms of popular amusement and provided a basis for the now common practice of offering character-based products. Disney’s animated Mickey Mouse and Fox Films’ Shirley Temple in many ways set the template for broad-based product tieins centered on media characters, with such things as watches, toy trains, clothing lines, dolls, and breakfast cereals available for purchase. Historian Gary Cross (1997, 2004) contends that the early character and celebritybased toys represented a sharp break from the past, where toys, previously intended to train boys and girls for their future gender roles, began to give way to fantasy narratives and personae, like those of spaceman Buck Rogers or Little Orphan Annie. These kinds of characters effectively gave ‘voice to the child’s imagination and left adults out of the picture’ (1997: 120). At the same time, the toy and entertainment industries also conspired with middle-class parents by reinforcing a sense of childhood ‘innocence’ found in fantasy play, which, argues Cross (2004), allowed (and continues to allow) adults to vicariously recover something of their own lost childhoods. A counter-tendency in the 1930s, toys with explicit didactic intent garnered a share of the market and a share of the discourse about the nature, shape, and purpose of child play alongside an interest in parenting and the family. Lisa Jacobson (2004) discusses how the emphasis of progressive reform regarding children’s play shifted from the playground – which had been an intensive site of activism during the Progressive Era (1890–1920), with its focus on working-class and immigrant children – to the privatized sphere of the middle-class home. ‘Educational’ toys appealed to the traditional, middle-class parent by addressing the child as a rational being (Cross, 1997), and hence served as a counter to the rising popular child culture of fantasy and celebrity. Interest in creating dedicated child playrooms arose alongside and interwove with the reaction against mass culture, which was said by one child study author

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of the time, Zilphia Carruthers Franklin, to leave children ‘adrift in a world of movies and street excitement’ (quoted in Jacobson, 2004: 166). Child experts, parenting publications and teachers together built a conception of the middle-class child – particularly girls and young boys – as those whose play needed to be sequestered in the safe and controlled space of the home, while being provided ‘appropriate’ and directive stimulation through toys, furniture and room design that evinced a child-centered ethos. Such efforts aimed to restore the authority of the family and the value of education over against those of a mass culture and market increasingly seen as intruders. That an increasing number and variety of manufactured baubles and gadgets were being made available to a growing market of parents, and especially of mothers, was, in itself, not a primary cause of concern in the early decades of the twentieth century. Observers did take note, from time to time, of the increase in the material culture of childhood, a development which could easily be read as ‘progress’ and a move toward ‘modernity’ by productionstarved Americans emerging from the economic downturn of the 1930s. Rather, it was the dual conception of children’s play – as both potential benefit and danger – that constitutes a key legacy of early, pre-World War II children’s consumer culture. Ambivalence about commercially enabled play encodes concerns about the growing importance of the marketplace in everyday life and the place of children in this world of consumption. As play – in the generic sense – came to be touted by experts and popular commentators (Wolfenstein, 1955) as key not only to child development but also to social development and, indeed, to mother-/parent– child bonding, many came to question the sources, materials, and media by which children experienced and engaged in ‘play.’

MEDIA, BRAND CHARACTERS, AND EXTENSIONS OF PLAY The longstanding tension between education and entertainment can be found in many

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aspects of Western, Protestant culture. In some manner, every recent new form of entertainment or media has been accompanied by a swell of moral concern about its effect on children. Dime novels in the late nineteenth century (Biesel, 1997); nickelodeon theatres in the early twentieth century (Nasaw, 1985); radio in the 1920s and 1930s (Jacobson, 2004, Chapter 6); film in the 1930s (Luke, 1990; Sammond, 2005); television since its inception (Postman, 1982; Spigel, 1992; Kinder, 1999); and videogames, the internet, and interactive electronic media (Buckingham, 2000) – each has provided pundits, politicians, scholars, activists, and parents fodder with which, at once, to define, redefine, and/or question ‘appropriate’ childhoods and to wrangle about the place of media in the making or unmaking of these childhoods. Especially after World War II, and with the advent and spread of television, children found entertainment developed for them and directed at them in the form of liveaction shows, cartoons, and live programs ‘hosted’ by local personalities (Spigel, 1992; Cvetkovic and Scardilli, 2012). By the early 1960s in the USA, specialized ‘children’s’ television came into its own in terms of content and, perhaps more significantly, in terms of its social and temporal place in children’s and families’ lives. Three television networks devoted programing specifically geared for preschool and elementary school-aged children’s consumption during Saturday mornings, at a time when there were no more than five channels in total available to households (Hendershot, 1998). With programing comes advertising, and young children provided a clear target audience for many promotions. This concentrated advertising and programing – and, in particular, the blurring between the two that was felt to be occurring – eventually sparked resistance from consumer watchdog groups, most notably Action for Children’s Television (ACT) in the USA. ACT objected that children’s programs had become ‘30-minute commercials’ for products such as Hot Wheels toy cars. They argued that insidious

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and unchecked commercialism was overriding the potential educational value of television for children. Unlike the situations in Sweden, Norway, and the United Kingdom at the time, which have regulated television programming and advertising to children, little oversight was in the offing. Eventually, in 1990, weak legislation in the form of the Children’s Television Act stipulated some slight modifications regarding advertising to children and the ratio of ‘educational’ v. entertainment programing. In the United States context, legislation has been ineffective in part due to the free market ethos that has tended to drive debate and discourse over almost anything related to commerce, including children’s place and participation in consumer-media life (Cook, 2009a; Buckingham, 2011). Also, by the early 1990s, due to significant changes in licensing and cross-promotion practices, the distinctions between entertainment, advertising/promotion, play, and commerce were sufficiently blurred to make it increasingly difficult to determine when a program ended and when a toy advertisement began, or when an advertisement ended and a program began. The success of, for instance, the Star Wars film and toy line in the 1970s, the introduction of the McDonald’s Happy Meals in 1979 (intended for children under age eight only), the United States consumer frenzy over Cabbage Patch dolls for Christmas season 1982, and the first Disney film tie-in with McDonald’s Happy Meal in 1987 – these together helped inaugurate a new era in the relationship between market culture and children’s play. Tom Engelhardt (1986) dubbed the new approach to cross-licensing arrangements as the ‘Shortcake Strategy’ – after the greeting card character that became a doll, a game and, later, a cartoon property – to highlight a change in the commercial provenance of many character-related products. For Engelhardt, companies began to realize the sales potential of the characters themselves, which could be marketed and placed on a variety of products, such as clothing, backpacks, and food containers. These characters

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and personalities could ‘live’ almost anywhere – on almost any surface, medium, or space – and thus could exist outside of specific narrative genres, thereby increasing their transferability to other, purportedly non-related products. Many children’s television programs in the 1980s that featured characters began to have their own product lines, effectively making the program a 30-minute commercial in itself for its own brand line (and thereby sidestepping what minimal legal provision was put in place). Programs – both ‘educational’ and non-explicitly educational – such as the Care Bears, SpongeBob SquarePants, Dora the Explorer, and Blues Clues, as well as the much-vaunted Children’s Television Workshop, known for programing like Sesame Street and its characters (Hendershot, 1998), all found ways to extend their brand outward from the program, thereby extending the play and imaginative space through product lines. Brand extension and the subsequent blurring between program, consumer product, and play also crossed national borders. In the 1980s, Sesame Street, as Hendershot (1998) shows, embarked on a deliberate effort to ‘test’ and introduce versions of its show in rural communities in a number of non-US countries, such as Mexico and Jamaica. In pan-European countries and the European Union since the 1990s, debate has arisen about the content of ‘children’s television’ programing and associated marketing intended for children. For decades, Nordic countries have had in place restrictions which limit direct advertising to children on television. These, however, have increasingly proven to be ineffective due to several factors, including the power and ubiquity of globalized media conglomerates such as Disney, differences in national regulatory efforts whereby the content of one country’s programs (for example the UK) can be consumed in another (for example Norway), and the multiple channels of distribution for media, characters, and products such as films, DVDs and, of course, the internet (Mjøs, 2010).

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By the 1990s, entire sub-industries were arising around and upon pre-teen children’s affinities for branded characters. In the United States, United Kingdom, Europe, Israel, and Australia, media-themed children’s birthday parties grew in popularity, often featuring cake decorations, party invitations, dishware, costumes, and games populated by characters and settings familiar to children from television and film. Party accessories could be purchased from many stores and from specialized catalogues such as Kid Zone. Holding the party – characterthemed or not – at a venue other than one’s home increasingly became an option for those who could afford to do so. Established global brands like McDonald’s and Disney and specialized establishments like the Chuck E. Cheese combination restaurant/ arcade in the United States and South America, as well as local establishments like bowling alleys and children’s museums, began to offer a range of options for birthday parties, from renting the space to planning the entire event, replete with the staff singing the ‘Happy Birthday’ song (McKendrick et al., 2000; Schoonmaker, 2006). Some mothers have sought alternatives to the media character-themed party, seeing in them evidence of the deep reach of commercial culture into the play and identities of their children, into their children’s peers’ lives and, also, into the circle of their own peers (Otnes et al., 1995; Clarke, 2007). Commercialized play forms for children proliferated throughout the 1990s and into the twenty-first century as market researchers, brand managers, and media content providers came to realize that ‘play’ served to engage children in the product and brand far more effectively and deeply than simple, direct sales pitch messages in an advertisement or on a product package. In the 1990s companies at first reluctantly adopted the internet as a site for product promotion and exposure for children’s products and brands. These sites functioned as virtual spaces for children to engage in simple games of memory, mastery or ‘fun.’ Brand managers and

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market researchers delved into the various dimensions of ‘kid fun,’ finding in the notion and experience of fun a key to reaching children. One market researcher, for instance (Poris, 2005), found 10 different kinds of fun that differed in terms of race/ethnic, age, and gender characteristics. These included: friend-orientated fun, empowering fun, creative fun, silly fun, sports-orientated fun, competitive fun, family-orientated fun, surprising/adventurous fun, relaxing fun, and rebellious fun. Play and fun, in commercial terms, here becomes a way to develop relevant messages that resonate with different aspects of childhood, understood as market segments. Many brands have set out to develop or redevelop brand mascots – characters that represent the product or set of products – finding in websites and virtual digital spaces an ideal medium whereby children, and adults for that matter, could interact with the character/brand on a one-to-one basis, as it were. Newly developed brand mascots like Chester the Cheetah (for the Cheetos snack brand), similar to traditional story or doll characters, could have an existence in multiple media and platforms, from websites to television commercials, from hand-held devices and computer games to product packaging, clothing and backpacks. The world of food and foodstuffs emerged as a particularly amenable medium of and for play. Beyond longstanding fare like animal crackers, alphabet soup noodles and some commercial breakfast cereal brands, the commercial and cultural category of ‘children’s food’ acquired renewed and heightened significance when placed in the dynamic mix of licensing, mascots, and new communication media. The Mattel toy company put out Barbie breakfast cereal in the 1990s. The Nickelodeon Network sold a variety of grocery items with their SpongeBob SquarePants character looking out from the package. Cooperative arrangements between food and film properties became an expected part of the marketing mix with characters such as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Shrek, and

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Disney princesses, among others, sharing space on product labels with food brands. Brand managers and product developers understood the value of making food fun for children, many setting out to produce this fun through a variety of means, including making food into playful shapes and giving food different or odd colors (the Heinz blue and green ketchup is perhaps the most famous). The shape of containers also served as fodder for fun and play as some were redesigned with children’s entertainment and functionality in mind. Websites supported brands and brand mascots, like Goldfish crackers, through games and animation in which they acquired personalities that could be put to the task of helping young children develop proficiency in arithmetic as the stars of a counting book, as often found in US supermarkets near the snack aisle. As ‘children’s food’ entered into the larger media mix of promotions and play, public and political concerns were voiced about the connections between ‘fun food’ and the rising rates of children’s obesity – in the USA, Europe, and elsewhere – with research and rhetoric claiming a direct connection between the two (Kaiser Foundation, 2006; CSPI, 2009; Kline, 2010). Regulatory efforts in the various European Union nations have turned the focus on, for instance, ‘deceptive’ advertising (Denmark), targeting children ‘directly’ by linking an advertisement to a program (Germany), and advertising in children’s programs of less than 30 minutes’ duration (Belgium; http://ec.europa.eu/avpolicy/docs/ library/studies/finalised/studpdf/oview.pdf). Many urged companies to direct the power of their characters and mascots toward healthy foods and not those with high sugar or fat content. Parents, particularly mothers, have battled against commercial meanings associated with foodstuffs, enacting a variety of strategies to coax or otherwise trick their children into eating something healthy (Cook, 2009b, 2009c), becoming concerned that food and other things had become ‘commoditoys’ (Langer, 2002) – that is, playthings that increase rather than satiate desire. Mothers

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found themselves being urged in parenting magazines and online blogs to take up the tactics of promoters and manufacturers and to turn homemade sandwiches and lunches into ‘fun’ shapes and motifs.

PLAY: LOST OR FOUND? During the period of the growth of commercial media-related play, the terrestrial play of children in the USA and other industrial nations was undergoing a different transformation. In many places, concerns about the physical abduction and sexual predation of children and about parents, especially mothers, being away from the home in the workforce for significant parts of the day combined to constrain the spatial range with in which children could venture with peers. In US schools, education budget cuts often resulted in a loss of extracurricular activities. Fears about violence in schools, coupled with concerns about legal liabilities, have made school recess time increasingly rare and increasingly surveilled, often taken away as a punishment for collective ‘bad’ behavior in the classroom (Beresin, 2004). Private, often indoor, parks, museums, and theme parks – like Sesame Street Place or the Please Touch Museum of Philadelphia – continue to proliferate as safe, controlled (and, for some, expensive) alternatives to either school or street play. It is perhaps unsurprising, given the narrative above, that scholars and observers in the first decade of the twenty-first century are reexamining the world of children’s play, seeking to uncover that which seemed to get lost between the characters and fears. Contemporary commentators and researchers tend to frame the narrative of children’s play in terms of loss – either an historical loss of free time and unstructured play or a loss of creativity in the face of contemporary consumer-media culture. Historian Howard Chudacoff (2007), writing of American childhood, draws the history of children’s play as a contest over time between adults and children. Adults – who include parents, experts, and those in commercial

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industries – have exercised their power over the timing, contexts, and forms of child play out of which arises children’s creativity and guile to engage in peer-orientated, unstructured, perhaps transgressive play (Chudacoff, 2007: 13–15). Positing a bifurcated dance between adult v. peer-structured play over time, he finds considerable fault with the rise of commercial goods and entertainment, particularly after World War II, whereby adults co-opted and ‘domesticated’ play through, among other things, character toys and scripted character stories. These reach their apotheosis for Chudacoff in latter-day video games, which exert a ‘constraining effect’ on creative, imaginative play (2007: 171–2). The great story he tells is of the resilience of children’s play, which has gone ‘underground’ in the face of commercialism, with children creating their own play from toys and spaces in ways not intended in their design (2007: 182–213). Susan Linn (2008) finds that children lose their ‘in-born’ creativity through exposure to commercial media. Making the ‘case for make-believe’ with a series of portraits of different children who engage in pretend play, Linn contends that play not only enables creativity in children but is also essential to development and to a variety of cognitive and emotional functions. Commercialism, particularly in the form of television characters and related merchandise, poses the most significant threat to children’s creative play – one that, she warns, it would be a ‘mistake’ to underestimate (2008: 34). In her estimation, children’s character media stunt children’s innate creativity by providing scripts that children are unable to transcend or otherwise challenge. Creativity and thus play, for Linn, necessarily and by definition can be found only in that which is not commercially generated or derived. Media consumption, in this sense, stands as the antithesis to play and potentially leads to ‘screen-dependent adults without the will or capacity to question what they are being sold’ (2008: 202). These narratives of loss recall Neil Postman’s (1982) seminal work, The Dis­ appearance of Childhood, which linked

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apparent changes in childhood and in parent– child relations to the rise of electronic media, especially television, at the time (see Buckingham, 2000). Such longstanding critiques of the relationship between children and media – now often strongly linked to play or the lack thereof – retain their rhetorical force and felt cultural relevance in their ability to enter into and reinforce public discourse that attempts to grasp the uncertainty of social and technological change by locating a particular type of childhood play as something universal and unchanging. Jensen (2013) notes a similar dynamic for the Danish context whereby concerns surrounding the ‘appropriate’ kind of children’s television are often directly linked to fears about the loss of some kind of (usually unspecified) essence of childhood often connected to ‘the myths of a timeless essence of play, imagination and creativity’ (2013: 249). Play, in this way, arises as a core issue in children’s consumption – and consumption in children’s play – because of the changing ability of adults and parents to introduce and engage in activities with children or with the personalities offered by and through commercial, digital means. Yet when research is carried out with children which seeks to grasp how they understand and handle the various forms of media, products, games, and devices, one finds a good deal of evidence that children respond to, transform, and interact with and through play forms, whatever their origin and however they are configured. Elizabeth Chin (1999) discusses the ways in which poor African American girls configure their understandings of race through their interaction with Barbie in ways not anticipated or planned by manufacturers and promoters. Hains (2012) finds that children’s play with Bratz dolls creates opportunities to discuss race and ethnic concerns, rather than the presumed preoccupation with the dolls’ supposedly sexual message. Historically speaking, researchers note that play with things such as dolls (Formanek-Brunell, 1983) and advertisements and images in the making of scrapbooks (Garvey, 1996) evince a creative engagement

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with the objects arising from the commercial realm of a sort clearly not prescribed by their manufacturers. A number of scholars have also found that attending to and making use of contemporary media characters and narratives with which children have been playing assists in the teaching of literacy and language in the classroom setting (Dyson, 1997; Marsh, 2010; Wohlwend, 2011). Children respond to this situation, apparently, in part because they are permitted to integrate their school and nonschool lives, their play and non-play selves into the learning activities at hand. When certain kinds of play are prohibited, like anything to do with television or cartoon characters (see Seiter, 1999), then a good deal of the materials from which they might craft narratives and characters (Götz et al., 2005) are also disallowed. In so doing, the interactional dynamics of children – of belonging and not belonging, of knowing and not knowing – get swept away in the process in favor of an adult-prescribed world of material from which to draw (Wohlwend, 2011). The emergence of Web 2.0 and related digital and social media technologies have provided the ability for interaction and collaboration through networked groups and settings, particularly for the creation of usergenerated content. Users in this field become ‘prosumers’ – productive consumers – who not only receive information (that is, entertainment) but can also transform it and share it (Ritzer and Jurgenson, 2010). Scholars seeking to understand what children do with these media have found a variety of ways in which identities become enacted, tested, shaped, shared, and discarded. How some children make, for instance, identity and gender through interactive games and toys in newly productive ways (Wohlwend 2011; Willett 2009; Marsh 2010; Ruckenstein 2010) – coupled with the ability of commercial firms to engage with and learn from children’s responses to prototype products – together raise questions about the roles children might play at the formative edge of new modes of economy. At the same time,

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the logics encoded in games (Kaiser Foundation, 2006; Bognost, 2007) and the ability to lead players – through use of their own skills and willingness to engage – in particular virtual spaces and practices offer a serious counterpoint to ‘creationist’ views of digital play.

CONCLUSION Children’s play constitutes a historical and cultural site of unease for parents, pedagogues, and observers. The ongoing integration of commercially made goods with play items, activities, and contexts over the last 150 years or so in Anglo-European contexts and beyond provides for a morally infused nexus of childhood, the market economy, and technology in public and professional discourse. At the crux of the matter resides fear and ambiguity. Many continue to fear that something essential about childhood is lost when play and commercial goods commingle to a significant, though unspecified, degree. Ambiguities become manifest when the consumer marketplace provides goods – dolls, games, toys – that parents and educators accept as fostering and even enhancing particular kinds of desirable childhoods. In response, one finds varying definitions of ‘appropriate’ toys and play arising in interaction with marketplace offerings that seek a demarcation between ‘pure’ children’s play and commercial expressions of it. The concerns regularly expressed in public discussions about the blurring of commercial goods and motivations with children’s play and activities belie the decades, and hence generations, of the various modes in which they have blended together, regularly ignoring the ways in which children make their play with consumer artifacts. It is unclear the extent to which the notion of ‘commercial play’ designates a particular kind of play, the origin of the play materials or, perhaps, the way children play with commerce and its associated meanings. What is clear is how the juxtaposition of ‘play’ and

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‘children’ with ‘consumer’ and ‘market’ serves to activate an impetus to presume an initial separation of these domains and so to alert onlookers for spillage from one to the other, thereby reactivating a search for some original or natural form of play that has become lost or hidden. Hence, efforts to ‘save play’ for children invariably involve saving children from certain kinds of play which presume clearly demarcated and conventionalized notions of consumption and commercialism – that is, media characters and screen time – and often involve the building or revitalizing of playgrounds as a counter to commercialization. Building particular kinds of play spaces for children with the thought that they will, in turn, create or enable particular forms of desirable play is a notion at least as old as the Progressive Era Play Movement in the United States. It not only draws upon and reinforces idealized notions of ‘the child’ and what constitutes appropriate or desirable ‘play,’ but also reinscribes economic and commercial activity with regard to children as necessarily that which dampens imagination and levels individuality. In so doing, contemporary, dominant discourses on children, play, and consumer culture replay and seek out those childhoods that may never have existed and, in so doing, ignore those which are arising.

REFERENCES Ariès, Philippe (1962) Centuries of Childhood. New York: Vintage. Beresin, Anna (2004) ‘School Power, Children’s Play and the Timing of Recess Violence’, in Myrdene Anderson (ed.), Cultural Shaping of Violence: Victimization, Escalation, Response. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. pp. 18–22. Biesel, Nicola (1997) Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction in Victorian America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bognost, Ian (2007) Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Video Games. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Brewer, John (1980) ‘Childhood Revisited: The Genesis of the Modern Toy’, History Today, 30(12): 32–9.

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Buckingham, David (2000) After the Death of Childhood: Growing Up in the Age of Electronic Media. Cambridge: Polity Press. Buckingham, David (2011) The Material Child: Growing Up in Consumer Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press. Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) (2009) ‘Better-For-Who? Revisiting Company Promises on Food Marketing to Children’. Washington, DC: CSPI. (http://cspinet.org/new/pdf/pledgereport. pdf) Chin, Elizabeth (1999) ‘Ethnically Correct Dolls: Toying with the Race Industry’, American Anthropologist, 101(2): 305–21. Chudacoff, Howard (2007) Children at Play: An American History. New York: New York University Press. Clarke, Alison J. (2007) ‘Consuming Children and Making Mothers: Birthday Parties, Gifts and the Pursuit of Sameness’, Horizontes Antropológicos, 13(28): 263–87. Cook, Daniel Thomas (2004) The Commodification of Childhood: The Children’s Clothing Industry and the Rise of the Child Consumer, 1917–1962. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cook, Daniel Thomas (2009a) ‘Children as Consumers’, in Jens Qvortrup, William A. Corsaro and Michael-Sebastian Honig (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Childhood Studies. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 332–46. Cook, Daniel Thomas (2009b) ‘Semantic Provisioning of Children’s Food: Commerce, Care and Maternal Practice’, Childhood, 16(3): 317–34. Cook, Daniel Thomas (2009c) ‘Children’s Subjectivities and Commercial Meaning: The Delicate Battle Mothers Wage When Feeding Their Children’, in Allison James, Anne Trine Kjørholt and Vebjørg Tingstad (eds), Childhood, Food and Identity in Everyday Life. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Cvetkovic, Vibiana Bowman and Scardilli, Brandi (2012) ‘Children’s Television’, in Charlene Mires, Howard Gillette, and Randall Miller (eds), The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. Camden, NJ: Mid-Atlantic Regions Center for the Humanities. Cross, Gary (1997) Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cross, Gary (2004) The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children’s Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Dyson, Anne Haas (1997) Writing Superheroes: Contemporary Childhood, Popular Culture, and Classroom Literacy. New York: Teachers College.

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Engelhardt, Tom (1986) ‘The Shortcake Strategy’, in Todd Gitlin (ed.), Watching Television: A Pantheon Guide to Popular Culture. (1st ed.) New York: Pantheon Books. pp. 68–110. Formanek-Brunell, Miriam (1983) Made to Play House: Dolls and the Commercialization of American Girlhood, 1830–1930. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Garvey, Ellen Gruber (1996) The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s to 1910s. New York: Oxford University Press. Götz, Maya, Lemish, Dafna, Aidman, Amy and Moon, Hyesung (2005) Media and the Make-Believe Worlds of Children: When Harry Potter Meets Pokémon in Disneyland. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Hains, Rebecca C. (2012) ‘An Afternoon of Productive Play with Problematic Dolls: The Importance of Foregrounding Children’s Voices in Research’, Girlhood Studies, 5(1): 121–40. Hendershot, Heather (1998) ‘Action For (and Against) Children’s Television: “Militant Mothers” and the Tactics of Television Reform’, Saturday Morning Censors: Television Regulation before the V-Chip. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. pp. 61–94. Jacobson, Lisa (2004) Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century. New York: Columbia University Press. Kaiser Foundation (The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation) (2006) ‘It’s Child’s Play: Advergaming and the Online Marketing of Food for Children’, The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation (www.kff.org/ other/its-childs-play-advergaming-and-the-online-2). Kinder, Marsha (ed.) (1999) Kids’ Media Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kline, Stephen (2010) Globesity, Food Marketing and Family Lifestyles. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Langer, Beryl (2002) ‘Commodified Enchantment: Children and Consumer Capitalism’, Thesis Eleven, 69(1): 67–81. Leach, William (1993) ‘Child-World in the Promised Land’, in James Gilbert, Amy Gilman, Donald M. Scott and Joan W. Scott (eds), The Mythmaking Frame of Mind: Social Imagination and American Culture. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. pp. 209–38. Linn, Susan (2008) The Case for Make Believe: Saving Play in a Commercialized World. New York: The New Press. Luke, Carmen (1990) Constructing the Child Viewer: A History of the American Discourse on Television and Children, 1950–1980. New York: Praeger.

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Marsh, Jackie (2010) ‘Young Children’s Play in Online Virtual Worlds’, Journal of Early Childhood Research, 8(1): 23–39. McKendrick, John H., Bradford, Michael G. and Fielder, Anna V. (2000) ‘Time for a Party! Making Sense of the Commercialization of Leisure Space for Children’, in Sarah L. Holloway and Gill Valentine (eds), Children’s Geographies: Playing, Living, Learning. Abingdon: Routledge. Mjøs, Ole J. (2010) ‘The Symbiosis of Children’s Television and Merchandising: Comparative Perspectives on the Norwegian Children’s Television Channel NRK Super and the Global Disney Channel’, Media, Culture and Society, 32(6): 1031–42. Nasaw, David (1985) Children of the City: At Work and At Play. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Nissenbaum, Stephen (1996) The Battle for Christmas: A Cultural History of America’s Most Cherished Holiday. New York: Vintage. Otnes, Cele, Nelson, Michelle and McGrath, Mary Ann (1995) ‘The Children’s Birthday Party: A Study of Mothers As Socialization Agents’, in Frank R. Kardes and Mita Sujan (eds), Advances in Consumer Research: Volume 22. pp. 622–7. Provo, UT: Association for Consumer Research. Poris, Michelle (2005) ‘Understanding What Fun Means to Today’s Kids’, Young Consumers: Insight and Ideas for Responsible Marketers, 7(1): 14–22. Postman, Neil (1982) The Disappearance of Childhood. New York: Delacorte Press. Ritzer, George and Jurgenson, Nathan (2010) ‘Production, Consumption, Prosumption: The Nature of Capitalism in the Age of the Digital “Prosumer”’, Journal of Consumer Culture, 10(1): 13–36. Ruckenstein, Minna (2010) ‘Toying with the World: Children, Virtual Pets and the Value of Mobility’, Childhood, 17(4): 500–13. Sammond, Nicholas (2005) Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930–1960. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Seiter, Ellen (1999) ‘Power Rangers at Preschool’, in Marsha Kinder (ed.), Kids’ Media Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. pp. 239–62. Schoonmaker, Sara (2006) ‘Piece of Cake: Children’s Birthday Party Celebrations and Alternatives to Consumer Culture’, Sociological Focus, 30(3): 217–34. Spigel, Lynn (1992) Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Willett, Rebekah (2009) ‘Parodic Practices: Amateur Spoofs on Video-Sharing Sites’, in David Buckingham and Rebekah Willett (eds), Video Cultures: Media

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Technology and Everyday Creativity. Houndmills Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 115–32. Wohlwend, Karen E. (2011) Playing Their Way into Literacies: Reading, Writing, and Belonging in the Early Child­ hood Classroom. New York: Teachers College Press.

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Wolfenstein, Martha (1955) ‘Fun Morality: An Analysis of Recent American Child-Training Literature’, in Margaret Mead and Martha Wolfenstein (eds), Childhood in Contemporary Cultures. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. pp. 168–78.

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24 Children’s Right to Play Stuart Lester and Wendy Russell

INTRODUCTION I like playing with my brother – pushing him around in the laundry basket, that’s my favourite game, I don’t know what it’s called – just the pushing my brother around in the laundry basket game (Boy aged six at the Consultation on Children’s Right to Play, Children’s Parliament and IPA Scotland 2010, Aberdeen, cited in Lester and Russell, 2010: 7).

This opening story provides a delightful illustration of seemingly mundane and fleeting moments of playfulness, moments when bodies, space, time and materials take on a different purpose and form, and when for the time being life is a little more pleasurable. In the time it takes to read the story, a multiplicity of such moments will appear and disappear across the globe. For the most part they go unnoticed by adults; children are very good at playing anywhere and with anything (Ward, 1979), within and between the everyday rhythms of life (Kullman and Palludan, 2011). These moments are highly significant and they are also fragile, ‘exquisitely sensitive to

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prevailing conditions’ (Bateson, 2011: 43); environmental factors (human, material, spatial, temporal) may prevent, restrict or disrupt them. Children generally manage to cope with this; play is a robust phenomenon that will find other outlets when the opportunity arises (Panksepp, 2001). However, where there are environmental stressors that reduce the potential for playful moments to occur it falls to adults, individually and collectively, to instigate a process of ‘repairing’ such conditions. Article 31 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) explicitly acknowledges the right to play. This chapter draws on a range of academic disciplines focusing on children’s experiences and their everyday lives to consider ways in which this right is understood, looking first at dominant understandings of the nature and value of childhood and play within the CRC. It suggests that these represent a narrow interpretation of play that undervalues the importance of article 31 and it seeks to redress this imbalance by showing how playing is a

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vital process that applies to all articles of the CRC. It does this through presenting an alternative perspective that foregrounds the playful ways in which children can appropriate time and space in order to create moments in which adult demands are temporarily set to one side to allow for other imaginative ways of being. The full text of article 31 of the CRC reads: 1. States Parties recognise the right of the child to rest and leisure, to engage in play and recreational activities appropriate to the age of the child and to participate freely in cultural life and the arts. 2.  States Parties shall respect and promote the right of the child to participate fully in cultural and artistic life and shall encourage the provision of appropriate and equal opportunities for cultural, artistic, recreational and leisure activity.

Positioning play alongside recreation, rest, leisure, culture and the arts implies play is something that happens when the demands of the real world of work and education are put to one side; it is ‘free time’. Considering play solely from this perspective may limit appreciation of the ways in which children’s play is woven into every aspect of daily routines. Understandings of play are inextricably linked to the ways in which societies construct and value the period of childhood (Gosso, 2010). The very concept of childhood distinguishes it from adulthood and reflects children’s physiological and psychological difference. However, the cultural, political, economic and social value of what these differences actually mean for the everyday lives of children and adults varies considerably across the globe (Gosso, 2010; James, 2010). While play may be a ubiquitous feature of childhood, there is a lack of research into these differences of value across cultures (Roopnarine, 2011). For the most part the heterogeneity of cultural practices is overshadowed by universal accounts of childhood and play based on minority world1 perspectives that ‘ignore the contrasting realities of childhood experiences and

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the cultural forces that may shape caregivers’ ideas about play’ (Roopnarine, 2011: 20). There is limited research about children’s everyday practices from majority world countries when compared to the detailed studies of children’s lives in the minority world. The few studies that have taken place challenge the narrow frame of reference of minority world play research (TrawickSmith, 2010) and present a different perspective on the ways in which play is interwoven into everyday practice (Punch, 2003; Tudge and Odero-Wanga, 2009). It is for this reason that the focus of the chapter is on play as a disposition, a sense of playfulness and state of positive arousal to engage with the world in a certain manner rather than as a separate time- and space-bound activity. This allows for a more nuanced and culturally sensitive recognition of the ways in which play may appear within the many and varied routines, relationships, symbols, materials and practices of children’s everyday lives.

CHILDHOOD AND THE CRC The notion of children’s rights is a complex and contested area of academic and political debate that extends well beyond the limits of this chapter. However it is useful to draw out some general themes to take forward in the discussion. The 54 articles of the CRC encompass an extensive range of rights across social, cultural, biological, political and economic aspects of children’s lives (Thomas and Percy-Smith, 2010). They are commonly grouped under the headings of protection, provision and participation rights, although it should be recognized that the articles are interdependent and indivisible. Undoubtedly, the CRC has been very influential in galvanizing states to pay increasing attention to the conditions of childhood and improve provision for children. Yet at the same time there is growing disquiet about the homogenization of what it means to be a child. Childhood is derived

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and portrayed through a minority world lens that sees children as immature individuals serving a period of apprenticeship to produce independent, autonomous and self-reliant adults. This has gained a position of ‘common sense’ that is rarely subject to critical scrutiny (James and Prout, 1997) and provides a universal template for shaping policies, institutions and practices of early childhood in a particular manner. For much of their childhood, children move through adult-designed and ordered spaces and institutions and are subject to the gaze of ‘experts’ who define, include and exclude children who do not fit into pre-established schemes of development and thereby discipline children’s difference (Rose, 1999). The intention is to guide children to a particular version of adulthood, but by doing so override indigenous patterns that have their own cultural coherence and orientation towards different purposes (Nsamenang, 2005). A counter perspective has emerged under the broad umbrella of the social studies of childhood (James and Prout, 1997; Wyness, 2006). This diverse field has sought to move beyond deterministic, totalizing and positivistic models and ideals of child development, giving rise to an alternative discourse that recognizes the heterogeneity of childhoods across a range of interrelated and differently experienced stratifications such as geography, culture, ethnicity, gender, class/caste, religion, disability and so on (James et al., 1998; Pence and Marfo, 2008). This has challenged the power relationship imbued in the adult/child binary by seeing children as active agents in the construction of their childhoods. However, this power shift essentially maintains oppositional relationships of structure/agency, being/becoming and other binaries that partition the world into mutually exclusive entities and leave one trapped in a ‘self-defeating loop’ (Prout, 2005: 143). A growing body of work (see for example Prout, 2005) seeks to discover the complex and messy relationships between heterogeneous materials and forces rather than adopting either/or, reductive positions, and by doing

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so reveals that there is no stable human experience awaiting revelation, no predetermined stages on a development line, but bodies are constantly reinvented as things happen (Thrift, 2008). These ideas are explored later in this chapter; before that, the next section explores some of the dominant constructions of play.

CONSTRUCTIONS OF PLAY Play scholarship encompasses a diverse range of disciplinary, epistemological and methodological perspectives (Henricks, 2006), and efforts to classify behaviour as play often promote controversy (Burghardt, 2011). Sutton-Smith’s (1997: 8) insightful exploration of the rhetorics of play notes how ‘play is placed in context within broader value systems, which are assumed by the theorist of play rather than studied directly by them’. The dominant minority world account of childhood permeates an understanding of play, and explanatory accounts situate play within the broader modernist discourse of ‘learning’, ‘outcomes’ and ‘development’ (Moss, 2007). Play is set up in oppositional relationship to what is not play, represented through the ways in which research into play has sought to define, classify and categorize it, to pin it down and to ascribe meaning in terms of individual freedom, learning and development. Consequently, the focus falls on play forms that can be seen to have a rational and instrumental purpose. For the most part, the benefits of play are assumed to be deferred until later – what Sutton-Smith (1997) refers to as the ‘progress rhetoric’. This belief in the value of play for progress gives licence for adults to promote the kinds of play that appear to have clear developmental benefits and to discourage other forms that adults may see as purposeless, disorderly and frivolous. In addition to the ‘progress’ view of play, there is also another minority world construct highlighted by Wyness (2006: 9), namely the ‘obligation to be happy’, which is equated to

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seeing childhood as a time for play free from moral and economic responsibility. Childhood is a ‘privileged domain of innocence, spontaneity, play, freedom and emotion in opposition to a public culture of culpability, discipline, work, constraint and rationality’ (Aitken, 2001: 7). Such an image pervades the ways in which adults come to understand and value play, an idealized and romantic viewpoint that expects play to be a happy, cooperative and productive experience. Yet, as many scholars of play acknow­ ledge, the multiple claims made on behalf of play and its developmental significance are based more on analogy, metaphor, speculation and self-referential presupposition and there is little hard evidence to support them (Sutton-Smith, 1997; Bateson, 2011). The privileged position of the progress rhetoric appears at odds with the diverse beliefs and cultural practices that shape childhoods across the majority world (Roopnarine, 2011). But while the ‘play ethos’ (Smith, 1988) may overstate or idealize the case for the role that play might have in development, this does not reduce the importance of play in the daily lives of children for creating moments of happiness and associated benefits (Smith, 2010). As with the concepts of childhood discussed in the previous section, there is a need to move beyond either/or, definitive accounts of playing to develop approaches that can work with the contingent, messy, interrelated and complex nature of minds, bodies, materials and space.

Thinking Play Differently The progress rhetoric of play, together with the wider childhood discourse of which it is a part, belongs to Cartesian philosophy that situates the body as something to be subjugated and controlled by the mind. The influence of this is still in evidence in the minority world, where primacy is given to rationality, autonomy and self-regulation, privileged as the desirable characteristics for becoming adult and informing institutional curricula and practices.

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This legacy is increasingly challenged by an approach that emphasizes the role of non-conscious body sensations, perceptions, emotions and movements that precede cognition (Thrift, 2008; Damasio, 2010). The ability to cope with the ‘ongoing-ness’ of life is helped by a number of bodily, mental and emotional processes that are all interrelated, including the moving body’s relationship with, and attentiveness to, the external world; the experience of the internal world (memory, imagination, daydreams, sensations); the bodily experience of emotions; and a conscious awareness of feelings (Damasio, 2010; Di Paolo et al., 2010). The mind is embodied and embedded in the world (Thompson and Varela, 2001), operating at multiple levels which dynamically interpenetrate and co-construct themselves, and by doing so bring about the conditions for their own future changes (Oyama, 2000). From this viewpoint development is a state in which restless bodies are continually coming to be as they experience the world, and by doing so perpetually and dynamically relaunch themselves into the world (Simpson, 2008). The body is ever-vigilant and alert to its own condition and the surrounding environment; as a body moves it senses and as it senses it moves (Massumi, 2002). Such sensations and movements continuously appraise and value the extent to which any situation affects the viability of a ‘selfsustaining and precarious network of processes’ (Di Paolo et al., 2010: 48). This dynamic relationship enables bodies to move towards the things that will enhance their chances of survival and to avoid those that decrease this state. From this perspective, bodies/minds are adaptive sense-makers, constantly responsive to changing conditions, engaged in a never-ending process of seeking to be and become ‘well’. This presents the contested concept of well-being not as an absolute or static state but, rather, an expression of the contingent, complex, dynamic and mutually influential qualities of the biological, psychosocial, economic,

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cultural, political and material environment. The key point here, in this highly simplified account of complex biological and social processes, is that bodies have a desire to affect and be affected in formation (or assemblages) with other bodies, materials and so on to maintain an optimal relationship with the environment, and these constitute the foundations of wellbeing and pleasure, or what may be referred to as ‘happiness’ (Damasio, 2010). There has been a long-standing association between play and ‘well-being’ (Lester and Russell, 2008). What adults classify as ‘playing’ may be a particular configuration of bodies, space, materials, symbols and so on assembled into a state in which all the components can achieve a greater capacity for being and becoming ‘better’, where desires to affect and be affected are actualized in a pleasurable manner or style. A playful disposition problematizes the current order of things by continuously asking ‘What if?’ The qualities that are generally used to distinguish play, such as its ‘as if’ nature, spontaneity, unpredictability, intrinsic value and the collective ability to be in control of being out of control (Lester and Russell, 2010), produce moments of pleasure, in which the players have increased control over the conditions of their lives. This can be illustrated by an extract from observation notes (Lester, 2012) following a visit to see an exhibition of landscape paintings by David Hockney: The gallery was very busy, and movement was restricted as we followed the flow of people through the various rooms. My attention was caught by two young girls (probably aged around 5/6 years old) with attendant adults who appeared very immersed in the paintings, certainly more so than the children who spent time chatting, moving through the crowd holding hands and occasionally breaking out into skipping movements around bodies, at one point sitting on the floor together and doing a small hand-clapping routine. My gaze became more focused as one child stood in front of one of the large landscape paintings, stepping over the marked line on the floor which tacitly placed a restriction on adult

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encroachment to the immediate space around the canvas. Placing her back towards one large tree in the left of the picture, the young child positioned her arms to align with the main branches, effectively mimicking the shape of the tree. The other child stood facing her friend and helped to manoeuvre her arms into a closer copy before standing alongside and adopting a position to represent another tree. This child then proceeded to ‘blow’ as if it was windy and her friend began bending and shaking in the breeze, and reciprocating with blowing on to the ‘other’ tree and provoking a similar shaking response. Shortly afterwards they appeared to become conscious of being watched and moved away, giggling before disappearing into the crowd.

What this observation reveals is that playing may be seen as a performance that involves ‘off-the-cuff’ behaviour created by affective and expressive encounters between bodies, space, symbols and materials, each carrying their own unique history and capacities. The emphasis switches from what is happening inside individual children’s minds to what is happening within and between child and adult bodies and everything else that constitutes the space of this encounter. This perspective of playing suggests that it is always contextual and relational, continually responsive to local conditions and resistant to general classification and categorization. These moments are also singular events; children becoming trees will not occur in this manner again, although there may be some residue of this in future moments. The perspective presented here suggests that mind/bodies are not fixed and selfcontained but distributed over time and space, and that self–other dualisms become redundant in seeking to account for this (Fagen, 2011). The notion of distribution constructs agency as a collective act of bodies and materials co-creating attachments rather than as acts of individuality. This shifts attention from children per se to children in relationship with others. Playful moments are ordinary, woven into the fabric of everyday life and not something apart, as the following observation of two young children in a Puerto Rican school illustrates:

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During hand washing before lunch, A. walks up behind R., who is waiting to use the sink, tugs the elastic waistband of his pants, and snaps it. A. screams loudly and laughs. R. turns to him and laughs. He reaches to grab A.’s waistband to retaliate, but A. steps away from him. Both children continue laughing (Trawick-Smith, 2010: 549).

Yet while they are ordinary, such moments matter; these apparently mundane events are fundamentally important to the ways children construct and go about their daily lives. There is a growing body of research that suggests playing may contribute to the enhancement of adaptive systems, building the capacity to cope better with uncertainty through refining stress response pathways and building a network of strong attachments to other bodies, spaces and materials (Burghardt, 2005; Lester and Russell, 2008). The fun and pleasure of playing generates positive affect, which has considerable health benefits (Gervais and Wilson, 2005), and the ability to affect and be affected in a joyous manner leads to ever-widening connections and greater possibilities for further connections across multiple levels of organization (Damasio, 2010); what playing may offer is a greater satisfaction in being alive (SuttonSmith, 2003). In contrast with the deferred benefits approach, this perspective suggests that play may have immediate benefits for the well-being of children and this will inevitably shape the ways in which children go on in their lives (Burghardt, 2005). In summary, playing may be portrayed as the ways in which children enact their rights to participate fully, as children, in their everyday worlds and by doing so enhance their ability to protect themselves. Through playful participation children become aware of their relational capabilities with other bodies, materials, space–time through an ongoing process of affective experimentation (Deleuze, 1988), maintaining a hopeful orientation to the future. Thus, rather than being an isolated article within the CRC, something of a luxury to be considered after other rights have been addressed, the right to play

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assumes a central role in the production of children’s well-being, and thus pervades all key themes of the CRC. Yet there is something of an anomaly here within the broad children’s rights framework; whereas provision and protection rights, and to a certain degree rights of participation, can be embedded into legislation, policies and institutional practices, children’s play cannot be given or provided. Playing is co-created through encounters with bodies and materials, not prescribed; it contains no advance notice of what it might become. It marks a moment of collective agency in a manner that temporarily transforms rather than conforms to environmental conditions (Henricks, 2006). Moments of playing are highly contingent and often fleeting, but a sufficiency of moments of play maintains a state of anticipatory alertness and readiness to seek out further space–time for playing. Equally, a prolonged and severe reduction in moments may lessen such a desire, contributing to reluctance or inability to seek out new experiences and affiliations with subsequent impact on children’s well-being and development (Bateson, 2011). Thus, the presence or absence of playfulness acts as a focal point for beginning to pay close attention to the conditions of childhood, and by inference adulthood, in the everyday spaces and practices that constitute young children’s daily lives.

THE NATURE OF ‘PLAY SPACES’ Spaces created by playing are relational achievements, an intimate web of associations and transactions between affective, social and material components that enmesh people and animate space (Duff, 2011). A key focus in this analysis is how spaces are produced through patterns of maintenance and repair; all spaces require a degree of structure and order that establishes the spatial rhythms and practices that shape and organize the lives of individuals (Lefebvre, 2004).

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They operate across many dimensions simultaneously, including state policies, local governance, technology and the infrastructural systems that work their way into local forms of social and spatial organization (road signs, lighting, timetables, work patterns, boundaries, etc.). Such orderings are a reflection of powerful interests that inscribe space with meanings which filter down into everyday practices and routines, thereby naturalizing forms of authority and control. Maintenance processes and environmental conditions are not single variables and they combine in complex ways. Issues of poverty, violence, poor sanitation, hazardous environments, and extreme circumstances such as natural disaster, war or political unrest, converge to shape adults’ and children’s perceptions and daily practices. Bartlett’s (2010) comparison between the lives of five-yearold twins living in a poor coastal village in Kenya and a child (Salim, aged six) living in a slum area in Mombasa shows that this is not a predetermined pattern and reveals the ways in which the maintenance, daily rhythms, routines and infrastructure of local communities may help to mitigate the effects of extreme poverty for children (sharing food, foraging, living outdoors in shared family spaces and so on in the coastal village) or exacerbate these (poor housing conditions, ill health, little outdoor space in the slum area). A significant difference between the lives of these children is the quality of the places where they play. Given the nature and limitations of outdoor space (poor drainage, traffic, violence), Salim is largely confined to playing indoors on the bed in a shared family room that measures 8 x 8 feet. In contrast, the twins have a large dirt yard to play in with trees, bushes, loose materials and access to friends and family. This illustrates the interrelatedness of, on the one hand, the organization of local and global conditions of childhood and, on the other, children’s responses to them, and how children’s capacity to affect and be affected by these conditions can be subject to more powerful forces. The everyday ways in which

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children and adults interact is constantly open to negotiation but children’s desire for agency in their childhood spaces often creates tensions for adults. This is further exacerbated by cultural norms and expectations that situate the caring and responsible adult against the vulnerable and dependent child (Kullman, 2010) and finds expression in local and habitual practices and daily routines (Gosso et al., 2007). For example, parents in minority world countries (and increasingly in the majority world) are held responsible for the educational success of their children and may see play as either a waste of time or an instrument to be used for educational purposes (Fisher et al., 2008; Singh and Gupta, 2012). In other cultural contexts, adults may pay little attention to play other than that it allows adults to get on with their work and gives a signal that children are healthy (Gaskins, 2000). Research into children’s spatial patterns reveals the diverse ways in which public and institutional spaces afford playful moments. But increasingly young children’s ability to be ‘separable’ (Lee, 2005), that is, to find time and space when they can be with but apart from adults, are matters of concern in both minority and majority world contexts (Malone and Rudner, 2011). Children often cherish informal ‘found’ spaces more than adult-designed, ‘purposeful’ spaces (Chatterjee, 2012) and efforts need to be made to ensure that children can have lightly supervised access to both their immediate environments and institutional spaces. This means paying careful attention to multiple maintenance processes that disempower marginalized actors (in this case, children) from contributing to the production of space. There is no blueprint for this but the following brief examples illustrate attempts to democratize public space. Bartlett (2005) reports on a squatter camp in Kathmandu and the ways in which the local community have protected an area of open land from settlement, keeping it as an informal play space. Another example is the Dutch woonerf, in which one end of a street

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may be closed to traffic, effectively reclaiming it for children and enhancing a sense of safety and community (UNICEF, 2012). Similarly, the Playing Out (www.playingout. net) project in Bristol, UK, has seen local residents close streets to traffic at specific times so that children can play out. The proliferation of early years education and welfare programmes has resulted in young children spending time in spaces and institutions where adult authority, in conjunction with tightly regulated rules, spatial arrangements, routines and predefined activities, seeks to subjugate children’s bodies and desires to education and socialization projects (Markström, 2010). Children are held in check by the organization of time and space that limits when, where and how to play (Skånfors et al., 2009). Warming’s study of young children in a daycare centre reveals the ways in which a teacher seeks to control children’s use of space and materials, calling children in from the playground and issuing the following command: Sit down. Today, you‘re going to sort Lego bricks by colour. The red ones go in this box, the white ones in this one, the blue ones in this one and the yellow ones in this one. I’ll bring you another box for stuff which isn’t Lego. Be careful to put the right colours in the right boxes (Warming, 2011: 44).

Yet this task was set up in such a way that children could not reach the boxes, and while some children attempted to draw the attention of the teacher to this, nothing happened. And so children started to play with the Lego bricks instead, while others shifted on their chairs, ‘messed around’ and even began making farting noises. For many practitioners, the idea that children may establish ‘lines of flight’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988) away from the demands of the nursery or school becomes problematic as educators face considerable pressure to meet externally derived outcomes and to maintain social order. The injunctions and control placed on adults have concrete and material consequences for the ways in which adult–child relationships are carried out,

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leaving little space for children’s desires (Mozère, 2007). What is of interest here, alongside the ways in which the children sought to move away from the tedium of the exercise, are the comments from the attending researcher who was seated at the table with the children. From this lowly position Warming experienced the frustration of not being able to comply with the demands and rules, felt it was ‘senseless and absurd’ and actually joined in playing a nonsense game with the children. This adult response reveals a different sensitivity to the situation, not simply concerned with pedagogical correctness and outcomes, but attuned to bodies, affections, movements and intensity of desire. In this mundane context playing produces a temporarily (dis)ordered space in which the emphasis is on process and change over inertia and fixity (Gallacher, 2006), where the rigid identities of (school) child and adult are set to one side to produce something else of equal value. Hannikainen’s (2001) Nordic kindergarten study wonderfully captures the multiple ways in which children and adults play, not simply at designated times and spaces, but throughout the everyday routines of the institution, illustrated by playful episodes appearing in circle time, schoolwork, lunchtime and clearing-up routines. This spirit of playfulness is ‘free, process-oriented and creative and… include[s] fantasy, humour, dramatic gestures, joking with language and exaggeration and laughter’ (Hannikainen, 2001: 132–3). Children wander from adult demands to produce moments of intensity when something different happens to the rhythms of the space and their position in it, and by doing so simply enliven the practicalities of everyday life. For the most part children and adults do manage to get on together as long as public, institutional and private spaces are sufficiently open and permeable to cope with divergent desires and experiences. Such spaces are continually produced through ongoing interactions and inventiveness (Lee, 2005), and there are numerous examples of

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the diverse ways in which playful moments may emerge in family and institutional routines (see, for example, Punch, 2003; Katz, 2004; Kullman, 2010). These show that child–adult relationships are not always problematic and marked by authority and power but can be shaped by affirmative everyday encounters, often playful, based on care, love and trust. The conditions of a ‘good space’ for playing therefore rely on intimate relations of recognition and mutuality, an ethics of care in which adults, individually and collectively, appreciate that playing is important in producing moments of difference and act responsibly with such moments, rather than seeking to control and usurp them into adult agendas.

A RIGHT TO PLAY Collectively these examples illustrate that a critical and democratic scrutiny of maintenance and repair processes can reveal the multiple ways that children are included and excluded from their everyday worlds. The micro incidents of playing introduced in this chapter are replayed in multiple practices and spatial arrangements across the diverse landscapes of childhood. Article 31 articulates the roles that state parties have in implementing children’s right to play, namely to recognize, respect and promote it – a duty that requires close and critical scrutiny of state, regional, institutional and local temporal and spatial practices to reveal the ways in which they may enable and restrict children’s desire and capacity to play. On the basis of this, actions can be taken that improve the everyday conditions of children’s lives and lead to a re-enchantment of space (Amin, 2006); spaces become more open and permeable to playful production and by doing so offer a reminder that space cannot be fully fixed. It also conjures up new uses that disrupt existing conventions and form new relationships, which in turn are subject to continuous re-formation. All citizens have a right to participate in the production of space, and for children

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moments of playing are an exercise in actualizing their rights to participate and be well. Rather than the ‘becoming-adult’ child of developmentalism, there is an alternative viewpoint here that recognizes bodies are not alone but are continually created and re-created through movements and connections with others. Children have a place in co-creating moments of ‘becoming trees’ and benefiting from being together with other children and adults in shared spaces of encounter. Such a perspective challenges the limitations of the instrumental value attributed to play and a narrow individualistic and separatist reading of article 31 by presenting children as being-in-common with adults, in which difference is an inevitable and vital part of life. It refers to the ways in which people are ‘thrown together’ and through this process can learn to get on together (Massey, 2005).

CONCLUSION As with playing itself, this chapter has sought to problematize the given order of things, to question dominant accounts of childhood, play and adult responsibility for supporting children’s right to play in order to reveal what more might be said and done. The relational approach adopted here suggests that children’s playfulness often contests these orderings, thereby changing dominant accounts. Rights are not essential and fixed but are contextually produced and enacted in time and space. A right to play offers an opportunity to subject local and global (adult) practices to critical scrutiny and by doing so reveal the ways in which they enable or disable moments of playing. It also implies that adults have a responsibility to make and leave room for play, to recognize that spaces can be temporarily transformed, to become indeterminate spaces in which children’s intense affects can find expression in becoming different. Such time–spaces are important, not in the limited sense of learning, but in

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maintaining a disposition that can continue to ask what more can be done. Carrying out acts of maintenance and repair becomes the basis for producing a more just and fair society.

NOTE 1. The terms ‘minority’ and ‘majority’ world are used here to refer to what are sometimes termed ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries respectively. These terms are preferred because they acknowledge that much power lies with the few countries whose economic, political and cultural activities affect the majority of humankind. We also appreciate that the use of these terms potentially continues a dichotomy that masks the diversity of contexts in majority and minority worlds and the ‘glocalized’ interconnections between them (Holt and Holloway, 2006).

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Kullman, K. (2010) ‘Transitional Geographies: Making Mobile Children’, Social and Cultural Geography, 11(8): 829–46. Kullman, K. and Palludan, C. (2011) ‘Rhythmanalytical Sketches: Agencies, School Journeys, Temporalities’, Children’s Geographies, 9(3–4): 347–59. Lee, N. (2005) Childhood and Human Value. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Lefebvre, H. (2004) Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. London: Continuum. Lester, S. (2012) 'Bringing Play to Life: Exploring Ways of Accounting for Play'. Unpublished PhD notes. Lester, S. and Russell, W. (2008) Play for a Change: Play, Policy and Practice: A Review of Contemporary Perspectives. London: National Children’s Bureau. Lester, S. and Russell, W. (2010) 'Children’s Right to Play: An Examination of the Importance of Play in the Lives of Children Worldwide'. Working Paper No. 57. The Hague, The Netherlands: Bernard van Leer Foundation. Malone, K. and Rudner, J. (2011) ‘Global Perspectives on Children’s Independent Mobility: A Socio-Cultural Comparison and Theoretical Discussion of Children’s Lives in Four Countries in Asia and Africa’, Global Studies of Childhood, 1(3): 243–59. Markström, A. M. (2010) ‘Talking About Children’s Resistance to the Institutional Order and Teachers in Preschool’, Journal of Early Childhood Research, 8(3): 303–14. Massey, D. (2005) For Space. London: Sage. Massumi, B. (2002) Parables for the Virtual. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Moss, P. (2007) ‘Meetings across the Paradigmatic Divide’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 39(3): 229–45. Mozère, L. (2007) 'In Early Childhood: What’s Language About?', Educational Philosophy and Theory, 39(3): 291–99. Nsamenang, A. (2005) ‘The Intersection of Traditional African Education with School Learning’, in L. Swartz, C. de la Rey and N. Duncan (eds), Psychology: An Introduction. Cape Town: Oxford University Press. pp. 327–37. Oyama, S. (2000) Evolution’s Eye: A Systems View of the Biology-Culture Divide. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Panksepp, J. (2001) ‘The Long-term Psychobiological Consequence of Infant Emotions: Prescriptions for the Twenty-first Century’, Infant Mental Health Journal, 22(1–2): 132–73. Pence, A. R. and Marfo, K. (2008) ‘Early Childhood Development in Africa: Interrogating Constraints of

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Prevailing Knowledge Bases’, International Journal of Psychology, 43(2): 78–87. Prout, A. (2005) The Future of Childhood. London: RoutledgeFalmer. Punch, S. (2003) ‘Childhoods in the Majority World: Miniature Adults or Tribal Children?’, Sociology, 37(2): 277–95. Roopnarine, J. (2011) ‘Cultural Variations in Beliefs about Play, Parent–child Play, and Children’s Play: Meaning for Child Development’, in A. Pellegrini (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Development of Play. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 19–37. Rose, N. (1999) Governing the Soul. London: Free Association Books. Simpson, P. (2008) ‘Chronic Everyday Life: Rhythmanalysing Street Performance’, Social and Cultural Geography, 9(7): 807–29. Singh, A. and Gupta, D. (2012) ‘Contexts of Childhood and Play: Exploring Parental Perceptions’, Childhood, 19(2): 235–50. Skånfors, L., Löfdahl, A. and Hägglund, S. (2009) ‘Hidden Spaces and Places in the Preschool: Withdrawal Strategies in Preschool Children’s Peer Cultures’, Journal of Early Childhood Research, 7(1): 94–109. Smith, P. K. (1988) ‘Children’s Play and its Role in Early Development: A re-evaluation of the “Play Ethos”’, in A. Pellegrini (ed.), Psychological Bases for Early Education. Chichester: Wiley John. pp. 207–226. Smith, P. K. (2010) Children and Play. Oxford: WileyBlackwell. Sutton-Smith, B. (1997) The Ambiguity of Play. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sutton-Smith, B. (2003) ‘Play as a Parody of Emotional Vulnerability’, in J. L. Roopnarine (ed.), Play and Educational Theory and Practice, Play and Culture Studies. (Volume 5.) Westport, CT: Praeger. pp. 3–17. Thomas, N. and Percy-Smith, B. (2010) ‘Introduction’, in N. Thomas and B. Percy-Smith (eds), A Handbook of Children and Young People’s Participation. Abingdon: Routledge. pp. 1–7. Thompson, E. and Varela, F. (2001) ‘Radical Embodiment: Neural Dynamics and Consciousness’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 5(10): 418–25. Thrift, N. (2008) Non-Representational Theory. Abingdon: Routledge. Trawick-Smith, J. (2010) ‘Drawing Back the Lens on Play: A Frame Analysis of Young Children’s Play in Puerto Rico’, Early Education and Development, 27(4): 536–67. Tudge, J. and Odero-Wanga, D. (2009) ‘A CulturalEcological Perspective on Early Childhood Among

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the Luo of Kisumu, Kenya’, in M. H. Fleer, M. Hedegaard and J. Tudge (eds), Childhood Studies and the Impact of Globalisation: Policies and Practices at Global and Local Levels. New York: Routledge. pp. 142–60. UNICEF (2012) The State of the World’s Children: Children in an Urban World. New York: UNICEF.

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Ward, C. (1979) The Child in the City. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Warming, H. (2011) ‘Getting Under Their Skins? Accessing Young Children’s Perspectives through Ethnographic Fieldwork’, Childhood, 18(1): 39–53. Wyness, M. (2006) Childhood and Society. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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25 Infant and Toddler Play Jennifer Sumsion and Linda J. Harrison

INTRODUCTION A rapidly emerging body of literature about the lives and experiences of infants and tod­ dlers in early childhood settings offers significant opportunities to examine ways in which very young children initiate and develop play in the course of constructing relationships, social identities and know­ ledge of their social, cultural and physical worlds. This chapter examines that literature, as well as research investigations about infants’ and toddlers’ play in other naturalis­ tic or quasi-naturalistic settings. Following Brooker and Edwards (2010), the chapter is structured around Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons’s (2003) distinction between Mode 1 and Mode 2 knowledge. As interpreted by Brooker and Edwards, Mode 1 knowledge ‘is characterized by traditional perspectives and approaches to science’ (2010: 8) that emphasize and value the homo­ geneous nature of disciplinary knowledge, and the ‘generation of increasingly advanced knowledge within a single field’. In the case

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of play, this field is the discipline of child development. Mode 2 knowledge, in contrast, is heterogeneous and characterized by trans­ disciplinary approaches that focus on generating knowledge that informs how a problem or a specific ‘context of application’ might be interpreted and/or addressed. In the case of play, the context is the social, cultural and physical worlds of infants. Brooker and Edwards (2010) recognize that both modes of knowledge offer useful and sometimes overlapping insights into infants’ and toddlers’ play. Implicit in the current chapter is a commitment to valuing multiple perspectives on play. While acknowledging the possibility of tensions between Mode 1 and Mode 2 approaches to knowledge produc­ tion, the intent is to foster a broad appreciation of contemporary research about infant and toddler play and to identify complementari­ ties, gaps and directions for future research. The chapter proceeds from the assumption that the complexities of play preclude an unproblematic definition and full under­ standing of play. The focus, therefore, is not

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on what play definitively ‘is’ for infants and toddlers, but, rather, what it can involve, ‘do’ and ‘mean’ (Wood, 2012). A further assump­ tion is the inherent interconnectedness of infant and toddler play, social interactions and learning (Johansson and Pramling Samuelsson, 2006; Trevarthen, 2011). In the first section of the chapter, Mode 1 studies are reviewed. The second section focuses on Mode 2 studies. In the third and final section, complementarities between Mode 1 and Mode 2 studies are examined, gaps in the literature identified and future research direc­ tions proposed.

MODE 1 STUDIES Mode 1 investigations focus on what the play of young children tells us about their devel­ opment, learning and well-being, and how play contributes to children’s growing physi­ cal, social and cognitive competencies. In essence, studying play and studying develop­ ment can be seen as synonymous: the activities or actions of an infant or toddler in play are indicative of the abilities that describe development. The bidirectional nature of play and devel­ opment is illustrated in two studies of infants’ perceptive and motor abilities. Perone et al. (2008) showed six-month-old babies a series of toys that differed by appearance (shape) or action (sound), and then observed their play with another set of toys. Babies’ motor activi­ ties (grasping and holding) when they played with the new toys were directly related to their attention to changes in appearance, but not to changes in action. The authors conclude that through play infants make ‘the link between the perceptual features of objects and the actions those objects afford’ (1247). Attention to the appearance of objects also informed Corbetta et al.’s (2000) study of five- to ninemonth-old babies’ reaching (one-handed v. two-handed) and manipulative play (batting, grasping, exploring by touch and mouthing) with a set of smaller to larger solid balls and soft pompoms. All children showed more

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mouthing of balls than pompoms, which indi­ cated that motor activity was influenced by the perceptual information the babies had from touching the toys. Reaching behaviour, however, differed by age rather than type or size of toy. Only children of nine months and older matched the use of their one- or twohanded reaching to the size of the toy. The authors conclude that ‘generating a reach toward an object will directly result from the tensions and interactions between the intent of the child, his ability to perceive and detect the object’s physical characteristic, and the motor capabilities (s)he has available to respond to that task’ (2000: 370). These examples not only provide a glimpse into babies’ very early play with objects, they also illustrate the highly specialized nature of Mode 1 studies, which tend to focus on spe­ cific aspects of development in structured play environments. In this chapter, the focus is on studies that model play situations simi­ lar to homes and early childhood services.

Imitation Readers will be familiar with very young, even newborn, infants’ propensity to imitate an adult’s facial expressions, movements and vocal sounds, and to engage in shared imita­ tive games. Trevarthen writes that ‘human imitation is generated by an innate interper­ sonal sensibility, one adapted to regulate a range of “acts of meaning” to regulate the interplay of intentions – acknowledging, ask­ ing, inviting, testing, and so on’ (2005: 95). Infants’ responses to the imitative actions of adults have been investigated through matching an adult’s play to the play actions made sponta­ neously by the infant (Agnetta and Rochat, 2004; Hauf et al., 2007). Children were observed to show increased interest (more looking and smiling) when the adult imitated their play actions or played with the same toy, but less interest when the adult played with a different toy or performed different actions. Toddlers’ interest in adults’ contingent actions is thought to be heightened because they become sensitive to ‘the intentions of an

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adult imitating them’ and begin to see the adult ‘as potential partner in playful social exchanges where roles can be interchanged and mutual impersonation can take place’ (Agnetta and Rochat, 2004: 33). These stud­ ies illustrate Thompson’s (2008) view that when adults respond to infants’ intentional acts in contingent ways (through their matched actions or emotional expression), they are contributing to the infants’ growing awareness of others as being ‘like me’ and to ‘the goal-oriented structure of human activ­ ity’ (2008: 8).

Intersubjectivity, Shared Intentionality and Social Referencing Trevarthen’s (2005: 101) position, which is shared by Thompson (2008) and others, is that the early playful exchanges of infants and adults demonstrate an ‘intersubjectivity’ or ‘other person awareness and the impulse to engage’ on the part of the baby. Tomasello and Carpenter (2007) use the term ‘shared intentionality’ to describe the collaborative interactions and shared goals of toddlers observed in adult-supported play. In a struc­ tured task designed by Rakoczy et al. (2005), an adult demonstrated instrumental play (for example making a sound against a glass with a piece of plastic garden tubing) and pretend play (for example brushing teeth with a col­ our mixer for stirring paint). After observing the adult, 18- and 24-month-old children were given each object and asked ‘What can you do with this?’ The aim was to compare the simple imitation of an action with the more complex task of understanding and creating pretend play. As pretence requires an appreciation of the other’s intentions, or a sense of collective intentionality, Rakoczy et al. expected that the toddlers would make more interpersonal contact with the adult during these tasks. Indeed, the results showed that social gazes, smiles and glances were more frequent when children were given the objects modelled in pretend play, suggesting an awareness of the sense ‘that “we” create

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some fictional reality’ (2005: 70). Similarly, Trevarthen notes the dynamic interplay of shared motives and emotions in adult–child teasing games that occur ‘within “the space of the We”’ (2005: 96). While intersubjectivity in infancy has pri­ marily been researched as a shared dyadic connection between babies and adults, recent work by Bradley (2009) and Selby and Bradley (2003) proposes that babies can also be socially in tune with peers. By placing three babies in a room, facing each other from the points of a triangle made by their strollers, and observing their spontaneous interactions, many examples of triadic infantto-infant imitative behaviours, synchronous vocalizations and mutual exchanges were identified (e.g. babies reaching out a foot towards another to play ‘footsie’), demon­ strating babies’ sense of being ‘within the same “intersubjective space”’ (Bradley, 2009: 266–7). The nature of infant–infant intersubjec­tivity, as distinct from infant–adult inter­subjectivity, is also evident in studies of social referencing. Social referencing in play is studied by pre­ senting infants with a novel task in the context of a clear message from the parent, via an encouraging smile or a fearful expression, about its properties. Kim and Kwak (2011) examined this phenomenon in 12- to 16-monthold toddlers using toys that were positive and attractive (such as a familiar character from a cartoon), negative and un­familiar (such as a tumbling barking bulldog) or ambiguous (such as a laughing flower). When faced with an ambiguous toy, children were seen to ref­ erence adults more and to be more influenced by the emotional message given by the adult. Nichols et al. (2010) adapted this task by using an older child to show positive, fearful or neutral responses to an ambiguous toy, and found that the pattern of response was different. Play was seen to: decrease in 12-month-old babies for both positive and negative peer messages; increase in 24-montholds when the peer gave a negative message; and be unaffected for 18-month-olds. The authors found very few commonalities

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between child–child and adult–child social referencing. The work of Nichols et al., Bradley and Selby supports a position that adult–child and child–child intersubjectivities and social understandings develop separately but in tandem. The more traditional view is that young children’s ‘social understanding emerges and consolidates in play and com­ municative routines during the dynamic give-and-take of social interaction with adults and then later generalizes to the less familiar, less routine, and less predictable world of peers’ (Brownell et al., 2006: 817).

Adult-supported Play Adult–child joint attention in play is a key process for infants’ and toddlers’ learning and development. It is ‘characterized by tri­ adic exchanges that involve both the infant’s and a partner’s awareness of the other’s mutual focus of attention on a third object or event’ and can be seen when ‘infants actively coordinate their attention to both the objects and the partner at the same time’ (Bigelow et al., 2004: 518). In a comparative study of 12-month-olds observed in four play con­ texts – infant alone, with mother, and with mother during periods of joint attention and no joint attention – Bigelow et al. found that infants engaged in more complex functional play, such as using the toy telephone to dial or placing rings on a stacking toy, when they were with the mother, particularly during episodes of joint attention. When playing alone or with the mother but not in joint attention, infants showed more simple types of play, such as banging or mouthing the toys. Joint attention in mother–child play was also found to enhance the complexity of infants’ independent play. Bigelow et al.’s study was conducted in a laboratory setting designed to model the types of play interactions that would be likely to occur naturally at home. They found that complex play was more frequent when moth­ ers scaffolded their infant’s play activities, through positioning objects, modelling and

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turn-taking. Similarly, in a home observation, Sung and Hsu (2009) found strong associa­ tions between toddlers’ symbolic play and mothers’ spontaneous following of the child’s actions and scaffolding through verbal elabo­ ration. The importance of child–mother play is further shown in a comparative study of toddlers with their mothers at home and with their early childhood educators at childcare (Klein and Feldman, 2007). Whilst no differ­ ences were found in the type and amount of interaction mothers and educators engaged in with the toddlers during play, only mothers’ supportive engagement and joint attention in play were associated with children’s assessed cognitive abilities. The same pattern was not observed for educators’ involvement. A con­ founding factor affecting comparative studies across home and early childhood settings, however, is that whilst educators have one-toone interactions with toddlers, unlike mothers they are also attending to a larger group. Educator–child interaction in play is typi­ cally studied in the context of group activities, where play behaviours may be directed towards a number of infants or toddlers. Girolametto and Weitzman (2002) observed educators’ language interactions with tod­ dlers in supported play with dough. Educators’ efforts to engage children in extended conversations and encourage turntaking were positively associated with toddlers’ language production. Observation of a targeted event such as this, however, may not fully represent the overall pattern of educator–child play or language. In a very detailed assessment of educator–child lan­ guage gathered during half-day observations, Laevers et al. (2011) reported that most adult utterances were either regulatory (for exam­ ple telling children what to do) or informative (for example telling children what they’ll get for lunch). There were few utterances fulfill­ ing interactional, affective, imaginative or enjoyment functions. The authors estimated that educators made an average of ten utter­ ances per hour, concluding that ‘practitioners do not invest a lot in communicating with children’ (2011: 294).

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Play with Peers in Early Childhood Settings Laevers et al. (2011) further reported that 68 per cent of infant and toddler utterances were addressed to an educator and only 12 per cent were directed towards peers. The same pat­ tern was reported by Deynoot-Schaub and Riksen-Walraven (2006) – toddlers had twice as much contact with educators as with peers in their spontaneous interactions during free play. Possible reasons for these differences are seen in an innovative study of social space in a toddler room by Legendre and Munchenbach (2011). Observations of free play showed that children spent most of their time in close proximity to other peers (82 per cent), twice as much as to an educator (40 per cent), but when they were with an educator they were also with other peers. Comparison of toddlers’ interactions with peers when they were in the proximity of an adult and when they were not showed marked differences in toddler–peer social interaction. When an adult was close by, more bids for attention and interaction were made to the adult and fewer were made to peers. The authors suggest that toddlers find adults more attractive play partners; ‘the compelling attractiveness of adult partners incites children to keep on attempting for interactions with them at the expense of interactions with peers’ (2011: 123). The early childhood environment can also affect child–peer interaction. Deynoot-Schaub and Riksen-Walraven (2006) reported that centres with higher ratios of children to educa­ tors had more peer interaction in play, and lower-quality centres had more negative play initiatives. McGaha, Lippard and Dallas Cummings (2011) found that mixed-age group­ ing of infants, toddlers and two-year-olds prompted a great deal of interest in the care and activities of babies. ‘Mutual exploration of toys also became a common way for the infants, toddlers, and 2-year-olds to interact. When one of the children would discover a new feature of a toy, the other children took turns imitating that child’s exploration’ (2013: online).

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MODE 2 STUDIES Mode 2 investigations of ways in which infants and toddlers negotiate and construct their social, cultural and physical worlds through play tend to focus on infant and tod­ dler agency and peer cultures. They emphasize actions as intentions, rather than as behav­ ioural indicators of development (Alvestad, 2010). Hence, research questions addressed by Mode 2 studies typically include: ‘With whom do infants and toddlers negotiate in their play? What do they negotiate about? What strategies do they use and with what effects/affects? What meanings do they con­ struct through their play?’ (Alvestad, 2010). The studies reviewed engage with these questions. They also exemplify the diversity of theoretical lenses employed across Mode 2 investigations (space constraints in this chapter have precluded capturing the full range of theo­ retical perspectives used); in part a response to the complex conceptual, methodological and ethical challenges inherent in attempting to understand the perspectives, experiences and intentions of infants and toddlers, especially those of the youngest, preverbal children (Johansson and White, 2011).

Playfulness From her research in a Norwegian barnehage (preschool) and survey of literature, Løkken (2000a, 2000b) draws attention to and teases out several features of the characteristically playful toddler ‘social style’. In particular, she highlights its corporeality; in other words, its location in the ‘toddling body’ (2000b: 165, emphasis in original), evidenced through ‘running, jumping, trampling, twist­ ing, bouncing, romping and shouting, falling ostentatiously, laughing ostentatiously’ (2000a: 531). Løkken notes that toddlers’ playful meaning-making, communication and peer relations are immediate and, in a phe­ nomenological sense, prereflexive: ‘Through intentional, bodily actions, the toddler imme­ diately understands him/herself and the world he/she is in’ (2000a: 531).

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The playful toddler style is also distinctively joyful. Løkken (2000a, 2000b) illustrates the pleasure that toddlers can gain from play with peers involving large, everyday objects such as chairs, sofas and mattresses. The repetition and variation of simple, structured actions and rou­ tines and the escalation of the intensity of these actions to a culmination point also tend to be a source of great delight. She also conveys the pleasure toddlers obtain in ‘music’-making through improvising and performing wellknown songs and rhymes and in ‘tutoring’ younger peers. What makes this play so joyful, Løkken (2000b) surmises, is the enjoyment toddlers experience in constructing shared meaning and establishing social structures and systems with their peers. Yet another notable aspect of the playful toddler style, according to Løkken (2000a, 2000b), is its strong affective element. She documents toddlers’ many affectionate ges­ tures during play, including patting, gently tapping or caressing other toddlers, and bring­ ing their faces in close proximity to those of other toddlers. Løkken emphasizes that tod­ dler peer relations are characterized by a kind of emotional and physical fusion. Indeed, drawing on Merleau-Ponty (1962: 354), she sees toddlers, in their playfulness, as ‘intercorporeal “collaborators” with each other in consummate reciprocity, where their perspec­ tives “merge” into each other as the children coexist in a common world’ (Løkken, 2000b: 173). As Greve (2008: 86) notes, toddlers experience play as a ‘mutual “we”’. Play features prominently in other phenom­ enological, primarily Merleau-Ponty-informed, explorations of various aspects of the life worlds of infants and toddlers as ‘bodysubjects’ in early childhood settings. Engdahl (2012) in Sweden and Greve (2008) in Norway, for example, provide rich portrayals of play as an integral aspect of the friendships of one- to two-year-olds in preschools, as well as in the friendships of two- and three-year-olds, which have been the focus of greater research atten­ tion. Engdahl (2012) describes one- to two-year-old toddlers’ playful greetings of their peers upon arrival at preschool; their

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explicit and sophisticated non-verbal invita­ tions to peers to join them in play activities; and their readiness to help peers who encoun­ ter a difficulty of some kind in their play to sustain that play (for instance, by helping to retrieve a toy that has rolled out of reach). Greve (2008) illustrates how play underpins various friendship styles among one- to threeyear-olds, with the nature of their play varying according to whether their friendships were based primarily on ‘rules and care’, ‘humour and [a sense of] danger’, ‘bodily togetherness’ or ‘negotiation’. Several play-related aspects of infant and toddler friendship styles identified by Greve (2008) have been examined by other research­ ers. Loizou (2005), for example, investigated humour in one- to two-year-olds in an early childhood setting in Cyprus. She found that toddlers recognized and intentionally created ‘absurd’, incongruous situations. They also playfully and intentionally violated others’ expectations, and enjoyed situations in which others violated expectations. Similarly, in Australia, Bradley et al. (2012) describe tod­ dler friends in a family day care home (at a childmind home) playfully violating their educator’s expectations of mealtime routines. Drawing on the Deleuzian concept of an assemblage of human and non-human entities, Bradley et al. highlight how everyday material objects – the highchairs in which they were sitting, their drink bottles and various food items – afforded the toddlers many opportuni­ ties for playful violations. Naturalistic studies of infants’ playful engagement with family members at home reveal many similar tendencies. Reddy (2008), for example, reports on the playful actions of infants from their first months in eliciting laughter from others. They showed the same playful appreciation of the incon­ gruous, the absurd and violation of expectations as the toddlers in Loizou’s (2005) study. Trevarthen (2011), too, reviews evidence of infants’ playful sharing of inten­ tions, feelings and experiences as they engage with others in what he terms responsive, affectionate and creative ‘companionship’.

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Singer (2002), in a study of nine Dutch and one Finnish early childhood centres, found that non-verbal negotiations with peers, also identified by Greve (2008) as characteristic of toddler play and friendship, were central to two- to three-year-olds’ reso­ lution of conflicts during play. Singer concludes that the toddlers were ‘masters in nonverbal communication and in using pro­ cedural knowledge of give and take’ (2002: 61). In many instances, their sophisticated non-verbal negotiations were more effective than teacher intervention in resolving play conflicts. Through such micro-level, everyday play interactions, Rutanen (2007) argues, infants and toddlers co-construct the culture of their early childhood settings. In illustration, she describes how a group of two-year-olds in Finland resisted their teacher’s carefully planned arrangements and efforts to engage them in science-related play associated with a ‘water project’. At the beginning of the ‘water play’ session, the toddlers sat pas­ sively around the water basin for almost eight minutes, silently refusing their teacher’s invi­ tations to participate. They then initiated their own play, making faces and waving their hands at each other, while continuing to ignore the water. After a further five minutes, they extended their play by pretending to pick up something from the floor, offering it to each other and ‘eating’ it. They continued to ignore the water. Still endeavouring to facilitate the water play she had planned, the teacher then placed plates and cups next to the water basin. The toddlers ignored those, too. Instead, they continued to co-construct their play through gazes, and through head, hand and mouth movements which they sequentially introduced within the group. Rutanen (2007: 63) notes that through ‘mutual adjustments’, the toddlers trans­ formed their ‘flow of actions (taking from the floor, offering, opening the mouth, putting to mouth, chewing, loud laughing)’ into a coordinated configuration of shared meanings, entirely ignoring the teacher’s provisions. In this way, they

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actively defined the play context in ways counter to ‘the adult sphere of expectations’ (2007: 66). Rutanen’s (2007) interpretation of this 36-minute-long play segment is informed by dialogical perspectives (Fogel et al., 2002). It is interesting in several respects. For exam­ ple, it challenges views, such as those expressed by Thyssen (2003: 606), that adults are children’s ‘most important play partners’ until around three years of age. It also highlights toddlers’ capacities to render teachers’ intentions irrelevant and, in doing so, complicates Fleer’s (2010) call for teacher-planned ‘conceptual play’ to foster children’s scientific (academic) knowledge. Moreover, Rutanen’s (2007) interpretation is consistent with Trevarthen’s (2011) observa­ tions about toddlers’ capacities to organize themselves into a playful ‘team’ to pursue their interest in shared invented behaviours and sup­ ports Lindahl and Pramling Samuelsson’s (2002) contentions about a phenomenon they term the ‘collective space of variation’, a toddler-constructed play space that can be invisible to teachers. To illustrate a ‘collective space of varia­ tion’ in action, Lindahl and Pramling Samuelsson (2002) describe a group of seven toddlers (aged 15–30 months) in a Swedish preschool who were trying to master climb­ ing and going down a slide (slippery dip). Like the toddlers described in Rutanen’s (2007) water play episode, the toddlers on the slide imitated each other’s actions, but also introduced many new variations. Their play proceeded as streams of collective experimentation in which each toddler intro­ duced their own subtle variation that others then imitated and varied. The authors docu­ ment seven distinct ways of sliding generated by the toddlers. Each of these ways, in turn, contained several variations. They conclude that the children collectively altered and expanded their group and individual reper­ toire of practices and actions. They also note that, in this episode, the teachers seemed unaware of the collective and individual learning that was taking place, and actively

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tried to disrupt the children’s play by physi­ cally repositioning them more conventionally on the slide.

Play and Learning Lindahl and Pramling Samuelsson’s (2002) work, along with more recent research (e.g. Johansson and Pramling Samuelsson, 2006; Klaar and Öhman, 2012), highlights the inter­ connectedness of infant and toddler play and learning. Klaar and Öhman (2012), for instance, document a toddler’s learning about natural phenomena as he strives to pull his sledge up an icy slope in the playground of a Swedish preschool. Using an approach based on Practical Epistemology Analysis (Wickman and Östman, 2002), derived in turn from John Dewey’s pragmatic philoso­ phy, Klaar and Öhman identify in fine-grained detail the practical actions that reveal the tod­ dler’s embodied learning as he ‘tries different ways of moving his body, experiences the consequences and coordinates his behaviour with the environment accordingly’ (2012: 451). They illustrate how play can generate meaning-making (learning) through extend­ ing ‘the action repertoire’ (2012: 452) rather than necessarily through conceptual change. Their approach offers a way of describing toddlers’ play and learning about natural phe­ nomena and scientific/academic concepts that neither relies on verbal interactions nor requires a focus on cognitive development. A cross-national study into the play and learning of children aged from birth to three years in early childhood settings (Pramling Samuelsson and Fleer, 2010b) highlights marked differences in early childhood educa­ tors’ beliefs, theories, approaches and emphases across the seven countries involved: Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, Chile, China (Hong Kong), Japan and the USA (Wisconsin). Case studies involving at least one child were undertaken in at least five early childhood settings in each country, with Rogoff’s (2003) socio-cultural theory provid­ ing the framework for interpretations. While Pramling Samuelsson and Fleer (2010a)

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caution against generalization, they suggest that their findings nevertheless indicate a dif­ ferent ‘ethos’ in each country studied. In Australia, for example, the emphasis tended to be on the provision of resources to facilitate play that promotes children’s social develop­ ment and problem solving, with relatively little educator involvement. In Aotearoa New Zealand, relationships, culturally specific practices and maintaining and promoting cul­ tural values in a culturally diverse society were prioritized. Educators in Sweden also focused on relationships, children’s social development and providing opportunities for infants and toddlers to be involved in demo­ cratic practices, for instance through expressing their ideas and making decisions. In Hong Kong, the emphasis was on learning and knowledge formation through play, while the Japanese case studies highlighted a prior­ ity on play that socialized children into Japanese values, including individual respon­ sibility for group harmonious relations. In Wisconsin, USA, developmentally appropri­ ate practice (DAP), with its emphasis on planning environments rather than on educa­ tors’ interactions with infants and toddlers, was influential. In Chile, educators were influenced by developmental and constructiv­ ist perspectives and interacted with infants and toddlers primarily through singing and dancing. Pramling Samuelsson and Fleer (2010a) concluded that there was a continuum across the case studies concerning the relative emphasis on play as a collective activity that fostered group relationships, and as an activity that benefited individual children’s learning. Differing emphases and values concerning play, in turn, shaped the play of the infants and toddlers in the case study settings.

COMPLEMENTARITIES AMONG MODE 1 AND MODE 2 STUDIES OF PLAY As the preceding sections have highlighted, Mode 1 and Mode 2 evidence is grounded in contrasting epistemologies, derived from

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different methodologies and employs distinc­ tively different constructs and terminologies. When the evidence claims from both modes are brought together ‘in conversation’, how­ ever, the complementarities appear more noteworthy than the tensions and contradic­ tions. Three overlapping areas are considered.

Relationality in Infant-toddler Play Both Mode 1 and Mode 2 studies seek to explain interpersonal and relationship expe­ riences in infants’ play with others, referring to an awareness of others as being ‘like me’ (Thompson, 2008: 8), a sense of a ‘mutual “we”’ in friendships (Greve, 2008: 86), cocreation of pretence (Rakoczy et al., 2005) and playful ‘teams’ (Trevarthen, 2011). A body of evidence including babies ‘tuning in’ to each other’s play in the absence of adults (Selby and Bradley, 2003), the dis­ tinct nature of peer social referencing (Nichols et al., 2010), the peer-specific play­ fulness of toddlers (Løkken, 2000a, 2000b; Loizou, 2005) and the preference for sponta­ neous peer play over educators’ planned activities (Rutanen, 2007) suggests that rela­ tionality with peers follows a different pathway from that proposed by the tradi­ tional transmission model, from child–adult to child–peer (Brownell et al., 2006). Rather, it seems that toddlers may find the ‘less familiar, less routine, and less predictable world of peers’ (Brownell et al., 2006: 817) a distinct avenue for interpersonal under­ standings and exchanges.

Capability and Agency Together, Mode 1 and Mode 2 studies pro­ vide many instances of the capabilities and competencies of infants and toddlers, whether these are presented as developmen­ tal achievements, as in the perceptual-motor skills of babies (Perone et al., 2008) and the complex play of toddlers (Bigelow et al., 2004), or through toddlers’ creation of a play culture, as seen by their efforts to help others (Engdahl, 2012) or negotiate conflict (Singer,

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2002). The methods used to elicit the evi­ dence for these capabilities, however, differ markedly. While Mode 1 investigations are notable for detailed analysis of, and explana­ tions for, children’s capabilities, they often limit what children are able to demonstrate due to the highly structured nature of the set­ ting. Mode 2 studies, however, acknowledge the full range of infant and toddler possibili­ ties by studying play in naturalistic early childhood settings. By not limiting the child’s experience, Mode 2 studies also provide greater insight into the agency of infants and toddlers in their play, as seen for example in toddlers’ determinations and experimentations described by Rutanen (2007) and Lindahl and Pramling Samuelsson (2002).

Methodology Despite obvious differences in the typical location of Mode 1 (structured playrooms) and Mode 2 (early childhood playrooms) research, methodological complementarity is seen in the use of video to generate detailed records of children’s play activi­ ties. New work in both Mode 1 and Mode 2 has used small video cameras attached to headbands or hats worn by infants and tod­ dlers to more accurately capture the experience of very young children. ‘Head cameras’ and eye-tracking devices have been used to study infants’ visual explora­ tion and attention to objects and people in laboratory playrooms (Yoshida and Smith, 2008; Franchak et al., 2011). Yoshida and Smith (2008) tracked 18- to 24-montholds’ eye movements as they played with a selection of toys alongside simultaneous footage from a video camera focused on the infant. By literally ascertaining the child’s view, Yoshida and Smith surmised which toys were of most interest to each child. Encouraged by Yoshida and Smith’s validation of such technology, Sumsion et al. (2011), in an Australian study, subse­ quently developed ‘baby-cam’ technology in an attempt to access the perspectives of

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children aged up to 18 months, in part by destabilizing researcher-centric frames of reference. In New Zealand, White (2011) used simultaneous footage from three cam­ eras (one held by the researcher and the others worn by a teacher and an 18-monthold) to generate ‘polyphonic footage’, which she analysed from a Bakhtinian dia­ logic perspective. Such technologies invoke complex theoretical, methodological and ethical challenges (Sumsion et al., 2014) that, most likely, will be best addressed by drawing on the resources of Mode 1 and Mode 2 research.

RESEARCH GAPS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS Despite the breadth and depth of research across Mode 1 and Mode 2 studies, there remain notable gaps in research concerning infant and toddler play.

New Technologies In reviewing research into the use of digital texts in early childhood settings, Burnett (2010) found no studies focusing on children under three years. Similarly, at the time of writing the current chapter, few reports of toddlers using new technologies at home were found. This gap is surprising given Marsh’s (2004) survey of parents of children aged from 2½ to 4 years in a working-class community in Northern England that found 36 of the 44 children involved had owned a toy mobile phone, from an average age of 12 months. Smith’s (2002) account of her son’s play from the age of 2½ to 3½, in which he pretended to become various hyper­ text objects that could be brought to life by clicking on an imaginary computer mouse, suggests that computer technologies had become integral to how this child interpreted his world. Yet, to date, there appears to have been surprisingly little engagement with the affordances of new technologies in the infant–toddler play literature.

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Play Cultures in Traditional Societies Whilst the studies in Mode 1 and Mode 2 are from many different countries in Australasia, Europe, North America, and the Middle East, there is a near silence about the play of infants and toddlers in traditional, as opposed to Westernized, societies. A notable excep­ tion is Göncü et al.’s (2000) analysis of toddler social play in traditional rural com­ munities in Guatemala and India and urban communities in Turkey and the United States. Comparing the variations in the kinds, types and themes of toddlers’ play and play part­ ners, Göncü et al. conclude that the activities and types of play, and the partners and com­ position of play groups, reflect ‘adult beliefs about children’s development and the social structure of the community’ (2000: 328). The important work conducted in studies such as this exposes the scarcity of research concern­ ing infant and toddler play in Indigenous cultures. This gap is concerning given find­ ings from Australian studies that Indigenous families place great importance on their children having access to culturally specific play opportunities in early childhood settings (Windisch et al., 2003). These findings, which are unlikely to be specific to Australia, highlight the urgent need for studies of infant and toddler play grounded in in-depth know­ ledge of and sensitivity to Indigenous cultures, preferably undertaken by Indigenous researchers.

CONCLUSION This chapter has brought together two bodies of literature that reflect, at first glance, strik­ ingly different modes of researching and understanding infant and toddler play. Framing a review around the contrasting assumptions and approaches to knowledge production about very young children’s play risks perpetuating an unhelpful ‘paradig­ matic divide’ (Moss, 2007) between Mode 1 studies grounded in the discipline of child

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development and Mode 2 studies informed by more heterogeneous disciplinary and the­ oretical perspectives. Such a divide, according to Moss (2007: 233), is character­ ized by a lack of engagement between researchers from different paradigms and a tendency to dismiss studies emanating from the other mode of knowledge production as ‘invalid, unintelligible, uninteresting or incredible’. To avert this risk, this chapter has emphasized complementarities and produc­ tive tensions to find common ground between Mode 1 and Mode 2 investigations while acknowledging their sometimes seemingly incommensurate assumptions. Accentuating the often overlooked common ground between studies from different modes has highlighted the relationality, capabilities and agency of infant and toddler play and the growing use of emerging technologies in recent studies. At the same time, it has identified noticeable oversights within each mode and in the gaps between the modes. Particularly salient at the time of writing is the scarcity of attention to infants and toddlers’ use of new technologies in their play, and, concomitantly, to rich and culturally sensitive accounts of infant–tod­ dler play in traditional societies. In brief, infant–toddler play is proving a rich and fertile seam within the broader research literature into young children’s play more generally. Continued efforts to tran­ scend traditional paradigmatic divides, along with attention to overlooked areas, will fur­ ther enrich this important field of research investigation.

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play with objects’, Developmental Science, 7: 518–26. Bradley, B.S. (2009) ‘Early trios: Patterns of sound and movement in the genesis of meaning between infants’, in S. Malloch and C. Trevarthen (eds), Communicative Musicality: Exploring the Basis of Human Companionshop. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 263–80. Bradley, B., Sumsion, J., Stratigos, T., et al. (2012) ‘Baby events: Assembling descriptions of infants in family day care’, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 13: 141–53. Brooker, L. and Edwards, S. (2010) ‘Introduction: From challenging to engaging play’, in Brooker, L. and Edwards, S. (eds), Engaging Play. Maidenhead: Open University Press. pp. 1–10. Brownell, C.A., Ramani, G.B. and Zerwas, S. (2006) ‘Becoming a social partner with peers: Cooperation and social understanding in one- and two-year-olds’, Child Development, 77: 803–21. Burnett, C. (2010) ‘Technology and literacy in early childhood educational settings: A review of research’, Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 10: 247–70. Corbetta, D., Thelen, E. and Johnson, K. (2000) ‘Motor constraints on the development of perception-action matching in infant reaching’, Infant Behavior and Development, 23: 351–74. Deynoot-Schaub, M.J.G. and Riksen-Walraven, J.M. (2006) ‘Peer contacts of 15-month-olds in childcare: Links with child temperament, parent–child interaction and quality of childcare’, Social Development, 15: 709–29. Engdahl, I. (2012) ‘Doing friendship during the second year of life in a Swedish preschool’, European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 20: 83–98. Fleer, M. (2010) Early Learning and Development: Cultural-Historical Concepts in Play. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Fogel, A., de Koeyer, I., Bellagamba, F., et al. (2002) ‘The dialogical self in the first two years of life’, Theory and Psychology, 12: 191–205. Franchak, J.M., Kretch, K.S., Soska, K.C., et al. (2011) ‘Head-mounted eye tracking: A new method to describe infant looking’, Child Development, 82: 1738–50. Girolametto, L. and Weitzman, E. (2002) ‘Responsiveness of child care providers in interactions with toddlers and preschoolers’, Language, Speech and Hearing Services in Schools, 33: 268–90. Göncü, A., Mistry, J. and Mosier, C. (2000) ‘Cultural variations in the play of toddlers’, International Journal of Behavioral Development, 24: 321–29.

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Greve, A. (2008) ‘Friendships and participation among young children in a Norwegian kindergarten’, in D. Berthelsen, J. Brownlee and J. Johannson (eds), Participatory Learning in the Early Years: Research and Pedagogy. Abingdon: Routledge, 78–92. Hauf, P., Aschersleben, G. and Prinz, W. (2007) ‘Baby do–baby see!: How action production influences action perception in infants’, Cognitive Development, 22: 16–32. Johansson, E. and Pramling Samuelsson, I. (2006) ‘Play and learning: Inseparable dimensions in preschool practice’, Early Child Development and Care, 176: 47–65. Johansson, E. and White, E.J. (2011) Educational Research with Our Youngest: Voices of Infants and Toddlers. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer. Kim, G. and Kwak, K. (2011) ‘Uncertainty matters: Impact of stimulus ambiguity on infant social referencing’, Infant and Child Development, 20: 449–63. Klaar, S. and Öhman J. (2012) ‘Action with friction: A transactional approach to toddlers’ physical meaning making of natural phenomena and processes in preschool’, European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 20: 439–54. Klein, P.S. and Feldman, R. (2007) ‘Mothers’ and care­ givers’ interactive and teaching behavior with toddlers’, Early Child Development and Care, 177: 383–402. Laevers, F., Buyse, E., Willekens, A., et al. (2011) ‘Promoting language in under 3s: Assessing language development and the quality of adult intervention’, European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 19: 269–97. Legendre, A. and Munchenbach, D. (2011) ‘Two-tothree-year-old children’s interactions with peers in child-care centres: Effects of spatial distance to care­ givers’, Infant Behavior and Development, 34: 111–25. Lindahl, M. and Pramling Samuelsson, I. (2002) ‘Imitation and variation: Reflections on toddlers’ strategies for learning’, Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 46: 25–45. Loizou, E. (2005) ‘Infant humor: The theory of the absurd and the empowerment theory’, International Journal of Early Years Education, 13: 43–53. Løkken, G. (2000a) ‘The playful quality of the toddling “style”’, Qualitative Studies in Education, 13: 531–42. Løkken, G. (2000b) ‘Tracing the social style of toddler peers’, Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 44: 163–76. Marsh, J. (2004) ‘The techno-literacy practices of young children’, Journal of Early Childhood Research 2: 51–66.

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McGaha, Cindy, Lippard, Batbara and Dallas, Karen Cummings, Rebekah, (2011) ‘Relationship building: Infants, toddlers, and 2-year-olds’, Early Childhood Research & Practice, 13(1): online. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962) Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Moss, P. (2007) ‘Meeting across the paradigmatic divide’. Educational Philosophy and Theory’, 39: 229–45. Nichols, S.R., Svetlova, M. and Brownell, C.A. (2010) ‘Toddlers’ understanding of peers’ emotions’, Journal of Genetic Psychology, 171: 35–53. Nowotny, H., Scott, P. and Gibbons, M. (2003) ‘Introduction: “Mode 2” revisited: The new production of knowledge’, Minerva, 41: 179–94. Perone, S., Madole, K.L., Ross-Sheehy, S., et al. (2008) ‘The relation between infants’ activity with objects and attention to object appearance’, Developmental Psychology, 44: 1242–8. Pramling Samuelsson, I. and Fleer, M. (2010a) ‘Commonalities and distinctions across countries’, in I. Pramling Samuelsson and M. Fleer (eds), Play and Learning in Early Childhood Settings. New York: Springer. pp. 173–90. Pramling Samuelsson, I. and Fleer, M. (2010b) Play and Learning in Early Childhood Settings. New York: Springer. Rakoczy, H., Tomasello, M. and Striano, T. (2005) ‘On tools and toys: How children learn to act on and pretend with “virgin objects”’, Developmental Science, 8: 57–73. Reddy, V. (2008) How Infants Know Minds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rogoff, B. (2003) The Cultural Nature of Human Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rutanen, N. (2007) ‘Two-year-old children as co-constructors of culture’, European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 15: 59–69. Selby, J.M. and Bradley, B.S. (2003) ‘Infants in groups: A paradigm for the study of early social experience’, Human Development, 46: 197–221. Singer, E. (2002) ‘The logic of young children’s (nonverbal) behaviour’, European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 10: 55–65. Smith, C.R. (2002) ‘Click on me! An example of how a toddler used technology in play’, Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 2: 5–20. Sumsion, J., Bradley, B., Stratigos, T., (2014) ‘“Baby cam” and an attempt at participatory research with infants: A case study of critical reflexivity’, in M. Fleer and A. Ridgway (eds), Visual Methodologies and Digital Tools for Researching with Young Children. Dordrecht, The Netherland: Springer pp. 169–192.

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Sumsion, J., Harrison, L., Press, F., et al. (2011) ‘Researching infants’ experiences of early childhood education and care’, in D. Harcourt, B. Perry and T. Waller (eds), Researching Young Children’s Perspectives: Debating the Ethics and Dilemmas of Educational Research with Children. Abingdon: Routledge, 113–27. Sung, J. and Hsu, H.-C. (2009) ‘Korean mothers’ attention regulation and referential speech: Associations with language and play in 1-year-olds’, International Journal of Behavioral Development, 33: 430–9. Thompson, R.A. (2008) ‘The psychologist in the baby’, Zero to Three, 28: 5–12. Thyssen, S. (2003) ‘Child culture, play and child development’, Early Child Development and Care, 173: 589–612. Tomasello, M. and Carpenter, M. (2007) ‘Shared intentionality’, Developmental Science, 10: 121–5. Trevarthen, C. (2005) ‘First things first: Infants make good use of the sympathetic rhythm of imitation, without reason or language’, Journal of Child Psychotherapy, 31: 91–113.

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Trevarthen, C. (2011) ‘What young children give to their learning, making education work to sustain a community and its culture’, European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 19: 173–93. White, E.J. (2011) ‘“Seeing” the toddler: Voices or voiceless?’, in E. Johansson and E.J. White (eds), Educational Research with our Youngest: Voices of Infants and Toddlers. Dordrecht, The Netherland: Springer, 63–85. Wickman, P.-O. and Östman, L. (2002) ‘Learning as discourse change: A sociocultural mechanism’, Science Education, 86: 601–23. Windisch, L.E., Jenvey, V.B. and Drysdale, M. (2003) ‘Indigenous parents’ ratings of the importance of play, Indigenous games and language, and early childhood education’, Australian Journal of Early Childhood, 28: 50–6. Wood, E. (2012) ‘The state of play’, International Journal of Play, 1: 4–5. Yoshida, H. and Smith, L.B. (2008) ‘What’s in view for toddlers? Using a head camera to study visual experience’, Infancy, 13: 229–48.

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26 Children’s Perspectives on Play Johanna Einarsdottir

INTRODUCTION The past two decades have seen an ongoing shift or reconceptualization in early childhood research, with the focus on listening to children’s voices in research in order to understand their experiences and learning in early childhood settings. Now children are increasingly considered as important participants in research regarding their own lives. This chapter will start by reviewing theoretical perspectives underpinning this development and examine the ways in which constructions of the child and childhood have shaped the methodologies of research with children. Research with young children is a sensitive area and hence ethical issues and challenges in researching with children have been brought to the forefront when researchers have attempted to empower children and elicit their perspectives. The remainder of the chapter surveys recent studies on children’s views on the nature and conditions for play. The focus will be on the findings from these

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studies as well as on the methodology and methods employed.

CHILDREN’S VOICES IN RESEARCH Increasing awareness of the importance of involving children as participants in research can be traced to several sources, both social and theoretical. In large part, this change is based on theoretical and conceptual shifts in the way in which children and childhood are viewed and the international children’s rights movement derived from the Convention on the Rights of the Child drawn up by the United Nations (United Nations, 1989). Political and economic reasons also lie behind this increasing interest, as illustrated by the view of children and their parents as consumers or users of early childhood provision. Finally, the idea of empowering the disempowered adds to the growing interest in children’s experiences and perspectives (Tangen, 2008; Einarsdottir, 2011a).

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The way in which adults view children and childhood has direct influence on the conditions that they provide for children. Teachers’ philosophical and ideological views influence their curriculum and pedagogy. Likewise, researchers’ philosophical and ontological stances influence how they conduct research with children. The field of early childhood education has in the new millennium been characterized by reconceptualization and critical reflections on dominant views of children, childhood, and schooling. Prevailing views of children as good or bad, or as developing through universal stages, have been questioned, and emphasis placed instead on the strengths and competence of children to be active in their own lives. Rather than focusing on the progression from immaturity to competence, this perspective views children as already being active participants and contributing members of society. Children are viewed as beings rather than becomings, as strong and competent actors in their own lives and experts on their own lives, capable of holding and sharing their own views and opinions (James and Prout, 1997; Cobb, Danby and Farrell, 2005). Hence, childhood studies regard childhood as a specific period instead of as a waiting phase – an important and interesting period and a distinct research area (Kehily, 2004; Qvortrup, Corsaro and Honig, 2009). New research and new theories have recognized the importance of the social and cultural context in which the child lives and develops (Qvortrup, 2004). Likewise, childhood is now understood as a social construction, contingent upon culture, time and context, because children and their conditions are not the same everywhere. Thus, it is more accurate to talk about ‘childhoods’ instead of ‘childhood’ (Jenks, 2004). Research with children has also been influenced by contemporary discourses of children’s rights and citizenship, based on the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (United Nations, 1989). The convention raised awareness of the agency of children and their place in society. An

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emphasis is placed on respect for the views of children: their right to express their opinions freely on all matters affecting them and to have those opinions taken seriously. A later addition to the convention, General Comment No. 7 (United Nations, 2005), addresses especially the rights of children under the age of eight to participate in decision-making that affects their own lives, and to communicate their views. It also emphasizes the importance of the adults’ attitudes. Adults need to listen to young children and respect their individual points of view and preferred ways of communicating.

LISTENING TO THE VOICES OF CHILDREN The debate on research with children instead of research on children has in the past decades moved from justifying listening to children’s perspectives in research to demonstrating how this can be done and the ethical issues that researchers have to keep in mind (Clark, 2011; Harcourt and Einarsdottir, 2011). Listening to the voices of children entails several issues. First, in educational research it refers to methodology and the methods used for gathering data from children to understand their perspectives. Second, it refers to children’s experiences and views on different aspects of their lives, the knowledge and experience that only they have. Finally, it refers to connections and reciprocal relationships between those who are listened to and those who listen: how adults hear what the children are saying, and how they interpret and react to this. Thus emphasis is placed on actively listening to children and interpreting and responding to their views and, in that way, taking their perspectives seriously, allowing them to influence research, policy and practice (Warming, 2005; Pascal and Bertram, 2009; Sommer, Pramling Samuelsson and Hundeide, 2010). A variety of methods suited to different children have emerged and have been used to

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engage young children in research. Often several methods are used in combination, such as in the well-known Mosaic approach, which uses a range of strategies (Clark and Moss, 2001). Participant observation has been commonly used in studies with young children, both as the main method and in combination with others. The role and the focus of the researcher can vary during participant observation, from being an observer to being a participant taking on the ‘least adult role’ (Mandell, 1984; Warming, 2011). Videos have proven valuable for recording observations (Corsaro and Molinari, 2000a; Duncan, 2005; Warming, 2005; Robson, 2011). Video cameras worn by young children have also been used, enabling researchers to see what the children are seeing in order to gain insights into their experiences (Sumsion et al., 2011). Video clips have frequently been used as a stimulus for discussion with children. Extracts from videos of children’s activities are shown to the children who participated in the interaction, who are asked to comment on what was going on (Theobald, 2012; Theobald and Danby, 2015). Interviews and conversations with children are another common approach. Children are used to being in groups in preschool settings, communicating with and learning from each other; they are stronger together than when alone with an adult researcher, so group interviews may reduce the power inequality between the two parties. Some researchers have recommended using stimuli such as dolls, toys, photos, books, and drawings to engage children during interviews (e.g. Brooker, 2001), or having an adult whom the children know well conducting the interviews. Questionnaires have not been commonly used with young children, although in some cases they have been adapted for use with young children by being presented as a card or board game through which children answer questions about their views and experiences in an early childhood setting (Einarsdottir, 2007). Visual methods such as photography and children’s drawings have been increasingly used as an avenue for engaging young children

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in research (Clark and Moss, 2001; Ailwood, 2011). One advantage of using photos that the children themselves take as a basis for interviews is that the children exercise more power when the data gathering is, in part at least, in their hands. When the children decide what to photograph, it is more likely that the interview revolves around things they find important (Rasmussen, 1999; Dockett and Perry, 2005; Cook and Hess, 2007; Einarsdottir, 2007; Stephenson, 2009). Drawings and mark-making have also been used to access young children’s views and experiences. Emphasis is placed on the drawing as a process, rather than the drawing as a product: drawing as meaning making is emphasized, where the meaning the children construct and convey while they draw is more important than their ability to draw. In that way, the focus is on listening to children as they draw, paying attention to their narratives and interpretations. The advantages of using drawings as a tool for listening to children’s views and experiences revolve around the fact that drawing is a familiar activity for children: they are active and in control of their drawings, they do not have to maintain eye contact with the researcher, and they can take their time in responding to questions or engaging in conversations (Veale, 2005; Einarsdottir, Dockett and Perry, 2009). Through visual methods such as drawings and photographs, children are given the opportunity to combine visual and verbal language, with emphasis placed on the children’s explanations and interpretations. New ideas and views about children and childhood have enabled researchers to learn about children’s knowledge, perspectives, and interests from the children themselves. Researchers who conduct research with children have endeavored to employ methods that take into consideration the different abilities and strengths of children and their rights in regard to participation. Children are a diverse group, with different ways of expressing their views. It is regarded as important to give children a choice of diverse methods for expressing their views – in particular, methods that build

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on children’s creativity and their ability to learn from each other in groups that involve verbal as well as visual means. As Punch (2002) has pointed out, the choice of methods should depend on a number of issues, age being only one of them.

ETHICS AND DILEMMAS Recently, several authors have pointed out that participatory research needs to be considered critically and reframed. It has been pointed out that using diverse methods to activate and involve children in research does not necessarily ensure high-quality data or research. Several researchers have warned against getting caught up in methods for methods’ sake: that is where, in the drive to develop new, innovative, and novel methods to promote children’s participation in research, the methods become the main thing (Gallacher and Gallagher, 2008; Lahman, 2008; Holland, Renold, Ross and Hillman, 2010; Dockett, Einarsdottir and Perry, 2011). Christensen and Prout (2002: 482) have presented the notion of ‘ethical symmetry’ in research, whereby the relationship between researcher and participant is seen to be equal, whether the research is with adults or children. From this point of view, researchers do not have to use particular methods or work with a different set of ethical standards when working with children. It does mean, however, that the research practices have to be in line with children’s experiences and interests. Power imbalance between adult researchers and children has been extensively discussed, especially the possibility that children do and say what the authority figure asks of them (Spyrou, 2011). Informed consent and ways of explaining the study to children and gaining their agreement to participate can thus be a challenge. A concept of assent that places emphasis on trust and the relationship between child and researcher has been applied, where seeking children’s informed assent is seen as an ongoing process that involves not only providing information at the beginning of a study but also renegotiating

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consent throughout the project (Dockett, Einarsdottir and Perry, 2012). Another challenge researchers face when conducting research with children concerns interpretation of data. Interpretation of data is not a neutral process, but is, rather, influenced by the researchers’ theoretical perspectives and views of children. Although analysis and interpretation is a challenge in all research, this can be even more problematic with young children with limited verbal expression. Researchers have attempted to respond to this challenge by involving children not only in data gathering but also in analysing, reflecting on, and interpreting research data (Theobald, 2012). The limitations of concepts such as children’s agency and voice for grasping the diversity of children’s lives and experiences have also been noted. Children do not have identical voices, nor do they have a shared perspective. In our desire to listen to children, the danger exists that they are treated as a homogenous group. Hence, only some children are heard, presumably those who have the loudest voices, and others may be silenced. The multiplicity of voices of different children is not realized (Vandenbroeck and Brie, 2006; Bühler-Niederberger and Van Krieken, 2008). Research involving children’s perspectives has now reached the point of being acknowledged as an important field of study respected within the field of social sciences. Research methods which involve and build on the strengths of children have been developed, and ethical issues and dilemmas to be considered have been identified. Scholars in the field have pointed out that perhaps the period has come to an end in which researchers working with children emphasize the uniqueness of their research and its differences from other types.

RESEARCHING PLAY WITH CHILDREN In recent years, research on play exploring children’s own perspectives on play has emerged. Many of these studies are ethnographic studies and the most common

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methods used are participant observations and interviews with children, individually or in groups, although participatory methods employing children’s drawings, photographs, and games have also been used. Howard and colleagues (Howard, Jenvey and Hill, 2006) reviewed the literature on children’s perceptions of play and learning in early years classrooms in the UK. The results showed that children generally make a clear distinction between play and non-play. Children seem to categorize activities as play according to their enjoyment of the task, the opportunity for make-believe, the absence of predetermined goals, the level of control afforded to them during the activity, the informality of the situation, the absence of adults and whether or not there are peers to play with. Wing (1995) explored the views of kinder garten to second-grade children (aged five– eight years) on work and play through interviews and participant observation in classroom environments in the United States in which, from the adult’s perspective, the lines between work and play were regularly blurred. The children employed the following criteria about what constituted work and what constituted play. First, the obligatory nature of the activities: children took note of their own intentions more often in play activities, and they seemed to own the decision-making related to play activities. Second, the cognitive and physical effort required: the children felt that play activities did not involve thinking or concentrating. Although they planned and took part in decision-making and problem solving in their play, they did not see those as cognitive demands. Third, the involvement and evaluation of the teacher: the children showed that the activities they considered to be work were those designed and directed by teachers, where teachers had expectations about the product that would result from the children’s efforts. Fourth, the fun children experienced while engaged in the activities. Fifth, finishing versus quitting: some activities needed to be completed, they were work; others, those that could be abandoned at will, were play.

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Context Children’s perceptions of play have been found to be contingent on the physical and social environment in which the play takes place. An activity may have the defining characteristics of play, yet the same activity, under other conditions and in a different context, may take on a different meaning. King (1979) conducted a study in four American kindergarten classrooms in different states and found that whether an activity was defined as work or as play appeared to depend on the social context in which the activity was carried out. Rogers and Evans (2006), in an ethnographic study in reception classes in the UK, discovered for example that the participating schoolchildren distinguished between play in school and play elsewhere. Howard (2002) considered children’s perceptions of play, work, and learning using Activity Apperception Story Procedure, a twopart procedure that elicits children’s perceptions using photographic stimuli. The children who participated in the study were three–six years old and attended six preschools and primary classes in the UK. The findings revealed that children clearly distinguished play from work and there were factors in the environment that influenced whether an activity was considered play or work. An activity at a table was, for instance, more frequently seen as work than an activity on the floor. If the teacher was absent during an activity, it was more likely to be classified as play. Similarly, Chapparo and Hooper (2002) found through participant observation and interviews with six-year-old children in Australia that the physical and social environment were important indicators of whether an activity was classified as play or work. Based on the environment in which they were performed, the children categorized school tasks differently: singing in class was, for example, classified as work, but singing in the playground was referred to as play.

Control There is evidence to suggest that children regard their own-initiated activities as play,

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but when an activity is planned and controlled by adults it is not considered play. During play, children find that they are able to make choices and exercise control of certain aspects, including choosing which friends to play with, deciding what to play, and determining how to play (King, 1979; Wing, 1995; Howard et al., 2006; Rogers and Evans, 2006; Pramling Samuelsson and Johansson, 2009; Wong, Wang and Cheng, 2011). Rogers and Evans (2006) found that roleplay activity was only regarded by children as play when they could choose with whom they played and had some measure of control over where, how, and what they played. The importance of having control and sharing it with others was obvious when the Swedish children in Pramling Samuelsson and Johansson’s study (2009) talked about their play. The children, aged five–seven years, felt that in play they had control and the opportunity to make their own choices. Wong and colleagues (Wong et al., 2011) examined what five– seven-year-old Hong Kong children perceived as play and as non-play by asking them to take photographs of other children playing and non-playing, and to draw pictures of play and non-play. Individual interviews were conducted to discuss the drawings and photographs in order to understand how the participants made sense of play and non-play. The findings revealed that self-initiative, freedom of choice, and creation were important indicators of play in the minds of the participating children. The children regarded activities as play when they took the initiative to play, when they could select what to play, and when there was space for creativity.

Adult Roles Children’s definitions of play are often linked to the level of adult presence or absence. Many studies show that children associate play with the absence of adults. Researchers in the UK and Australia (Howard et al., 2006) examined the social context as a cue for children’s perceptions of play and learning, using photographic stimuli that contained

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cues for facilitating the identification of activities as play, work, or learning. Findings revealed that the children, who were aged four–six, were significantly more likely to characterize photos that portrayed activities where only children were present as play. Another study employing the same methods revealed that the children were more likely to describe it as work and learning, not play, if a teacher was present (Howard, 2002). Similarly, Wing’s (1995) study with children in first- and second-grade classrooms in the USA reveals that the level of teacher involvement was one of the things that distinguished play from work in their minds. The children in Wong and colleagues’ (Wong et al., 2011) study in Hong Kong also regarded classroom activities as non-play if adults were present. Although children do not want adults to interfere in their play, there is evidence to suggest that preschool children want their teachers to be supportive and available when they need them, and to be able to turn to them for assistance if needed when they are playing. Pramling Samuelsson and Johansson (2009) observed and interviewed preschool and primary school children in Sweden and identified five categories to which children’s reasons for involving teachers might be traced: (a) to get support and help, (b) to be noticed and acknowledged by the teachers, (c) to make teachers aware when someone broke the rules or customs, (d) to get information from the teacher, (e) to invite them into the play. Pálmadóttir and Einarsdottir (in press) explored 1-3 year old Icelandic children’s perspectives about preschool teachers' roles in their play by observing their emotional and bodily expressions. The findings illustrate that the children saw the educators’ roles as providing assistance in play situations and with play material, supporting their social interactions, and participating in play and playful actions. Sandberg (2002) interviewed Swedish children in preschools and after-school centres about teachers’ role in play. The children reported that when the teachers took part in the play they were too controlling and did not know how to play. However, the findings also suggest that children

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wanted to be able to turn to the teachers for support and participation in the play in certain circumstances, such as keeping track of the rules, helping to solve conflicts, or playing with them if they could not find a playmate. Other studies in the Nordic countries have also shown children’s desire for help from their teachers for entering into play or obtaining a position within a peer group (Kragh-Müller and Isbell, 2011; Einarsdottir, in press). Investigators have noted a tension in early childhood institutions between routinized and collective activities organized by the teachers on the one hand, and play controlled by the children on the other. Play is frequently interrupted by the routines of the classroom, formal planned activities, or teachers’ social rules. The children in Sandberg’s (2002) study complained that the teachers often interrupted their play for reasons such as circle time. Rogers and Evans’ (2006) ethnographic study with preschool and primary school children also revealed that children were frequently interrupted when playing to undertake formal activities such as reading. Children, however, seem to find ways to go against adults’ rules and regulations. Corsaro (2009) observed how children in the USA and Italy got around the rule of not bringing toys to preschool by smuggling small things in their pockets and hiding them from the teachers. Markström and Halldén (2009) observed how preschool children in Sweden seem able to create time and space for themselves by using alternative spaces, artefacts, and rules to suit their own purposes. By using the wrong toys in the wrong rooms, they were able to remove themselves from the collective time, space, and activities, and at the same time from the frame of normality (Markström and Halldén, 2009: 116). Strandell (1997) also found that the Finnish preschool children in her study found ways to create play in not-so-playful situations organized by the teachers, such as meal times and singing sessions. Corsaro refers to the strategies children use as ‘secondary adjustments’ and to the creation and sharing of these secondary adjustments as composing the ‘underlife’ of the preschool (Corsaro, 2009: 306).

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The Roles of Peers Studies demonstrate that peers and playing with peers are at the top of young children’s lists when they are asked what is important to them in preschool (Strandell, 1997; Sheridan and Pramling Samuelsson, 2001; Einarsdottir, 2008, 2011b; Dunphy and Farrell, 2011; Kernan, 2011). Rogers and Evans’ (2006) study shows the value of play as a vehicle for children to be with their friends, and the choice of playmates was an important factor for the children in determining the level of enjoyment and success of the play. Similarly, Huser’s (2010) study in a German kinder garten revealed that play was important for the peer culture and was characterized by shared meaning making and friendship. All the children expressed the importance of having a friend to play with, and felt that play was enriched by a friend’s presence. Dunphy and Farrell (2011) found that the leading function of play, in the minds of the Irish children in their study, was for social interactions and maintaining friendships. However, play can also be a social arena for negative, difficult, and hurtful experiences (Ailwood, 2003; Löfdahl and Hägglund, 2006; Grieshaber and McArdle, 2010) and children have reported that the worst experience in preschool is not having friends to play with, or being excluded from a peer group (Einarsdottir, 2008). Play has been identified as a social process through which children produce their own ordering, establish social status, and confirm power order (Ryan, 2005; Löfdahl, 2006; Löfdahl and Hägglund, 2007; Corsaro, 2009; Evaldsson, 2009; Grieshaber and McArdle, 2010). As Brooker (2011) has pointed out, much of young children’s play activities are directed towards constructing, maintaining, and reconstructing their identities in relation to their peers. In play with peers, children establish their own ranking in the peer group, positioning themselves as bigger or smaller, older or younger, stronger or weaker, and trying out gender roles. Studies have shown how children use power in play to exclude and marginalize other children. Löfdahl and Hägglund (2006)

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observed how preschool children in Sweden, within the context of play, communicated and acted in relation to social participation and power. The children’s social representations of power and participation in play included rationales for who can join the play and who cannot, and also how to provide exceptions from the official rule that ‘anyone can join.’ Age was an influential factor, and older children seemed to have the power to make decisions which seemed to deviate from the common rules, excluding and marginalizing certain children. In another ethnographic study, Löfdahl and Hägglund (2006) examined the concept of agency as a means of reconstructing and maintaining power orders and status in peer groups. The findings illustrated how the children’s shared knowledge concerning social status and social differentiation in the group was strengthened and confirmed during a traditional teacher-led ring game, where they were supposed to choose a friend. The children developed the game as an arena for confirming the power hierarchy in the group, using their agency and empowerment to give the ring game a different meaning than their teacher intended.

CONCLUSION This chapter has examined the ways in which constructions of the child and childhood have shaped the methodologies of play research and reviewed methods used and dilemmas identified in contemporary research on children’s play. The chapter has reviewed research on play which connects strongly with children’s perspectives and uses different methods for interacting with children. The findings from these studies have revealed several themes that illustrate children’s views on the nature of play and the conditions needed for an activity to be defined as play. In the minds of children, self-initiation, freedom of choice, influence, control, fun, opportunities for creativity, and being with friends without the presence of adults are important indicators of play. Future research

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needs to dig deeper into the nature of play, what counts as play for children, and what children like and do not like about play. The influence of the social context and thus the role of adults is of particular relevance. In addition, research with very young children with limited verbal skills and children with special needs is a sensitive but underresearched area.

REFERENCES Ailwood, J. (2003) ‘Governing early childhood education through play’, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 4(3): 286–98. Ailwood, J. (2011) ‘It’s about power: Researching play, pedagogy and participation in the early years of school’, in S. Rogers (ed.), Rethinking Play and Pedagogy in Early Childhood Education: Concepts, Contexts and Cultures. Abingdon: Routledge. pp. 19–31. Brooker, L. (2001) ‘Interviewing children’, in G. MacNaughton, S. Rolfe and I. Siraj-Blatchford (eds), Doing Early Childhood Research: International Perspectives on Theory and Practice. Buckingham: Open University Press. pp. 162–77. Brooker, L. (2011) ‘Taking children seriously: An alternative agenda for research?’, Journal of Early Childhood Research, 9(2): 137–49. Bühler-Niederberger, D. and Van Krieken, R. (2008) ‘Persisting inequalities: Childhood between global influences and local traditions’, Childhood, 15(2): 147–55. Chapparo, C. J. and Hooper, E. (2002) ‘When is it work? Perceptions of six-year-old children’, Work, 19: 291–302. Christensen, P. and Prout, A. (2002) ‘Working with ethical symmetry in social research with children’, Childhood, 9(4): 477–97. Clark, A. (2011) ‘Foreword’, in D. Harcourt, B. Perry and T. Waller (eds), Researching Young Children’s Perspectives: Ethics, Theory, and Research. Abingdon: Routledge. pp. xvii–xviii. Clark, A. and Moss, P. (2001) Listening to Young Children: The Mosaic Approach. London: National Children’s Bureau. Cobb, C., Danby, S. and Farrell, A. (2005) ‘Governance of children’s everyday spaces’, Australian Journal of Early Childhood, 30(1): 14–20. Cook, T. and Hess, E. (2007) ‘What the camera sees and from whose perspective: Fun methodologies for

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engaging children in enlightening adults’, Childhood, 14(1): 29–45. Corsaro, W. A. (2009) ‘Peer culture’, in J. Qvortrup, W. A. Corsaro and M.-S. Honig (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Childhood Studies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 301–16. Corsaro, W. A. and Molinari, L. (2000a) ‘Entering and observing in children’s worlds: A reflection on a longitudinal ethnography of early education in Italy’, in P. Christensen and A. James (eds), Research with Children: Perspectives and Practices. New York: Falmer. pp. 179–200. Danby, S. and Farrell, A. (2005) Ethical Research with Children. New York: Open University Press. Dockett, S. and Perry, B. (2005) ‘“You need to know how to play safe”: Children’s experiences of starting school’, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 6(1): 4–18. Dockett, S., Einarsdottir, J. and Perry, B. (2011) ‘Balancing methodologies and methods’, in D. Harcourt, B. Perry and T. Waller (eds), Researching Young Children’s Perspectives: Ethics, Theory, and Research. Abingdon: Routledge. pp. 68–81. Dockett, S., Einarsdottir, J. and Perry, B. (2012) ‘Young children’s decisions about research participation: Opting out’, International Journal of Early Years Education, 3(20): 244–56. Duncan, J. (2005) ‘“She’s always been, what I would think, a perfect day-care child”: Constructing the subjectivities of a New Zealand child’, European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 13(2): 51–61. Dunphy, L. and Farrell, T. (2011) ‘Eliciting young children’s perspectives on indoor play provision in their classroom: Reflections and challenges’, in D. Harcourt, B. Perry and T. Waller (eds), Researching Young Children’s Perspectives: Ethics, Theory, and Research. Abingdon: Routledge. pp. 128–42. Einarsdottir, J. (2007) ‘Research with children: Methodological and ethical challenges’, European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 15(2): 197–211. Einarsdottir, J. (2008) ‘Children’s and parents’ perspectives on the purposes of playschool in Iceland’, International Journal of Educational Research, 47(5): 283–91. Einarsdottir, J. (2011a) ‘Icelandic children’s transition experiences’, Early Education and Development, 22(5): 737–56. Einarsdottir, J. (2011b) ‘Reconstructing playschool experiences’, European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 19(3): 389–404. Einarsdottir, J. (in press). Children’s perspectives on the role of preschool teachers. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal. Einarsdottir, J., Dockett, S. and Perry, B. (2009) ‘Making meaning: Children’s perspectives expressed through

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drawings’, Early Child Development and Care, 179(2): 217–32. Evaldsson, A.-C. (2009) ‘Play and games’, in J. Qvortrup, W. A. Corsaro and M.-S. Honig (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Childhood Studies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 316–31. Gallacher, L.-A. and Gallagher, M. (2008) ‘Methodological immaturity in childhood research? Thinking through participatory methods’, Childhood, 15(4): 499–516. Grieshaber, S. and McArdle, F. (2010) The Trouble with Play. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Harcourt, D. and Einarsdottir, J. (2011) ‘Introducing children’s perspectives and participation in research’, European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 19(3): 301–7. Holland, S., Renold, E., Ross, N. J. and Hillman, A. (2010) ‘Power, agency and participatory agendas: A critical exploration of young people’s engagement in participative qualitative research’, Childhood, 17(3): 360–75. Howard, J. (2002) ‘Eliciting young children’s perceptions of play, work and learning using the Activity Apperception Story Procedure’, Early Child Development and Care, 172: 489–502. Howard, J., Jenvey, V. and Hill, C. (2006) ‘Children’s categorisation of play and learning based on social context’, Early Child Development and Care, 176(3,4): 379–93. Huser, C. (2010) ‘Children’s voices on play in a Mosaic approach study: Children as conscious participants in a case study’, Bogazici University Journal of Education, 26(1): 35–48. James, A. and Prout, A. (eds) (1997) Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood. London: Falmer. Jenks, C. (2004) ‘Editorial: Many childhoods?’, Childhood, 11(1): 5–8. Kehily, M. J. (2004) ‘Understanding childhood: An introduction to some key themes and issues’, in M. J. Kehily (ed.), An Introduction to Childhood Studies. Maidenhead: Open University Press. pp. 1–21. Kernan, M. (2011) ‘Children’s and parents’ perspectives on play and friendships’, in M. Kernan and E. Singer (eds), Peer Relationships in Early Childhood Education and Care. New York: Routledge. pp. 27–37. King, N. R. (1979) ‘Play: The kindergartners’ perspective’, The Elementary School Journal, 80(2): 81–7. Kragh-Müller, G. and Isbell, R. (2011) ‘Children’s perspectives on their everyday lives in child care in two cultures: Denmark and the United States’, Early Childhood Education Journal, 39: 17–27. Lahman, M. K. E. (2008) ‘Always othered: Ethical research with children’, Journal of Early Childhood Research, 6(3): 281–300.

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Löfdahl, A. (2006) ‘Grounds for values and attitudes: Children’s play and peer-cultures in pre-school’, Journal of Early Childhood Research, 4(1): 77–88. Löfdahl, A. and Hägglund, S. (2006) ‘Power and participation: Social representations among children in pre-school’, Social Psychology of Education, 9: 179–94. Löfdahl, A. and Hägglund, S. (2007) ‘Spaces of participation in pre-school: Arenas for establishing power orders?’, Children and Society, 21: 328–38. Mandell, N. (1984) ‘The least-adult role in studying children’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 16: 433–67. Markström, A.-M. and Halldén, G. (2009) ‘Children’s strategies for agency in preschool’, Children and Society, 23: 112–22. Pálmadóttir, H. and Einarsdottir, J. (in press). Young children's views on the role of preschool teachers. International Journal of Early Childhood. Pascal, C. and Bertram, T. (2009) ‘Listening to young citizens: The struggle to make real a participatory paradigm in research with young children’, European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 17(2): 249–62. Pramling Samuelsson, I. and Johansson, E. (2009) ‘Why do children involve teachers in their play and learning?’, European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 17(1): 77–94. Punch, S. (2002) ‘Research with children: The same or different from research with adults?’, Childhood, 9(3): 321–41. Qvortrup, J. (2004) ‘Editorial: The waiting child’, Childhood, 11(3): 267–73. Qvortrup, J., Corsaro, W. A. and Honig, M.-S. (2009) ‘Why social studies of childhood? An introduction to the Handbook’, in J. Qvortrup, W. A. Corsaro and M.-S. Honig (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Childhood Studies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 1–18. Rasmussen, K. (1999) ‘Om fotografering og fotografi som forskningsstrategi i barndomsforskning’ [On photography and photographs as a research method in child studies], Dansk Sociologi, (10): 63–78. Robson, S. (2011) ‘Producing and using video data with young children: A case study of ethical questions and practical consequences’, in D. Harcourt, B. Perry and T. Waller (eds), Researching Young Children’s Perspectives: Ethics, Theory, and Research. Abingdon: Routledge. pp. 178–92. Rogers, S. and Evans, J. (2006) ‘Playing the game? Exploring role play from children’s perspectives’,

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European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 14(1): 43–55. Ryan, S. (2005) ‘Freedom to choose: Examining children’s experiences in choice time’, in N. Yelland (ed.), Critical Issues in Early Childhood Education. Maidenhead: Open University Press. pp. 99–114. Sandberg, A. (2002) ‘Children’s concepts of teachers’ ways of relating to play’, Australian Journal of Early Childhood, 27(4): 18–22. Sheridan, S. and Pramling Samuelsson, I. (2001) ‘Children’s conceptions of participation and influence in pre-school: A perspective on pedagogical quality’, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 2(2): 169–94. Sommer, D., Pramling Samuelsson, I. and Hundeide, K. (2010) Child Perspectives and Children’s Perspectives in Theory and Practice. New York: Springer. Spyrou, S. (2011) ‘The limits of children’s voices: From authenticity to critical, reflexive representation’, Childhood, 18(2): 151–65. Stephenson, A. (2009) ‘Horses in the sandpit: Photography, prolonged involvement and “stepping back” as strategies for listening to children’s voices’, Early Child Development and Care, 179(2): 131–41. Strandell, H. (1997) ‘Doing reality with play: Play as a children’s resource in organizing everyday life in daycare centers’, Childhood, 4(4): 445–64. Sumsion, J., Harrison, L., Press, F., McLeod, S., Goodfellow, J. and Bradley, B. (2011) ‘Researching infants’ experiences of early childhood education and care’, in D. Harcourt, B. Perry and T. Waller (eds), Researching Young Children’s Perspectives: Ethics, Theory, and Research. Abingdon: Routledge. pp. 113–27. Tangen, R. (2008) ‘Listening to children’s voices in educational research: Some theoretical and method­ ological problems’, European Journal of Special Needs Education, 23(2): 157–66. Theobald, M. (2012) ‘Video-stimulated accounts: Young children accounting for interactional matters in front of peers’, Journal of Early Childhood Research, 10(1): 32–50. Theobald, M. and Danby, S. (2015) ‘“Well, now I’m upset”: Moral and social orders in the playground’, in J. Cromdal and M. Tholander (eds), Morality in Practice: Exploring Childhood, Parenthood and Schooling in Everyday Life. London: Equinox. United Nations (1989) Convention on the Rights of the Child (www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/ crc.aspx). United Nations (2005) Convention on the Rights of the Child: General Comment No 7. Implementing Child

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Rights in Early Childhood (www.ohchr.org/english/ bodies/crc/docs/AdvanceVersions/GeneralComment 7Rev1.pdf). Vandenbroeck, M. and Brie, M. B. (2006) ‘Children’s agency and educational norms: A tensed negotiation’, Childhood, 13(1): 127–43. Veale, A. (2005) ‘Creative methodologies in participatory research with children’, in S. Greene and D. Hogan (eds), Researching Children’s Experience. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. pp. 253–72. Warming, H. (2005) ‘Participant observation: A way to learn about children’s perspectives’, in A. Clark, A. T. Kjørholt and P. Moss (eds), Beyond Listening:

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Children’s Perspectives on Early Childhood Services. Bristol: Policy Press. pp. 51–70. Warming, H. (2011) ‘Getting under their skins? Accessing young children’s perspectives through ethnographic fieldwork’, Childhood, 18(1): 39–53. Wing, L. A. (1995) ‘Play is not the work of the child: Young children’s perceptions of work and play’, Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 10: 223–47. Wong, S.-M., Wang, Z. and Cheng, D. (2011) ‘A playbased curriculum: Hong Kong children’s perception of play and non-play’, The International Journal of Learning, 17(10): 165–80.

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27 Digital Play Christine Stephen and Lydia Plowman

INTRODUCTION This chapter is about engagement with digital toys and technologies during children’s early years. Driven by belief in the power of play to support learning and development, and the conviction of parents and policymakers that competencies with digital technologies will be necessary to ensure future employability and economic effectiveness, play with technologies has become an integral part of educational provision for young children in affluent nations. Preschool settings have been equipped to support children’s learning about and through digital technologies, and curriculum and pedagogical guidance developed for their use in preschool settings (e.g. Learning and Teaching Scotland, 2003; NAEYC, 2012). Furthermore, the positive value placed on early learning, coupled with the belief in the potential of digital technologies to enhance learning, has fuelled the market in educational interactive toys for play at home.

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Despite the apparent popularity of digital technologies and the availability of digital resources at home and in educational settings, play with these technologies is a contested activity. While parents and children increasingly encounter and interact with digital technology across all aspects of their daily lives, the debate between those who favour and those who oppose young children’s engagement in digital play is in danger of reaching stalemate. The purpose in this chapter is not to take sides or search for definitive answers about outcomes or impact. Instead, the aim is to consider what is known about children’s play with digital technologies and technological toys at home and in their educational settings. Given the range of digital resources for play, leisure activities, communication, education and work which children encounter in their everyday lives, any exploration of digital play must go beyond screen-based technologies such as desktop computers, laptops and tablets where the interface is through a keyboard, mouse or touch screen.

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Products such as the Wii and games consoles use a television display and may use a motion-sensing interface. Digital cameras, mobile phones and leisure technologies such as interactive television and DVDs are also features of young children’s technological experience in the more affluent industrialised nations at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Before they begin school, children may encounter email, shopping online, webcams, Skype conversations and internet searching, as well as toys that simulate appliances such as mobile phones and cash registers, or educational resources such as reading devices and responsive globes. For the youngest children there are technologyaugmented toys with lights, sound, motion and programed interactions. Defining play is a continuing challenge for scholars, but it becomes particularly complex in the context of digital play, which can range from games with predefined rules, through competition against a virtual partner, to employing a simulated technology in an imaginative play setting. All of these activities are referred to by adults and children as play, and it is this broad, activity-orientated understanding of digital play that is adopted here. The concern in this chapter is with ‘what is played’, and in what circumstances, by children aged from birth to eight years old, with an emphasis on the years before children start formal schooling. We begin by looking at the popular debate about digital play before moving on to survey empirical evidence about the nature of digital play. Contemporary understandings of digital play are then discussed and we conclude with a consideration of future developments.

THE DIGITAL PLAY DEBATE Early reviews of empirical findings about young children’s encounters with digital technologies have pointed to varied and patchy evidence about use and impact, and to the tendency for research to be concentrated

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on the practices of children and their educators in educational settings (e.g. Stephen and Plowman, 2003; Bolstad, 2004). Nevertheless, there is a general recognition in the literature that digital technologies are at least a ‘benign addition’ (Cuban, 2001) and at best a supplement to existing practices that can contribute to children’s learning and to their motivation to learn. In contrast to this measured response, a highly polarised debate has developed in the media around engagement with digital technologies for zero- to eight-year-olds at home and in preschool and school. On the one hand there are claims that anxieties are fuelled by moral panic and nostalgia and assertions that being a competent user of digital media will be an essential prerequisite for success in the twenty-first century, while on the other there are concerns about the developmental dangers associated with the early use of screen-based technologies. Anxieties about technology use in the early years typically focus on three main areas of negative impact: health and wellbeing; cognition and brain development; and social and cultural competencies. There are concerns that screen-based technology is used as a form of unsupervised babysitting which denies children adult company, along with anxieties about ‘addiction’, physical inactivity, passivity and lack of verbal and social development, as well as fears about internet safety. There are doubts too about the developmental appropriateness of computer-based or virtual learning experiences as opposed to traditional, ‘hands-on’ activities (see for instance Alliance for Childhood, 2004; Palmer, 2006). The American Academy of Pediatrics (2011) argues there is no evidence that children’s learning is facilitated by educational media and concludes that children under two years old should not watch television or engage with other screenbased media. Elsewhere questions have been raised about the neurological impact on young children of spending time using digital toys and technologies (Howard-Jones, 2011), while the role that these new resources play in the marketisation of education raises

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a different set of socially relevant issues (Selwyn, 2011). Those with more positive perspectives on technology argue for benefits for children’s cognitive development and learning and for their social and cultural awareness and participation. These arguments tend to be forward-facing, concentrating on ways of enhancing the learning of particular skills such as phonological awareness or mathematical concepts, the collaborative learning skills needed in a knowledge economy (Yelland, 2008) and the integration of the competencies with technologies which children develop at home into their formal learning settings (Parette et al., 2010; McPake et al., 2012). Others suggest that the extent of digital technologies in family homes means that everyday practices have moved beyond the pro and anti-digital play debate. A UNESCO report (Kalaš, 2010) states that ‘it is not necessary any more to prove that ICT matters in early childhood education. New digital technologies have entered every aspect of our reality, including families and lives of young people’ (2010: 16). From the perspective of researchers considering children’s play with digital technologies, two aspects of the debate are striking. The first is that on both sides of the argument the concern is largely with what may enhance or inhibit development, rather than with the kinds of play afforded or the ways in which digital resources are incorporated into play and family life. Technology is currently associated more with educational than with play value, but belief in ‘learning through play’ in the early years has led to a burgeoning literature that attempts to validate children’s play with computer games by claiming they are educational. Furthermore, educational value is frequently used as a marketing device for digital toys, with claims about accelerating progress in learning to read, write and use numbers. However, learning toys are often based on mundane educational tasks disguised as entertainment. The so-called interactivity may well provide some initial motivation for learning but the research evidence suggests

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that it rarely continues beyond the first few encounters and may even get in the way of the educational potential. Digital interactivity alone does not guarantee either an educational or a playful encounter. The second striking feature is the narrow focus on screen-based technologies in general, and computers in particular, where the user is positioned as static and the activity is entirely virtual. This is all the more surprising given the greater availability of resources which do not depend on an interface with a traditional television or computer screen or where, as with the Wii, the activity is relayed through a screen but controlled by the child’s physical actions. By moving the adult or child player to be at some distance from the screen, the Nintendo Wii, Microsoft Kinect and similar motion-control user interfaces were designed in part to assuage the fears of those who believe that digital play leads to a lack of physical activity or social interaction, as they invite group play and a higher level of movement than is associated with video games and computers. Play with digital technologies has been criticised as constraining creativity but Bolstad (2004) argues that digital technologies can be employed to support creative play and expression, not only through the selective and supported use of computer games but also through employing digital cameras, programable toys or walkie-talkies for a range of play activities. Technological pets, toys that simulate programable domestic appliances and mobile telephones all afford play that is different in kind from the ‘traditional’ computer game. In educational settings the more open-ended programable toys, such as Beebots and some forms of Lego, dispense with a screen altogether, enabling children to try ‘What if ?’ scenarios and to develop computational thinking. Engaging with digital technologies at home is perhaps more likely to involve creative or imaginative uses, for instance, as families compose digital scrapbooks or children download pictures of favourite characters to use as they act out stories. The increasing accessibility, particularly

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at home, of tablet computers and smartphones is leading to a resurgence in the use of screenbased technologies but features such as the touch screen, and easy portability, can solve some of the operational problems observed when children play on desktop computers.

SURVEYING THE EVIDENCE ON DIGITAL PLAY Researching the Extent of Digital Play In light of the intense debate described above it is surprising that there has not been more research on the role of digital technologies in the lives of children in the early years. In particular, there is a lack of academic writing about the digital experiences of children younger than three years of age, although there is anecdotal evidence and journalistic comment on the advantages, dangers and inevitability of digital play for the youngest children in newspaper articles and blogs. One exception is the work of Bergen et al. (2010). Working with a toy manufacturer, they examined the impact of technological augmentation on the ways in which children aged from 7 to 28 months and their parents interacted with the toys. They concluded there was initial support for the idea that the technologically enhanced toys they studied promoted what they categorise as ‘exploration, practice play, social game play and humor expression’ (Bergen et al., 2010: 15). Although ostensibly referring to ‘playing with computers’, much of the available literature is concerned with experiences in educational settings and adopts a narrow interpretation of both digital resources and learning, typically being concerned with measuring the impact of the use of computers or other devices on the acquisition of specified skills and knowledge. A focus on using computers and the outcomes for aspects of learning more directly associated with the school agenda tells us little about the ways in which preschool children interact with or

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play with digital technologies, although Vangsnes et al. (2012) have alerted us to the tension between the ways in which teachers tried to involve five-year-olds in pedagogical interactions around a computer game and the children’s focus on the game as a competitive play episode with friends. Surveys of children’s play with digital technologies beyond educational settings often use estimates of screen time as the measure of engagement. Vandewater et al. (2007) found that, contrary to the guidance offered by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), 62 per cent of children aged from birth to two had watched some television on the target day, although screen time estimates for the majority of three- to six-year olds did fall within AAP guidelines. Rideout’s (2011) survey of parents of children aged from birth to eight in the USA found that although 12 per cent of two- to four-year olds used a computer every day and another 24 per cent at least once per week, television remained their dominant form of screen exposure, with 73 per cent viewing at least once each day. The headline figures from these surveys are often drawn upon in studies which raise concerns about digital play for young children. But there are limitations to this evidence, which usually depends on parental recall, is limited to exposure to a specified range of screen-based technologies and often relates to a particular cultural context. Two studies of Scottish children’s everyday experiences with digital technologies at home offer evidence about the place of digital play in the lives of young children (Plowman et al., 2012). There was no evidence that play with digital media dominated the lives of the three- to five-year olds who participated. On the contrary, children choose, and parents prefer, variation and balance between play with digital technologies and toys and play with traditional toys. Each family sought to ensure what they considered to be a suitable mix of physically active and imaginative play both indoors and outside. Televisions, computers with internet access

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and mobile phones were ubiquitous features of their homes but, regardless of family income, each home also contained large numbers of traditional toys. The proportion of the playthings that could be categorised as technological ranged from a maximum of 33 per cent in one household to much nearer 10 per cent in others and in most of the homes traditional toys outnumbered those with technological features by three to one. Vandewater et al. (2007) explored whether or not spending time with screen-based media reduced the time that children under six years old in the USA spent in more traditional pursuits and concluded that, ‘contrary to popular belief’, there was no relationship between time spent viewing and time reading or in outdoor play. The implication of findings such as those of Plowman et al. (2012) and Vandewater (2007) is that digital play adds to the play pursuits available to young children rather than displacing whole areas of activity.

Digital Play in Context Focusing on how much time preschool children typically spend with digital technologies or their rate of progress in learning particular concepts tells us little about the nature of their digital play. For instance, just as older children have been found to use more than one form of technology at a time, so young children often play with traditional toys, perhaps building a train track or constructing with Lego while glancing occasionally at the television screen. Oakes (2009) argues that media effects studies typically fail to take account of the context in which technologies are being used and Vandewater and Lee (2009) have criticised the focus on measures of use rather than analysis of content. Exploring children’s play with digital technologies demands attention to the context in which the engagement occurs, the form of activity, its place in young children’s play repertoires and the conditions which promote sustained and meaningful encounters. Local cultural expectations, perspectives and values influence children’s actions and

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opportunities at home no less than in institutional settings. For instance, Ljung-Djärf et al. (2005) characterised the approach of early years educational settings to the introduction of digital technologies as protective, supportive or guiding and described how the behaviours of practitioners in these different environments influenced children’s experiences. At a more micro level, Ljung-Djärf (2008) found differences in the social environment in which three- to six-year-olds engaged with computers in their educational settings. She identified three social and relational positions which shaped children’s actions: resource owner, participant and spectator. As they examined play with toys and technologies at home, Stephen et al. (2013) identified four dimensions of family life which make a difference to children’s digital play. Parents’ attitudes towards digital technologies and playthings, their ideas about how children learn and their role in this process and patterns of family interactions and practices were influential, as were individual differences between children. They were discriminating users of technologies who had distinct preferences amongst the digital resources and games available to them and were able to make judgements about their own performance (Stephen et al., 2008). As with traditional play, gender makes a difference to digital play. Although there was no clear difference between girls and boys in the proportion of their toys that were technological, Stephen (2011) found evidence of gender differences in the nature of the digital playthings children owned and in the branded characters they favoured. Marsh (2004) drew attention to the opportunities for pleasure and self-expression which encounters with technologies, and television in particular, afforded two- to fouryear-olds. She found that although watching television was a central feature of the way in which young children spent their time at home, it was a far from passive activity. The children talked about what they saw and continued the narrative themes in their imaginative play. Marsh’s later study of play

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in online virtual worlds found a similar integration of digital and traditional play forms (Marsh, 2010; Marsh, this volume). Online the five- to seven-year-olds engaged in digital imaginative and role play and games with rules; both forms of play that were also part of their non-digital play repertoire.

Facilitating Digital Play Plowman, Stephen and McPake (2010) designed a series of studies to go beyond reports of usage to investigate the nature of preschoolers’ encounters with digital resources in their educational settings and at home. An initial study suggested that, contrary to expectations, children’s encounters with computers and other digital resources in preschool playrooms were often brief and could be unsatisfactory because they could not understand or comply with the instructions for the game, became confused by layers of choices or possibilities, were unable to cope with the cognitive demands of the tasks, lacked operational skills or were distracted by peers (Stephen and Plowman, 2003). In these circumstances playing with the computer appeared to be a less than playful activity and the attractiveness of more traditional options in these richly resourced environments was evident (Plowman and Stephen, 2005). Stephen and Plowman (2008) found that positive engagement with technologies in the playroom depended on sensitive and responsive support from practitioners, which the researchers conceptualised as guided interaction. They found that engaged play with digital technologies was supported by distal activities such as selecting resources in response to children’s interests and deploying staff in ways that ensure they can proactively support children as they use technologies. Effective proximal guided interaction was found to be multimodal, enacted through gesture, expression and touch as well as the spoken word. Physical, verbal and socio-emotional actions guided the children’s interactions with the technology – for instance, modelling how to use the toy cash register and card reader,

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reading instructions in a dialogue box or sitting alongside them to give encouragement or share pleasure in the animations. Stephen and Plowman (2013) went on to explore digital play at home and found that guided interaction from a responsive adult was just as critical there as it was in educational settings. Indeed, parents engaged in the same forms of guided interaction exhibited by educators, including verbal and non-verbal responses and interventions, physical actions and cognitive activities. However, support was needed more often at home than in educational settings in order to manage disappointment or unhappiness with lack of success in digital play with games on the computer, a games console or on the Wii. Three- to five-year-olds could become frustrated when competing with other family members or when attempting a task with an inappropriate level of difficulty on a shared resource.

CONTEMPORARY CONSIDERATIONS Going Beyond ‘Digital Natives’ Contemporary thinking about digital play is ready to challenge established generalisations and ideas that are reaching the status of folk belief, such as the commonly repeated idea that all children are keen users of new technologies to the exclusion of other activities. As the evidence reviewed above suggests, not all of young children’s play is digital. The belief that there is a natural bond between children and technology is reflected in the widespread use of the term ‘digital natives’. According to Prensky (2001), those who have grown up with technology are digital natives. Although originally coined to refer to college students, the term is now applied to children of all ages. They are contrasted with so-called ‘digital immigrants’, such as their parents and teachers, who have adopted technology later in life. This description is initially convincing as some children do have a facility for technology and some adults can feel overwhelmed, but

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many children of this age do not behave as ‘digital natives’. Their early exposures to digital play, whether with computer games, the Wii or interactive learning toys, can be characterised by timidity or lack of interest. This may be a consequence of design, personal preference or competencies: interaction does not come as naturally as the term ‘digital natives’ suggests for children aged three or four who are faced with an unfamiliar website or game and have not yet learned the conventions of interface design.

Is Digital Play Distinctive? Defining the characteristics of digital play remains elusive. Throughout this chapter play with digital technologies has been thought of from an activity perspective which focuses on play, including play with digital technologies, as a cultural practice mediated through the physical, cognitive, social and emotional environments in which children are growing up. Furthermore, it is important to note that the play possibilities afforded by digital technologies vary with the target user. An interactive toy which produces sounds and lights may be an opportunity for playful exploration for a one-year-old child but is unlikely to be part of the play of a four-yearold, for whom engaging in play in a virtual world may be equally inappropriate. Within the context of an educational environment, with its discourse of purposeful play and play as the medium for learning, digital technologies have been thought of as an educational tool by educators, policymakers and researchers, but there are other discourses about play which assume alternative purposes and value positions. Digital play may be thought of as a way of keeping children entertained, having fun, collaborating with others or competing. However, children’s play with digital technologies involves them in many of the same cognitive operations they encounter with traditional toys at home and in preschool. In digital games they match, sort, categorise, count and manage quantity. They can practise phonics and encounter other literacy skills as

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they navigate menus and screen displays and watch films and listen to audio-stories. Play with digital technologies may be less likely to extend children’s physical capacities than traditional play activities, but the evidence suggests that three- to five-year-olds continue to seek out and enjoy gross motor play. The term ‘digital play’ often refers to a model of play that derives from screen-based computer games and, by comparison with the multimodality of traditional toys that afford grasping, throwing, squeaking, blinking and squeezing, or the pretend play supported by household objects, screen-based play may well seem two-dimensional. However, this focus on screen-based activity means that the ways in which children integrate digital and non-digital play can be overlooked. The distinction between digital and embodied play is being eroded by a new generation of technologies with tangible (that is, touchable) interfaces facilitating seamless movement between digital and non-digital resources and play narratives. For instance, Stephen et al. (2013) observed a four-year-old girl taking an interactive ‘talking’ dog for a ride in a train made from a cardboard box, and children use old computers and non-functioning mobile phones as props for play in imaginary offices, shops and schools. The presence of digital technologies in the homes and educational settings of young children can be seen to have impacts on their lives in three distinct ways, not all of which fit with any traditional definition of play. Firstly, they allow young children to engage, with some support, in particular activities in much the same way as adults. Advances in communication technologies are perhaps the most obvious development here, with age being no barrier to talking to relatives on Skype or taking and sending photographs on a mobile phone or tablet computer. Secondly, young children participate in family leisure practices including the use of digital technologies such as watching DVDs and interactive television, playing games on the Wii or using games consoles. But it is a matter of debate whether or not these leisure

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pursuits constitute play. None of the families in the home-based studies by Plowman et al. referred to watching the television or a DVD as play, for instance. Similarly, Glenn et al. (2012) report that although the Canadian children aged seven to nine in their study ‘described a vast array of activities as play it became apparent that children rarely included watching television’. Thirdly, digital play resources targeted at the early years market vary in the degree of playfulness and openended use which they afford and therefore in the extent to which the activity might be considered to be play. Children in the early years use computer art packages to draw, colour and print out pictures and complete computer activities which often focus on shape, comparing quantities, identifying rhymes and sequencing, but few of these games are open-ended and they offer limited scope for playful behaviour.

Developing Research and Theory The early years literature is dominated by a concern with learning and development and the place of technologies in the lives of young children does not escape this focus. Much of the research reporting on the ways in which children in the early years of primary school (five to eight years old) engage with technology adopts a relatively straightforward positivist approach, investigating and measuring the outcomes of play with novel technologies for specific aspects of learning or development (e.g. Couse and Chen, 2010). The relationship between the development of digital literacy and the contribution which playing with technologies makes to emerging literacy and communication skills has been a particular feature of research endeavours. Plowman et al. (2010) found that children learned how to master operational features, extended their know­ ledge and understanding of the world and supported the development of positive dispositions such as persistence and independence as they played with a range of digital resources at home and in their preschool.

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However, another form of learning was only evident in the home studies: learning about and changing the nature of participation in the authentic cultural practices of family or community, such as communication, shopping and leisure. At home children learned to participate in family narratives and visual records, to communicate by email and mobile phone, to shop online and to relax together by playing games on the Wii and watching television. Verenikina et al. (2010) have concluded that there is a considerable gap in knowledge about the ways in which computer games for children in the early years of primary school activities can support what is described as ‘developmental play and higher order thinking in very young children’ (2010: 156), a reminder of the dearth of evidence-based understanding in this rapidly developing area. There is, too, a growing realisation that children’s exposure to digital technologies at home makes a difference to their interest in and motivation to engage with the resources offered in their educational setting. After examining the literature on the relationship between technology and literacy in educational settings for children aged from birth to eight years, Burnett (2010) argued that more research was needed about children’s digital practices at home in order to understand the way in which their digital experiences there influence their meaning-making. There has been a welcome extension of the range of theoretical approaches adopted as researchers move beyond attempts to measure specific outcomes to studying the nature of play with digital resources. For instance, employing the Bourdieuian concept of habitus to explore the differences in expectations between children who have grown up in the digital age and their parents, Zevenbergen (2007) identified a distinct digital habitus acquired at home but not yet responded to in educational settings. Actor network theory facilitates the study of the part played by the human and non-human agents in play with digital technologies and has particular value when the object of attention is a material

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resource or form of software. Similarly, an analysis adopting the intra-active pedagogy developed by Lenz Taguchi (2010) from the work of Deleuze and Guattari will focus on the interaction of children, adults and material resources during digital play episodes and the learning which happens in between these elements (see Lenz Taguchi, this volume). A socio-cultural theoretical orientation positions digital technologies as a material, social and cultural feature of childhood in the twentyfirst century. The Vygotskian tradition explores the critical role of the more able other in the Zone of Proximal Development and the kind of support required to enable children to make use of the digital tools of their society (Vygotsky, 1978). In addition, it frames exploration of the ways in which play with digital technologies can be expected to foster cultural interpretation and reproduction through imagination in action (Edwards, 2011). Hedegaard (2012) points to the value of taking account of what she conceptualises as children’s motives and their social situation in an activity setting. From this perspective, children’s play with digital technologies depends on their preferences and desires as well as on the social, material and cultural environment in which each child is growing and participating. The literature on communities of practice and Rogoff’s (2003) conceptualisation of learning as guided participation provide alternative ways of conceptualising children’s encounters with technologies at home and in educational settings.

FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS While the capacity of digital playthings to extend children’s physical and social activities seems limited, it is perhaps in the area of imaginative play that there is the greatest scope for development. The evidence suggests that stimulating imaginative or pretend play or acting as a prop in pretend play is not a current strength of digital resources (e.g. Bergen, 2010), although some children do blend traditional and technological playthings or engage with brand characters or games across digital

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and non-digital formats. However, there is potential for digital resources to move away from the current reliance on defined and closed game designs to more open-ended and flexible uses that respond to children’s changing interests and relate to authentic experiences which they want to reproduce in play. Carr (2000) set out three critical affordances for any technological activity in the early years: transparency, challenge and accessibility. It seems important for the designers of games and digital resources to collaborate with those whose expertise lies in understanding what children want from play and what playthings can offer them. As new forms of technology are developed and as the locus of interaction moves to the digitally enhanced tangibility of the lived environment, with sensors and computer chips embedded into a wide range of devices, it will become easier to design materials that children can touch, feel, move around and share; developments which are likely to stimulate the more imaginative, physical and exploratory aspects of children’s play. Products already coming on to the market, for instance, combine virtual and real worlds so that touchable toys use tags to communicate with each other both on and offscreen. We are likely to see a continued evolution of toys that build on advances in speech and gesture recognition to adapt to their owners by displaying emotional responses. Augmented-reality games use a link between a tablet or smartphone and, typically, a set of interactive figures, with the device providing a screen through which the real world of the living room is viewed with the figures superimposed on it. There will be new developments in social media which will offer alternative forms of communication and access to the perspectives and knowledge of others, but the impact which these advances will have on opportunities for play remains unclear. As the design of the interface on smartphones and tablet computers becomes more child-friendly, opportunities will emerge for children to create and integrate their own content, such as drawings, photos and video, thus overcoming some of the current concerns about the closed nature of technological products.

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Nevertheless, the question posed by Bergen et al. (2010) about whether or not there is an optimum degree of technological augmentation reminds us that knowledge about digital play is in the early stages of development and there is a need to continue to pose critical questions about what is played and the affordances of technologies. While it is foolish to predict the future, the increasing technologisation of play is likely to accelerate different manifestations of play and prompt alternative ways of conceptualising its role in childhood. The hybrid mix of digital and nondigital and of real and virtual worlds may shape both the developmental and the cultural nature of play. The tangible nature of some of these technologies and the multimodal nature of the feedback may have some impact on children’s movement, cognition and emotions; at the same time, cultural and social change within the family and the wider community will influence not only what children play with but also who they play with, for what purpose and where. It is unlikely that children will cease to play with traditional toys in the foreseeable future. Whether innovative or not, there is still a need for products that promote curiosity, creativity, imagination and learning and this means taking design seriously: both traditional and technological toys may foster or impede the characteristics we consider desirable in young children.

CONCLUSION In this chapter we have surveyed the contested nature of children’s play with digital technologies and the empirical evidence available about the nature of that play, its outcomes and the conditions in which it is sustained and productive. The studies reviewed suggest that play with digital technologies can be satisfying for children in the early years, although there is little evidence on which to base this conclusion for the youngest children in this age range. Digital play can provide opportunities for entertainment, fun and learning but the experience of any one

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child will depend on individual motives, adult or peer support and a good match between design and the child’s purpose in the play episode. Contrary to expectations raised by the popular media, there is evidence that digital play does not dominate the lives of children under the age of eight. Research suggests that digital technologies and playthings are just one part of the complex and contingent socio-cultural environment in which children live and learn. The studies drawn on in this chapter were not designed to provide answers to the questions about potential harm or benefits that bedevil the media debate about young children’s use of digital technologies. The focus here has been on understanding the ways in which children engage with digital technologies and playthings. Nevertheless, the findings about the influence of children’s preferences and family life and practices on their digital play throw doubt on claims that such play has a universal impact for good or ill. Children’s choices, the options provided and encouraged by their families and the presence or absence of a supportive adult all make a difference to what is played.

REFERENCES Alliance for Childhood (2004) Tech Tonic: Towards a New Literacy of Technology. College Park, MD: Alliance for Childhood. American Academy of Pediatrics Council on Communications and Media (2011) ‘Media Use by Children Younger than 2 Years Old’, Pediatrics, 128, 5: 1040–45. Bergen, D., Hutchinson, K., Nolan, J.T. and Weber, D. (2010) ‘Effects of Infant–parent Play with a Technology-enhanced Toy: Affordance-related Actions and Communicative Interactions’, Journal of Research in Childhood Education, 24, 1: 1–17. Bolstad, R. (2004) The Role and Potential of ICT in Early Childhood Education: A Review of New Zealand and International Literature. Wellington: New Zealand Council for Educational Research. Burnett, C. (2010) ‘Technology and Literacy in Early Childhood Educational Settings: A Review of Research’, Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 10, 3: 247–70.

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Carr, M. (2000) ‘Technological Affordance, Social Practice and Learning Narratives in an Early Childhood Setting’, International Journal of Technology and Design Education, 10: 61–79. Couse, L.J. and Chen, D.W. (2010) ‘A Tablet Computer for Young Children? Exploring Its Viability for Early Childhood Education’, Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 43, 1: 75–98. Cuban, L. (2001) Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Edwards, S. (2011) ‘Lessons from “A Really Useful Engine”™: Using Thomas the Tank Engine™ to Examine the Relationship Between Play as a Leading Activity, Imagination and Reality in Children’s Contemporary Play Worlds’, Cambridge Journal of Education, 41, 2: 195–210. Glenn, N., Knight, C., Holt, N. and Spence, J. (2013) ‘Meanings of Play Among Children’, Childhood, 20, 2: 185–99. Haugland, S. (2000) ‘Early Childhood Classrooms in the 21st Century: Using Computers to Maximise Learning’, Young Children, 55, 1: 15–30. Hedegaard, M. (2012) ‘Analyzing Children’s Learning and Development in Everyday Settings from a Cultural-Historical Wholeness Approach’, Mind, Culture and Activity, 19: 127–38. Howard-Jones, P. (2011) The Impact of Digital Technologies on Human Wellbeing: Evidence from the Sciences of Mind and Brain. Oxford: Nominet Trust. Kalaš, I. (2010) Recognizing the Potential of ICT in Early Childhood Education. Moscow: UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education. Learning and Teaching Scotland (2003) Early Learning Forward Thinking: The Policy Framework for ICT in Early Years. Glasgow: Learning and Teaching Scotland. Lenz Taguchi, H. (2010) Going Beyond the Theory/ Practice Divide in Early Childhood Education. Abingdon: Routledge. Ljung-Djärf, A. (2008) ‘The Owner, the Participant and the Spectator: Positions and Positioning in Peer Activity Around the Computer in Pre-school’, Early Years: An International Journal of Research and Development, 28, 1: 61–72. Ljung-Djärf, A., Åberg-Bengtsson, L. and Ottosson, T. (2005) ‘Ways of Relating to Computer Use in Preschool Activity’, International Journal of Early Years Education, 13, 1: 29–31. Marsh, J. (2004) ‘The Techno-literacy Practices of Young Children’, Journal of Early Childhood Research, 2, 1: 51–66.

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Marsh, J. (2010) ‘Young Children’s Play in Online Virtual Worlds’, Journal of Early Childhood Research, 8, 1: 23–39. McPake, J., Plowman, L. and Stephen, C. (2013) ‘Preschool Children Creating and Communicating with Digital Technologies in the Home’, British Journal of Educational Technology. (2nd ed. 1st edn, 2012.) 44, 3: 421–31. National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) (2012) ‘Technology and Interactive Media as Tools in Early Childhood Programs Serving Children from Birth through Age 8’. Joint position statement of the NAEYC, Washingdon DC, and the Fred Rogers Centre for Early Learning and Children’s Media, Latrobe, PA. Oakes, J. (2009) ‘The Effect of Media on Children: A Methodological Assessment from a Social Epidemiologist’, American Behavioral Scientist, 52, 8: 1136–51. Palmer, S. (2006) Toxic Childhood: How the Modern World is Damaging Our Children and What We Can Do About It. London: Orion. Parette, H.P., Quesenberry, A.C. and Blum, C. (2010) ‘Missing the Boat with Technology Usage in Early Childhood Settings: A 21st Century View of Developmentally Appropriate Practice’, Early Childhood Education Journal, 33: 335–43. Prensky, M. (2001) ‘Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants’, On the Horizon, 9, 5: 1–6. Plowman, L. and Stephen, C. (2005) ‘Children, Play and Computers in Pre-school Education’, British Journal of Educational Technology, 36, 2: 145–58. Plowman, L., Stephen, C. and McPake, J. (2010) Growing Up With Technology: Young Children Learning in a Digital World. Abingdon: Routledge. Plowman, L., Stevenson, O., Stephen, C. and McPake, J. (2012) ‘Preschool Children’s Learning with Technology at Home’, Computers and Education, 59, 1: 30–7. Rideout, V. (2011) Zero to Eight: Children’s Media Use in America. San Francisco, CA: Common Sense Media. Rogoff, B. (2003) The Cultural Nature of Human Development. New York: Oxford University Press. Selwyn, N. (2011) Schools and Schooling in the Digital Age. Abingdon: Routledge. Stephen, C. (2011) ‘Playing and Learning with Technologies’, Research Briefing Two for Digital Childhoods, Scottish Universities Insight Institute (www.strath.ac.uk/media/faculties/hass/research/digitalchildhoods/Digital_Childhoods_Research_Briefing_2. pdf). Stephen, C. and Plowman, L. (2003) ICT in Pre-School: a ‘Benign Addition’? Dundee: Learning and Teaching Scotland.

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Stephen, C. and Plowman, L. (2008) ‘Enhancing Learning with ICT in Preschool’, Early Child Development and Care, 178, 6: 637–54. Stephen, C., McPake, J., Plowman, L. and Berch-Heyman, S. (2008) ‘Learning from the Children: Exploring Preschool Children’s Encounters with ICT at Home’, Journal of Early Childhood Research, 6, 2: 99–117. Stephen, C., Stevenson, O. and Adey, C. (2013) ‘Young Children Engaging with Technologies at Home: The Influence of Family Context’, Journal of Early Childhood Research, 11, 2: 149–64. Vandewater, E.A. and Lee, S-J. (2009) ‘Measuring Children’s Media Use in the Digital Age: Issues and Challenges’, American Behavioral Scientist, 52, 8: 1152–76. Vandewater, E.A., Rideout, V.J., Wartella, E.A., Huang, X., Lee, J.H. and Shim, M. (2007) ‘Digital Childhood: Electronic Media and Technology Use Among Infants, Toddlers, and Preschoolers’, Pediatrics, 119, 5: 1006–15.

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Vangsnes, V., Økland, N.T.G. and Krumsvik, R. (2012) ‘Computer Games In Pre-school Settings: Didactical Challenges when Commercial Computer Games are Implemented in Kindergartens’, Computers and Education, 58: 1138–48. Verenikina, I., Herrington, J., Peterson, R. and Mantei, J. (2010) ‘Computers and Play in Early Childhood: Affordances and Limitations’, Journal of Interactive Learning Research, 21, 1: 139–59. Vygotsky, L.S. (1978) Mind in Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Yelland, N. (2008) ‘Curriculum, Pedagogies and Practice with ICT’, in N. Yelland (ed.), Critical Issues in Early Childhood Education. Maidenhead: Open University Press. pp. 224–42. Zevenbergen, R. (2007) ‘Digital Natives Come to Preschool: Implications for Early Childhood Practice’, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 8, 1: 19–29.

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28 Play in Peer Cultures Annica Löfdahl

INTRODUCTION

PEER CULTURE

When small children spend longer periods of time together in institutions such as school or preschool, they develop their own peer cultures. The American sociologist William Corsaro’s (1985, 2005) concept of peer culture has been widely used within early childhood research in recent decades to describe children’s perspective on, and interpretations of, the culture they are part of, as well as to focus on how children deal with issues of great importance in their lives and their own development. Play is considered to be one of the most important activities within which to study peer cultures, as its performative nature tends to bring the topics of children’s peer culture to the surface. Peers in this sense are children who meet in the specific environments of preschool settings and spend time together on a daily basis over a longer period – sometimes spending several years in the same preschool peer group.

Peer culture is a theoretical concept. As such it can be helpful in describing and understanding what happens when children are together in preschool. Corsaro himself defined peer culture as ‘a stable set of activities or routines, artefacts, values, and concerns that kids produce and share in interaction with each other’ (2005: 110). It means that the processes through which norms, attitudes and values are expressed in play and other activities are similar within one group or subgroup of children in the same preschool, although they vary over time and culture. In order to fully understand the value of and use of peer culture as a theoretical concept, we need to know something about its background. When developing the concept in the 1970s Corsaro had to engage with dominant theories of child development focusing on the individual child, and also with traditional understandings of socialization. These

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included both deterministic models, which described children as passive, and constructivist models, which considered the child’s own solitary activities as the basis for development and learning. Peer culture, as Corsaro argues, offers an alternative to these theories by avoiding individualistic explanations and paying attention to collective actions and social structures. Central aspects within the theory are therefore children’s collective agency; their ability to interpret and reproduce the norms and values in their surroundings; and how they apply their common ideas to the content of their play, in the social structure of the group and in power situations. Corsaro describes these strategies as interpretive reproduction and secondary adjustments.

Interpretive Reproduction Corsaro applies the term interpretive reproduction to the innovative and creative aspects of children’s participation in society. Within their peer cultures children learn to interpret and understand the surrounding culture – that is, the events, norms and values they encounter through adults’ and other children’s actions. It means that children ‘download’ and interpret and reproduce the culture that surrounds them, in the preschool, at home and in society at large, in order to make it intelligible and manageable. Children appropriate what adults say and do, not outright, but as reconstructed content in their own activities. For example, power relations are a central feature of children’s experiences, which they try to use themselves in their play, where they perform the role of adults controlling children and where they exaggerate and make fun of adult roles. In their play they experiment with more or less forbidden actions such as being mean and rowdy, but also with approved roles such as being obedient, eating food properly and being quiet and nice children. Reproduction and production are key terms for describing how children’s peer

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cultures are initiated and maintained, and how their actions and interactions are related to the local context and to the common history of the group. Corsaro developed the concept of interpretive reproduction to understand how children interpret and reinterpret (reproduce) the cultural and social events and phenomena of the surrounding culture, and how these events and phenomena are integrated into and made intelligible ​​ (produced) in their peer cultures. Interpretive reproduction is thus an expression of children’s active participation in a continuous process in which culturally mediated knowledge, norms and values ​​must be understood anew. Corsaro views children as active participants in society rather than as passive novices in the way they acquire information from the adult world and use this in a creative and interpretive process. This means that each new generation seeks to create meaning from such information, ​​in relation to its own life and circumstances. For children in preschool, this includes understanding their position as children relative to adults, and understanding what it means to live and interact with other children at the preschool. But it is also about understanding the meanings of cultural practices and routine events inside and outside the preschool. In this way, interpretive reproduction offers a dynamic description of socialization that describes a more reciprocal relationship between the growing child and its environment than a traditional understanding, in which children passively internalize social norms and values. Corsaro emphasizes that, through participation in peer culture, children are involved in cultural production as well as transformation. Children’s peer cultures are thereby a context for children’s changing and growing understanding of the community; hence the importance of understanding their experiences, meanings and actions, which indicate children’s potential ability to contribute to a better and changed society, both here and now and in the future.

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Secondary Adjustments A further feature of children’s peer cultures is ‘secondary adjustments’, a concept originally introduced by the American social psychologist Erving Goffman in his theories about how the inmates of mental hospitals found ways to evade the rules they were required to follow. Corsaro uses this term to describe children’s collective actions as a means to evade adults’ rules in the preschool, such as avoiding tidying up, avoiding participating in common events or bringing ‘forbidden’ toys to the preschool. While primary adjustments signify that children are doing as they are told (reading and adapting), secondary adjustments enable them to appear to comply while collectively resisting the imposition of adult cultural rules and norms. Such adjustment arises especially in institutional contexts, such as preschools. Secondary adjustments include children’s strategies for ignoring and excluding other children from their play, in defiance of the institutional, and adult-initiated, rules that say ‘anyone can join’.

Developing Concepts In his initial studies of friendship and peer relations Corsaro (1985) showed that peer cultures create their own social structures and hierarchies which contribute to and shape negotiations among children. Language and cultural routines are important aspects of children’s peer cultures. Language is important because it is a symbolic system that encodes local, social and cultural structures and cultural routines because of their habitual taken-for-granted character, which provides children with a secure and shared understanding of belonging to a specific social group. As such, cultural routines provide a framework for producing, displaying and interpreting a wide range of sociocultural knowledge. Corsaro developed his theories during ethnographic studies among Italian and North American preschool children and their

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specific cultures. For example he noticed that the Italian children frequently made up stories about ‘la Strega’, a powerful and threatening witch who ‘appeared’ around Christmas in the children’s homes. Corsaro explains that such fascinating and threatening figures are appropriated from routines and rituals in the family and are reproduced as part of the routines in these children’s peer culture. He also gives detailed descriptions of children’s talk in the peer group. ‘Discussione’ are highly dramatic and public discussions that children experience in their families and reproduce in negotiations and disputes with peers. These kinds of disputes were specific to the cultural context of the Italian children and were not found in similar North American contexts. Corsaro’s comparative analyses captured the complex relationships in peer culture and enabled him to describe friendship as a reflection of values and practices in local communities and cultures (Corsaro, 1985).

RESEARCH ON CONTEMPORARY PEER CULTURE AND PLAY Recent studies of young children’s peer cultures reveal that researchers have adopted and applied the concept of peer culture in different ways. Peer culture is used both as an empirical concept, such as a group of children being studied, and as a theoretical and analytical concept, used to identify children’s negotiations and agency. Studies discussed here focus on children’s joint social activities, on the meaning of such activities and on the outcomes and implications for practice which are reported. Three broad themes prevail in recent research: learning, because it is connected to general curricular goals emphasizing the relation between play and learning; gender, because such aspects are a frequent topic in children’s play; and everyday life, which remains the most common topic in peer culture studies. The Nordic countries dominate the research on children’s peer cultures, which

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may be due to a strong focus on the importance of children’s perspectives in policy documents as well as in the strong base of children’s rights in the region. In addition, the fact that the youngest children (one–three years old) typically attend preschool in these countries contributes to the need to understand how children’s play and peer relationships develop. The review of studies also shows a preponderance of ethnographic approaches, partly as follow-up studies to Corsaro’s early work and partly from a desire on the part of researchers to make children’s own perspectives visible.

Learning Aspects Several authors have focused on the influence of peer play interactions on children’s readiness to learn, including where differences in class, race and family life are present (Bulotsky-Shearer et al., 2011; Lareau, 2011). One study (Bulotsky-Shearer et al., 2011) emphasizes the positive influences of interactive peer play for African American preschool children from low-income households attending a Head Start programme. These authors call for evidence-based interventions designed to foster interactive peer play for this population, and for other minority ethnic children, with the aim of diminishing differences in learning outcomes between Anglo-American children and children from other backgrounds. These arguments can be critiqued as deriving from a notion of the ‘becoming’ child rather than the ‘being’ child, but they do place a positive value on letting children play and act together, rather than focusing on individual learning. The researchers advise that the field must consider the variability among cultural groups, but also the substantial variability within groups of culturally diverse children, in order to fully understand the nature and function of children’s peer play. Where previous overviews of peer play show that children from low-income groups are less represented in research, Bulotsky-Shearer et al. (2011) instead plead for more studies on specific

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cultural groups, to inform culturally valid interaction practices built on peer play. Chen and French (2008) suggest how cultural factors influence children’s social competence and peer relations and stress the implications of the cultural changes occurring in many societies today for children’s socialization and social development. Studies on play and learning have also focused more explicitly on children’s learning in specific topics such as literacy, mathematics and science. Flottorp (2010) examines mathematical meaning making as part of three–five-yearold children’s everyday play. The children were supported with toys (pots and cups) of different sizes and colours. Through analyses of their verbal and non-verbal forms of expression of mathematical order and structure she concludes that this specific aspect of learning is closely interwoven with the context and children’s friendships. The children did not use explicitly mathematical expressions; rather they relied on their common way of interacting in their cultural routines, playing ‘cooking in the sandbox’, though Flottorp argues that making use of the specific toys triggered their negotiations about – and made them develop their own – mathematical expressions, which may be seen as part of their specific peer culture. Peer play in such contexts is considered to be a part of curricula for early childhood education, and is directed at children’s future learning outcomes. A significant trend in current European early childhood curricula is a focus on individual children’s learning processes in relation to language, mathematics and sciences. In Sweden, for example, the curriculum for preschool stresses children’s ability to learn through play, and the individual child is not formally assessed in terms of grades and evaluation. Nevertheless, an evaluation ten years after the implementation of the curriculum (Skolverket, 2008) was heavily concerned with the recent focus on the individual child, which suggests that the use of play in preschool is changing from being seen as a resource for children’s joint learning towards the individual child’s learning and ‘becoming adult’.

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Other studies stress teachers’ awareness of children’s peer cultures and their meaning for children ‘here and now’, and advocate training early childhood educators to promote the socio-emotional competence of toddlers and preschool children (Rosenthal and Gatt, 2010). Both Rubin et al. (2011) and Ladd (2005) argue that peer culture and participation in peer groups promote children’s health and development.

Gender Aspects Several research studies identify the importance of gender in the peer cultures of preschool (and school-) children. In the USA, Madrid and Kantor (2009) show how young girls construct what the authors call emotional themes, which means acting properly and in accordance with the existing group harmony in their peer culture play. The girls in their study used the peer culture and emotional themes to resolve conflicts and to appropriate society’s emotional display rules. From the perspective of interpretive reproduction, analyses of the girls’ talk during a recurring daily routine – when the girls were playing ‘kitties’ – revealed how the girls made use of a societal female code in their talk, but also how they used their female kitty roles to conduct ‘borderwork’ between themselves and boys, insisting that boys could not be ‘kitties’, only ‘dogs!’ The girls used their position of powerless kitties against the boys as strategies to enter the boys’ play and even control it by directing what, when and how the kitties were captured and saved by the dogs (the boys). The study exemplifies how societal gender structures are interpreted and dealt with among a group of children, showing that gendered structures may be strengthened rather than transformed by children’s activities within their peer culture. By contrast Hellman (2010) demonstrates how children in their play negotiate, interpret and question gender stereotypes together in preschool. In Hellman’s study children were not so much concerned about whether a boy

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or girl could be part of a specific gendered play than whether they were using appropriate signifiers – whether or not Batman really could be pink – and in what places, related to the normative gaze, they were able to accentuate specific gender or sex characteristics in their activities or if they had to create ‘secret’ spaces invisible to teachers and other children. In that way the children were constructing common norms and values within their peer culture that also restricted or made possible certain play in certain gendered spaces, allowing them to question structural norms and enable changes. In a study of children’s play in natural spaces, Änggård (2011) identified which affordances the environment provided in terms of places and play material and which gender positions were available in different forms of play. For example, in family play Änggård noted that the roles allowed gender transgressions and thus gave all children opportunities to test positions connected to the opposite gender. The natural environment invited the boys to join family play as they could pretend to fish and cook over an open fire, actions associated with masculinity. The study illustrates how values connected to domestic arenas are gendered and, through interpretive reproduction, become a part of the children’s peer culture and play. The complexity of what children interpret and reproduce in their play is discussed by Wohlwend (2012). Through studies of children’s play with Disney princess dolls in preschool, Wohlwend argues that gender identities developed through play with transmedia texts interact with peer cultures in preschool. She analysed drawings and negotiations and disputes in play situations between two five-year-old boys who played with dolls loaded with meaning from a specific media text. Her analysis shows that the children’s norms and attitudes appropriated from the media dolls blurred with previous negotiated meanings of gender in their play. The boys were also blending the dolls’ play with elements and characters from other films and TV series that made them renegotiate the

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gender identities offered by the dolls. Wohlwend’s results indicate how children’s contemporary peer cultures are influenced by the complex gender messages designed into their favourite media, which children may take up, resist or improvise on.

Everyday Life Aspects Studies of children’s everyday life in preschool are the most common approach to describing children’s strategies for influencing, defending and constructing the social order in school and preschool. Markström and Halldén (2009) use peer culture, among other approaches, as a theoretical tool to explore children’s strategies for agency in preschool. Analyses of children’s negotiations during their everyday life in preschool reveal how children manage their collective regulation and how they – together and with teachers – negotiate their participation in collective activities. These include children’s strategies for defending their peer culture against the teacher’s intentions, including temporal and spatial restrictions. For example, children use strategies of silence and avoidance such as not listening, not answering or going away. Through negotiations with the teachers children make use of their knowledge of collective norms and routines and thereby, through their joint interactions, contribute to changes in the social order of the institution. An inherent tension exists between free play and the routinized and collective activities in the preschool, and children are active in playing at the border, as if the institution is the children’s place. Markström and Halldén (2009) stress children’s agency in influencing and shaping their everyday life. Another study describes young school children (aged six to seven years) as active agents in the collaborative construction and appropriation of school rules (Martin and Evaldsson, 2012). The researchers examine the ways in which children participate in processes of changing their understanding of school rules in educational activities within a

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Reggio Emilia classroom, with its specific educational context. The way children display their understandings is understood as their creative utilization and transformation of cultural experiences, by means of collective agency. Data in this study consist of chronological sequences of children’s participation in a project about school rules. Analysing the data in this way enabled the researchers to describe the previously shared understanding as well as the ongoing learning. Children’s changed understanding of the rules shows how the content in the peer culture changed over time. The children, through talk and actions attending to bodily and material resources, made sense of and collectively constructed the school rules in arguing for, negotiating and enacting the local relevance of the rules. Martin and Evaldsson stress the meaning of the specific educational practice: It is true to say that the Reggio Emilia pedagogical practice that permeates the school in this study provides the children with opportunities to plan, enact, and probe the practical and future consequences of more abstract school rules as part of collective processes for making sense of peer play interactions and hypothetical scenes of action (2012: 70).

Both these studies show children interpreting and reproducing the surrounding culture; although they are afforded different opportunities and spaces for their activities, they seem to negotiate on the collective rules in order to make sense of the preschool/school setting. Martin and Evaldsson indicate the importance of arranging a setting that takes account of peer interactions in supporting children’s development. Studies of everyday life in preschool have recently begun to include the youngest children (aged from one to three years), showing how toddlers engage in peer play situations and participate in the intersubjective life in preschool. Several research projects in the Nordic countries have focused on toddlers’ interactions or on their use of preschool as a cultural and culture-generating forum (Johansson and

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Emilson, 2010). Ødegaard (2006) analyses toddler-initiated co-narratives during meal times in preschool, a daily routine in children’s everyday life, and shows how even small children try to come to grips with the problems they encounter and respond to troublesome issues by showing anger, fear, loss and desire. Ødegaard argues that these co-narratives can be seen as children’s efforts to make meaning and take control of these important themes, while also learning and trying cultural patterns for the expression and enactment of emotions. For example, when the children talk about the ‘Gloomy Santa Claus’, they are referring to a scary event from home. With scaffolding from their teacher, the group of children were able to develop the theme and simultaneously the teacher could learn something about the children’s understandings and experiences of Santa Claus. Like the children in Corsaro’s studies, these very young children show collective agency as they participate in the preschool culture as well as – through their play and routine situations – making changes of importance for their daily life. A further important aspect of the everyday life of young children is transitions. Studies of the transition between preschool and school demonstrate that children’s agency must be taken into account when planning for transition activities (Lash, 2008; Einarsdottir, 2011). Lash followed a morning group of five–six-year-old preschoolers who would be starting school in a few months. She describes a dynamic and complex flow of activities in the classroom, showing that the give-and-take of relationships is part of the agency children make use of when developing a peer culture as one aspect of community. In this study, the teacher often referred to the group that would come to the classroom in the afternoon as if they were one common group, soon to be starting school together, although they had not yet met. The ‘morning’ children talked about and imagined and interpreted how the ‘afternoon group’ would be and act. Lash’s analyses show how the children, through the power of their peer culture, entered into a competition

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with the afternoon class. The children developed themes in their play actions such as protecting play materials and blaming children from the afternoon class as soon as something went wrong. In this respect secondary adjustments were directed towards the afternoon class when, for example, toys were hidden and placed somewhere else during clean-up time, in order not to be found by the other children. Over time the children developed a common view of the afternoon children (they were not as nice as the morning class), which they could use to protect their own play spaces and materials. In this case the children’s peer culture worked in opposition to the teacher’s promoted classroom community and her efforts for a smooth transition into school, still showing the need for the children to be able to share and develop common values and norms as ‘becoming’ schoolchildren. A related study (Bateman, 2012) indicates how four-year-old children in a new primary school class in Wales used their behaviour to initiate and maintain social organization. Bateman anticipated that the new school context would present an opportunity for the children to display social organization strategies to configure new social relationships and thereby provide good opportunities to observe how children co-constructed their new social worlds. Her study demonstrates that the children made verbal references to their membership of a dyad or group by using the collective pro-terms ‘we’ and ‘us’ as a resource. According to Bateman, ‘The children used these collective pro-terms to verbally affiliate themselves with another person in order to make it observable that such an affiliation, or friendship, existed’ (2012: 176). Bateman’s study demonstrates how children’s peer culture develops and holds aspects of inclusion and exclusion, raising a question for early childhood teachers: ‘What about the children who are excluded in the process?’ (2012: 177). When Danby et al. (2012) studied Australian children’s strategies for friendship when starting school, they found rich descriptions and

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accounts of how the children initiated and built friendships. Data consist of group talks with children during their first weeks in school and show that making friends requires complex understandings of social knowledge and interactions, built on the children’s own knowledge from their peer culture rather than on adult-initiated strategies. As an example of interpretive reproduction, the researchers argue that the children have experiences and understandings derived from participating in adult social worlds, but they make them their own in how they enact them. Such studies reveal the importance of teachers providing opportunities for unstructured activity and periods of time for children to have both the physical and the social space required to build and maintain peer group culture. In addition they need to be aware that, when exposed to new situations, children construct their friendship groups and dyads in full knowledge of ‘who can be played with and who cannot’, while including some children and excluding others.

FUTURE RESEARCH ON PEER CULTURE, METHODS AND THEORIES As the previous section indicates, research in this field has traditionally employed ethnographic approaches, where naturalistic studies describe ‘what children actually are doing’. Those days might have passed when long-term or large-scale ethnographic studies were economically possible, and reduced funding has led to small-scale ethnography where a few months are spent in the field. The limited time spent in the field requires a more explicit focus on certain topics to study, such as children’s numeracy activities, or theoretically sampled group interviews and discussions during school lessons. Formal and informal talks with children, in combination with classroom observations and traditional field notes, seem to be the most common ways to explore children’s perspectives. Video-based observations are less commonly used, perhaps as a result of ethical and other concerns about their use.

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In recognition of the increasing complexity of contemporary contexts, researchers have increasingly drawn on more complex theoretical combinations or models to be able to describe children’s activities. For example, combinations of conversation analysis, gender theories and concepts from childhood sociology serve to improve – or even replace – the theoretical concept within the theory of peer culture when children’s joint activities are to be described. Corsaro’s significant step was to focus on children’s collective agency rather than, as in traditional developmental psychology, on the individual child. Today it is a widely accepted view that children learn together and that peer interactions and play are of great importance also in children’s individual learning and development. Maybe the concept of ‘peer culture’ has become so familiar that it is used as a starting point, making peer cultures exist as an empirical rather than a theoretical ground.

EXTENDING THE CONCEPT OF PEER CULTURE This section offers recent examples of research on children’s peer culture in preschool conducted by Löfdahl and colleagues. Based on the theoretical concept of peer culture, the project ‘Stability and Change in Social Knowledge Domains among Children in Preschool’ was developed, which aimed to identify how children in preschool jointly construct knowledge about their social life there and how this knowledge is utilized, is developed and changes over time. Some findings from these studies (e.g. Löfdahl and Hägglund, 2006, 2007, 2012) are discussed below. The project took data from ethnographic studies over a period of two years in two ordinary Swedish preschools, and additional shorter studies. Given our globalized world, in which it is no longer enough to focus only on one aspect of children and childhood, the theoretical model of ‘social knowledge domains’, based on several integrated

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theoretical perspectives, was developed. This model drew on theoretical models of children and childhood derived from childhood sociology, on children’s geography, on concepts of peer cultures and interpretive reproduction and on social representation theory. These models show that social knowledge domains hold information about children’s positions, their places and their values and attitudes in the research settings. They also consider structural and agency perspectives and the dialectics in between them. In this project, preschool children’s social representations of belonging were studied as social constructions of how to explain and handle social and cultural diversity in shared daily life at preschool. We regarded the children’s social representations of belonging as a locally interpreted version of what may be identified as cultural views of children and childhood. From this vantage point, age, gender and ethnicity are viewed as general descriptors for diversity that are likely to be objects for constructions of locally decided interpretations among children.

Social Inequalities and Social Order Some of the social knowledge domains we identified contained rules for belonging that were based on inequalities. It was obvious that age and, to a certain extent, cultural background were important markers of difference. The meaning of age is very present in the everyday life of the preschool, for example through documentation and celebration of birthdays and through age grouping for various activities. Besides, access to certain spaces and material is dependent on children’s age. When social knowledge domains contained conditions for access and belonging, criteria related to age were quite common. Age, as carrying both limits and possibilities, was basic knowledge that was evident in children’s shared constructions of social consequences of age. It was activated for example when a situation appeared threatening, such as when children wanted to

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get rid of ‘toddlers’ in their game or gain access to physical and social spaces. What is interesting is that age was hardly ever used as a marker of friendship, but, rather, to mark power and social positioning. Being older, having a birthday and specifying one’s age worked as structural markers and were often used in negotiations about access and content in play. Age was found to be frequently used as a recourse in negotiations in newly established groups, where the social order was not yet fixed. After a while, when the social hierarchy in the peer group was established, it no longer seemed necessary to make clear which norms and values were linked to age. Social knowledge domains for situations and places where age worked as a social resource had been established in the children’s everyday life and were no longer in need of negotiation. In one part of the project, the multicultural preschool setting and possible social know­ ledge domains that children construct there were a focus of specific attention. Our analyses challenge the idea about the Swedish preschool as a cultural meeting place where children are able to develop their understanding of other cultures in a positive manner. The data indicate that the social meaning of cultural differences, in a similar way to age, is integrated into children’s shared constructions of social belonging and power. This might contribute to the formation of an everyday preschool reality that does not always appear as positive. From the perspective of the preschool, diversity includes both maintaining and defusing differences. School practices designed to ensure equal rights to participation, and an ethos that implies peers, places and props are supposed to suit everyone, may conflict with other practices which regularly separate individual children from other activities, such as segregated mother-tongue language training. In this setting, the appearance in the classroom of the mother-tongue language teacher could be seen as a symbol of how ‘good diversity’ was brought to a head. In such situations, individual children’s

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linguistic and cultural differences (those who required additional language support) were made visible, which also seemed to challenge agreed social positions in the peer group and to invite efforts to change. This seemed to demonstrate that the children had a complicated knowledge mission to deal with when jointly trying to understand the various meanings of cultural differences and their social value in this particular preschool.

The Social Occupation of Spaces One part of the project focused particularly on children’s shared knowledge about place and the way they construct meaning in places. The analysis showed that children’s social knowledge domains might be tied to certain places in the preschool and that their meaning does not always correspond to the institutional or pedagogical function of the place. For instance, children made use of the art studio in a totally different way from the artistic activities it was meant for. The art studio had a special meaning in the setting due to its strategic placing. From here, the children could supervise the whole setting and even watch over parents’ arrivals to fetch their children. The art studio functioned as a neutral room where no one had the right to regulate access, although negotiations were continuously carried out about other activities and places in the setting. This meant that children entered the art studio to ‘present themselves’ in the mornings as well as between other activities, when play situations no longer were able to be maintained or when they wished to watch over or be in control of their peers. Any artistic activities were mostly secondary, while the main activities concerned discussions about positioning and participation, although often embedded in children’s comments about ‘nice’ or ‘ugly’ paintings. In this way, children’s new constructions of the function of the studio came to influence the selection of possible actions in the art studio. This is just one example of children’s use of their collective agency in what we might describe as the ‘social

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occupation’ of spaces in the preschool. The children took possession of a room and gave it a new function, which was different from the intended one.

AN INTEGRATED CONCEPT OF PEER CULTURE Results from our own studies, and conclusions drawn from earlier ones, show that the concept of peer culture needs to be combined with other theoretical and analytical tools to provide a more detailed picture of peer cultures in today’s complex society. By integrating the concept of peer culture into several related theories in our project we were able to gain richer insights into the children’s interpretive reproduction. The model of children’s social knowledge domains not only placed focus on the children and their perspective but also provided us with sophisticated analytical tools to describe and understand children’s peer culture in a broad societal context. We were able to take advantage of the dialectic between structural perspectives in the preschool, set up by the teachers and the curriculum, and the agency perspectives acted out by the children. We were able to regard places in preschool as something more than just a place to play in, but also a construction of the children’s own geography, as well as to relate children’s positions within preschool to wider societal ideas on children and childhood. Frequently our results showed that the children were occupying the preschool social spaces, loading them with their own meanings and struggling to create an understanding in their everyday lives, from their own perspective – not free from how the teachers planned the preschool activities but, rather, as interpreted and reproduced contents in the children’s peer cultures.

CONCLUSION The research discussed in this chapter has little to report on the adults in the preschool or school. We noticed in our project, however,

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that the teachers often turned out to be standing in the background rather than actively engaged together with the children in their activities. We also found differences, on the one hand, in the content of children’s peer culture and actions and, on the other, in the teachers’ actions and didactic agenda. It was conspicuous that children on a daily basis were involved in actions of social segregation while the adults similarly formulated rules about everyone’s right to belong, prompting the question: was there ever any integration between the strict rules of exclusion within the peer group and the caring actions from the teachers? It might be that children’s peer cultures contain normative aspects about how social differences, social values and social segregation are to be handled while adults are present in the background and act when someone feels hurt or harmed. Perhaps this is a condition of the institutionalized childhood offered by the Swedish (and most European) preschool, with its caring and learning perspectives. Finally, the emphasis on the importance of teachers’ awareness about children’s peer cultures, and the important contributions to the field of knowledge about children’s peer culture, their development and learning, must be taken into consideration both in the development of preschool practice and in further research on peer culture. Further, theoretical development in relation to the concept of peer culture must go on; combinations from new trends in child development must be reflected on when using the theory in future research.

REFERENCES Änggård, E. (2011) ‘Children’s gendered and non-gendered play in natural spaces’, Children, Youth and Environment, 21(2): 5–33. Bateman, A. (2012) ‘Forging friendships: The use of collective pro-terms by pre-school children’, Discourse Studies, 14(2): 165–80. Bulotsky-Shearer, R. J., Manz, P. H., Mendez, J. L., McWayne, C. M., Sekino, Y. and Fantuzzo, J. W.

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(2011) ‘Peer play interactions and readiness to learn: A protective influence for African American preschool children from low-income households’, Child Development Perspectives, 6(3): 225–31. Chen, X. and French, D. (2008) ‘Children’s social competence in cultural context’, Annual Review of Psychology, 59: 591–616. Corsaro, W. (1985) Friendship and Peer Culture in the Early Years. Norwood, NJ: Able Publishing. Corsaro, W. (2005) The Sociology of Childhood. (2nd ed.) Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. Danby, S. J., Thompson, C., Theobald, M. A. and Thorpe, K. J. (2012) ‘Children’s strategies for making friends when starting school’, Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, 37(2): 63–71. Einarsdottir, J. (2011) ‘Icelandic children’s early education transition experiences’, Early Education and Development, 22(5): 737–56. Flottorp, V. (2010) ‘Matematisk meningsskaping i barns lek’ [Mathematical meaning making in children’s play? Verbal and non-verbal forms of expressions], Nordic Early Childhood Education Research, 3(3): 95–104. Hellman, A. (2010) ‘Kan Batman vara rosa? Förhandlingar om pojkighet och normalitet på en förskola’. [Have you ever seen a pink Batman? Negotiating boyishness and normality at preschool]. Dissertation Doctoral, University, Gothenburg, Sweden. Johansson, E., and Emilson, A. (2010) ‘Toddlers’ life in Swedish preschool’, International Journal of Early Childhood, 42(2): 165–79. Ladd, G. W. (2005) Children’s Peer Relations and Social Competence: A Century of Progress. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Lareau, A. (2011) Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, with an Update a Decade Later. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Lash, M. (2008) ‘Classroom community and peer culture in kindergarten’, Early Childhood Education Journal, 36: 33–8. Löfdahl, A. and Hägglund, S. (2006) ‘Power and participation: Social representations among children in pre-school’, Social Psychology of Education, 9(2): 179–94. Löfdahl, A. and Hägglund, S. (2007) ‘Spaces of participation in pre-school: Arenas for establishing power orders?’, Children and Society, 21: 328–38. Löfdahl, A. and Hägglund, S. (2012) ‘Diversity in preschool: Defusing and maintaining differences’, Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, 37(1): 119–26. Madrid, S. and Kantor, R. (2009) ‘Being kitties in a preschool classroom: Maintaining group harmony

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and acting proper in a female peer-culture play routine’, Ethnography and Education, 4(2): 229–47. Markström, A.-M. and Halldén, G. (2009) ‘Children’s strategies for agency in preschool’, Children and Society, 23(2): 112–22. Martin, C. and Evaldsson, A.-C. (2012) ‘Affordances for participation: Children’s appropriation of rules in a Reggio Emilia school’, Mind, Culture, and Activity, 19(1): 51–74. Ødegaard, E. Eriksen (2006) ‘What’s worth talking about? Meaning-making in toddler-initiated conarratives in preschool’, Early Years: An International Journal of Research and Development, 26(1): 79–92. Rosenthal, M. and Gatt, L. (2010) ‘“Learning to Live Together”: Training early childhood educators to

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promote socio-emotional competence of toddlers and pre-school children’, European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 18(3): 373–90. Rubin, K., Bukowski, M. W. and Laursen, B. (2011) Handbook of Peer Interaction, Relationships and Groups. New York: Guilford Press. Skolverket (Swedish National Agency for Education) (2008) ‘Ten years after the pre-school reform: A national evaluation of the Swedish pre-school: A Summary of Report 318: 2008’. Stockholm, Sweden: Skolverket. Wohlwend, K. E. (2012) ‘The boys who would be princesses: Playing with gender identity intertexts in Disney princess transmedia’, Gender and Education, 24(6): 593–610.

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29 The Impact of Race and Culture on Play in Early Childhood Classrooms Jennifer Keys Adair and Fabienne Doucet

INTRODUCTION One day Grace’s teacher said they would do the play Peter Pan. Grace knew who she wanted to be. When she raised her hand, Raj said, ‘You can’t be Peter—that’s a boy’s name.’ But Grace kept her hand up. ‘You can’t be Peter Pan,’ whispered Natalie. ‘He isn’t black.’ But Grace kept her hand up.

The above excerpt from the award-winning children’s fiction book Amazing Grace, by Mary Hoffman (Frances Lincoln, 2007) tells the story of a bright and bold young Black girl, brings to front-and-centre children’s production and reproduction of the social dynamics within their societies. Though the characters in this story are fictional, there is no shortage of researcher and practitioner accounts of similar exchanges in real early childhood classrooms and on real playgrounds. In this chapter, we focus specifically on play as an expression of children’s sensemaking of societal dynamics, particularly the dynamics surrounding race, ethnicity, and culture.

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Drawing from the play culture theory of Gilles Brougère (2005, 2008), we consider play as an important way for young children to develop, learn, and experiment with socially constructed ideas in the larger society around them. Our exploration of play as an interpretation of larger societal issues specifically pertains to race and culture, first from a historical perspective, and then in relation to current studies from an international body of early childhood educational research. We also explore how children's interpretations of race and culture affect what and how they play as well as how their play is interpreted. By beginning with a historical perspective on play and its connection to race and culture, we demonstrate how early childhood educational researchers have grown in their acceptance of and attention to the presence of racial and cultural dynamics in early childhood educational settings. Next, we look at current work on play as interpretations of culture and race in the larger society in a number of ways, including varying

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definitions and interpretations of play, the dangerous nature of play and how young children explore racial and cultural identities through play. Finally, we turn to future implications for play as it connects to race and culture. We are interested in how national and cultural ideas about play are changing, but not necessarily all in the same way. We will use examples from India and China to talk about how ideas about play will continue to be shaped by global early childhood movements as well as by culturally specific ideas about young children. It is our hope that these comparative perspectives on play as racially and culturally constructed might broaden scholarly conversations about play, as well as strengthen in more culturally responsive ways our advocacy for play in early childhood classrooms.

PLAY AND LARGER SOCIETY As Brougère and colleagues (Brougère, Guenif-Souilamas, and Rayna, 2008) explain, play is a way to understand how children see the larger society. Play does not represent the world but how children make sense of the world. Brougère wrote that when children play, they ‘reappropriate through their play culture whole patches of their society’s culture’ (2008: 15–16). It then follows that children’s play has a role in manifesting and interpreting the cultural and racial circumstances of the society within which it exists. Young children think and talk about racial identities from an early age, usually around three–five years old (Van Ausdale and Feagin, 2001; Ryan and Grieshaber, 2004; Park, 2011). Children notice that some groups of people seem to be more or less important than others. In countries like the United States of America (USA), Australia, and South Africa, for example, children understand that lighter skin and European features are considered more beautiful than dark skin and African features, and that White people

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are presented more frequently and often more favourably than darker-skinned people on television, in movies and in the media generally (Rizvi, 1993; Tobin, 2000; Dulin-Keita, Hannon, Fernandez and Cockerham, 2011; Shutts, Kinzler, Katz, Tredoux and Spelke, 2011). When early childhood educators assume that play is race-neutral or that play should bring people together, rather than allowing children time to interpret and act out the world as they understand it, sameness is given more emphasis than differences (Delpit, 2007). This orientation romanticizes children’s understandings of the world and insists on preserving an assumed fundamental innocence in young children’s assessments of human difference (Van Ausdale and Feagin, 2001). In writing about play in India, Roopnarine and colleagues argued, ‘Euro-American mainstream ideas about play and early childhood do not thoroughly consider the cultural imperatives and social agendas in the discussion of the implications of play in early childhood in other societies’ (1994: 10).

Historical Perspective of Play and Its Connection to Race and Culture Early childhood education has long been involved in education politics as well as in specific political battles that include cultural and racial discrimination. Historically, early childhood classrooms have been a place where discrimination and inequities can first be seen between children. Studies from Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and the USA from the 1980s through to the early 1990s increasingly paid attention to how racism and cultural discrimination worked against young children of color in schools (Delpit, 1986; Palmer, 1990; Gill, Mayor and Blair, 1992; SirajBlatchford, 1994, 1999; Black-Gutman and Hickson, 1996). Early research on young children’s first experiences with discrimination showed that play was a vehicle for them to act out and experiment with their growing

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racial understandings. Paul Connolly’s (1995, 1996) work in inner-city, multi-ethnic English primary schools, and then later (Connolly and Healy, 2004) with young children in Northern Ireland, demonstrated that play was an opportunity for children as young as three years old to reproduce the ethnic, cultural, and/or racial characteristics of their communities and to interpret the harsh cultural and racial discrimination they faced or observed. Lubeck (1985), in her classic ethnography of two preschools in the USA (one predominantly African American and the other White), argued that early education settings provide the first examples of how schools and classrooms are the product of the communities they serve and of the larger social system ‘that is premised on an unequal distribution of resources’ (1985: 146). In this study, Lubeck skillfully argues that not only were the cultural ideas and practices about educating young children different between the two environments but the ideas and practices were also different because the schools were responding to and preparing children for various kinds of acceptance in society. Racial prejudices helped shape how the African-American preschool conceptualized what was done at school, including play. The absence of such concerns also shaped the ideas and practices of the mostly White preschool. Even if schools are not actively responding to or acting upon the social disparities that exist inside and outside of preschool contexts, they still send messages to young children about their racial and cultural identities. For example, Tomlinson (1983) found that young children from marginalized communities were affected by the ‘way schools perceive and react to their racial and ethnic backgrounds’ (1983: 62). Similarly, Williams and De Gaetano’s (1984) work in US multicultural, multilingual early childhood settings argued that racism affects how young children see themselves as learners and how they understand their place in the world. Consequently, emerging studies of

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teacher and child relationships within increasingly multicultural early childhood centres began to show that White teachers often exaggerated, underestimated and over-generalized ‘ethnic minority children both in terms of policies and practice’, as Ogilvy, Boath, Cheyne, Jahoda and Schaffer found in nursery schools in Scotland (1990: 1). Biggs and Edwards (1992) similarly found that British early childhood teachers treated ethnic minority children differently from their White counterparts not just in learning tasks but in play and general interactions as well.

Discrimination and Play Many of these early studies demonstrated that playtime, whether in the classroom or on the playground, provided the time and space for children to act out the social and racial constructs of the time. For example, in Wright’s (1992) study of multiracial and multicultural primary schools in the UK, she found that White children used racist language towards the African-Caribbean children at the school when teachers were not in charge but, rather, ‘child culture’ ruled (1992: 62). ‘At playtime’, she concludes, `black children faced considerable and racist abuse from some white children within the schools’ (1992: 64). Such examples are not exclusive to the UK. For instance, in an Australian first-grade classroom Rizvi (1993) found that almost half of the children depicted robbers as Black and their victims as White during a classroom lesson and art project on crime. Early childhood studies in the USA and UK included attention to children’s play as a reflection of the larger societal racial tension, but also as an activity that could provide anti-discriminatory experiences for children (Goodman, 1964; Brown, 1998). As a result, beginning in the 1980s, early childhood scholars created anti-discriminatory programmes such as the Anti-bias Curriculum (Derman-Sparks and the ABC Task Force, 1989) and Kaleidoscope

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(De Gaetano, Williams and Volk, 1997). Both programmes aimed to help young children develop non-racist attitudes to counter strong discriminatory messages in the larger society.

Cultural Interpretations of Play This increased attention to cultural and racial diversity in early childhood also turned the field’s attention to the cultural variation in how children are educated in different communities and nations. The early twentieth century saw assertions regarding the importance and centrality of play to children’s lives, ranging from German philosopher Karl Groos’s theory of play as central to the development of life skills to British Prime Minister Lloyd George’s declaration in 1926 that ‘The right to play is a child’s first claim on the community. Play is nature’s training for life. No community can infringe that right without doing deep and enduring harm to the minds and bodies of its citizens’ (quoted in Hewes, 2007). The Declaration on the Rights of the Child (1959) asserted recreation and play as a right of childhood, a position that was later reinforced globally by the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989). But over time, comments like ‘all children play’ or ‘all children need play’ began to be questioned, because without a racial and/or cultural interpretivist lens, early childhood teachers, administrators and policymakers too easily assume that ideas about play and other early childhood activities are universal (Göncü and Gaskins, 2007). Using ethnographic data collected in the Yucatan, Taiwan, and among the Kpelle in Liberia, Gaskins, Haight and Lancy (2007) made a convincing case that play is not essential for learning, nor does it always lead to positive developmental outcomes across cultures. Gaskins’ (1990) research in a Mayan community in the Yucatan revealed that preschool children spent very little time playing because they contributed to the work activities of the household (see Gaskins, this volume).

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Early UNESCO reports also described differences in how and how much children used play to learn at home and at school in different parts of the world (see Siraj-Blatchford, 1995; Haddad, 2002). McCann’s (1990) study of Mirpuri Pakistani families living in England showcased strong differences between Mirpuri and British primary school ideas about play. For example, Mirpuri parents did not see play as involving toys, thus children arrived at school able to play the ‘Mirpuri’ way, which meant outside in natural settings with minimal artificial objects. Meanwhile, the school encouraged ‘play’ with artificial objects, puzzles, and games in the classroom, which often left Mirpuri children at a disadvantage (1990: 188). In addition, Briggs’s (1970) classic childhood ethnography describes how among young Inuit children living on the Canadian island of Buffin, play was instigated by teasing, mocking, and physical aggression meant to warn, explain, reiterate, and make familiar many cultural understandings of the world. Roopnarine, Hossain, Gill and Brophy (1994), in writing about play in India, explained that young children’s play is characterized by touch as much as by the activity. As they put it, play in India is often conceptualized as the opposite of formal interaction. Singing, rocking, face-to face interactions and demonstrating an activity can all be considered play if the children and parents are able to be physically close and the interactions are informal. Roopnarine et al. point out that children often re-enact in their play what they receive from adults as infants and toddlers, which includes touching during songs, meditations, and games. As cultural definitions of play became a larger part of early childhood knowledge across countries, policymakers in education began paying closer attention to how play, along with other essential social experiences, promoted cross-cultural understanding as well as cultural resilience. In 1996, for example, Aotearea/New Zealand published a policy framework for early childhood, Te Whāriki: He Whāriki Mātauranga mo ngā

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Mokopuna o Aotearoa, that emphasized the role of the environment or nature in children’s play. The framework outlines a comprehensive approach to infants, toddlers, and preschoolers with the understanding that ‘through playing together, children develop a sense of wellbeing of others and the environment’ (Ministry of Education, 1996: 98). According to this framework, play serves not only to create social relationships but also to foster allegiance to and respect for the natural environment (Rau and Ritchie, 2011).

CURRENT RESEARCH ON PLAY AS INTERPRETATIONS OF CULTURE AND RACE IN THE LARGER SOCIETY Contemporary early childhood research demonstrates a much broader understanding of how young children’s play is connected to larger social issues of race and culture. For example, Tobin’s collaborative work comparing national approaches to early childhood education demonstrates that differences among and between preschool settings in different countries are not just cultural but also a response to the larger societal issues happening locally, nationally, and/or globally. More recently, a multivocal ethnographic project called Children Crossing Borders (CCB), the most comprehensive description of which is provided in Tobin, Arzubiaga and Adair (2013), has been examining immigration and early childhood settings in England, Germany, Italy, France and the United States. Findings from this study show how play is an avenue for children to explore and interpret much larger societal tensions. A detailed example of how children explore and interpret societal tensions in their play can be found in Kurban and Tobin’s (2009) study of Turkish immigrant children in German preschools. Through video, they documented a group of girls who prayed before they ate, talked about cooking Halal meals in the outdoor kitchen area and fought in Turkish over heirlooms from Turkey in the dramatic play area. When the

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Turkish immigrant parents saw the films of their daughters, they were shocked. The families were all quite secular, did not speak Turkish exclusively at home, and did not pray at home – activities the girls asserted were important features of their home lives. Kurban and Tobin explain that the girls’ play could be seen as a sort of hyperperformance of Turkish identity that connected to multiple factors in and outside of the classroom, including how the girls felt isolated by the other children and the teachers (Kurban, 2006) and how they had internalized the alienation felt by their parents (Kurban and Tobin, 2009). This understanding of how and why the girls used play to perform their Turkish identity is significant because it counters the misunderstanding that the girls are acting out some ‘true’ Turkish identity. Instead Kurban and Tobin argue that the girls used play to appropriate the available identities and to respond to larger inequities and burdens facing immigrant communities in Germany. One of the main implications of the study is that: well-meaning early childhood educators, such as the teachers at Kohl Strasse Kindergarten, should be helped to see how their whiteness/privileged social position works to obscure their awareness of the depth of the alienation and suffering of the minority children and families they serve (2009: 33).

Another important contribution to growing understandings of how racial attitudes continue and reproduce in early childhood settings is MacNaughton’s (2001, 2005) pioneering work in Australia. Her research examines the impact of social ideas of race, class, and gender on young children’s experiences in early childhood settings, as well as the teaching approaches used by the educators. This research demonstrates that young children recognize skin color and then are able to decode how much value skin colors have in the larger society. Earick (2008) also writes that racial identities are a part of early childhood classrooms because they are a part of the larger society. However, her work argues that early childhood teacher

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education still struggles to prepare teachers to address the cultural and racial complexities of young children’s activities in school, including play. She contends that key theoretical underpinnings of play and constructivism have roots in White, neoconservative ideologies that can normalize Whiteness while devaluing the ideas and perspectives of teachers, students, and families of color (see also Adair, 2013).

Definitions and Interpretations of Play With growing attention to how race and culture affect young children’s experiences at school, early childhood researchers in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand became increasingly concerned that psychological and sociological studies about young children’s play were representing children’s racial and cultural understandings as simplistic. As Connolly (1998) wrote, ‘If a child chose a White doll over a Black one in a laboratory test, then the assumption is that this indicates they are racially prejudiced and will always wish to avoid and exclude other ethnic minority children’ (1998: 5). This interpretation does not account for cognitive development, nor does it mention children’s agency in social production and reproduction. For example, Rizvi’s (1993) ethnography in an Australian primary school showed that young children are not passive recipients of what he called the ‘contradictory messages of popular racism.’ Instead he found that children, ranging in age from 6 to 11, actively challenged, questioned, and pushed against racist discourses even as they also actively reproduced them, mirroring the contradictory nature of the messages (see also MacNaughton and Davis, 2009). This growing body of international research, as well as indigenous rights advocacy within the field of early childhood education, has brought significant attention to the connection between culture and play. Local and national variations of play within early childhood settings involve constructs of race and culture. National approaches to play reflect different ideas about what is and is not

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play, as well as the cultural and national contexts involving the role of play at school. For example, in the USA there is growing pressure in preschools and early grades to ensure young children have a predetermined set of academic skills (Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff, Berk and Singer, 2009). These skills are precursors to the skills and knowledge that will be formally tested beginning in grade three. With this intense pressure has come the desire among early childhood educators to somehow justify ‘play’ within skill-driven early learning environments. Terms like ‘learning through play’ have become commonplace in US preschool culture and allow teachers to justify play as learning. As a result, games led by teachers count as play. Play in this sense includes reciting numbers and letters with songs and directed activities. For various reasons, play is more removed from learning in other countries. In France, for example, play is defined by the absence of adults. French early childhood scholars argue that play is only meaningful to children if they get to control the rules and define and lead the activity. Playing games with teacherdirected rules may not be counted as play. ‘Children do not play to learn, something pedagogues forget too often’ (Brougère, 2008: 15). Instead, Brougère (2005) argues, children are free from learning but seek a host of other experiences such as conflict and pleasure. Similarly, reflecting values from their home country, the Korean-American caregivers in Farver’s (1999) studies of preschool children’s play shared that they viewed play as something children did on their own for fun, when they did not have schoolwork to do. Also, research in Kenya has consistently shown that adults rarely figure as partners in children’s play (Tudge and Odero-Wanga, 2008).

THE DANGEROUS NATURE OF PLAY? As well as the films made of Turkish immigrant children in German preschools, the Children Crossing Borders study included

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films made in four other countries (see Tobin, Arzubiaga and Mantovani, 2007). As part of the videocued ethnographic method, teachers and immigrant parents in all of the participating countries watched video clips and used them to reflect on what they believe is best for educating young children of immigrants. The US teachers watched the French preschool that served a large number of West African immigrant children. In one scene, children are running around outside on the playground chasing each another. One boy, who is of French heritage, pushes a girl of Asian descent to the ground. When US teachers watch this, they usually sigh with empathy for the girl. They seem puzzled and mildly annoyed, asking ‘Where is the teacher?’ A few seconds later, the girl is seen sitting next to a boy from West Africa who raises his arm and fist towards the boy of French heritage who had pushed her down. At this, US teachers gasp and again ask with more urgency, ‘Where is the teacher?’ In this scene, the boys and the girl are all ‘playing’. However, the actions of the French-heritage boy and the West African boy are not seen in the same way. Even though the French-heritage boy’s playing actions pushed the girl to the ground, the West African boy’s threat, with his raised arm and fist, caused more visible alarm among US teachers. This interpretation is racial – meaning similar playful acts are seen with different sets of standards. Even the less violent play act is seen as more dangerous than the one that actually did harm to someone. Just as the US teachers in the CCB project interpreted the play act with a raised fist differently from the play act of pushing a child to the ground, there is much evidence that the play acts of children are interpreted differently based on their racial characteristics. For example, Stevenson, Davis, Carter and Elliot (2003) argue that African-American boys are rarely able to make meaning of who they are at school. Teachers often misunderstand and then mislabel their play as aggression because they give in to media representations of Black males instead of getting to know Black

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families and young African-American children in more authentic ways. Suspension rates for African-American males beginning in elementary school are dramatically higher than those of their White peers (USDOE Office of Civil Rights, 2014). AfricanAmerican boys’ play is risky because it is vulnerable to the ‘danger of White female misinterpretation’ (2003: 61). Children’s aggressive play sometimes does re-enact lived experiences. In Northern Ireland, for example, Connolly and Healy (2004) witnessed both Catholic and Protestant children as young as three–four years old playing with and discussing their ‘guns’ and ‘rocket launchers’, and acting out events they had witnessed such as police car fires and ethnic parades. Connolly and Healy concluded that these re-enactments help children make sense of their experiences, but teachers were quick to stop children from engaging in this kind of play, citing school rules against violent play.

How Young Children Explore Racial and Cultural Identities through Play When children are given time and space to play in whatever capacity, they reflect their own cultural and racial understandings of who they are and what they are thinking about. Paley’s (1979/2000) classic book White Teacher describes how each year children segregated themselves in particular areas in the room. The block or doll areas became organized, intense places to play that often ignored the desires and ideas of children of color and caused them to play elsewhere. In Paley’s classroom, how and where children choose to play revealed their own ideas about belonging. Children’s play in the context of early schooling can be an important avenue for interpreting and taking on identities if it is validated within early childhood classrooms. In Riojas-Cortez’s (2001) work on young children’s language development in play, she writes that culture is most evident during socio-dramatic play episodes. She critiques early childhood education’s emphasis on

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valuing artifacts (dress, books, flags, etc.) over knowledge-inspiring work about children’s dramatic play and their Mexican-American funds of knowledge. Riojas-Cortez (2001) details her own experience as a classroom teacher who was dissatisfied with the district’s attempts to be culturally relevant. Her critique was that artifacts rather than knowledge were valued in the school and district. As a result of her dissatisfaction, she made play the central way in which children could share, build upon, and interpret their identities as MexicanAmerican children. She argues that culture can be seen in many activities within an early childhood classroom, but perhaps culture is most ‘evident’ (2001: 35) during play when children are free to bring their own ideas about the world into self-initiated dramatic re-enactments of daily life. Cultural ideas about identity are also part of how young children make sense of and interpret the world around them in their play. How children talk about issues within their play (those concerning race, gender, economics, etc.) offer insight into how children think about the world. However, adults tend to interpret children’s behavior based on individual characteristics rather than their social, cultural, racial, or political identities and understandings. For example, Pelo (2008) documented a recurring game in a US preschool classroom called ‘baby and dad’ that happened between one of the oldest boys and one of the youngest girls. The teachers had an adverse reaction to the play, regarding it as oppressive and situationally problematic because the boy was taking an authoritative position while the girl was taking on the role of the baby, with what the teachers saw as having little or no power in the play. Teachers were concerned by the power imbalance between the older boy and younger girl. The authors worked with the teachers to see the play as working through ideas about family life, sexuality, gender, caretaking, and child development. Once the teachers reflected more deeply on their reactions to the play, they saw that their own cultural perspectives

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affected how they interpreted the play. The teachers came to realize that play was a way to explore social identity markers such as gender and age. Pelo argues that this kind of exploration is important because ‘when we fail to recognize children’s social identities, we erase fundamental aspects of who they are and who their families are’ (2008: 72). Similarly, Valdès in her classic work Con Respecto (1996), followed four-and fiveyear-old children of Mexican immigrants as they began kindergarten in the USA. She finds that their White, Anglo-American teachers struggled to make sense of the play they saw in the classroom. One particular teacher describes Cynthia (one of the children in the study) as needing to change her play in order to be successful. The teacher goes on to explain that Cynthia, instead of ‘playing,’ washes the tables, sweeps the floors, and doesn’t speak up when other children tease her. The teacher claims this is worrisome because ‘she’s not a very vibrant little girl jumping around, moving around, talking, laughing’ (p. 145). This teacher’s assumptions are problematic, because she believes that Cynthia will need to ‘snap out of’ her particular take on playtime. Dyson (1997) addressed the potential cognitive dissonance play creates for adults, writing that ‘Play creates a space between child intentions and physical reality and, in this space, children do not always follow blueprints for cultural action’ (1997: 14). Valdès’s (1996) research illustrates this well, documenting how uncomfortable many teacher participants in the study felt about the immigrant children’s expressions of play – or lack thereof, in the case of pretend play. Indeed, pretend or fantasy play, and children’s interest in and enjoyment of it, is a common assumption in Western cultural constructions of play (Valdès, 1996; Göncü and Gaskins, 2007). And yet concepts of play, if not culturally flexible, can negatively impact the social identities of young children, particularly children of immigrants or children who come from marginalized communities.

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When play is not recognized as both cultural and racial, teachers often fall into the trap of normalizing play instead of broadening interpretations of play.

FUTURE IMPLICATIONS OF PLAY AS IT CONNECTS TO RACE AND CULTURE The role of play in early schooling has recently been increasingly debated in China and India. In India, publicly funded primary schools are often formal and teacher-directed (Prochner, 2002). Play is often considered as an out-of-school experience while schooling is work. Gupta’s (2006) important studies of how Vygotsky and other Western early childhood educational philosophies ‘translate’ or compare to Indian early childhood contexts reveal that verbal and physical contact among children are much more common forms of play than play with objects both in and outside of school. Children are not made to play with their own age groups in formal, structured ways. According to Gupta, ‘Children playing with each other and engaging in extensive verbal interactions is a sight seen more commonly and widely than children playing with objects. Knowledge as the process of social construction is very much more evident among children growing up in India’ (2006: 115). This common form of play, however, is not typical of Indian early childhood classrooms but is found before and after school, as well as during outside time. By contrast, play-based learning is increasingly becoming part of Chinese early childhood programs, particularly in urban areas. Instead of being threatened by the Western early childhood philosophies of learning through play, Chinese educators have argued that Chinese educational systems can take outside ideas and improve them, making them work for Chinese contexts of learning. The Preschool in Three Cultures Revisited project (Tobin et al., 2009) demonstrates that China, particularly in urban regions, has started to embrace playbased curricula with an emphasis on dramatic

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and imaginative play in order to encourage creativity and problem-solving as entrepreneurial necessities. At the same time, rural China and some urban areas resist play-based learning as part of the schooling curriculum, still wary of losing traditional educational values. Vong’s (2012) work in private Chinese kindergartens demonstrates that the inclusion of play is complicated by teachers not having experienced play at school, as well as by parental pressures regarding ‘mastering musical instruments, practising martial arts, writing Chinese characters and solving mathematical problems with the abacus’ (p. 44). Cheng (2006) argues that early childhood teachers in Hong Kong have little support in incorporating play into the curriculum even when they are as convinced as the Shanghai teachers in Tobin et al.’s study that play should be used to improve Chinese education and to better prepare children to be successful in changing global markets.

CONCLUSION Play is connected to ideas about culture and race. Research on children and play has increasingly focused on the presence of racial and cultural dynamics in early childhood educational settings. Play is now more often seen, in the area of early childhood education globally, as a mechanism and space for children and adults to act out a variety of social identities, including those defined or formed by race and culture. Play has many definitions and types, though racial prejudices still factor into how play is interpreted. Play is one element of early childhood contexts that demonstrates cultural and racial variability among children, teachers, and communities. Most often, conversations around play are about the quantity and quality of play offered to young children in classroom spaces. However, how play is interpreted and how play has the potential to provide learning opportunities for teachers and parents is less understood or recognized in teacher education programs. Play, when

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conceptualized as a universal, culturally neutral, and color-blind activity, negates the potential of play to segregate children along cultural, racial, socio-economic, and other lines. Conceptualizing play monolithically can also lead to gaps in understanding between teachers and children, and between teachers and cultural and racial communities. Play without cultural or racial references then joins the host of other ways in which early childhood activities are discussed in terms of ‘all children’ rather than being recognized in their full complexity and variability.

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Functional Perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. pp. 155–78. Goodman, M. E. (1964) Race Awareness in Young Children. New York: Crowell Collier. Gupta, A. (2006) Early Childhood Education, Postcolonial Theory, and Teaching Practices in India: Balancing Vygotsky and the Veda. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Haddad, L. (2002) ‘An integrated approach to early childhood education and care’, Early Childhood and Family Policy Series No. 3. Paris: UNESCO. Hewes, J. (2007) ‘Back to basics: The right to play’, Connections, 11(2): 1–4. Hirsh-Pasek, K., Golinkoff, R. M., Berk, L. E. and Singer, D. G. (2009) A Mandate for Playful Learning in Preschool: Presenting the Evidence. New York: Oxford University Press. Kurban, F. (2006) ‘“They don’t like us”: Reflections of Turkish children in a German preschool’. Paper presented at 13th Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Education (RECE) Conference, MadisonWisconsin. Kurban, F. and Tobin, J. (2009) ‘“They don’t like us”: Reflections of Turkish children in a German preschool’, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 10(1): 24–34. Lubeck, S. (1985) Sandbox Society: Early Education in Black and White America. Philadelphia, PA: Falmer Press. McCann, A. (1990). Culture and behaviour: A study of Mirpuri Pakistani infant pupils. In R. Webb (Ed.), Practitioner Research in the Primary School. (pp. 183–201). London: RoutledgeFalmer. MacNaughton, G. (2001) ‘“Blushes and birthday parties”: Telling silences in young children’s constructions of “race”’, Australian Research in Early Childhood Education, 8(1): 41–51. MacNaughton, G. (2005) Doing Foucault in Early Childhood Studies: Applying Poststructural Ideas. Abingdon: Routledge. MacNaughton, G. and Davis, K. (2009) ‘Race’ and Early Childhood Education: An International Approach to Identity, Politics, and Pedagogy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. _ _ Ministry _ of Education _(1996) Te whariki: He whariki matauranga mo nga mokopuna o aotearoa: Early Childhood Curriculum. Wellington, New Zealand: Learning Media Limited. Ogilvy, C. M., Boath, E. H., Cheyne, W. M., Jahoda, G. and Schaffer, H. R. (1990) ‘Staff attitudes and perception in multicultural nursery schools’, Early Child Development and Care, 64(1): 1–13. Paley, V. G. (1979/2000) White Teacher. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Palmer, G. (1990) ‘Preschool children and race: An Australian study’, Australian Journal of Early Childhood, 15(2): 3–8. Park, C. C. (2011) ‘Young children making sense of racial and ethnic differences: A sociocultural approach’, American Educational Research Journal, 48(2): 387–420. Pelo, A. (2008) ‘Playing with gender’, in A. Pelo (ed.), Rethinking Early Childhood Education. Milwaukee, WI: Rethinking Schools. pp. 67–73. Prochner, L. (2002) ‘Preschool and playway’, Childhood Education, 9(4): 435–53. Rau, C. and Ritchie, J. (2011) ‘“Ahakoa _He Iti”: Early childhood pedagogies affirming of Maori children’s rights to their culture’, Early Education and Development, 22(5): 795–817. Riojas-Cortez, M. (2001) ‘Preschoolers’ funds of know­ ledge displayed through sociodramatic play episodes in a bilingual classroom’, Early Childhood Education Journal, 29(1): 35–40. Rizvi, F. (1993) ‘Children and the grammar of popular racism’, in C. McCarthy and W. Crichlow (eds), Race, Identity and Representation in Education. London: Routledge. pp. 126–39. Roopnarine, J. L., Hossain, Z., Gill, P. and Brophy, H. (1994) ‘Play in the East Indian context’, in J. L. Roopnarine, J. E. Johnson and F. H. Hooper (eds), Children’s Play in Diverse Cultures. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. pp. 9–30. Ryan, S. and Grieshaber, S. (2004) ‘It’s more than child development: Critical theories, research, and teaching young children’, Young Children, 59: 44–52. Shutts, K., Kinzler, K. D., Katz, R. C., Tredoux, C. and Spelke, E. S. (2011) ‘Race preferences in children: Insights from South Africa’, Developmental Science, 14(6): 1283–91. Siraj-Blatchford, I. (1994) The Early Years: Laying the Foundations for Racial Equality. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books. Siraj-Blatchford, I. (1995) ‘Nourish and nurture: World food programme assistance for early childhood education in India’s Integrated Child Development Services’, Education Sector Monograph No. 3. Paris: UNESCO. Siraj-Blatchford, I. and Siraj-Blatchford, J. (1999) ‘“Race”, research and reform: The impact of the three Rs on anti-racist pre-school and primary education in the UK’, Race Ethnicity and Education, 2(1): 127–48. Stevenson, H. C., Davis, G. Y., Carter, R. and Elliot, S. (2003) ‘Why Black males need cultural socialization’, in H. C. Stevenson (ed.), Playing with Anger: Teaching Coping Skills to African American Boys through Athletics and Culture. Westport, CT: Greenwood, Praeger. pp. 61–86.

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Tobin, J. (2000) “Good Guys Don’t Wear Hats”: Children’s Talk about the Media. New York: Teachers College Press. Tobin Joseph, Arzubiaga, Angela and Adair, Jennifer Keys. (2013) Children Crossing Borders: Immigrant Parent and Teacher Perspectives on Preschool for Children of Immigrants. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Tobin, J., Arzubiaga, A. and Mantovani, S. (2007) ‘Entering dialogue with immigrant parents’, Early Childhood Matters. The Hague, The Netherlands: Bernard van Leer Foundation. Tobin, J., Hsueh, Y. and Karasawa, M. (2009) Preschools in Three Cultures Revisited. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Tobin, J., Wu, D. and Davidson, D. (1989) Preschool in Three Cultures: Japan, China, and the United States. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Tomlinson, S. (1983) Ethnic Minorities in British Schools: A Review of the Literature, 1960–82. London: Heinemann. Tudge, J. and Odero-Wanga, D. (2008) ‘A cultural– ecological perspective on early childhood among the Luo of Kisumu, Kenya’, in M. Fleer, M. Hedegaard and J. Tudge (eds), World Yearbook of Education 2009: Childhood Studies and the Impact of

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30 Playfulness and the Co-construction of Identity in the First Years R o d P a r k e r- R e e s

INTRODUCTION We see the self as originally an extension of experience of the other (Fonagy et al. 2004: 8).

Attempts to understand learning in early childhood have tended to focus on the development of ‘higher mental functions’ (Vygotsky, 1981), which depend on information being tidied into generalised concepts. Because language has been the primary means of accessing what people know, remember and understand, the study of learning has focused on processes which result in consciously accessible, ‘speakable’ knowledge more than on the ‘softer’ processes by which we unconsciously adjust and tune our expectations, particularly about how the people around us are likely to behave. This chapter will focus on playful interactions which allow very young babies and their caregivers to gather soft knowledge about each other, enabling them to negotiate and coconstruct roles and identities. Such interactions include the closely attuned contingencies of primary intersubjectivity (Trevarthen and

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Hubley, 1978), individual and mediated attention to objects (Fogel et al., 2006), and ‘triadic’ exchanges which reveal differences in people’s attention and perspectives. Infants can perceive, shape and regulate their interactions with others well before their experience is organised into awareness of distinct ‘selves’. Interactions with more knowledgeable others and in culturally shaped environments provide opportunities for immersive, complex, intuitive learning. Playful interactions are particularly valuable because playfulness helps to loosen the hold of structures, social rules and constraints, making it easier for participants to find a fit between public, shared concepts and their own unique tangle of experiences. The intricate process of fitting one’s responses to another person’s attention while acknow­ ledging and enjoying their interest in one’s own focus of attention constitutes a social situation of development which helps infants to begin to pick out distinctive patterns in their interactions with different partners. The undifferentiated ‘Great We’ of early

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experiences (Vygotsky, 1998: 232) is gradually resolved into a great web of relationships. As they learn about the distinctiveness of others infants also come to learn who they are, co-constructing a personal social identity which will never be exclusively their own. Recent work in developmental psychology has focused attention on the fundamental distinction between the detached, ‘spectatorial’ perspective favoured by experimental psychologists (Hutto, 2008) and a ‘participant’ perspective which acknowledges the importance of understanding how it feels to engage with another person (Engel 2005; Reddy 2008, 2011; Schilbach et al., 2013). We experience relaxed, playful interactions with people with whom we are especially familiar and our playfulness allows us to reveal more of ourselves to each other, thereby further deepening our feeling of familiarity. Intimate relationships feel markedly different from contacts with strangers, when we need to be more consciously watchful for the cues which allow us to predict how another person is likely to behave. Partners who are particularly familiar with each other can tune in to subtle cues which allow them to co-regulate their attention and their levels of arousal, making their interaction feel smooth and easy. As they explore what works in this particular context, their relaxed, open reciprocity can sometimes lift their interaction into exuberant playfulness, further reinforcing the intimacy of their relationship (ParkerRees, 2007).

GATHERING SOFT KNOWLEDGE Babies clearly learn a huge amount in their first year of life but the way they gather information about patterns and consistencies in what happens around them is very different from the conscious, purposeful pursuit of knowledge which is often associated with later forms of learning (Parker-Rees, 2010). Early experiences help babies to discover regularities and surprises in their actions, perceptions and responses, resulting in ‘soft’,

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intuitive ways of knowing quite unlike the kinds of learning which we associate with conscious mental activity and accessible, declarative ‘hard’ knowledge. Accounts of development which focus on how children ascend into hard mental activity have tended to undervalue the role of this soft, embodied thinking but recent accounts of the earliest stages of social development (e.g. Hobson, 2002; Carpendale and Lewis, 2006; Seemann, 2011a) have acknowledged its importance. Being fully human appears to be inescapably dependent on this primary, felt knowing, and playful interactions provide particularly rich opportunities for acquiring and refining the soft knowledge which lets us know what to expect from other people (Youell, 2008). Playful interactions enable us to develop flexible social skills which allow us to participate in different kinds of interaction with partners whose behaviour is also responsive to our own. The importance of play in the development of this social adaptability can be seen even in the development of rats. Over several decades, Pellis and Pellis (2009) have conducted a series of ingenious studies to research the effects of depriving juvenile rats of opportunities to engage in social play. They have gathered a strong body of evidence to support their argument that without early experience of playful interactions, rats consistently fail to develop the ability to adapt their own behaviour to that of a coresponsive partner. It would clearly not be acceptable to conduct similar studies with human infants, but these findings suggest that it is worth considering if playful interactions might also provide rich opportunities for infants to learn about how different people can be expected to respond to objects and events. Infants have to learn about sociocultural meanings – what different people like, value, want, fear and shun. Play helps them to learn what it feels like to interact with different partners and how to adjust their own participation in different kinds of interactions. Playfulness and soft, social learning are bound in a virtuous spiral of mutual support.

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When we interact with other people we adjust our behaviour to achieve a better fit (Shockley et al., 2003). We may not be consciously aware of these adjustments but we experience them as physical responses which allow us to remember, anticipate and imagine how it feels to interact with a particular person. When we know someone well we can predict their responses more reliably and we therefore feel more relaxed and comfortable with them. When we interact with familiar people we can be more playful because we are less reliant on the predictability offered by social scripts and conventions. As we develop greater trust and familiarity we reveal and learn more about each other and about ourselves, co-constructing a socially situated awareness of who we are.

PRIMARY INTERSUBJECTIVITY Human infants are actively supported by older and more enculturated others who generally enjoy the experience of getting to know a baby, albeit in a variety of culturally distinctive ways (Gaskin, 2006). While adults of other species tolerate interaction with infants, humans, to varying degrees in different cultures, may encourage babies to join in with social interactions. Research suggests that mothers are usually particularly committed to building an intimate relationship which serves as a comfortable emotional ‘nest’ in which babies can develop the confidence and skills which will allow them to fly in future social encounters (Fonagy et al., 2004). Colwyn Trevarthen (1979) offers a powerful account of the early development of primary intersubjectivity in the first few months of life. He argues that the combination of babies’ physical helplessness and their perceptual capability affords rich opportunities for a particularly intimate form of interaction which has no topic other than developing the relationship itself. Babies soon learn that they can steer the flow of interaction, conditioning their caregivers through skilful deployment of smiles, gurgles, quivering lips, frowns and

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cries, and caregivers are usually more than willing to lose themselves in finding a connection with their baby. Babies enjoy the feeling of being ‘liked’ (Parker-Rees, 2007) and specifically the feeling of being the focus of another person’s attention (Reddy, 2011). They are finely attuned to detect contingency in the movements of objects and people, and are quick to pick up on the fit between their own actions and those of another person who is actively engaging them in co-regulated interaction (Fogel, 1993). The playfulness of primary intersubjectivity provides opportunities for caregiver and baby to develop specialist expertise in adapting to each other’s shifting dynamics. The pleasure of ‘having a chat’ with a responsive baby increases the likelihood that caregivers will make time for this, and every chat consolidates and reinforces mutual feelings of intimacy and familiarity. Intimacy is experienced as an intensely affective response, partly because of the release of dopamine when we experience a match between what we expect and what we perceive (Frith, 2007). This pleasure response drives us to seek opportunities to engage in social interactions because these help us to refine our models of how we can expect others to behave (Zeedyk, 2006). Within a communicative exchange, the spiral of shared enjoyment can result in moments of exuberance which are marked by increased levels of oxytocin, a hormone associated with pair bonding, trust and love (Feldman, 2007). Playful interaction can escalate into exuberance only when the participants are able to relax into a flow of mutual ‘liking’ adjustments and it is in this heightened form of intimate exchange that babies are able to borrow from their partner’s abilities, allowing them to appear ‘a head taller’ (Vygotsky, 1978: 102). When playing a game like ‘peep-o’, for example, a baby who has delighted in being able to anticipate the excitement of his play partner’s ‘reveal’ may feel confident enough to introduce his own playful variations on the game, lifting his participation from passive observation to active contribution by

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snatching at the cloth behind which she is hiding. Intimacy is highly context-specific and the tuning of fit between one’s own actions and another person’s responses requires an investment of ‘face-time’ before the co-regulation of interactions becomes easy, smooth and relaxed. It is perhaps for this reason that mutual playfulness acts as a reliable marker of familiarity as well as a powerful context for its development. Infants, like adults, do not like it when an unfamiliar person presumes to engage with them in an overfamiliar way. It is difficult for playful interactions to blossom if either infant or adult is not sufficiently relaxed; parents who are too concerned about tuning in to their babies may unwittingly communicate a degree of anxiety which makes interaction feel less playful. Beebe, Lachman and Jaffe (1997, in Fonagy et al., 2004) have shown that while high levels of coordinated interpersonal timing between mother and baby are predictive of high levels of cognitive performance in the baby’s later childhood, slightly lower levels of contingency are predictive of secure attachment and ‘easy’ temperament. Daniel Stern (2001) noted that levels of coordinated interpersonal timing between four-month-old babies and their mothers in their home were actually lower than when the same babies interacted with a stranger in a laboratory. The higher level of contingency in the less familiar context may be due to ‘interactive vigilance’; both baby and adult were highly alert, working to sustain and manage their relationship, whereas in the familiar home environment mother and baby were able to relax, lower their guard and ‘just be’ together ­– ‘an active and necessary condition for play’ (2001: 145). In these very early months, the experience of easy, intimate interactions with a familiar partner provides a particularly fertile example of what Vygotsky described as a ‘social situation of development’: The social situation of development... determines wholly and completely the forms and the path along which the child will acquire ever newer personality characteristics, drawing them from the

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social reality as from the basic source of development, the path along which the social becomes the individual (1998: 198).

Vygotsky argued that successive social situations of development provide environments which both support opportunities for action and constrain them. Development therefore takes the form of a series of crises as individuals borrow from their social surroundings precisely the capabilities which will allow them to challenge the restrictions inherent in social participation. The close, familiar intimacy of primary intersubjectivity allows babies to develop the confidence and security which will allow them to ‘fly the nest’; to extend their sphere of action beyond the mother–baby dyad.

INDIVIDUAL AND MEDIATED ATTENTION TO OBJECTS Parents and caregivers enjoy the intimacy of primary intersubjectivity but they are also usually responsible for sowing the seeds of the crisis which will turn their child’s attention away. Even in the earliest interactions with a baby, adults often introduce toys or everyday objects, placing things in the baby’s hands or using them to attract the baby’s attention. The extent to which adults’ use of toys is responsive to the baby’s reactions will vary. Some adult–child dyads develop a strong focus on supporting the infant’s exploration of objects while others focus more on their social interactions, inviting and expecting less attention to the objects themselves (Fogel et al., 2006). Decisions about what is introduced to the baby, what is placed where the baby can reach it and what babies are encouraged to do with the objects they handle are all mediated, in different ways in different cultures, by adults’ understandings about what babies need or are likely to want: Objects are not things in themselves for infants in the first half year. Objects are enlivened by their embeddedness in social activities and become part of the infant’s world through their incorporation

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into the historical process of the development of the parent–infant relationship (Fogel et al., 2006: 40).

As babies become able to support themselves in a sitting position, freeing their arms and hands from their duties as body props, the golden time for primary intersubjectivity may be rather abruptly pushed aside in favour of exploration of physical objects. When an infant responds to the introduction of an object by actively refusing the caregiver’s efforts to engage, this can be experienced by caregivers as an unwelcome loss of intimacy. It may, however, be particularly important for babies to be able to explore their environment immediately, without their experiences being mediated through another person’s know­ ledge and interests. In order to develop sensitivity to other people’s attention to other things, babies need to explore the nature of their own relationships with objects and events. Exploratory play with objects enables children to find out about the world and refine their movement schemes by poking, prodding, mouthing, banging and throwing things. This action-focused play also allows their own body and actions to become more perceptually transparent. Repeated handling of different objects enables babies to master motor control of arms, hands and fingers so that their use of these becomes automatic and effectively invisible. Their attention can then be focused on the effects of their actions rather than on the actions themselves (Pacherie, 2011). At the age of four or five months, babies are not yet in a position to be able to separate out hard facts about the properties of objects from their complex experience of what it feels like to interact with them. What they ‘know’ about a teddy bear, for example, is a set of anticipations about how it will respond to their actions on it – how it will feel if they squeeze it, what it will smell like if they hold it against their face and how it has featured in their interactions with other people. By handling objects, babies develop ‘action-guiding positions’ (Seemann, 2011b: 194) which link past experiences of interaction to possible future actions – objects which they have

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enjoyed eating will be linked with ‘good to eat’ connotations and an armchair may be associated with the experience of ‘cuddling up with mummy’. Babies do not come to know about a separate, external environment; rather they come to know about their own, felt experience of acting in the environment. Objects are known in terms of their affordances (Costantini and Sinigaglia, 2012), not objective properties which are equally available to anyone but specific relationships between their features and the child’s own personal abilities. The skills which infants develop through handling objects are situated and context-specific: ‘a property not of the individual human body as a thing-in-itself, but of the total system of relations constituted by the presence of the organism-person in a richly structured environment’ (Ingold, 1996: 178). When babies withdraw from the intensity of interactions with other people to focus on playing with inanimate objects, their situation remains inescapably grounded in the features and properties of their interactions. The objects available for them to play with, the opportunities to play and the ways in which others respond to their play all contribute to their developing ability to participate in particular kinds of socially structured interactions.

NOTICING THE ATTENTION AND PERSPECTIVES OF OTHERS Even as babies are honing their ability to focus attention on their relationships with objects and events around them, they are also developing awareness of the focus of other people’s attention. Vasu Reddy (2008) has charted a pattern of development in the progressive expansion of infants’ awareness of the objects of other people’s attention. From about four months (about when many infants are just beginning to switch their focus from their caregiver to exploring objects) they engage in triadic interactions with another person and an object in that person’s hand, where the connection between person and

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object is explicit and physical. After a few months when they are intently focused on their own exploration of objects, they are likely to become increasingly sensitive, from about seven months, to other people’s attention to what they do – for example, to a parent who laughs when they bounce up and down in response to hearing music. At this age infants quickly learn that they can produce a predictable response by performing ‘tricks’, but they may also show signs of selfconsciousness if too much attention is paid to their actions. They are able to regulate the level of attention they are receiving, either turning away to reduce their exposure or ‘showing off’ to increase it. From about eight months infants can share attention to objects in their own hands, particularly by handing things to another person, and it is not clear whether their attention is focused more on the object or on the social processes of ‘giving’ and ‘receiving’. Soon after their first birthday, infants demonstrate their ability to share attention to remote objects, both by following another person’s gaze and by themselves pointing to guide another person’s attention. Joint attention does not appear suddenly and fully formed towards the end of the first year. It emerges gradually, as infants develop their ability to focus attention on aspects of different kinds of interaction – particularly those, like exuberant play, which are associated with heightened emotions. Reddy (2011) has argued that the affective charge of experiencing another person’s attention underpins and motivates the later expansion of awareness of people’s attention to objects which are beyond immediate reach. At each stage the infant’s attention is focused not on either an object or another person; rather it is on the relationship between person and object. Having felt the charge of being the focus of attention and of focusing attention (in the exploration of objects), infants are encouraged and helped to close the sides of the relatedness triangle (Hobson, 2002), so that they are able to focus on another person’s attention to an object or

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event, to observe what things mean to other people. It has been assumed that the focus for infants’ learning then turns outwards, that they begin to engage with the world in the same sort of way in which scientists, historians and ethnographers approach it, driven by a desire to know what it means and to explain it. While we can learn about the world by observing how other people respond to it, we can also learn about other people by noting how they respond to the world. A shared focus of attention, such as a play format, can act as a reference point which allows people to notice differences between what they expect and what they observe. While babies are unlikely to have any conscious awareness of what they have learned about their mother, their response to engaging in shared interactions with her will colour their expectations about how she is likely to behave in familiar situations. These anticipations of how their mother is likely to respond allow a baby to notice and interpret even slight variations in her responses. We do not need to be consciously aware of the adjustments we make as we get to know each other but this process of ‘transactional calibration’ (Bruner, 1986: 62) continuously updates and fine-tunes our ability to anticipate other people’s actions, making them feel increasingly familiar. This allows us to relax more and to be more playful in our interactions with them and as a result we are able to get to know them better: Infants do not learn about the social world mostly from third persons, from ‘he’s’ and ‘she’s’ whom they observe dispassionately from the outside. Instead, they learn, first and foremost from the ‘you’s’ with whom they interact and engage in collaborative activities with joint goals and shared attention (Moll and Meltzoff, 2011: 398).

Sharing attention involves much more than simply observing another person’s response and comparing it with one’s own. Carpenter and Liebal (2011) offer an account of how triadic, person–object–person interactions are assembled, showing how they often culminate in the affective reward of a ‘sharing

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look’. First, one person notices something which strikes her as interesting and which, based on previous interactions, she expects the other person will also find interesting. She ‘catches his eye’ with an initiation look and then, when this look is acknowledged, and she has his attention, she guides his focus to the interesting object by turning her gaze onto it. She checks that he has followed her lead and that he has seen the noteworthy object and then both celebrate the recognition of their ‘togetherness’ with a ‘sharing look’. Both receive an affective boost from the confirmation that they know each other well enough to be able to share in each other’s interests; ‘I saw that and I knew you would be interested in it’. The sharing looks and knowing smiles which mark successful triadic interactions are evidence of what Bruner (1995) referred to as ‘meeting of minds’ and remind us that our main reason for sharing attention to other objects and events is less to extend our knowledge than to strengthen our relationships with other people. Carpenter and Liebal note that although ‘subjectively [sharing looks] feel utterly simple and directly perceived’ (2011: 173), it is remarkably difficult to describe or define them in a way which does justice to the pleasure they both produce and display. This explanatory gap may be due to the fact that the soft knowledge on which social interactions are built is processed through fast, automatic channels which are largely inaccessible to direct, conscious observation. The sharing is felt more than observed. The toddler’s interest in the details and distinctness of other people’s relationships with objects and events, what particular people like and dislike, what frightens them or disgusts them, what they prize and what they ignore, reminds us that meaning is initially an entirely relational property, an affordance or a relationship between an object and a person. It makes no sense, at this point, to talk about the meaning of an object or event; one can really only talk about what it means to a particular person. The sharing and exchange of attention, and specifically

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the shared attribution of meaning to objects and events, would appear to be a higher mental function (Vygotsky, 1981) which must first be experienced in interactions with and between other people (on the social plane) before it can be internalised as the ability to observe one’s own attention and notice the personal meanings one has learned to associate with objects and events. It has been widely recognised (Bruner, 1986; Rogoff, 2003; Tronick, 2005; Trevarthen, 2011) that as soon as infants develop the ability to notice how others respond to aspects of their environment, they gain access to a rich store of ready-made socio-cultural information. ‘Social learning trains bodies to use each other’s brains’ (Cowley, 2004: 574). Children become increasingly skilled in identifying what other people can be expected to find funny, frightening, disgusting, desirable or shocking, and they are particularly interested in monitoring the affective responses of familiar people.

LEARNING WHO WE ARE: FROM ‘US’ TO ‘ME’ While most of an infant’s interactions may at first be with a particularly familiar partner, most often with his/her mother or primary caregiver, there will also usually be plenty of opportunities to meet other people, each of whom will occupy a particular position on a scale of familiarity, from cosily intimate to disturbingly strange. For the infant, each person will be associated with a distinct felt response, ranging from easy, relaxed and open to tense, anxious and vigilant and with distinct expectations – comfort or excitement, high or low energy, cuddly or remote, etc. Without needing to be able to categorise features, distinguish between types or read minds, infants already have sufficient soft knowledge to begin to distinguish different patterns associated with their interactions with different people. Gradually, the ‘great we’ is resolved into increasingly distinct other identities, each of which is known not in terms of a set of properties of the person so

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much as in terms of what it feels like to interact with that person. The ability to differentiate between the felt experiences associated with interactions with different others also enables infants to begin to notice patterns in their response to interactions, patterns which can become features of their own identity: ‘I like it when Daddy throws me up in the air’, ‘I don’t like it when Granny squeezes me too hard’, ‘that dog frightens me but Mummy likes it’. The emergence of a sense of self can be seen as the separation of a distinct identity out of the ‘Great We’, leaving behind a tangle of ‘you’s and ‘they’s who no longer interfere in our uniquely personal engagement with the world. From this perspective, participation in playful interactions enables us to differentiate ourselves by helping us to notice differences between other people’s ways of being with us, other people and things. We can then use our awareness of these differences between other people to begin to notice differences between other people and ourselves. The emergence of self-awareness can also be seen, however, as a reorganisation of relationships within the ‘Great We’. From this perspective it is not so much that playful interactions help us to set ourselves outside our knowledge about other people as they allow us to make that knowledge part of our identity. Our soft knowledge about other people’s ways of engaging with us, and with other people and things, is internalised in the form of knowledge of social conventions, expectations and patterns of behaviour. This soft knowledge continues to inform decisions and opinions which we think of as ‘our own’: We rarely recognize the extent in which our conscious estimates of what is worthwhile and what is not, are due to standards of which we are not conscious at all. But in general it may be said that the things which we take for granted without enquiry or reflection are just the things which determine our conscious thinking and decide our conclusions. And these habitudes which lie below the level of reflection are just those which have been formed in the constant give and take of relationship with others (Dewey, 1916: 22).

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SPECTATORS AND PARTICIPANTS, OUTSIDERS AND INSIDERS, THIRDPERSON AND SECOND-PERSON PERSPECTIVES Our decisions about how we should ‘go on’ in day-to-day life are informed by what Shotter (2012) describes as ‘withness thinking’, the soft, fuzzy knowledge which comes from our experience as participants in interactions with particular people in particular contexts. Until recently, however, the study of developmental psychology has been dominated by models of learning which have favoured the adoption of a ‘third-person perspective’ (Reddy, 2008; Schilbach et al., 2013), standing apart from interactions and observing them from the outside. The difference between the third-person, ‘I–it’ perspective and the second-person, ‘I–you’ perspective is illustrated by Reddy (2008) as the difference between what it feels like to see someone smiling at someone else and what it feels like when you notice that someone is smiling at you. The third-person perspective favoured by most psychologists has meant that concerns about managing and controlling variables have driven the study of early interactions into clinics and baby labs. As a result, we now know more about how infants and caregivers behave in unfamiliar situations than about how they behave in the privacy of their homes, where they are more likely to feel relaxed and comfortable enough to enter into playful interactions. The problems associated with adopting an outside perspective when studying early interactions may be particularly evident in accounts of parenting practices in unfamiliar cultures. Accounts of mother–infant interactions in several African tribal cultures, for example, have emphasised the absence of evidence of playful interactions. Le Vine and Le Vine (1963, in Tudge and Odero-Wanga, 2009: 144) observed of the Gusii in Kenya that ‘Mothers do not play with their children, fondle them, or display affection for them openly’. The need for some caution in interpreting these findings is highlighted, however,

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in an observation by Price-Williams (1975), cited by Rogoff (2003) in a discussion about cultural patterns of playfulness: Among Hausa mothers, the custom is not to show affection for their infants in public. Now those psychologists who are concerned with nurturance and dependency will go astray on their frequency counts if they do not realize this. A casual [observer] is likely to witness only public interaction; only when much further inquiry is made is the absence of the event put into its proper perspective (2003: 27).

It is not only casual observers who risk this sort of misapprehension; even the most rigorous of observers may fail to see events in their proper perspective if participants see them as outsiders. When it comes to the intimate, playful interactions which characterise early adult–child relationships it may be particularly difficult for anyone to observe the play without, to some extent, compromising how relaxed and open the participants feel. Grondin went so far as to say that ‘one who observes the play with sovereignty from outside acts as a spoilsport, exactly because he does not play along’ (2000: 52). Anyone who has tried to video-record mothers ‘acting naturally’ with their babies will know that this delicate, intimate relationship is often particularly private and easy to disrupt. A mother whose attention has been even partially taken outside her interaction by her awareness of a video camera is, to varying degrees, less fully present for her baby.

FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS The earliest playful interactions are highly context-specific and it is becoming increasingly evident that they cannot be fully experienced or understood without acknow­ ledging the support available from the intimacy of familiar relationships. Interest in the processes which allow babies to begin to connect with other people has grown as advances in technology have made it possible to document more and more of the intricacies of interpersonal exchanges. In

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recent years, researchers from different disciplines have shown increasing interest in exploring the borderlands between their fields. Easier access to research findings from all over the world and from different paradigms has meant that researchers are more and more able to ‘play’ with different ways of examining and understanding the topics they study. Rapid advances in the range of technologies available for studying activity in the brain have made it possible to examine the neuronal processes which allow us to connect, both consciously and intuitively, with the interests, feelings and concerns of other people (Keysers and Gazzola, 2012). This new understanding of social aspects of mental processes has also led neuroscientists to explore the boundaries between their discipline and neighbouring territories. Seemann (2011), for example, brings together a range of perspectives on joint attention from developmental and comparative psychology, philosophy of mind and social neuroscience. Schilbach et al. (2013) review the boundaries between neuroscience, developmental and social psychology and phenomenology, where the ‘spectatorial’ approach previously associated with hard science is challenged by a softer ‘second-person’ perspective. The shift of focus from intrapersonal processes to interpersonal spaces is also evident in work by Fogel et al. (2006). Fogel and his colleagues draw from Piagetian theory, so­ciocultural theory, ecological theory and dynamic systems perspectives to develop a relational–historical research approach which examines interactions between care­ givers and infants in order to study the development not of the infant but of the relationship itself. This approach has yielded fascinating insights into how the inevitable variation in familiar routines generates changes, some of which are amplified, played with and eventually adopted as new frames for interaction. Interest in the finer details of how interpersonal exchanges are co-constructed has also informed therapeutic approaches, such as

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Suzy Tortora’s (2006) ‘Dancing Dialogue’. Tortora works with children for whom social interaction is either difficult or unmotivating, basing her approach on what she has learned from very sensitive observations of interaction between mothers and babies. She engages in a ‘dance’ with the child, echoing aspects of the child’s movement patterns in her own actions. Her playful, responsive style of interaction helps to support development by loosening familiar structures, allowing for the wholesale reorganisation of existing abilities across the dyad and not just in one participant, the ‘learner’ or ‘patient’.

CONCLUSION Careful examination of early interactions, from a variety of different perspectives, highlights the intricate subtlety of the processes by which babies and caregivers come to know each other. This knowing is grounded in the gradual accumulation of soft know­ ledge, as much about the feel of particular forms of interaction as about the features of another person. We can help babies to find out who they are by paying close attention to them and by letting them notice how we respond to them. Playful interactions with a familiar partner offer particularly rich opportunities for noticing, testing out and shaping new ways of being together. Vygotsky (cited in Kravtsov and Kravtsova, 2009: 207) urged professional pedagogues to abandon the traditional ‘outsider’, didactic perspective in favour of a more engaged relationship with children: ‘Do not teach and do not “bring up”, but live an interesting life together with children’. Our life together with children is likely to be more interesting if we recognise the importance of making time to be playful.

REFERENCES Beebe, B., Lachman, F. and Jaffe, J. (1997) ‘Mother– infant interaction structures and presymbolic self and object representations’, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 7(2): 133–82.

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Bruner, J. (1986) Actual Minds Possible Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bruner, J. (1995) ‘From joint attention to the meeting of minds’, in C. Moore and P. Dunham (eds), Joint Attention: Its Origins and Role in Development. , NJ: Mahwah Erlbaum Lawerence, pp.1–14. Carpendale, J. and Lewis, C. (2006) How Children Develop Social Understanding. Oxford: Blackwell. Carpenter, M. and Liebal, K. (2011) ‘Joint attention, communication and knowing together in infancy’, in A. Seemann (ed.), Joint Attention: New Developments in Psychology, Philosophy of Mind, and Social Neuroscience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. pp. 159–81. Costantini, M. and Sinigaglia, C. (2012) ‘Grasping affordance: a window onto social cognition’, in A. Seemann (ed.), Joint Attention: New Developments in Psychology, Philosophy of Mind, and Social Neuroscience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. pp. 430–60. Cowley, S. (2004) ‘Contextualizing bodies: human infants and distributed cognition’, Language Sciences, 26: 565–91. Dewey, J. (1916) Democracy and Education. New York, NY: Macmillan. Engel, S. (2005) Real Kids: Creating Meaning in Everyday Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Feldman, R. (2007) ‘Parent–infant synchrony and the construction of shared timing: physiological precursors, developmental outcomes, and risk conditions’, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 48(3–4): 329–54. Fogel, A. (1993) Developing through Relationships: Origins of Communication, Self and Culture. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Fogel, A., Garvey, A., Hsu, H.-C. and West-Stroming, D. (2006) Change Processes in Relationships: A Relational-Historical Research Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fonagy, P., Gergely, G., Jurist, E. and Target, M. (2004) Affect Regulation, Mentalization, and the Development of Self. London: Karnac Books. Frith, C. (2007) Making Up the Mind: How the Brain Creates Our Mental World. Oxford: Blackwell. Gaskin, S. (2006) ‘Cultural perspectives on infant–caregiver interaction’, in N. Enfield and S. Levinson (eds), Roots of Human Sociality: Culture, Cognition and Interaction. London: Berg Publishers. pp. 279–98. Grondin, J. (2000) ‘Play, festival and ritual in Gadamer: on the theme of the immemorial’ (trans. L. K. Schmidt), in L. K. Schmidt (ed.), Language and Linguisticality in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. pp. 51–8.

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Hobson, P. (2002) The Cradle of Thought: Exploring the Origins of Thinking. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hutto, D. (2008) Folk Psychological Narratives: The Sociocultural Basis of Understanding Reasons. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ingold, T. (1996) ‘Situating Action V: the history and evolution of bodily skills’, Ecological Psychology, 8(2): 171–82. Keysers, C. and Gazzola, V. (2012) ‘The vicarious brain’, Paper presented at ‘Nature and Development of Social Connections:  From Brain to Group’ symposium, Herzliya Interdisciplinary Centre, Israel. Kravtsov, G. G. and Kravtsova, E. E. (2009) ‘Cultural– historical psychology in the practice of education’, in M. Fleer, M. Hedegaard and J. Tudge (eds), World Yearbook of Education 2009: Childhood Studies and the Impact of Globalization: Policies and Practices at Global and Local Levels. Abingdon: Routledge. pp. 202–12. LeVine, R. A. and LeVine, B. B. (1963) ‘Nyansongo: a Gusii community in Kenya’ in B. Whiting (ed.), Six Cultures: Studies of Child Rearing. New York: John Wiley & Sons. pp.15–202 Moll, H. and Meltzoff, A. (2011) ‘Joint attention as the fundamental basis of understanding perspectives’, in A. Seemann (ed.), Joint Attention: New Developments in Psychology, Philosophy of Mind, and Social Neuroscience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. pp. 393–413. Pacherie, E. (2011) ‘The phenomenology of joint action: self-agency versus joint-agency’, in A. Seemann (ed.), Joint Attention: New Develop­ ments in Psychology, Philosophy of Mind, and Social Neuroscience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. pp. 343–89. Parker-Rees, R. (2007) ‘Liking to be liked: imitation, familiarity and pedagogy in the first years of life’, Early Years, 27(1): 3–17. Parker-Rees, R. (2010) ‘Hunting and gathering: how play helps us to let in, as well as to get in, information about our environment’, in J. Moyles (ed.), The Excellence of Play. Maidenhead: Open University Press. pp. 67–79. Pellis, S. and Pellis, V. (2009) The Playful Brain: Venturing to the Limits of Neuroscience. Oxford: Oneworld Publications. Price-Williams, D. R. (1975) Explorations in CrossCultural Psychology. San Francisco, CA: Chandler & Sharp. Reddy, V. (2008) How Infants Know Minds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Reddy, V. (2011) ‘A gaze at grips with me’, in A. Seemann (ed.), Joint Attention: New Developments in Psychology, Philosophy of Mind, and Social Neuroscience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. pp. 137–57. Rogoff, B. (2003) The Cultural Nature of Human Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Seemann, A. (ed.) (2011a) Joint Attention: New Developments in Psychology, Philosophy of Mind, and Social Neuroscience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Seemann, A. (2011b) ‘Joint attention: towards a relational account’, in A. Seemann (ed.), Joint Attention: New Developments in Psychology, Philosophy of Mind, and Social Neuroscience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. pp. 183–202. Schilbach, L., Timmermans, B., Reddy, V., Costall, A., Bente, G., Schlicht, T. and Vogeley, K. (2013) ‘Toward a second-person neuroscience’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36(4): 393–414. Shockley, K., Santana, M. V. and Fowler, C. A. (2003) ‘Mutual interpersonal postural constraints are involved in cooperative conversation’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 29(2): 326–32. Shotter, J.  (2012) ‘More than cool reason: “withnessthinking” or “systemic thinking and thinking about systems”’, International Journal of Collaborative Practices, 3(1): 1–13. Stern, D. (2001) ‘Face-to-face play: its temporal structure as predictor of socioaffective development: commentary on Jaffe et al. 2001’, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 66(2): 144–49. Tortora, S. (2006) The Dancing Dialogue: Using the Communicative Power of Movement with Young Children. Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brookes Publishing. Trevarthen, C. (1979) ‘Communication and cooperation in early infancy: a description of primary intersubjectivity’, in M. Bullowa (ed.), Before Speech: The Beginning of Interpersonal Communication. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 321–47. Trevarthen, C. (2011) ‘The generation of human meaning: how shared experience grows in infancy’, in A. Seemann (ed.), Joint Attention: New Developments in Psychology, Philosophy of Mind, and Social Neuroscience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. pp. 73–114. Trevarthen, C. and Hubley, P. (1978) ‘Secondary intersubjectivity: confidence, confiding and acts of meaning in the first year’, in A. Lock (ed.), Action, Gesture and Symbol: The Emergence of Language. London: Academic Press. pp. 73–113. Tronick, E. Z. (2005) ‘Why is connection with others so critical? The formation of dyadic states of consciousness: coherence governed selection and the

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co-creation of meaning out of messy meaning making’, in J. Nadel and D. Muir (eds), Emotional Development: Recent Research Advances. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 293–315. Tudge, J. and Odero-Wanga, D. (2009) ‘A culturalecological perspective on early childhood among the Luo of Kisumu, Kenya’, in M. Fleer, M. Hedegaard and J. Tudge (eds), World Yearbook of Education 2009: Childhood Studies and the Impact of Globalization: Policies and Practices at Global and Local Levels. Abingdon: Routledge. pp. 142–60. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978) Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Vygotsky, L. S. (1981) ‘The genesis of the higher mental functions’, in J. Wertsch (ed.), The Concept of Activity in Soviet Psychology, Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. pp. 144–88. Vygotsky, L. S. (1998) The Collected Works of L. S. Vygotsky: Volume 5: Child Psychology. New York: Springer. Youell, B. (2008) ‘The importance of play and playfulness’, European Journal of Psychotherapy, Counselling and Health, 10(2): 121–9. Zeedyk M. S. (2006) ‘From intersubjectivity to subjecti­ vity: the transformative roles of emotional intimacy and imitation’, Infant and Child Development, 15: 321–44.

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31 Connecting Home and Educational Play: Interventions that Support Children’s Learning Maria Evangelou and Mary Wild

INTRODUCTION Underpinning this chapter is a contention that playful interactions between parents and children can facilitate wider aims of promoting educational equality of opportunity. The importance of learning in play has been well established within developmental psychology and education (Sylva, Bruner and Jolly, 1976). Within developmental psychology, even theories which differ in terms of their emphasis on the role of others in supporting learning agree on the importance of play. Piaget (1950) offers an individualized account of learning, stressing the child’s engagement with the physical environment, whilst Vygotsky (1978) prioritizes the role of social and cultural interaction in play. Although they see play through different lenses, both emphasize its importance. The positive role of play is manifest across a range of developmental domains (Evangelou, Sylva, Wild, Glenny and Kyriacou, 2009). Although such accounts locate play within the context of a developmental paradigm, it is important

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to remember that play can be variously conceptualized. The basic right of children to recreation and play was established in Article 31 of the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child (UN, 1989) and its implications are expounded more fully in the recent General Comment on this Article (UNCRC, 2013). The right to educational opportunities, cited in Article 28 of the Convention, was further endorsed in the Dakar Agreement (2000). The connection between play and education is foregrounded by other international organizations such as the European Union; the recommendations of the Council of the European Union on early childhood education and care (2011) encapsulates the important role of play for learning in its aims: Promoting developmentally appropriate programmes and curricula, which fosters the acquisition of both cognitive and non-cognitive skills, whilst recognising the importance of play, which is also crucial to learning in the early years (Recommendation 5, p. 4).

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In a comparative study of three nations (Japan, USA and Sweden), Izumi-Taylor, Pramling Samuelsson and Rogers (2010) identify six themes of play: as a process of learning, as a source of possibilities, as empowerment, as creativity, as children’s work and as fun. They draw attention to different emphases in each of these three countries. For example, Japanese teachers signalled the empowerment theme as more central than their counterparts in the USA or Sweden. They also found that Japanese and Swedish teachers are more likely to report offering unstructured play to children than American teachers. However, teachers from all three nations agreed on the power of play to promote positive feelings. In their summary, Izumi-Taylor et al. refer back to a notion of the ‘playful learning child’ (2010: l), and in doing so make the point that young children do not distinguish between play and learning. Smith (2010) denotes the importance of ‘playful behaviour’ as a facilitator of learning in which play is seen as dispositional in its nature and not necessarily focused towards a clearly defined goal. This resonates with Rogers’ description of play as ‘spontaneous, child led and intrinsically motivated’ (Rogers 2011: 6). As Rogers further points out, this type of play can be in contradistinction to more adult-led pedagogies of play. The complex nature of play is also acknowledged in a review of the importance of play in learning by Whitebread, Basilio, Kuvalja and Verma (2012). Whitebread and colleagues draw on consultations with early education experts from across Europe, and note a distinction between some experts who believe that ‘the full potential of play can only be unlocked by active teachers or parents’ (2010: 33) and others who recommend a more child-led approach, predominantly free of explicit adult direction. This chapter will consider research evidence of specific early childhood interventions which support the contention that parents can ‘unlock’ the full potential of their

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child’s play if they are supported in their understanding of the significant role of play in children’s learning and development.

PARENTING AND THE HOME LEARNING ENVIRONMENT The Council of the European Union on Early Childhood Education and Care (2011) endorsed the significant role of parents in children’s learning and development. The Council highlighted the need to ensure close collaboration between home and ECEC (recommendation 3: 4) and agreed an intention of: Supporting parents in their role as the main educators of their children during the early years, and encouraging ECEC services to work in close partnership with parents, families and communities, in order to increase awareness of the opportunities offered by ECEC and of the importance of learning from an early age (2011: 4).

In order for this suggestion to be followed through, parents need to be aware that play has an important role in children’s development, and understand how their own role can facilitate play-based learning. The link between socio-economic disadvantage and educational underachievement has been established in research. It is highlighted for instance by Feinstein and others from analysis of birth cohort studies, and is seen to be cumulative, such that when poorer children enter primary school, despite early indications of potential, they tend to fall behind (Feinstein, 2003, 2004). This is also highlighted by Schoon (2006), who compared two cohorts of children in Britain (the 1958 and 1978 birth cohorts) and drew attention to the range of potential factors that can disadvantage a child. Risk factors may occur as a result of individual characteristics (such as birthweight or gender), family characteristics (such as income, poor housing conditions or dysfunctional parenting) and community factors (such as the wider social environment).

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Although Schoon’s work did not directly address preschool provision, her findings stress that multiple layers of disadvantage can interact with one another to reinforce and entrench it. Conversely, and more positively, this means that there is not an inevitable correlation between a particular set of circumstances and a particular set of outcomes. For example, a child from a poor home would not necessarily experience poor caregiving (Schoon, 2006). Schoon also offers a positive message about the possibility of improvement in life chances and of individuals ‘beating the odds’ (2006: 8) to achieve happy and successful lives. Parental involvement in learning may be a key factor in overturning adverse circumstances: as Feinstein (2003, 2004) has pointed out, parental involvement that provides stimulation and teaching in the home leads to higher scores on child development measures. Furthermore, this can be so even when controlling for maternal education and family socio-economic background. The longitudinal study entitled ‘The Effective Provision of Pre-school Education’ (EPPE) that was undertaken in England from 1997 to 2003 considered the effects of preschool education and highlighted the significance of the quality of the ‘Home Learning Environment’ (HLE) for supporting positive child outcomes, both concurrently and at subsequent ages (Sylva et al., 2004; Sammons et al., 2007). The HLE concept incorporates a range of learning-related provision in the home, including ‘reading, library visits, playing with letters and numbers, painting and drawing, teaching (through play) the letters of the alphabet, playing with numbers and shapes, teaching nursery rhymes and singing’ (Desforges with Abouchaar, 2003: 23). The effects of a positive home environment are important and lasting. The EPPE study demonstrates that the quality of a child’s relationships and learning experiences in the family have more influence on future achievement than ability, material

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circumstances or the quality of preschool and school provision (Sylva et al., 2004). In further expositions of these findings, the EPPE research team stress that it is ‘what parents do’ with their children, rather than ‘who parents are’, that is most significant (Melhuish et al., 2008). The high quality of the HLE, as described by Sylva et al. (2004), is related to the concept of ‘at home good parenting’ described by Desforges and Abouchaar (2003). This comprises a secure and stable environment, accompanied by intellectual stimulation, parent–child discussion, cultivation of values and high aspirations in relation to education and personal fulfilment (Desforges with Abouchaar, 2003: 4). It is further argued within the EPPE findings that a positive home environment can compensate for other forms of disadvantage in young children’s lives. These findings chime with the work done in Australia by Saunders, Naidoo and Griffiths (2007), who point out that interventions seeking to support parents have great potential to redress some childhood inequalities. More positively, this evidence implies equality might be augmented by interventions that aim to enhance the skills of parents in supporting their children’s educational opportunities. Interventions aim, amongst other things, to promote school readiness by diminishing ‘the socio-economic status (SES) disparities in the preschool years so that poor children enter school on a more equal footing to their more affluent peers’ (Brooks-Gunn, 2000: 9). There are a number of characteristics of effective interventions (Brooks-Gunn, 2000: 10): • they tend to be two generational, including parents as well as children • they are non-stigmatising, avoiding the label ‘problem families’ • they are multifaceted, not just targeting single factors such as education, health or parenting but linking these areas as appropriate

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• they are locally driven, based on consultation and involvement of parents and local communities • they are culturally appropriate and sensitive to the needs of children and parents.

Conceptualizing the effective characteristics of early intervention programmes by means of different features, Luthar (2003: 443) identified alternative routes to combating inequality. These include the significance of ‘cognitive advantage’, in which improvements in children’s early development have a subsequent positive effect on later attainment in school, and of ‘family support’, in which parents’ capabilities to promote their children’s learning and development are reinforced or extended. Analysing the concept of family support, various reviews have suggested that a range of strategies might be employed to enhance parenting capability. These include for example parent training, parent support, parent education and family education (Desforges with Abouchaar, 2003; Moran, Ghate and Van der Merwe, 2004; Shinman, 2005; Harris and Goodall, 2007). Evans (2006), in a background paper for the ‘Education for all global monitoring report’ (EFA, 2007), makes the point that parenting programmes can be focused on parent education and on parent support, and contends that it is important to distinguish the two. Evans’ report defines parent education as ‘any training or learning activity provided for parents’ (2006: 8). An example of this kind of parent education might include teaching parents skills that might potentially increase the family income and well-being. In contrast, parent support involves providing parents with ‘information on how to give children the kinds of parenting they require to maximize their potential’ (2006: 8). Supporting parents to enhance their children’s learning through play would fall into the latter category. The EFA background paper on parenting programmes (Evans 2006) notes that they can be particularly efficacious for families labelled

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‘at-risk’. The conclusions stress that the impact of such programmes may not be confined to particular child outcomes but has the potential to support children’s development more holistically, and that this will be influenced by characteristics of the individual child and the context of their lives. Nevertheless, it is emphasized that highquality early intervention programmes that give parents information and support in their parenting role ‘can make a significant change in a child’s life course’ (2006: 3). However, there is an important caveat; the report argues that parents should not be viewed as instrumental or simply as conduits to improving child outcomes. Rather, parents should be valued in their own right, and therefore effective interventions should reflect the needs and existing skills of parents in their design and implementation. The parenting programmes discussed in the EFA report (Evans, 2006) include some that are oriented towards education, but focus primarily on health outcomes. The report is therefore a useful summation of some features that can be found in parenting programmes, but this is not born out of a specific focus on play. Nevertheless, the report notes that a common feature of programmes was the positive impact interventions had on parents by increasing their awareness of their children’s development and of their own role in supporting that development, for example through interactions which might include talking and playing with their child (2006: 39). However, just as Evans points out that parents should not be seen merely as instrumental to the development of children, it might also be argued that play should not be seen in a purely instrumental light; it can be helpful in supporting learning but it has an intrinsic value beyond this. The EFA background paper refers to many examples of early childhood intervention programmes in the minority as well as majority world. The next section shows how some of these programmes have evolved to

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support children’s learning through working with parents.

THE EVOLUTION OF EARLY CHILDHOOD PROGRAMMES TO SUPPORT CHILDREN’S LEARNING, 1960–2000 As far back as the 1960s, concern was expressed about the quality of maternal care, especially of the type provided by low-income mothers in the preparation of their children for school (Halpern, 2000). Alongside this, research findings were beginning to highlight the importance of early experiences in children’s later development and abilities, as intelligence was no longer perceived as fixed but rather as malleable (Halpern, 2000). In response, a number of early childhood interventions were designed to include programmes for infants, toddlers and preschoolers and targeting mothers from low-income families. The Head Start and HighScope Perry Preschool projects in the USA are the two most frequently cited early childhood intervention projects. A key feature of these programmes included teaching parents (most usually mothers) games and activities that they could share with their children. Such activities aimed to enhance the cognitive development of children as well as supporting basic parenting skills such as feeding, bathing and hygiene. It is significant to note that the ultimate intention of these programmes was, and one might argue still is, to promote school readiness. In this initiative, it is evident that play is seen as instrumental to the greater purpose of learning and the relationship with parents is one in which parents are positioned as in need of instruction to improve their parenting. There is little sense that parents may have knowledge and skills of their own to contribute to their child’s development. However, as Halpern (2000: 364) noted, by 2000 these programmes had evolved such that ‘parents were to have a significant role in the programme, but not as targets of parent

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education, but as partners with professionals’. Halpern further commented that by the turn of the century this inclusion of the family, and indeed the community, was to increasingly supersede interventions that targeted only the child in the family. In addition, he claimed, the entire Head Start philosophy was ‘responsive and appropriate to each child’s and family’s developmental, ethnic, cultural, and linguistic heritage and experience’ (Halpern, 2000: 2). Thus, the orientation towards parents was argued to have evolved towards a more partnership and community form. However, the orientation towards play appeared to have remained instrumental, conceptualizing development and learning as the primary objectives to be targeted through the provision of play activities. One of the best-known early interventions, HighScope, was devised in response to the US president Lyndon Johnson’s ‘War on Poverty’, an initiative which set out to interrupt the cycle of underachievement of African-American children in cities by providing early education and support for parents. The original Perry Preschool Project, run by the independent non-profit HighScope Educational Research Foundation, was established in 1970 as one of the ‘planned variations’ of the Head Start initiative, and originated from research and programme activities in the Ypsilanti Public School. In this cognitively oriented approach, the emphasis was on training teachers’ use of a process of ‘plan–do–review’ as the way that children engaged in, and reflected on, their daily activities. Further emphasis was placed on increasing the expectations of children, parents, carers and teachers. The HighScope approach has proven to be transferable, as its curriculum model has been used in over 20 different countries and training initiatives have been implemented in 5 different countries. Epstein (2001) evaluated its outcomes and showed that the HighScope model extends the original Head Start approach by delineating a curriculum model for children and by specifying the elements needed to involve parents in their children’s education.

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It is therefore a relatively prescriptive model of learning, where activities between adults and children are goal-oriented. It extends the notion of parental involvement in their children’s education by focusing on parental aspirations and expectations for their children. Another programme launched in the 1960s and taken up internationally is the Home Instruction for Parents and Preschool Youngsters (HIPPY), a home-based, parent involvement school readiness programme (HIPPY International, 2009). The programme started in Israel in 1969 and has since been replicated in more than a dozen countries including Turkey, Mexico, Chile, New Zealand, South Africa and the United States (HIPPY International, 2013). Whilst the basic elements of the programme remain the same in each country, the HIPPY model is adapted to the cultural and linguistic needs of the local community. HIPPY, like Head Start and HighScope, aims to raise parental expectations of their children’s achievements and to increase the frequency of parent–child activities. In this intervention, the focus may indeed be aspirational for parents but there is an implicit notion that parents are in need of instruction, and the curriculum and activities presented for parents and their children remain highly structured rather than a more fluid interpretation of the role of play. Kagitcibasi et al. (2009) draw attention to the fact that most longitudinal evaluations of early childhood interventions to date have originated and been followed up in the USA. However, they report some longitudinal findings from Turkey on the Turkish Early Enrichment Project (TEEP). The TEEP project was significantly influenced by the HIPPY model and was adapted for use in Turkey via the Mother Child Education Programme (MOCEP). The original TEEP interventions took place between 1983 and 1985. Children either attended preschool or their mothers received training in how to support their child’s learning at home. The children were between the ages of four and six years and from disadvantaged backgrounds. The effects

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of the enrichment activities on their life trajectories were considered seven and nine years after the original interventions. Both groups demonstrated enhanced outcomes over children who were not enrolled in the project. Kagitcibasi et al. (2009) suggest that the children whose parents were trained to support their children at home were more likely to exhibit better adjustment to modern life as young adults. An overarching implication from the programmes described briefly in this section is the idea that parents can have a key role in their children’s learning and that this can be enhanced by specific interventions that work with parents to support their parenting skills, their understandings and their aspirations. However, it is apparent in these long-standing programmes that parents are frequently viewed through a deficiency lens, as in need of external support. Play has a role as one of the mediators that support children’s learning but is not prioritized as an end in itself. This seems to undermine the full potential of play, as identified by Izumi-Taylor et al. (2010) in their idea of the ‘playing learning child’.

THE EARLY LEARNING PARTNERSHIP (ELP) PROJECT (2006–2008) The contention that parental involvement in educational play can be a powerful facilitator of children’s learning will be demonstrated by drawing on a specific programme of early years interventions that was offered in England and which was multifaceted (Evangelou, Sylva, Edwards and Smith, 2008). The selected programmes reviewed will be those that specifically aim to build parental skills in supporting children’s learning through play. The Early Learning Partnership Project (ELPP) project (2006–2008) was commissioned by the Labour government. It recognized parental support as an important emerging theme in research that could inform policy, with the underlying aim of improving child outcomes particularly for those children

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at risk of developmental delay. A key policy imperative was the prevention of deleterious outcomes for children through early intervention rather than a retrospective remedial intervention. In a report on the ELPP project (Dalzell, Watson and Massey, 2009), the Foreword specifies an explicit focus of the project on addressing ‘inequality of opportunities’ (2009: v). It was suggested that the more general emphasis in UK education policy, which stresses parental involvement in their children’s learning, inadvertently entrenches the disparity between already engaged parents and those who are either unaware of the importance of being involved in their children’s learning, or are unable to do so through lack of confidence, knowledge or access to resources. It was acknowledged in the recruitment strategy of the ELPP initiative that the reasons some families find themselves excluded are multiple and diverse. Thus, individual project sites within the initiative exhibited variation in how they defined their target groups. The families who participated in the initiative therefore presented a range of different indicators of disadvantage. These factors could be related to health (child or parent and mental or physical); finances; refugee or asylum seeker status; parents who were living with domestic abuse or substance misuse. Families of children already known to services and deemed to be at high risk of neglect were invited to be involved. Additionally, amongst the categories of families identified as potential participants were ‘families where children were considered to be at risk of failing to reach their potential on starting school and families who found it hard to engage with their children through play’ (Dalzell, Watson and Massey, 2009: 7). An overarching aim of the ELPP initiative was that individual programmes would be drawn together to share successful practice and to work together cohesively towards the common goal of increasing parental involvement in their children’s learning (Goff, Evangelou and Sylva, 2012). There was a particular focus on parents who may not be

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aware of their potential to support their children’s learning. Thus, ELPP was situated within an early intervention paradigm characterized by the notion that family-based educational support can serve as a protective factor in the lives of young children. The ELPP initiative unfolded across a range of local contexts, with the agencies which implemented the project adopting different combinations of strategies to facilitate parents’ involvement in their children’s learning. A full summary can be found in the evaluation report (Evangelou et al., 2008). However, a key feature of all the approaches within the ELPP was a focus on ways in which parents could interact with their own children to promote their learning. Two exemplars from ELPP are provided below which particularly emphasize the important role of play in their approaches to working with parents to support children’s learning: first, Peers Early Education Partnership (PEEP); second, Parents’ Involvement in their Children’s Learning (PICL). Both demonstrate how play can be foregrounded as an integral part of the philosophy of a programme, permeating its implementation and delivery. These two approaches were selected as they demonstrate both explicit and implicit models of valuing play-based learning opportunities in their work with parents.

PEEP/Learning Together The Peers Early Education Partnership (PEEP), now known as Parents’ Early Education Partnership, is an early learning programme which aims to improve the life chances of children, particularly in disadvantaged areas such as inner cities. Its purpose is to raise educational attainment, especially in literacy, by supporting parents in their role as the first educators of their children. PEEP focuses on how to make the most of learning opportunities in everyday life at home – listening, talking, playing, singing and sharing books. PEEP can be delivered in a variety of ways, including home visits, group sessions or

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through open access activities, for instance in the children’s centres which are situated in every community in England. Open access sessions might be available to parents from many socio-economic groups, but elements of this programme were also targeted towards specific groups who may be experiencing particular challenges, for example young parents and homeless parents. Thus, the programme has elements of universality combined with more targeted provision. The PEEP philosophy stresses that parents are a child’s first and most important educators, and this is highlighted in their curriculum material ‘Learning Together with Children’. Self-esteem is seen to be crucial to children’s learning and parents are supported in recognizing their children’s achievements and building on these to extend learning. This is echoed further in the PEEP ethos, which stresses that to support children’s learning any programme must start from a position that also values the relationships with parents and other carers, aiming to build on their knowledge of the child. By working with parents as equals in a non-judgemental way, the programme can simultaneously value diversity and create opportunities for parents to share experiences in a safe and supportive environment. This is particularly important for vulnerable families. The PEEP theoretical framework is based on a number of core principles. The curriculum focuses on five developmental areas: self-concept and learning dispositions (e.g. perseverance, curiosity); oral language; reading; writing; and numeracy. These are explored through nine themes at each age level from birth to age four, combining information and ideas to do at home with five accompanying videos and two songbooks. Core activities of the programme take two forms. One consists of activities with children: songs and rhymes; sharing books and stories; singing, talking and playing together to develop children’s listening, talking and later literacy and to strengthen relationships. The other aspect consists of talking time between adults and a PEEP leader on a theme

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of child development, in which parents and carers are encouraged to share their experiences at home and their understanding of children’s learning.

PICL/Engaging Parents The Parents’ Involvement in their Children’s Learning (PICL) programme originated in Pen Green, a well-known Centre for Children and Families in the English Midlands. The centre was founded in the 1980s, at a time when the town’s main employer, a steel works, had closed down, and many local families were living in poverty. The centre’s ‘Framework for Engaging Parents’ is a professional development programme which outlines the centre’s programme for working with parents, PICL. This long-established approach offers a framework for knowledge sharing between workers and parents about children’s learning. Pen Green describes its approach as ‘social constructivist’ – that is, children construct their own knowledge through their own first-hand experiences and are influenced by people in their environment. Involving parents in their children’s learning draws on principles of advocacy, knowledge sharing and community development. The emphasis of the PICL training is to promote a community-based approach to working with parents which respects the knowledge parents have about their own children. Parental involvement in their children’s learning takes a number of forms: ‘key concept’ sessions, family group meetings, videoing children as they play at home, discussing patterns of activity, keeping a diary and contributing to a home–school book. An articulated emphasis is on co-reflection by parents and practitioners on children’s naturally occurring play. Key themes for play analysis are explored with parents, including ‘involvement’ and ‘well-being’ (Laevers, 1997) and ‘schemas’ (Athey, 2007). The Pen Green framework does not include a formal curriculum. However, it does have a coherent and distinctive combination of strategies to support parents’

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understanding of their children’s learning. First, video reflection is used as a tool to engage with parents as equals. This involves parents and practitioners sharing video footage of a child as learning and play take place, both at home and in the preschool setting. This allows parents and workers to jointly reflect on key aspects of a child’s development and think ahead about ways to build on this and further support the child’s learning. A second key strategy in the Pen Green approach is sharing theoretical knowledge of child development with parents. By sharing ways of analysing children’s learning through, for example, the schema theory (Athey, 2007), parents become more able to share the same tools for understanding the deep-level interests their child is demonstrating. A third element in the Pen Green approach is the development of a dialogue between parents and practitioners where they can both bring their separate knowledge and understanding of the child together. This is helpful in respect of providing appropriate learning experiences and environments for the child. Just as importantly, it engenders a mutual respect and understanding of each other’s point of view and contribution. By listening to each other, parents and practitioners may create new knowledge and understanding together.

The Role of Play in ELP The examples showcased above both include play as a starting point for the exploration of children’s learning and development, and seek to involve parents in discussion of the key role that play has in supporting this. They emphasize this in different ways. PEEP has an explicit curriculum that highlights the role of play and offers examples of play activities and advice on supporting children through these. PICL starts from play episodes and encourages parents to draw out the implications for

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children’s learning by linking these episodes to particular theoretical frameworks. In both cases play is seen as a crucial fulcrum of learning and parents are supported in recognizing this. Another thing that both approaches have in common is that neither seeks to ‘preach’ to parents or simply tell them what they ‘should be doing’ whilst engaging with their children. The emphasis in both programmes is on mutual respect and valuing what parents are already doing as a starting point.

Evaluation of the ELP Initiative The UK government commissioned an evaluation study of the ELP project (Evangelou et al., 2008) that included a focus on how parents could be enabled to support their young children as learners. Since the implementation of the ELP initiative was quite complex, the evaluation was designed within a mixed methods framework consisting of 20 longitudinal case studies of the sites involved in ELP. A range of measures were used to examine the ways in which parents were supporting their children’s learning and their views of participation in the ELP project. The quality of the Home Learning Environment was reported by families during an extended interview at home (pre and post participation in the ELP project), along with structured observations of their parenting practices at home. Results from the pre-participation interviews indicated that the greatest gap in the parenting skills of the sample was the ability to take an active role as a stimulator of their child’s learning, particularly through providing cognitively challenging experiences (Goff, Evangelou and Sylva, 2012: 173). An interesting finding was that many of the families scored highly on the Home Learning Environment at pre-test, indicating that families had some awareness of what should be included in order to provide a high-quality learning environment. However, it was evident

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that families were less secure in their knowledge of how to provide sufficient challenge and stimulation to accompany the learning resources. By the time of the post-participation interview significant improvement was evident in the ways in which ELP parents actively supported their children’s learning. This suggests that ELP participation had influenced parental involvement even after taking into account the initial awareness of parents of the importance of providing a strong Home Learning Envi­ ronment. Additionally, parents reported more positive views on their relationships with their children and a reduction in negative feelings as a result of participating in the ELP project. Parents particularly welcomed specific advice and practical ideas that they could adopt for use with their own children. They also valued simply being able to talk about their child’s individual needs and coming to understand those needs through a dialogue with professionals. In practical terms, parents reported that they were now providing more varied experiences for their children – for example, taking the children out of the house more often – and also valuing opportunities to extend their children’s learning in simple everyday activities. It is worth noting that play was not a directly observed outcome measure of the evaluation. Nevertheless, in two of the three strands of the evaluation project, play was identified as a mediator of the positive outcomes noted. Analysis of these strands of the evaluation revealed the impact that play had had within the interventions. There was an increasing tendency for parents to engage with their children in structured play scenarios, for example by providing opportunities for creative and messy play or in sharing activities such as singing, rhyming games or books with their children. Parents also identified the powerful role of play as a facilitator of their children’s social development. It was interesting to note that the

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evaluation additionally highlighted ways in which play could contribute to enhancing the warmth of relationships between parents and children. Though not overtly positioned as a learning goal, this sharing of playful spaces between adults and children might in this way exert a more subtle but enduring influence on children’s developmental outcomes. It is important to understand the processes of implementation of early interventions which focus on parental involvement in their children’s learning. As the ELP evaluation was restricted to less than a year, it is not possible to demonstrate the preventative role of the projects, especially against children’s long-term learning trajectories. Nevertheless, the findings of this study suggested that: it is possible to improve levels of parental involvement and broaden the quality of the HLE via the implementation of an early intervention project in a minimum of three months. The study also showed that it is possible to influence parental involvement over and above parents’ already fairly strong awareness of the importance of providing a strong HLE (Evangelou et al., 2008: 118).

Another important finding from the study was the identification of a continuum of parental awareness and skills of which professionals and practitioners should be aware. In an effort to support all the families a programme may be working with, the professionals involved need to appreciate and accept that parents may be positioned along two parallel continua of awareness and skills. There are parents who are not aware of the role they can play in their children’s learning, whilst others are very aware of this. Some parents may be aware of the role they can play in their children’s learning but are insecure in their knowledge of how to do so. The ELP project demonstrated success where practitioners were encouraged to acknow­ledge parents’ starting points on both trajectories (awareness

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and skills) and were able to sensitively communicate ideas about the value of play and to adapt resources to support parents wherever they were positioned along each continuum. Practitioners needed a degree of freedom to make responsive adjustments when working with vulnerable parents. It was found that both parents and staff in the project valued policies aimed at enhancing parental involvement in their children’s learning.

CONCLUSION What constitutes the existing skills and awareness of parents may be a complex phenomenon. Mutual understandings and shared meanings cannot be taken for granted. For example, although professionals and practitioners in the early years may appreciate play as a medium of learning, this understanding may not always be assumed or accepted by parents. It is noteworthy that the finding of the ELP evaluation drew attention to a spectrum of awareness, understanding and practices amongst parents. Parents are not accurately conceptualized as deficient in their parenting and even when parents might benefit from ideas and inspiration on how to engage with their children and support their learning, they will also have particular parenting strengths in terms of their deep knowledge of their child, and may already be engaging in meaningful ways. This suggests that what is required is a bidirectional approach where both partners are valued for the contributions they make to children’s development. Practitioners and parents learn from each other to mutually enhance their own understandings and the child’s learning. As Evangelou et al. demonstrate, interventions can ‘help parents to be in control of the learning environment for their young children, and... can be treated as equal

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players in creating or choosing that environment, whether at home or in the school or early years settings’ (2008: 5). These programmes see play as a key facilitator of learning but parents seemed to be positioned more positively, as their contributions and knowledge of their children were thoroughly acknow­ledged. By sharing and building on each other’s awareness and understandings in relation to play, these interventions may simultaneously start to reposition play not purely as a means to an end but as a human experience that has inherent value and potential.

REFERENCES Athey, C. (2007) Extending Thought in Young Children: A Parent-Teacher Partnership. (2nd ed). London: Paul Chapman. Brooks-Gunn, J. (2000) ‘Do you believe in magic? What we can expect from early childhood intervention programs: early childhood intervention programs: are the costs justified?’, Congressional Briefing, Washington, Dc. Council of the European Union (2011) ‘Council conclusions on early childhood education and care: providing all our children with the best start for the world of tomorrow’, 3090th Education, Youth, Culture and Sport Council meeting, Brussels, 19 and 20 May. Dalzell, R., Watson, A. and Massey, K. (2009) ‘A report on the Early Learning Partnership Project’. London: Family and Parenting Institute. Desforges, C., with Abouchaar, A. (2003) The impact of parental involvement, parental support and family education on pupil achievement and adjustment: A literature review. DFES Research Report 433. London: DfES. Epstein, A. (1998) ‘Is the High/Scope edu­ cational approach compatible with the Revised Head Start performance standards?’ YES!, HighScope Educational Research Foundation, 17(2), 1: 8–11. Evangelou, M., Sylva, K., Edwards, A. and Smith, T. (2008) ‘Supporting parents in promoting early learning: The evaluation of the early learning partnership project’. Nottingham: DCSF.

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Evangelou, M., Sylva, K., Wild, M., Glenny, G. and Kyriacou, M. (2009) ‘Early years learning and development: literature review’. Nottingham: DCSF Publications. Evans, J. L. (2006) ‘Parenting programmes: An important ECD intervention Strategy’. Background paper prepared for the ‘Education for all global monitoring report 2007’. Paris: UNESCO. Feinstein, L. (2003) ‘Inequality in the early cognitive development of British children in the 1970 cohort’, Economica, 70: 73–97. Feinstein, L. (2004) ‘Mobility in pupils’ cognitive attainment during school life’, Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 20(2): 213–29. Goff, J., Evangelou, M. and Sylva, K. (2012) ‘Enhancing parents’ ways of supporting their children’s early learning through participation in an early intervention project in the UK: The Early Learning Partnership Project Early Childhood Education in the Family’, Zeitschrift fuer Familienforschung [Journal of Family Research], 24(2): 160–77. Halpern, R. (2000) ‘Early childhood intervention for low-income children and families’, in J. P. Shonkoff and S. J. Meisels (eds), Handbook of Early Childhood Intervention. (2nd ed.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 361–86. Harris, A. and Goodall, J. (2007) ‘Engaging parents in raising achievement: Do parents know they matter?’, Research project commissioned by the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust and DCSF. Izumi-Taylor, S., Pramling Samuelsson, I. and Rogers, C. S. (2010) ‘Perspectives of play in three nations: A comparative study in Japan, the United States, and Sweden’, Early Childhood Research and Practice, 12(1): online. HIPPY International (2009) ‘HIPPY research summary’ (a list of research reports that have been produced since the 2003 publication of Parents Making A Difference, organized by primary focus on children, parents, home visitors or community. Studies submitted from USA, Canada, Germany). Jerusalem: HIPPY. HIPPY International (2013) www.hippy-international.org Kagitcibasi, C., Sunar, D., Bekman, S., Baydar, N. and Cemalcilar, Z. (2009) ‘Continuing effects of early enrichment in adult life: The Turkish Early Enrichment Project 22 years later’, Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 30: 764–79. Laevers, F. (1997) A Process-Oriented Child Monitoring System for Young Children. Leuven, Belgium: Centre for Experiential Education.

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Luthar, S. (2003) Resilience and Vulnerability: Adaptation in the Face of Childhood Adversities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Melhuish, E. C., Phan, M. B., Sylva, K., Sammons, P., Siraj-Blatchford, I. and Taggart, B. (2008) ‘The effects of the home learning environment and preschool center experience upon literacy and numeracy development in early primary school’, Journal of Social Issues, 64(1): 95–114. Moran, P., Ghate, D. and Van der Merwe, A. (2004) ‘What works in parenting support? A review of the international evidence. Nottingham: DCSF. Piaget, J. (1950) The Psychology of Intelligence. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Rogers, S. (2011) ‘Play and pedagogy: A conflict of interests?’, in S. Rogers (ed.), Rethinking Play and Pedagogy in Early Childhood Education. Abingdon: Routledge. pp. 5–18. Sammons, P., Sylva, K., Melhuish, K., Siraj-Blatchford, I., Taggart, B., Grabbe, B. and Barreau, S. (2007) ‘The effective pre-school and primary education 3–11 project (EPPE 3–11): Influences on children’s attainment and progress in Key Stage 2: cognitive outcomes in year 5’. London: DfES/Institute of Education. Saunders, P., Naidoo, Y. and Griffiths, M. (2007) ‘Towards new indicators of disadvantage: deprivation and social exclusion in Australia’. Sydney: Social Policy Research Centre. Schoon, I. (2006) Risk and Resilience Adaptations in Changing Times. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shinman, S. (2005) ‘Learning from families: Policies and practices to combat social exclusion in families with young children in europe: Report for England and Wales’. London: Brunel University/Home-Start International. Smith, P. K. (2010) Children and Play: Understanding Children’s Worlds. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Sylva, K., Bruner, J. S. and Jolly, A. (1976) Play: Its Role in Development and Evolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Sylva, K., Melhuish, E., Sammons, P., Siraj-Blatchford, I. and Taggart, B. (2004) ‘Effective pre-school education: Final report’. London: DfES/Institute of Education. UNESCO (2000) ‘The Dakar Framework for Action: Education for all: Meeting our collective commitmets’. Paris: UNESCO. United Nations (1989) Convention on the Rights of the Child, Resolution 25, Session 44. United Nations (2013) General Comment No. 17 on the Right of the Child To Rest, Leisure, Play,

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Recreational Activities, Cultural Life and the Arts (Art. 31). Geneva: UN Vygotsky. L. S. (1978) Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Whitebread, D., Basilio, M., Kuvalja, M. and Verma, M. (2012) ‘The importance of play: A report on the value of children’s play with a series of policy recommendations’. Brussels, Belgium: Toys Industries for Europe.

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32 Opportunities and Affordances in Outdoor Play Margaret Kernan

INTRODUCTION Many would agree that the existence of childhood is inextricably linked to being able to play. In many instances, this is understood as space and time to play outdoors. Why outdoors particularly? The persistent if somewhat nostalgic adult association of a good childhood and play in nature is one factor. But perhaps of more significance are the dimensions of play outdoors, which serve both to distinguish it from being in an indoor environment and to capture its appeal for children, such as its characteristics of being freer and less controlling or restricted; more open to change and variation; sensorially rich; spacious, physically vigorous; less tidy, unstructured; encouraging feelings of capability and competence; and scary, risky and adventurous. During the first decades of the twenty-first century there has been a noticeable urgency in the manner in which young children’s

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(lack of) opportunities to play outdoors has been discussed by child advocates, paediatricians, educators, parents and children alike. This discussion is typically framed within changing conditions of childhood globally and with reference to phenomena such as increased urbanization, traffic danger and migration; the proliferation of attractive indoor play technologies; and pressures of educational attainment at ever younger ages (IPA, 2010). Three prominent themes of investigation regarding the ‘state of play’ outdoors have been: (1) diminished opportunity for movement, specifically freedom to explore and engage in physically active play outdoors; (2) loss of contact and familiarity with the natural habitat and (3) children and risk outdoors. These concerns are also commanding the attention of early childhood education and care (ECEC) researchers and practitioners, especially since increasing numbers of girls and boys worldwide are spending more time in organized ECEC settings.

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BROADENING THE PLAY RESEARCH AGENDA For much of the twentieth century, the majority of play research about children in the early childhood years focused on play in indoor environments and through the analytical lens of developmental psychology, child development and ECEC (Piaget, 1962). However, the combined impetus of public health concerns, such as cardiovascular disease and rising levels of obesity and environmental concerns, such as depletion of natural habitats, along with the conceptualization of play as a childhood right, has resulted in a broadening out of the research agenda on young children’s outdoor play. Collaborative work from researchers from the fields of urban planning, public health, landscape architecture, environmental psychology, sociology of childhood, developmental psychology and ECEC has introduced new perspectives to learning and development in the early years. One result of such interdisciplinary work has been a new focus on interactional and reciprocal relations with the physical and social environment outdoors – sometimes termed a ‘socio-ecological’ perspective. A central ecological concept that came to the attention of outdoor play researchers is that of affordance. It was developed by perception psychologist James Gibson over many decades and explained in his seminal text The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, published in 1979.

THE ATTRACTION OF AFFORDANCE FOR PLAY RESEARCHERS When Gibson first coined the term ‘affordance’, he explained it as follows: ‘the affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill’ (Gibson 1979: 127). His analysis concerned visual perception of the physical environment in terms of action and exploration. As summarized by Greeno (1994: 339), ‘affordance

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refers to whatever it is about the environment that contributes to the kind of interaction that occurs’. Thus, flat, uncluttered surfaces afford walkability, objects – depending on whether or not they are detached or attached – afford carrying, throwing, grasping or containing. Crucially, in Gibson’s theory, perception of the environment was understandable in terms of both the perceived and the perceiver. For example, a small step, hardly noticed by an adult, might be perceived as sit-on-able or jump-off-able by a two-year-old close to the ground. In 1988 Heft conducted a meta-analysis of three earlier studies of children’s outdoor environments, the outcome of which was a functional taxonomy of affordances in children’s outdoor environments. This offered a way of thinking about environments that was fundamentally active and goal-directed (Heft, 1988) and was also relevant for those concerned with supporting young children’s physical activity, curiosity, exploration, play and learning. Naturally occurring features (such as shrubs and edging) and designed-in physical features or installations (such as swings and sand pits) of outdoor environments in ECEC outdoor play spaces began to be defined in terms of their affordances and their ‘playability’. As researchers further explored the concept of affordance, definitions, theoretical understandings and applications became elaborated and diversified (see for example Reed, 1996; Stoffregen, 2000; Kytta, 2002, 2004). Whilst Gibson had focused primarily on physical environmental systems, it became clear that when applying the notion of affordance to children’s engagement with the physical environment, whether at home, in an organized and institutionalized setting such as ECEC or indeed in public space, it was necessary to take account of the social and cultural world, including child-rearing practices and opportunities and constraints placed on children. Merging ecological psychology with concepts and methods of ethnographic social science offered a promising way forward (Greeno, 1994).

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MOVEMENT FOR LEARNING In the 2010s the importance of physical activity for learning and development is slowly regaining prominence, having been a rather neglected dimension for many decades. Once again, public health concerns may drive the debate, such as evidence showing that physical inactivity is a major contributor to death and disability from noncommunicable diseases worldwide (Lee et al., 2012). Babies and young children are primed to be physically active in order to learn and develop. Gains in movement during the first year of life greatly facilitate young children’s deliberate and organized exploration of their environment and perceptual learning, and ‘upright locomotion demands virtuoso control of equilibrium of the whole body and at the same time opens up the world for exploration of its useful offerings and its geography’ (Gibson and Pick, 2000: 48). Other researchers have similarly highlighted the significance of the attainment of unsupported sitting (freeing hands for exploration) and independent walking for babies’ and toddlers’ perception of the world and the opportunities they have for acting on their environment and receiving input from the environment (Thelen and Smith, 1994; Oudgenoeg-Paz, Volman and Leseman, 2012). Walking children can carry objects from one place to another and are also better able to direct adults’ attention to specific objects, resulting in joint attention, which facilitates the development of communication skills (Clearfield, 2011). An important conclusion of Oudgenoeg-Paz et al.’s (2012) study, which examined the predictive relationship between attainment of walking and the productive vocabulary of toddlers (16–28-month-olds) was that once motor milestones are achieved, children’s exploratory behaviour plays a much larger role in language development than the actual attainment of the milestones. These are some of a growing number of studies that are demonstrating the importance of experience of the physical environment in the first

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three years of life for the sensory motor coordination and cognitive advances necessary for children to thrive as learners in the early years and later during school age (see also Piek et al., 2008; Goddard Blythe, 2012). One could conclude that with developing competencies in locomotion, combined with more control of objects and developing communication skills, children’s field of experience indoors and outdoors extends, offering a broader world to explore that is rich in information and diverse in terms of affordances for action. However, as observed by Reed (1996), children are generally not placed in a natural environment replete with possible affordances. Rather, often they are ‘put in a modified environment in which specific possibilities are emphasized and others are downplayed’ (Reed 1996: 124) by adults. Developing this notion, Reed described affordances in terms of the ‘field of free action’ (FFA) and the ‘field of promoted action’ (FPA) whereby the former represents an independent, active exploration and striving for meaning, and the latter includes all the affordances ‘made available to or emphasized for the child by other people and excludes those affordances forbidden to the child by other people’ (Reed, 1996: 130). Therefore, it is important to take into account both fields of free action and promoted action when considering young children’s opportunities for physical exploration and movement. Basic housing conditions, the choice of which is certainly outside the realm of young children, also need to be considered.

ASSESSING AFFORDANCES AT HOME Mindful of the importance of motor development in the early years and the primacy of the home environment as an influencing factor in children’s learning and development, Rodrigues et al. (2005) developed an instrument for assessing affordances in the home environment of young children, otherwise known as the AHEMD-SR. It is designed to

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measure the quality and quantity of factors (affordances and events) in the home that are conducive to enhancing motor development in children aged 18 to 42 months. It is based on the assumption that toys, materials (for example simple puzzles, shape sorters), play apparatus (for example slides, stairs, tunnels) and indoor and outdoor space afford opportunities for action or physical activity and thus promote fine motor and gross motor development. In a later instrument, AHEMD-RD, items relating to stimulation and nurturing by parents (and others) are included, providing an additional component of events. In total, AHEMD-RD comprises 67 items divided into 5 subscales: outside physical space; inside physical space; variety of stimulation; fine motor toys; and gross motor toys. Outside space items referred to space associated with the house, such as back yard, front yard, garden – for example, ‘In the outside space is there more than one type of ground texture?’; ‘In the outside space is there any apparatus or platform that permits your child to climb on/off and step or jump from?’ The validity and reliability of AHEMD was initially examined with Portuguese and US families and its validity has subsequently been validated with families of young children attending day care services in Iran (Haydari et al., 2009) in The Netherlands (Burgt et al., 2010) and in Taiwan (Yu-hsin et al. 2011). A second instrument designed for 3–18-month-olds, AHEMDIS, has also been developed (Cacola et al., 2011). It has been suggested that with further research the AHEMD-RD could function as a screening instrument for detecting children at high risk of developing motor problems (Burgt et al., 2010). Its applicability for ECEC practitioners has also been proposed, as a best practice instrument, to guide early intervention with respect to the home environment and to provide insight for practitioners regarding pedagogical aspects of homes of families from different cultural backgrounds (Gabbard et al., 2008). However, the cultural appropriateness of items needs further attention, particularly if AHEMD-SR is to be used with more representative populations (low socio-economic

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status (SES) as well as mid and high SES) and in non-industrialized countries and cultures. The developers themselves acknowledge this, describing the tool as experimental.

DESIGNING FOR MOVEMENT IN PLAY Interdisciplinary approaches to studying children’s movement outdoors are also evident in the projects of Cosco and colleagues at the Natural Learning Initiative at North Carolina State University, in the United States. Cosco et al. (2010) integrated behaviour-mapping techniques with affordance in order to research the design components associated with increased physical activity. Behaviour mapping is an observational method which allows the simultaneous recording of people’s locations and their activity levels. A detailed mapping analysis was undertaken in two ECEC centres, providing insight into how children interact with different aspects of the physical environment. Two of the areas on which the researchers focused were playground surface and pathways. It was found that the amount of use and level of activity on pathways was substantially affected by surface quality (hard or soft), path width and path form. It was also observed that looped pathways were more interesting for children than linear ones and that typically children are more active on hard and curvy pathways, which afford speed and circular motion – both attractive to children. Cosco et al. (2010) point to the differing priorities of play space designers and children when it comes to surface selection. Typically, safety is prioritized by designers and practitioners, and speed and ease of movement is prioritized by children (see also Sandseter, 2009).

PROMOTING OR CONSTRAINING AFFORDANCES? Tensions between children’s play priorities and the intentions of practitioners within the

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institutional constraints of ECEC settings were addressed in Kernan’s (2010) study of outdoor play in ECEC settings in Ireland. Kernan built on the earlier influential work of the Finnish researcher Kytta (2002, 2004), who had analysed affordances for eight and nine-year-old children in terms of fields of free action, promoted action and constrained action in urban and rural settings in Finland and Belarus. Kernan’s study considered the pedagogical relation between adults and children, part of which involves adults creating learning opportunities and environments for play, indoors and outdoors, that engage, challenge and interest young children. Historical and cultural traditions regarding play and learning outdoors, whether services are located with the formal education sector or within the care sector, and regulatory frameworks were also accounted for. Outdoors, as defined in this study, encompassed three interconnecting arenas of action: indoor–outdoor connectedness; the enclosed outdoor space in an ECEC setting; and the wider outdoors. Qualitative fieldwork in four diverse ECEC settings incorporated observation, photography (child and researcher), and interviews with children, practitioners and managers of services. The following analysis relates to one of the settings studied: The principal argument for the laying of the manufactured safety surface was to facilitate maximum accessibility across time (both seasonal time and the ages and developmental stages of children) and weather conditions. The trade-off was the removal of grass, shrubs, climbers, and overhanging trees. The elimination of these elements reduced the direct contact with nature and the possibility of finding naturally occurring loose parts. On the other hand, it increased the amount of time and space available outdoors in the enclosed outdoor space. In this area, multiple affordances were perceived, actualized and shaped by children. The raised rim around the sandpit and the slide platform afforded balancing and being high up. Boys and girls were often observed creating small hiding spaces, particularly when facilitated by adults who provided empty cardboard boxes, old sheets or large construction blocks (Kernan, 2010: 164).

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One of the findings of Kernan’s research was that the outdoor environments which young children enjoyed most were often the places where adults enjoyed being with children. Both adults and children were observed to share the delight of observing change outdoors, with joint wonderment and discovery of the ‘real’ world. Waters and Maynard (2010) have also commented on how the outdoors prompts expressions of awe, wonder, excitement and questioning. Their study focuses on child-initiated interactions on walks to a local country park in a large innercity school in South Wales. Waters and Maynard (2010) are amongst a number of researchers who have argued that the quantity of affordances for physical activity (Fjørtoft, 2001), cognitive engagement and social and emotional development for young children (Thompson and Thompson, 2007) is greater in green or natural environments, compared to more traditional playgrounds or built play environments. Here the assumption is that natural environments are sensorially richer, more diverse, flexible, replete with loose parts from nature and have elements which contain fewer predetermined functions. Consequently, play in natural environments is viewed as potentially more complex, extended, free, imaginative, self-determined and ‘playful’. Other studies present evidence of a more nuanced picture regarding natural versus traditional playspaces (Mårtensson et al., 2009; Sandseter, 2009; Storli and Hagen, 2010). In a small-scale study where accelerometers were used to measure levels of physically active play, Storli and Hagen (2010) found no difference in the level of physically active play between traditional playground environment and play in the natural environment, suggesting that environmental diversity may be overestimated as a significant factor to encourage physically active play. The levels of activity of the same children were measured when in the traditionally boundaried preschool playground and when they visited wilder natural environments (a stony beach with rock pools, the rugged slopes of hills). Here, the researchers point to individual differences as a

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contributing factor – children who had higher levels of physical activity in natural environments were also physically active in traditional playgrounds. Sandseter’s (2009) study of affordances for risky play in a traditional preschool outdoor playspace and a natural outdoor playground found a comparable quantity of affordances for risky play (play with great heights, play with high speed, play with dangerous tools) in both types of settings. However, the natural outdoor playground afforded a higher level of risk in children’s play. It is important to acknowledge that both these studies took place in the Nordic country of Norway, where even so-called ‘traditional’ or ordinary playspaces may afford more challenging and diverse play than traditional ECEC play spaces in other contexts. In the Nordic countries of Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark, love and care of nature is regarded as an important part of national identity, and is meant to be learnt during childhood. A certain degree of riskiness is furthermore viewed as being important for development, and there is a high value placed on children’s independence and control (Moser and Martinsen, 2010). The ordinary preschool in Sandseter’s study had several climbing trees in addition to traditional play equipment such as swings, a slide (switchback) and bikes, and children were free to climb on the roof of the play hut. Of the 117 Norwegian services surveyed by Moser and Martinsen (2010), 70 per cent had climbing trees. Clearly, cultural factors play a big part in the particular role of nature and risk in early childhood pedagogy in different contexts; many authors have commented on the contrasting approaches to risk and safety in and with nature within Nordic countries, as compared to more risk-averse contexts (New, Mardell and Robinson, 2005; Tovey, 2007).

NATURE AND THE GOOD CHILDHOOD Geographers, environmental psychologists and health professionals conceptualize

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access to nature as a quality-of-life issue for both children and adults and as central to physical and mental health (Louv, 2005, 2011). This is not a new idea; its origins can be traced to the ideas of Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) and Robert Owen (1771–1858), whose writing coincided with the first wave of industrialization and urbanization. It can also be traced to the subsequent nineteenth-century urban ‘project’ to provide municipal parks as a means of ameliorating the negative effects of city living (Hendrick, 1997). By the end of the twentieth century, firsthand experience in and with nature was beginning to be viewed both as a need and a right of children globally (UNCRC, 1989; Moore, 1997) and as central to constructions of a good childhood in many contexts. Furthermore, the importance of early positive experiences in nature was also being linked to concerns regarding the future stewardship of the planet at a time when environmental conservation and sustainable development was gaining global attention. By the 2000s, nearby nature was being proposed as an antidote to violence (Jualla and van Oudenhoven, 2008) and to excessive screen time (Sigman, 2011); as well as an option to soften the blow of abuse and neglect, excessive noise, pollution and traffic in young children’s lives (Louv, 2012). These proposals were given momentum in advocacy and awareness-raising initiatives such as the global World Forum Foundation’s Nature Action Collaborative for Children, with members in six continents; the more localized US-based Children and Nature Network (www.childrenandnature.org); and the UK conservation charity The National Trust’s 2012 campaign ‘50 things to do before you’re 113/4’, a checklist of 50 outdoor challenges for children. Additionally, young children’s direct contact with nature was being given form in the growing number of outdoor preschools and forest kindergartens and schools in the Nordic countries and in Germany, UK, Ireland and the United States.

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RESEARCHING CHILDREN AND NATURE The nature and children initiatives described above were, and are, largely based on a belief that being outdoors in nature positively contributes to children’s holistic and healthy development. Although the research base is increasing and the affordance approach facilitates both quantitative and qualitative analyses, empirical evidence incorporating robust cause-and-effect studies demonstrating a link between time spent in natural settings and improved development and learning is scant. In 2011, Gill took on the task of rigorously examining the empirical evidence regarding the benefits for children of experiences with nature, on request from the London Sustainable Development Commission. It is useful to summarize his findings here. The evidence is strongest for claims about physical and mental health. A small number of robust cause-and-effect studies support the claims for a positive link between spending time in nature and mental health, emotional regulation and motor development. There is also good evidence of a link between time spent in natural settings as a child and positive views about nature as an adult. Furthermore, a lack of regular positive experiences in nature is associated with the development of fear, discomfort and dislike of the environment. A more modest body of evidence points to improvements in the quality of children’s outdoor play and in their self-confidence, language and communication and psycho-social health. These studies included those which evaluated the impact of two UK-based Forest Schools (Davis and Waite, 2005; O’Brien and Murray, 2007). A further challenge when considering children’s relationship with nature, whether in public space or within the context of pedagogical relations in ECEC settings, is the contrasting perceptions and experience of nature of adults and children. Whereas adults scan the land for picturesque panoramas,

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children are on their hands and knees engaged with what is immediately before them. Thus nature is not some scenic backdrop, but nature’s elements are close by, and are responsive to children’s exploratory urge (Nabhan and Trimble, 1994). In some contexts, typically the more risk-averse contexts referred to earlier, it is precisely this ‘handson’, whole-body engagement of children with nature outdoors that can be problematic for adults and sometimes children, including concerns about children getting dirty, wet or cold (Corbett and Kernan, 2010). As indicated above, the prioritization of risk management in the design of ECEC outdoor spaces in Ireland in the 2000s (laying of safety surfaces and removal of bushes, plants and grass for fear of hazards), was underpinned by an increasingly litigious culture and perceptions of the ‘bad’ Irish weather, making it difficult for practitioners to balance children’s need to experience curiosity outdoors with the demands of safety regulations, inspections and insurance requirements (Kernan and Devine, 2010). Another view of contrasting adult and child perspectives on nature is Gulløv’s (2003) analysis of forest kindergartens in Denmark, which she describes as being extremely popular amongst middle-class parents living in urban areas. Whilst parents are in no doubt that this is a healthy way to spend one’s childhood and ‘actively choose this kind of institution and support its values and pedagogical aims, it is not unusual to hear the children themselves complain about the cold, the discomfort and the lack of toys’ (2003: 27–8). Contrasting adult and child perspectives on playing outdoors in a Nordic winter are also evident in Sandberg and Vuorinen’s (2006) study. As reported by one of the interviewees, ‘I don’t like to be out in the winter and play because it’s so cold outside. At my preschool, the preschool teachers always say that one must be outdoors, but we children don’t like it’ (2006: 13). A possible compromise which offers regular exposure to nature, but not at the same

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intensity as the all day, every day version advocated in the original forest schools, is that which is envisaged in the UK Forest School programme. Here, Forest School takes place within timetabled school sessions in regular preschool and primary schools, whereby children access woodland sites in either the school grounds or the local neighbourhood. Typically, this might take place once a week or every two weeks (O’Brien and Murray, 2007; Ridgers et al., 2012). Such a scheduled visit to nature is also advocated in the Outdoor Learning Project in South Wales reported on earlier, where innercity schoolchildren spent an afternoon four times a year in a local country park containing ‘a wooded area, open scrubland, grassed space, puddles and swampy ground, trees and panoramic views’ (Waters and Maynard, 2010: 477). The timetabled Forest School programme described in Ridgers et al.’s (2012) case study included the ubiquitous wilderness and nature activities: building shelters, cooking on camp fires and identifying plant and wildlife, all reminiscent of the elemental experiences of humans. According to Hughes (2001), these are essential experiences for children to connect with the physical and natural environment. However, it is also important to remember that playing in nature doesn’t need to happen ‘out there’ in a forest or ‘wilderness’. Nearby nature, in the marginal green areas of housing estates, in city gardens or in a single tree with low-lying branches or a messy area in an ECEC setting which affords hole-digging, can be equally valuable for young children’s connection with their environment.

EQUAL OPPORTUNITIES FOR GIRLS AND BOYS OUTDOORS? The final topic which will be briefly addressed in this chapter concerns equity in opportunities for girls and boys outdoors. The tendency to refer to children in the sexless neutral when writing about outdoor play, as if both sexes

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have the same experiences and opportunities to play outdoors, is noteworthy. However, from about age one, it is possible to observe differences in boys’ and girls’ level of movement, in their play preferences and priorities and in the ways in which girls and boys use outdoor space in early childhood settings. For example, boys’ preference to be outdoors and their tendency to make more active choices and use more space than girls have been demonstrated in a number of studies (Henniger, 1985; Dunn and Morgan, 1987; Pellegrini, 2005). It is widely acknowledged that both biology and socializing effects have a part to play in these differences (Maccoby, 1998; Eliot, 2009). However, a key question arising is whether girls and boys have equal opportunities to benefit from playing outdoors. If boys have a larger action radius, move more from one place to another, have they therefore the opportunity to discover more? Nabhan and Trimble (1994) have referred to the cultural barriers and fears that keep girls from natural spaces, which in turn lessen girls’ opportunities to develop competence and a sense of control outdoors. They argue that girls receive little positive reinforcement for climbing trees, digging or turning over rocks. Furthermore, in many contexts worldwide, girls also have restrictions placed on their opportunity to play outdoors because of greater responsibilities at home with respect to domestic chores and care of younger siblings. They are also more restricted due to fears of kidnapping, trafficking or sexual exploitation (IPA, 2010). MacNaughton (2006) argues that gendered power structures in preschool are not challenged enough. A similar finding is reported by Ärlemalm-Hagsér (2010), who comments on the challenges in operationalizing the national curriculum policy in Sweden with respect to gender inequity in a context where the outdoor environment was initially viewed as a gender-neutral zone and the concepts of gender role and gender pattern were interpreted by practitioners as unclear and difficult to explain.

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Whilst many of the affordances studies cited in this chapter included both boys and girls in their samples, only a few have specifically analysed actualized affordances as a factor of being a girl or a boy. In contrast to what might be expected given earlier findings, Niklasson and Sandberg’s study (2010), which involved 103 three to nine-year-olds in 71 preschools and schools in Sweden, found comparable levels of perceived and utilized affordances amongst girls and boys. Girls in the seven–nine-year-old age-group had the highest levels of utilized affordance overall. Child interviewees, in this study, were taken on adult researcher-led walking tours of the service during which the children recorded on a recording sheet their perceptions of the outdoor environment in terms of affordances whether or not they agreed with the guide, that is, perceived affordance. The same children were then observed during play to assess utilized affordances. One conclusion could be that Swedish practitioners have similar expectations of what girls and boys should experience outdoors, reflected perhaps in the overt gender-neutral zone of Swedish preschools reported by Ärlemalm-Hagsér (2010). A second conclusion may be that there is a close match between the affordances taxonomy for children’s play outdoors (Heft, 1988; Kytta, 2002) and preschool teachers’ intentions for outdoor play in Sweden. These affordances are promoted to children in the design of outdoor spaces, the available materials and the organized activities. The one exception in this respect is water, which featured considerably less amongst both perceived and utilized affordances for both boys and girls and for all age groups studied (Niklasson and Sandberg, 2010).

CONCLUSION The concept of affordance has proved to be a powerful tool in gaining insight into young children’s engagement with their environment. The benefits of affordance as a research approach are that affordances are objective,

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real and physical, and they address the complementarity of the perceiver and the environment. For this reason, affordances have been attractive for play researchers: they open adults’ minds to what it is about the topology of the environment and its contents, whether natural or human-made, that engages girls and boys of different ages. When parents and practitioners can put themselves in the shoes of young children and perceive affordances of environments from children’s points of view, shared moments of discovery and learning are possible. The same applies to interactions between children. When child players are able to perceive affordances for other child perceivers, joint interests are discovered, the fun of playing together becomes possible and peer relationships are strengthened, not to mention the possibilities of adventure and discovery. It is important to stress that these two kinds of relationships are very important in ECEC settings (Kernan et al., 2011) and opportunities and affordances are central to both. Furthermore, researching utilized affordances along with perceived affordances allows a critical analysis of the kinds of play behaviours outdoors that are promoted and constrained by the adult world. Such a reflective exercise could also be undertaken with children, parents, practitioners and policymakers as part of a collaborative process to assess the quality of play opportunities children have outdoors. The synthesis of affordances research as applied to play provided in this chapter has pointed to some gaps in the literature. In addition to the highlighted need to differentiate between girls’ and boys’ opportunities outdoors and to challenge inequities, it is noteworthy that the majority of studies are focused on contexts where most children are materially secure (Northern and Western Europe, North America). There are small pockets of affordances projects in other parts of the world, such as the work of the research group in Universidade Metodista de Piracicabo in Brazil, as well as research conducted in Malaysia and reported in the proceedings of

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the Asia Pacific International Conference on Environment-Behaviour Studies (e.g. Said, 2012). To date, most of the cross-cultural research on affordances and opportunities for outdoor play has focused on children in their middle childhood years (e.g. the Growing Up in Cities project and the IPA Global Consultation on Children’s Right to Play; IPA, 2010). According to Iltus (2012), politicians, the general public, funding organizations and academics fail to realize the strong link between the physical conditions in which children grow up and their health and development. This chapter has highlighted the importance of physical activity and exploratory play indoors and outdoors in the first years of life for learning and development. Clearly there is much scope for diversifying affordances research to include attention to the affordances and opportunities in environments for babies, toddlers and preschool-aged children growing up in lower- and middleincome countries. This is particularly important at a time when ECEC is globally becoming recognized as the first stage of education. A call for more causal research illuminating the natural environment’s role in reducing stress in young children’s lives and enhancing learning and development worldwide has also been noted. A further area of diversification concerns the opportunities for young children with disabilities to play outdoors. A small number of PhD studies suggest promising ways forward (Herssens, 2011; Hussein, 2012) and merit further development. In both these studies, attention is drawn to the touching, feeling, hands-on, manipulatory and action-oriented value children place on their environments, which is central to the affordances approach. To conclude, it is worthwhile emphasizing the resilience of children, their play and how they interact with their physical environments, wherever they are. As we are reminded by Kuschner (2012: 104), ‘history shows us that that the life force of play is difficult to extinguish’.

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REFERENCES Ärlemalm-Hagsér, E. (2010) ‘Gender choreography and micro-structures: Early childhood professionals’ understanding of gender roles and gender patterns in outdoor play and learning’, European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 18(4): 515–25. Burgt, S., van der, Dongen, C. van, Pasman, J. and Roefs, D.A.C. (2010) ‘Issues in the validity of the AHEMD-SR in a Dutch sample’. Unpublished Bachelor’s thesis, University of Utrecht, The Netherland. Cacola, P., Gabbard, C., Santos, D.C. and Batistela, A.C. (2011) ‘Development of the affordances in the home environment for motor development: Infant scale’, Pediatrics International, 53(6): 820–5. Clearfield, M. (2011) ‘Learning to walk changes infants’ social interactions’, Infant Behaviour and Development, 34: 15–25. Corbett, M. and Kernan, M. (2010) ‘Revisiting and rethinking provision for outdoor play in early years services in Ireland’, ChildLinks,Journal of Barnardos’ Training and Resource Service, 3: 29–34. Cosco, N., Moore, R. and Islam, M.Q. (2010) ‘Behaviour mapping: A method for linking preschool physical activity and outdoor design’, Medical Science Sports Exercise, 42(3): 513–9. Davis, B. and Waite, S. (2005) ‘Forest School: Opportunities and challenges in early years: Final evaluation report ‘, Plymouth. University of Plymouth. Dunn, S. and Morgan, V. (1987) ‘Nursery and infant school play patterns: Sex-related differences’, British Educational Research Journal, 13(3): 271–81. Eliot, L. (2009) Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow Into Troublesome Gaps and What We Can Do About It. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Fjørtoft, I. (2001) ‘The natural playground as a playground for children: The impact of outdoor play activities in pre-primary school children’, Early Childhood Education Journal, 29: 111–17. Gabbard, C., Cacola, P. and Rodrigues, L.P. (2008) ‘A new inventory for assessing Affordances in the Home Environment for Motor Development (AHEMD-SR)’, Early Childhood Education Journal, 36: 5–9. Gibson, E.J. and Pick, A.D. (2000) An Ecological Approach to Perceptional Learning and Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gibson, J.J. (1979) The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.

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Gill, Tim (2011) ‘Children and nature: A quasi-systematic review of the empirical evidence:, A report for the London Sustainable Development Commission’. London: Greater London Authority. Goddard Blythe, Sally (2012) ‘Assessing neuromotor readiness for learning: Why physical development in the early years supports educational success’, in C. Clouder, B. Heys, M. Matthes and P. Sullivan (eds), Improving the Quality of Childhood in Europe 2012: Volume 3, Brussels: European Council for Steiner Waldorf Education, Alliance for Childhood European Network Foundation. pp. 17–37. Greeno, J. (1994) ‘Gibson’s affordances’, Psychological Review, 101(2): 336–42. Gulløv, E. (2003) ‘Creating a natural place for children: An ethnographic study of Danish kindergartens’, in Karen Fog Olwig and Eva Gulløv (eds), Children’s Places: Cross-cultural Perspectives. Abingdon: Routledge. pp. 23–38. Haydari, A., Askari, P. and Nezhad, M.Z. (2009) ‘Relationship between affordances in the home environment and motor development in children age 18–42 months’, Journal of Social Sciences, 5(4): 319–38. Heft, H. (1988) ‘Affordances of children’s environments: A functional approach to environmental description’, Children’s Environments Quarterly, 5: 29–37. Hendrick, Harry (1997) Children, Childhood and English Society 1880–1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Henniger, M.L. (1985) ‘Preschool children’s play behaviours in an indoor and outdoor environment’, in J.L. Frost and S. Sunderlin (eds), When Children Play: Proceedings of the International Conference on Play and Play Environments. Wheaton, MD: Association for Childhood International. pp. 145–149. Herssens, J. (2011) ‘Designing architecture for more: A framework of haptic design parameters with the experience of people born blind’. Doctoral thesis, Leuven University, Belgium. Hughes, B. (2001) Evolutionary Playwork and Reflective Analytic Practice. Abingdon: Routledge. Hussein, H. (2012) ‘The influence of sensory gardens on the behaviour of children with special educational needs’. Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, 38: 343–54. Iltus, S. (2012) ‘Recognising the importance of the living conditions children grow up in’, Editorial, Early Childhood Matters, 118: 5–9. IPA (International Play Association) (2010) ‘IPA global consultations on children’s right to play’. Faringdon: International Play Association. Jualla, R. and van Oudenhoven, N. (2008) ‘Lowering the tolerance towards violence against children:

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Lessons from Nicaragua and Trinidad and Tobago’, in  Aldrie Henry-Lee and Julie Meeks Gardner (eds), Promoting Child Rights through Research: Selected Papers from the Caribbean Children’s Research Conference, 2007–2008: Volume 2. SALISES (Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies), Kingston pp. 108–22. Kernan, M. (2010) ‘Outdoor affordances in early childhood education and care settings: Adults’ and children’s perspectives’. Children, Youth and Environments, 20(1): 152–77. Kernan, M. and Devine, D. (2010) ‘Being confined within? Constructions of the good childhood and outdoor play in early childhood education and care settings in Ireland’. Children and Society, 24(5): 371–85. Kytta, M. (2002) ‘Affordances of children’s environments in the context of cities, small towns, suburbs and rural villages in Finland and Belarus’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 22: 109–23. Kytta, M. (2004) ‘The extent of children’s independent mobility and the number of actualised affordances as criteria for child-friendly environments’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 24: 79–198. Kuschner, D. (2012) ‘What is the state of play?’ International Journal of Play, 1(1): 103–4. Lee, I.-M., Shiroma, E.J., Lobelo, F., Puska, P., Blair, S.N. and Katzmarkzyk, P.T. (2012) ‘Effect of physical activity on major non-communicable diseases worldwide: An analysis of burden of disease and life expectancy’.The Lancet, 380(9838): 219–29. Louv, Richard (2005) Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-deficit Disorder. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin. Louv, Richard (2011) The Nature Principle: Human Restoration and the End of Nature-deficit Disorder. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin. Louv, Richard (2012) ‘Nature’s neurons: Do early experiences in the natural world help shape children’s brain architecture?’ Children & Nature Network blog. Maccoby, E.E. (1998) The Two Sexes: Growing Up Apart, Coming Together. Cambridge, MA: Belknap and Harvard University. MacNaughton, G. (2006) ‘Constructing gender in early years education’, in C. Skelton, B. Francis and L. Skulyan (eds), The Sage Handbook of Gender and Education. London: Sage. pp. 127–38. Mårtensson, F., Boldemann, C., Söderström, M., Blennow, M., Englund, J.E. and Grahn, P. (2009) ‘Outdoor environmental assessment of attentionpromoting settings for preschool children’. Heath and Place, 15: 1149–57. Moore, R.C. (1997) ‘The need for nature: A childhood right’. Social Justice, 24: 203–20.

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Moser, T. and Martinsen, M.T. (2010) ‘The outdoor environment in Norwegian kindergartens as pedagogical space for toddlers’ play, learning and development’, European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 18(4): 457–71. Nabhan, Gary Paul and Trimble, Stephen (1994) The Geography of Childhood: Why Children Need Wild Places. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. New, R.S., Mardell, B. and Robinson, D. (2005) ‘Early childhood education as risky business: Going beyond what’s “safe” to discovering what’s possible’, Early Childhood Research & Practice, 72: online. Niklasson, L. and Sandberg, A. (2010) ‘Children and the outdoor environment’, European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 18(4): 485–96. O’Brien, L. and Murray, R. (2007) ‘Forest School and its impacts on young children: Case studies in Britain’, Urban Forestry and Urban Greening, 6: 249–65. Oudgenoeg-Paz, O., Volman, M.J.M. and Leseman, P.P.M. (2012) ‘Attainment of sitting and walking predicts development of productive vocabulary between ages 16 and 28 months’, Infant Behavior and Development, 35(4): 733–6. Pellegrini, A.D. (2005) Recess: Its Role in Education and Development. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Piaget, J. (1962) Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood. New York: W.W. Norton. Piek, J.P., Dawson, L., Smith, L.M., Gasson, N. (2008) ‘The role of early fine and gross motor development on later motor and cognitive ability’, Human Movement Science, 27: 668–81. Reed, Edward S. (1996) Encountering the World: Towards an Ecological Psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ridgers, N.D., Knowles, Z.R. and Sayers, J. (2012) ‘Encouraging play in the national environment: A child-focused case study of Forest School’, Children’s Geographies, 10(1): 49–65. Rodrigues, L., Saraiva, L. and Gabbard, C. (2005) ‘Development and construct validation of an inventory for assessing the home environment for motor development’, Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 76(2): 140–8. Said, I. (2012) ‘Affordance of nearby forest and orchard on children’s performances’, Procedia – Social and Behavioural Sciences, 38: 195–203.

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Sandberg, A. and Vuorinen, T. (2006) ‘From hayloft to own room: Girls’ play environments in our time’, in J. Brodin and P. Lindstrand (eds), Interaction in Outdoor Play Environments: Gender, Culture and Learning. Stockholm: Research Report No. 47, Child and Youth Science, Stockholm Institute of Education. Sandseter, E.B. Hansen (2009) ‘Affordances for risky play in preschool: The importance of features in the play environment’, Early Childhood Education Journal, 36: 439–46. Sigman, A. (2011) ‘Does not compute, revisited: Screen technology in early years education’, in Richard House (ed.), Too Much, Too Soon? Early Learning and the Erosion of Childhood. Stroud: Hawthorn Press. pp. 265–89. Stoffregen, T.A. (2000) ‘Affordances and events’. Ecological Psychology, 12(1): 1–28. Storli, R. and Løge Hagen, T. (2010) ‘Affordances in outdoor environments and children’s physically active play in pre-school’, European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 18(4): 445–56. Thelen, Esther and Smith, Linda B. (1994) A Dynamic Systems Approach to the Development of Cognition and Action. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Thompson, J.E. and Thompson, R.A. (2007) ‘Natural connections: Children, nature, and social-emotional development’, Exchange, 46–49. Available at http:// ccic.dpi.wi.gov/files/ccic/pdf/newsart/63/Natural_ connections.pdf Tovey, Helen (2007) Playing Outdoors: Spaces and Places, Risk and Challenge. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Waters, J. and Maynard, T. (2010) ‘What’s so interesting outside? A study of child-initiated interaction with teachers in the natural outdoor environment’, European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 18(4): 473–83. Yu-hsin Hsieh, Ai-wen Hwang,  Hua-fang Liao, Pauchung Chen, Wu-shiun Hsieh and Pei-yi Chu (2011) ‘Psychometric properties of a Chinese version of the home environment measure for motor development’, Disability and Rehabilitation, 33(25–26): 2454–63. United Nations (1989) Convention on the Rights of the Child.

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33 Media, Popular Culture and Play Jackie Marsh

INTRODUCTION Research on the relationship between popular culture and play has, historically, drawn on a range of theoretical perspectives, including those originating from the fields of cultural studies and media studies. Inevitably, discussion on the nature of popular culture itself must be informed by analyses of the nature of social and cultural practices in specific economic, historical and political contexts. Definitions of popular culture are many and varied, and therefore it is necessary to begin the chapter with a clear statement of how this notion is conceptualized in this context. Drawing from Mukerji and Schudson (1991: 3), who emphasize the way in which popular culture includes the beliefs, practices and objects that are widely shared among a population, it can be proposed that children’s popular culture includes both media-related texts and artefacts and those non-media-related practices and beliefs that are embedded in everyday life experiences. Examples of the latter might include

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urban legends, popular sayings, chain letters (or emails, as is currently the case) and customs. In relation to young children, everyday cultural practices include the transmission of nursery rhymes. The focus in this chapter is on those aspects of children’s popular culture which are embedded in, or influenced by, media and new technologies, such as television, films, computer games, online sites and mobile technologies, and related texts and artefacts. This demarcation is not intended to suggest that media-related play and nonmedia play can be easily categorized and separated in this way; play, as we know, is a fluid and complex concept that defies attempts to classify it or its contents. Further to this, it is problematic to suggest that culture can be separated into something that relates to ‘popular’ and that which is distinct from it. As Raymond Williams (1977) suggested, ‘culture is ordinary’, by which he intended to argue that the concept of culture should include everyday practices in addition to notions of high culture that relate to the arts, for example. Nevertheless, despite these

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limitations to an approach that does focus narrowly on media-related play, there is much to be gained from a close analysis of the way in which media-related popular cultural practices are integrated into play, given the numerous myths and misunderstandings that abound in this area, which give rise to recurrent moral panics about the nature of childhood in the new media age (e.g. Palmer, 2006).

THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES Theoretical perspectives from cultural studies provide opportunities to consider the relationship between dominant, hegemonic cultural values and children’s play. Poststructuralist analyses of this relationship have moved beyond the Frankfurt-school notion of the ‘duped’ masses to acknowledge the complexities of the interactions between consumer and producer. For example, Du Gay, Hall, Janes, Mackay and Negus (1997) developed the ‘circuit of culture’ model in order to examine the social and cultural practices embedded in the use of the Sony Walkman. They identified key elements that circulate in cultural production and consumption, which include identity, regulation and representation. This model makes it clear that in any cultural event, complex factors intersect. As a result, it is difficult to make any assumptions about children’s agency, or lack of it, in the practice of media production or consumption without considering the ways in which each of these elements interact in situated contexts. Perspectives from cultural studies also enable a consideration of the relationship between children’s play and larger structures within society over time. For example, Williams’s work has more recently been drawn upon to consider the way in which children’s play practices are composed of elements that operate simultaneously, yet originate from different timescales, with varied cultural effects (Willett, Richards, Marsh,

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Burn and Bishop, 2013). Williams distinguished between residual, dominant and emergent aspects of culture in an attempt to explain how the present is layered: Any culture includes available elements of its past, but their place in the contemporary cultural process is profoundly variable. I would call the ‘archaic’ that which is wholly recognized as an element of the past, to be observed, to be examined, or even on occasion to be consciously ‘revived’, in a deliberately specializing way. What I mean by the ‘residual’ is very different. The residual, by definition, has been effectively formed in the past, but it is still active in the cultural process… Thus certain experiences, meanings, and values which cannot be expressed or substantially verified in terms of the dominant culture, are nevertheless lived and practised on the basis of the residue – cultural as well as social – of some previous social and cultural institution or formation (Williams, 1977: 122).

In children’s play, residual forms, such as games that have been passed on and rearticulated through generations, are present in contemporary culture. Dominant practices reflect hegemonic cultural forms and it is this element of popular cultural play that has perhaps received most attention, with, for example, extensive reviews of the way in which dominant ideologies in relation to commercialism pervade children’s play practices (Seiter, 1995; Kenway and Bullen, 2001). It is the ‘emergent’ category that Williams felt offered the potential for oppositional practices (Williams, 1981). In considering the relationship between media, play and popular culture, innovative and emergent practices develop which provide space for children’s agentive play and which enable children to challenge and transgress dominant cultural values and forms; these play practices may, in turn, become residual if they are sedimented into everyday practice over time (Willett et al., 2013). The related field of media studies has also been highly influential in analyses of children’s play and popular culture. Whilst the majority of research in this field has been focused on the practices of older children and

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young people, the findings do have relevance when considering the experiences of young children. Work in this area has identified the way in which media are a central element of children’s lives (Buckingham, 2000). In the digital nexus of play and creativity, media are central to children’s meaning-making practices (Willett, Robinson and Marsh, 2009). Children develop ‘ruling passions’ (Barton and Hamilton, 1998) related to particular media characters, texts and/or artefacts and these inform constructions of identity and social relationships in the early years (Marsh et al., 2005). As media texts have become more embodied in digital technologies, children communicate with others in multiple ways through online networks (Ito et al., 2008) and engage in participatory communities that develop a range of skills and knowledge (Jenkins et al., 2006). Two concepts in particular deserve consideration here: those of transmedia intertextuality and media ecology. One of the key theoretical concepts that has informed understanding of the relationship between media, popular culture and play is that of transmedia intertextuality. Kinder (1993) developed this concept in an analysis of children’s media texts, which are linked together in a process of ‘transmedia intertextuality’, such as the way in which television programmes may have spin-offs in the form of books, comics and computer games. Grimes (2008: 122) points to the way in which such media ‘supersystems’ privilege consumerism, suggesting that ‘each text promotes consumption of the other (related) texts, and invokes consumerism as the preferred mode of experience – by promising that purchase of ancillary products will enable more intimate access to the narrative and its characters’. Drawing on Fleming’s (1996) analysis of the way in which toys are positioned in these crossmedia supersystems, this phenomenon can be seen to create a narrativized semiotic system in which children can access the narrative from any entry point and, thus, the

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idea of a particular text being the central focus is no longer relevant. A second key concept that is germane to any study of the relationship between media, popular culture and play is the notion of the media ecology. Originating from the work of Marshall McLuhan (1964) and developed by Neil Postman (1970: 61) as ‘the study of media as environments’, this ecological metaphor emphasizes the way in which media are embedded within social and cultural networks in which the various elements are integrated. Scolari (2012: 218) identifies two particular uses of the term in the field: ‘(a) media ecology as an environment and (b) media ecology as an intermedia relationship’. Media researchers who use the term (e.g. Ito et al., 2008; Horst, Herr-Stephenson and Robinson, 2010) have identified how children and young people’s media practices are related and rooted in their everyday lives. However, a number of commentators have identified the problems that arise when drawing from a biological concept (see Scolari, 2012) and Carrington (2013) suggests that the complexities of social interaction in the new media age require an alternative concept that allows for more flexibility. She proposes, drawing from Deleuze (1991), to use the term ‘assemblages’ to account for the polycentricity and multilayeredness of media supersystems in which individual elements can be separated in a discrete manner: While an ecological framing looks to find a contributory role for all components, an assemblage has room for tension, mismatch and ongoing reconfiguration. There is not a sense of creating and then maintaining a balanced symbiosis of parts. As a result of this heterogeneity and independence, assemblages dismantle and reassemble in different combinations as context and requirements shift (Carrington, 2013: 209).

New media assemblages permeate the play practices of young children in contemporary societies and shape the ways in which children draw on a range of media texts in their play. The next section of the chapter offers a brief history of the trajectory of practices in

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this area over the past half-century or so, from play focused on a single medium to the kinds of play practices that are clearly identifiable in the new media age, in which, as Carrington notes, polycentricity and shifting meanings across space and time are clearly identifiable elements.

MEDIA, POPULAR CULTURE AND PLAY: A HISTORICAL REVIEW In order to illustrate the issues raised in the move from single mediaplay to new media assemblagesplay, this section focuses on a discussion of children’s television-related play, drawing from two research studies conducted between 2009 and 2012. Whilst it is necessary to focus on one medium because of space restrictions, patterns that emerge can also be applied to other media. Further, the studies outlined here were based in England and thus, inevitably, the historical review is culturally specific. Nevertheless, the trends that are discernible across the past half-century in the UK are likely to be similar to patterns in other media-saturated cultures and, thus, the analysis may be applied more broadly in an international context. Whilst commercially made television sets were available in the UK from 1928, it was only in the 1950s that wider take-up occurred as families purchased sets in order to watch the Coronation (Hilmes and Jacobs, 2003). This period coincides with the start of the research undertaken by folklorists Iona and Peter Opie on children’s play. The Opies undertook surveys of children’s play in the 1950s–1980s in the UK, which led to a series of publications (Opie and Opie, 1959, 1969a, 1969b, 1985; Opie, 1993) detailing children’s games, rhymes, songs, customs, rites of passage and beliefs. In a study funded by the British Academy, Marsh and Bishop (2012a) traced some of the original contributors to the Opie surveys and interviewed 8 of them, along with 20 of their contemporaries, in order to examine continuities and discontinuities in relation to

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media and play over time. The individuals were traced through a number of sources including the use of social networking sites (e.g. Facebook, Friends Reunited), local press and school alumni networks. Semistructured oral history interviews were conducted with each individual, to explore their memories of play and its relationship to media and commercial markets. These data were compared with findings from a study undertaken as part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Beyond Text programme – ‘Children’s playground games and songs in the new media age’ (Burn et al., 2011). The project included ethnographic studies, conducted over two years, of two primary school playgrounds in Sheffield and London. Children aged 5–11 were involved in the study. Researchers visited the playgrounds weekly and undertook observations of playground play, using written field notes, digital video cameras, still cameras and digital audio recording equipment. Children also participated in interviews about the play that had been observed on occasion; sometimes these interviews took place straight after the play, at other times children reflected on video data. Each school had a Children’s Panel, which consisted of children who met with the researchers on a regular basis throughout the project. Children also undertook their own observations of play, using video cameras and notebooks. These data were compared and contrasted in order to identify continuities and discontinuities in such play between the 1950s and 1960s and 2010s. Inevitably, there are challenges that are raised in this approach. The respondents in the British Academy-funded study were invited to reflect on events that took place 50 or 60 years ago and their memories may not have been accurate; for some respondents, there may have been elements of nostalgia in their reminiscences. In comparison, children in the AHRC-funded study were asked to demonstrate and discuss contemporary play activities and therefore recollection was much easier. Nevertheless,

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the data raised a series of issues that deserve consideration in any review of the relationship between media, popular culture and play over time. First, it was notable that there are numerous continuities in such play. Bishop and Curtis (2006), in a review of the relationship between television and play, suggested that there are three primary ways in which children draw from television. The first of these is allusion. Children refer to the names of television programme characters, celebrities or brand names (onomastic allusion), copy gestures drawn from television (gestural allusion) or refer to topics they have viewed on television (topical allusion). The second way in which children draw from television is referred to as the process of syncretism or hybridization. This can account for the way in which children blend characters and plots drawn from television with more traditional play practices such as ‘cops and robbers’ play, which might draw on a TV series called The Bill (cf. Opie and Opie, 1969: 340). The third way in which children draw on television is through the process of mimesis. Whilst mimesis can refer to instances in which children copy characters or storylines faithfully, it can also refer to more creative adaptations in which children develop the original plots and characters in new and innovative ways. These three patterns were prevalent in both sets of data. For example, allusion – particularly onomastic allusion, in which children referenced television characters in their play – was evident across all of the datasets, with programmes and characters mentioned from the 1950s and 1960s including Watch with Mother, The Man from Uncle and Bonanza and those in the more recent study ranging from children’s programmes (for example SpongeBob SquarePants) to programmes aimed at adults (for example EastEnders). Similarly, in relation to mimesis, the adults in the oral history interviews reported replaying stories from favourite television programmes, such as Robin Hood, just as this activity was

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observed in the contemporary playgrounds (Willett et al., 2013). The process of syncretism or hybridization was also discernible across the two projects. Children blended characters and plots drawn from television with more traditional play practices. In Children’s Games in Street and Playground (1969), the Opies identify eight categories of ‘pretending games’: • Mothers and Fathers • Playing Schools • Road Accidents (boys feign injury; girls makebelieve they are nurses) • Playing Horses (children pretend to be or to possess animals) • Storybook World (children make-believe they would be able to manage in abnormal situations) • War Games (children engage in pretence battles either against an imaginary enemy or an opposing group of children) • Cops and Robbers (players on one side chase or seek the other side) • Fairies and Witches (girls enact the everlasting fight between good and evil) (1969: xxv–xxvi).

Television-influenced play could be found across the majority of these categories, such as children playing ‘Cowboys and Indians’ games in the 1950s and 1960s, based on programmes such as Bonanza, and children playing witches and wizards in the 2010s, centred on programmes such as Wizards of Waverley Place. This process has been a persistent theme over the decades. As Cummings James and McCain report in their study of television and play in 1982, ‘there was no game theme identified that was not somewhat related to the themes in games identified in previous research on the folklore of children’s play’ (p. 799). This process of syncretization is complex and multilayered and certainly challenges any notion that children simply ‘copy’ the source text (cf. Sutton-Smith, 1997). Whilst there are a number of continuities with the past, there are also discontinuities. Obvious differences relate to the way in which new genres, such as reality television, now permeate the playgrounds of today,

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such as the observations made of children replaying The Jeremy Kyle Show (Marsh and Bishop, 2012b). Further, a key difference between the two eras could be found in relation to shared viewing experiences. The majority of children in the 1950s and 1960s would generally have all watched the same programmes because of the limited number of channels. This was clear in the interview with 58-year-old Neil: Interviewer: You obviously had a TV in your home then, were you watching those at your own house? Neil: Mainly, yeah. We tended to sort of come in, play during the day, come in in the afternoon – I think it was 4 o’clock we finished or something like that, I’m not too sure now. We’d get in and then we’d have our tea and then watch a bit of telly, and those sort of... the 4 to 5 time would be kids’ programmes, really, I think. Interviewer:  Yeah, OK. And did you sort of share those programmes with your friends, did you like talk about them or anything, or did you just assume they watched the same ones as well? Neil:  Well I think we just sort of assumed they watched them, because every time we came out... normally what… it’s quite strange, what would happen, if there was say a football match on – not many in those days – but all the kids, after the football was over, they’d all come running out in the street with a ball. And if ‘Robin Hood’ was on, when the programme had finished they’d all come running out in the street with their bows and arrows. So everyone sort of knew, I suppose we’d all been watching the same and they all... didn’t sort of talk about it, just got, you know, starting playing what was ever on the telly.

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This is obviously not the case in contemporary society. Multiple channels proliferate in the 2010s, with a number aimed at children, such as CBBC/CBeebies, CITV, Disney and Nickelodeon. This means it is not certain all children will share knowledge of the same programmes in order to inform their play. Griffiths and Machin (2003) argue it is the shared aspect that is important and in the more recent study, children did report sharing information about media texts with each other in order to be inclusive in their play. Kathy Marsh (2009) suggests that whilst one or more children may get content from television to inform their play, it is often transmitted and learnt by subsequent children in the same way as other play, by oral transmission and customary example. There is another important consideration – the affordances of television in each of the periods considered. We now have the ability to pause and restart programmes at will, view them over and over via ‘catch up’ and iPlayer and view small segments of them repeatedly if we so wish. Viewers capture their favourite television sequences and post them to YouTube. Older programmes, such as earlier series of Dr Who, are also much more readily available. This means that children can access television content via other media and whenever they want to; they do not have to wait for it to be programmed. For example, Emma, in Year 6 (aged 10–11), explained to a researcher how she learnt a clapping game sequence from the Nickelodeon programme I Carly by rewinding the relevant sequence on YouTube: Emma: You see a clapping game and then if you camera wind it and fast forward it you watch it a couple of times and you start doing it. It sinks into your head and then you know it. And you go to school and you’re like, ‘Oh, I’ve got a new clapping game, I’ve watched this at...’. Like, ‘Look at this that I’ve just learnt off I Carly’. And then you start doing it and it spreads all around school.

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Finally, in comparing these datasets, a key difference can be identified in relation to the nature of new media assemblages, as identified by Carrington (2013). Television has become increasingly integrated into a narrative-based semiotic system in which television programmes relate to books, toys and so on. Therefore, television influenced fantasy and physical play in the more recent study, but it also influenced play with playthings as children traded cards related to television themes, or clutched ‘Hannah Montana’ CDs as they sang and danced. It is no longer possible to examine the impact of television on play in isolation from other media. This brief review of data from these two studies highlights both the discontinuities and continuities in the relationship between media, popular culture and play over time. Whilst there have been few changes in the way in which children draw from media in their play, the nature of the media landscape itself has changed beyond recognition since the 1950s, which means that children draw from media narratives as they are instantiated across a range of platforms. The historical developments in relation to the media landscape – that is, the move from isolated media to crossmedia platforms, can be seen in relation to research undertaken in this area. Research on young children’s popular culture-related play in the latter half of the twentieth century tended to focus on a limited range of media and examined them in isolation. The majority of this research focused on television and film. Some studies, such Paley’s (1988), emphasized the way in which young children draw on television and film narratives imaginatively in their play, although a number of researchers felt that media-related play could be more limited than non-media-related play (e.g. Singer and Singer, 2005). Due to ongoing concerns about perceived negative effects, a great deal of research in this area focused on issues of violence. Numerous studies analysed, for example, the impact of viewing animated films, such as cartoons, on children’s behaviour and beliefs, reporting negative effects (see Kondo and Steemers, 2007, for a review).

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This focus on exploring adult anxieties regarding children’s play continued in work that examined superhero play. Several research projects were conducted on young children’s superhero play in the 1980s and 1990s, related to the film and television series they encountered. Some of these studies raised concerns about the way in which such play embeds narratives of aggression (Carlsson-Paige and Levin, 1987), whilst other accounts were keen to point to the way in which superhero play can enable children to work through emotions and fears and can foster social relationships (Dawkins, 1991). Although a number of commentators lamented the influence of media on superhero play (e.g. Carlsson-Paige and Levin, 1990), such play has a long tradition, given that children have always been interested in war play and play that explores conflict (French and Pena, 1991). There was limited research on the impact of other media on play in the twentieth century. There were isolated reports of children incorporating into play information they heard on radio. For example, in Palmer Bonte and Musgrove’s (1943) report on a study of war play in Hawaiian preschools, which took place six months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, they recall a play episode which involved children constructing a ship and during which a boy made the sound of a siren and shouted, ‘This is an air raid alarm! Take cover!’, which was an exact imitation of the warning played on radio at the time. This is a rare example, however, and apart from a consideration of young children’s orientation to radio for musical interest (Young, 2008), research on radio and play is extremely limited. Research on the relationship between play and computers and other digital media is discussed elsewhere (Stephen and Plowman, this volume) and so is not discussed here, but needless to say there was little attention paid to this area in relation to children’s play before recent developments in the field. Therefore, the research on media and children’s play in the twentieth century can be characterized by a focus on a limited

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range of media, examined largely in isolation from other media, and a preoccupation with the potential negative influences of media on young children’s play and development. It was only in the last decade of the twentieth and at the beginning of the twenty-first centuries that research in early childhood began to take account of the way in which popular cultural narratives spanned various media, despite evidence of the cross-media integration of television programmes from the 1980s (Grimes, 2008). A growing understanding of the way in which children were positioned as consumers (Langer, 2005; Cook, 2008; Cook, this volume) led to more nuanced accounts of children’s positioning in relation to globalized media discourses, with the agency of children becoming increasingly recognized. For example, Wohlwend (2009) outlines the findings of a three-year ethnographic study of literacy play in early childhood classrooms in the USA. She details how girls playing with Disney princess dolls resisted the discourse of emphasized femininity associated with these characters, with one girl transforming Princess Aurora from victim to rescuer. In their play, children created their own storylines and developed characters based on aspects of their own and their friends’ and families’ identities. This does not mean the commercial products held no sway over this play. As Wohlwend suggests: Productive consumption is located in the tension between agency and subjection; children are neither cultural dupes at the mercy of global corporations nor cultural geniuses who shrewdly access and expertly manipulate vast networks of gendered multimedia for their own purposes. Although Zoe exercised more agency than the Sleeping Beauty story line actually provided, she still maintained masculine/feminine hierarchical relationships by excluding Peter from doll play, by using princess dolls to write and play familyfocused stories, and by culminating her books and plays with weddings for happily-ever-after endings (2009: 45).

The notion of ‘productive consumption’ that Wohlwend refers to here recognizes the way in which children are not simply consumers

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but also producers – or as Bruns (2006) suggests, ‘produsers’, in which the acts of consumption and production interact. This is a theme addressed by Edwards (2011) in her analysis of the way in which children engage with the Thomas the Tank Engine brand. She examines how children in contemporary societies are able to develop new cultural products which contribute to the Thomas the Tank Engine narrative, such as the creation of videos in which children develop new episodes of the story through filming their play, with the films then uploaded to YouTube for other children to enjoy. Current research studies on the relationship between media, popular culture and play in early childhood, therefore, recognize the complex ways in which children engage in consumptive and productive activities in relation to new media assemblages and identify the elements of the emergent cultural forms proposed by Raymond Williams (1977), which provide scope for acts of agency and transgression. An area of growing interest in this field is the way in which children’s popular cultural practices move across online and offline spaces, an area which is explored in the final section of this chapter.

TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY CONTEXTS: VIRTUAL PLAYGROUNDS AND BEYOND In recent years, many young children with Internet access have been drawn to the use of online virtual worlds (Black, 2010; Marsh, 2010). Virtual worlds are 3D simulated environments which sometimes contain gaming and social networking elements and there are now over 150 virtual worlds either operating or in development that are aimed at children and young people under 18 years of age. These sites have around 355 million registered users under the age of 10 (KZero, 2012). Popular virtual worlds for children aged under eight include Club Penguin, Moshi Monsters and Webkinz. Research on

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the use of virtual worlds and other social networking forums has tended to be undertaken with teenagers, young people and adults (Grimes and Fields, 2012), but there are now studies emerging that examine the way in which young children use these sites. Burke and Marsh (2013), in an edited collection, draw together a number of authors who have undertaken empirical and analytical studies in this area, and a number of key themes emerge from this collective work. The first theme to be addressed is that it is not possible, in contemporary play practices, to separate online and offline domains. Children move across these spaces in fluid ways and genres of offline play (such as socio-dramatic play, fantasy play and games with rules) can be discerned in their play in virtual worlds, just as themes and characters from virtual world play appear in offline play contexts. Second, these virtual spaces are part of the narrativized semiotic system that is embedded in children’s use of media texts and children draw on their understandings and experiences with narratives across a range of media in their online play. Third, the ability to manipulate avatars and virtual homes enables children to construct and reconstruct social identities and allows them to experiment and take risks in ways that are not possible in face-to-face social play. Fourth, the virtual worlds that young children play in are frequently one element of a commercialized super-system and children are increasingly engaged in commercial practices that merge online and offline. For example, children are able to buy from local shops Club Penguin toys and artefacts, which unlock online credit and enable them to purchase virtual items for their avatars and homes. Fifth, often children’s online play takes place with peers, siblings and family members, not unknown others. Finally, we can discern in this play the consequences of increasing mobility in technological platforms. Children can access the virtual world using a desktop computer or laptop, but they can also use a games console or mobile phone app for this purpose, meaning that

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play is not connected to local spaces and contexts in the ways in which it traditionally has been. These recent studies lead us to reconsider the nature of the relationship between media, popular culture and play in the twenty-first century. Having moved from a substantial body of early research in the late twentieth century that examined children’s playful interactions with single media to a more nuanced understanding, developed over the past decade, of how play crosses textual and media boundaries, we are now at a point where we are beginning to understand the way in which young children’s play navigates the ontological and epistemological borders of online and offline media worlds. Future research in this field needs to address a number of key questions that are emerging. For example, how will play develop when the technology advances further to enable players to wear items of clothing or jewellery that gain them entry into online play worlds? This technology is already in use, such as the clickable bracelets that Disney use to enable children who play their virtual world Pixie Hollow to exchange virtual data with friends wearing the same bracelets. These developments will, inevitably, accelerate in future years, and it will be of interest to play researchers to determine how children navigate this landscape. We may see further developments in relation to the use of immersive technologies that enable players to embed themselves in mixed-reality environments and there will be questions raised with regard to the impact of this on children’s imaginative play. The increasing sophistication of robots could also lead to fruitful areas for research on children’s play, focusing on how children integrate robots into existing cultural play scripts. Whilst these questions relate to advancements in technology, the concerns and issues to be pursued are ones which are longstanding in this field, focused as they are on children’s social identities and imaginative and creative engagement with media and popular cultural play artefacts.

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CONCLUSION The analysis offered in this chapter suggests that whilst access to and use of media have grown exponentially over the past 60 years, there are continuities as well as discontinuities in the ways in which media and popular culture inform play. Therefore, the commentators who bemoan the current state of childhood because of the influence of media (e.g. Palmer, 2006) need to be reassured that traditional forms of play persist and continue to be syncretized in creative and innovative ways with popular cultural texts and artefacts, whilst increasingly mobile and polycentric new media assemblages facilitate inventive imaginative and novel forms of play. This analysis reinforces the importance of historical studies of media-related play in order to ensure that a longer-term, and therefore more balanced, understanding is developed of an area of study that traditionally attracts dichotomous and polarized views.

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Burke, A. and Marsh, J. (eds) (2013) Children’s Virtual Play Worlds: Culture, Learning and Participation. New York: Peter Lang. Burn, A., Bishop J., Jopson, L., Marsh, J., Mitchell, G., Richards, C., Robinson, J. and Willett, R. (2011) ‘Children’s playground games and songs in the new media age: Final report.’ Swindon: Projects, Beyond text, Arts and Humanities Research Council. Carlsson-Paige, N. and Levin, D.E. (1987) The War Play Dilemma: Balancing Needs and Values in the Early Childhood Classroom. New York: Teachers College Press. Carlsson-Paige, N. and Levin, D.E. (1990) Who’s Calling the Shots? How to Respond Effectively to Children’s Fascination with War Play and War Toys. Philadelphia, PA: New Society Publishers. Carrington, V. (2013) ‘An argument for assemblage theory: Integrated spaces, mobility and polycentricity’, in A. Burke and J. Marsh (eds), Children’s Virtual Play Worlds: Culture, Learning and Participation. New York: Peter Lang. Cook, D. (2008) ‘The missing child in consumption theory’, Journal of Consumer Culture, 8: 219–43. Cummings James, N. and McCain, T. (1982) ‘Television games preschool children play: Patterns, themes and uses’, Journal of Broadcasting, 26 (4): 783–800. Dawkins, M. (1991) ‘Hey dudes, what’s the rap? A plea for leniency towards superhero play’, Australian Journal of Early Childhood, 16 (2): 3–8. Deleuze, G. (1991). Empiricism and Subjectivity. New York: Columbia University Press. Du Gay, P., Hall, S., Janes, L., Mackay, H. and Negus, K. (1997) Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman. London: Sage and Open University Press. Edwards, S. (2011) ‘Lessons from “a really useful engine”™: Using Thomas the Tank Engine™ to examine the relationship between play as a leading activity, imagination and reality in children’s contemporary play worlds’, Cambridge Journal of Education, 41 (2): 195–219. Fleming, D. (1996) Powerplay: Toys as Popular Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press. French, J. and Pena, S. (1991) ‘Children’s hero play of the 20th century: Changes resulting from television’s influence’, Child Study Journal, 21: 79–95. Griffiths, M. and Machin, D. (2003) ‘Television and playground games as part of children’s symbolic culture’, Social Semiotics, 13 (2), 147–60. Grimes, S.M. (2008) ‘Saturday morning cartoons go MMOG’, Media International Australia, Special Issue:

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Beyond Broadcasting: TV for the Twenty-first Century, 126: 20–131. Grimes, S. and Fields, D. (2012) ‘Kids online: A new research agenda for understanding social networking forums’. New York: The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. Hilmes, M. and Jacobs, J. (2003) The Television History Book (Television, Media and Cultural Studies). London: British Film Institute. Horst, H., Herr-Stephenson, B. and Robinson, L. (2010) ‘Media ecologies’, in M. Ito, S. Baumer, M. Bittani, D. Boyd, R. Cody, et al. Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out. Cambridge, MA: The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning and MIT Press. Ito, M., Horst, H., Bittanti, M., boyd, d., Herr-Stephenson, B., Lange, P.G., Pascoe, C.J. and Robinson, L. (2008) Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project. Cambridge, MA: The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning and MIT Press. Jenkins, H., Clinton, K., Purushotma, R., Robison, A. and Weigel, M. (2006) ‘Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century’. An occasional paper on digital media and learning. Chicago, IL: The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Kenway, J. and Bullen, E. (2001) Consuming Children: Education–Entertainment–Advertising. Buckingham: Open University Press. Kinder, M. (1993) Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Videogames: From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kondo, K. and Steemers, J. (2007) ‘Can television be good for children? Review for “Save Children’s TV”, London: Save Kids’ TV and CAMRI, Westminster University. KZero (2012) ‘Virtual worlds: Industry and user data: Universe chart for Q1 2012’. Cambridge: K zero. Langer, B. (2005) ‘Consuming anomie: Children and global commercial culture’, Childhood, 12: 259–71. McLuhan, M. (1964) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill. Marsh, J. (2010) ‘Young children’s play in online virtual worlds’, Journal of Early Childhood Research, 8 (1): 23–39. Marsh, J. and Bishop, J.C. (2012a) ‘A study of the relationship between media, commercial markets

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and children’s play in the UK between 1950 and 2011: final report to the British Academy’. London and Sheffield: British Academic and university of Sheffield. Marsh, J. and Bishop, J.C. (2012b) ‘We’re playing “Jeremy Kyle”!: Television talk shows in the playground’, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 35(1): 16–30. Marsh, J., Brooks, G., Hughes, J., Ritchie, L. and Roberts, S. (2005) ‘Digital beginnings: Young children’s use of popular culture, media and new technologies’. Sheffield: University of Sheffield. Marsh, K. (2008) The Musical Playground: Global Tradition and Change in Children’s Songs and Games. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mukerji, C. and Schudson, C.M. (1991) Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Opie, I. (1993). The People in the Playground. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Opie, I. and Opie, P. (1959/2001) The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren. New York: New York Review of Books. Opie, I. and Opie, P. (1985) The Singing Game. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Opie, P. and Opie, I. (1969a/2008) Children’s Games in Street and Playground: Volume 1: Chasing, Catching, Seeking. Edinburgh: Floris Books. Opie, P. and Opie, I. (1969b/2008) Children’s Games in Street and Playground: Volume 2: Hunting, Racing, Duelling, Exerting, Daring, Guessing, Acting, Pretending. Edinburgh: Floris Books. Paley. V.G. (1988) Bad Guys Don’t Have Birthdays: Fantasy Play at Four. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Palmer, S. (2006) Toxic Childhood. London: Orion Press. Palmer Bonte, E. and Musgrove, M. (1943) ‘Influences of war as evidenced in children’s play’, Child Develop­ ment, 14: 179–200. Postman, N. (1970) ‘The reformed English curriculum’, in A. C. Eurich (ed.), High School 1980: The Shape of the Future in American Secondary Education. New York: Pitman. pp. 160–8. Postman, N. (1982) The Disappearance of Childhood. New York: Vintage Books. Scolari, C.A. (2012) ‘Media ecology: Exploring the metaphor to expand the theory’, Communication Theory, 22: 204–25. Seiter, E. (1995) Sold Separately. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

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Singer, D.G. and Singer, J.L. (2005) Imagination and Play in the Electronic Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sutton-Smith, B. (1997) The Ambiguity of Play. Ambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Willett, R., Richards, C., Marsh. J., Burn, A. and Bishop, J. (2013) Children, Media and Playground Cultures: Ethnographic Studies of School Playtimes. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Willett, R., Robinson, M. and Marsh, J. (eds) (2009) Play, Creativity and Digital Cultures: Volume 17. New York: Routledge.

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Williams, R. (1977) Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williams, R. (1981) Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review. London: Verso. Wohlwend, K. (2009) ‘Damsels in discourse: Girls consuming and producing identity texts through Disney princess play’, Reading Research Quarterly, 44 (1): 57–83. Young, S. (2008) ‘Lullaby light shows: Everyday musical experience among under-two-year-olds’, International Journal of Music Education, 26 (1): 33–46.

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Index academic pushdown 230 Action for Children’s Television (ACT) 285–6 action competence 271 action research 197 Activity Apperception Story Procedure 323 activity format 61–3, 65 activity theory 6 actor network theory 84 adaptive expertise 272 adults children’s perspective 324–5 digital play 335 ethics 104, 108 imitation 307–8 narratives 246–8 outdoor play 395 participation 34, 45, 52, 63, 130–3, 142, 143, 182 play spaces 301–2 race and culture 359 relationships 280 social history 97 supervision 34–5, 59, 68 see also teachers advertising 280, 285–6 affect 135, 136–7 affordance 280–1, 338, 391–402, 408 age appropriate knowledge 171 peer culture 350 agency 279 childhood studies 93, 98–9, 100 children’s perspective 320, 322, 326 collective 229, 299, 343, 348, 349, 351 gender 116, 120 individual 229 infant and toddlers 314 literacy development 228–9 materialism 80–2, 84–5 peer culture 347 race and culture 359 AHEMD-RD 394 AHEMD-SR 393–4 ambiguity, commercial goods 278, 290 American Academy of Pediatrics 331, 333 anthropology 32, 39, 45 anti-bias approach 68–71 Anti-bias Curriculum 356–7 anti-racist approaches 67–78 Ariés, P. 94–5 assemblage 85, 86, 93 gender 120 infant and toddler play 311

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assemblage cont. media supersystems 405 new media 405–6, 409 assessment 141–75 checklists 266, 267, 268–9 developmental play 165 embedded formative assessment 266–7 feedback 266–7 formative assessment 144, 264–75 identity 265, 266–7 informal assessment 269–70 key competencies 265, 271–2 materials 268 playfulness 264–75 pretend play 266 Reggio Emilia 270, 273 skills 267–9 social relationships 265, 269–70 assimilation 70 attunement to play 265, 270–1 autotelic materials 266, 267, 268 auxiliary function, auxiliary tool 21, 27–9 ‘baby-cam’ 314–15 Bakhtin, M. 109, 110 Bateson, G. 12, 37–8, 61, 165 ‘becoming-adult’ 302, 345 ‘becoming-with’ 81, 82, 84–5, 86, 88 ‘becoming-worldly’ 86, 87 Bildung 170 Billig, M. 169 binary logic 103, 104 body 297–8 infant and toddler play 310–11 bodymind 80, 83, 85 boundary-crossing 243 brands extension 286–7 mascots 287–8 category-maintenance work 98, 116–17 character education 103, 105–6 child-centredness 131–3, 196 Child-Development Model 160 childhood studies 91–102, 320 childism 230, 238 Children Crossing Borders (CCB) 358, 359–60 children’s perspective 319–29, 342, 345 see also peer culture Children’s Television Act 1990 286 Child Study movement 159 ‘circuit of culture’ 404

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co-authoring 108 co-construction 188, 189, 197 of identity 366–77 co-creation 210–11, 299 co-dependencies 85–7 cognition distributed cognition 88 physical play 254, 256 primary intersubjectivity 369 cognitive dissonance 361 cognitive play 160, 164–5, 348, 349, 351 ‘collective space of variation’ 312 colonialism see postcolonialism Comenius, J. A. 10, 170 commercialism 286, 289–91 commercialization 287 common-worlds 81, 83, 85–7, 89 competence 242–3 conative enactment 241–2 Confucianism see post-Confucianism consumption/consumer economy 96, 97, 289–93, 410 content knowledge 143, 154 pedagogical content knowledge 192, 199–200, 201 subject content knowledge 193, 196 content learning, play provision 192–203 contexts for play/learning 277–414 children’s perspective 319–29 digital play 330–41 home and educational play connection 378–90 infant and toddler play 306–18 media and popular culture 403–14 race and culture impact 354–65 right to play 294–305 Corsaro, W. 342–4, 349 creativity 289 critical literacy 72 critical periods 23 critical race theory 122 cultural activity 31–42 cultural-aesthetic 241 cultural construction 58 cultural-historical perspective 6, 21, 56–66, 142, 241–2, 248–9 cultural politics 91–3, 95–100 culture children’s 93–5 ‘eduplay’ 152 funds of knowledge 199 home and educational play connection 379 impact 354–65 infant and toddler play 315 see also socio-cultural perspective curriculum 6, 141–75 adult-guided play 149–51 anti-bias 356–7 assessment issues 264–75 content learnng and knowledge 192–203 developmental play 157–68

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curriculum cont. guides 106–8 literacy development 228–39 mathematical learning 216–27 narrative understanding 240–51 outdoor play 398 play provisions and pedagogy 180–91 technicist/policy-driven play 151–3 see also Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) degrees of freedom of activity 61–2 Deleuze, G. 120, 134–5, 137 Derman-Sparks, L. 68, 69, 70, 71, 73 developmentalism 59, 65 ages-and-stages view 162–3 developmental domains 57 developmental psychology 104, 130, 145, 171, 194, 196, 367, 373, 378 developmental stages 26 microgenetic, ontogenetic and phylogenetic developmental domains 57 play stages / stage appropriate play 21, 25–7, 159–60, 163 developmentally appropriate practice (DAP) 118–19, 142, 158, 313 guidelines 171 developmental pedagogy 142, 169–79, 188–9 developmental play 157–68, 337 Dewey, J. 11–12, 159, 162–3, 194, 201, 313 diachronic simultaneity 175 diachronic style 240 dialogical perspective 312, 315 didactics 170, 188 digital media 248, 278–9, 290, 315, 330–41, 409 digital natives’ 335–6 Disney 284, 286, 287, 288, 410 diversity 67, 68, 71, 75 mathematical learning 221–3 documentation artefacts 266, 269–70 dolls 92, 96–7, 289 character dolls literacy play 410 peer culture 346–7 persona dolls 73 race and culture 360 double-subjectivity 23, 24–5 dramatic play 108–10 teachers’ views 207 drawing 231–2, 236–7 children’s perspective 321, 323, 324 early childhood intervention programmes 381–8 Early Learning Partnership Project (ELP) 383–8 Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) 147, 150, 152–4 Effective Provision of Preschool Education (EPPE) 380 El’konin, D. B. 59, 60, 62, 63, 65, 241 Ellis, M. J. 12

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Index

embedded learning 192–3 embodiment 128, 135 emotional experience, narratives 241, 244–5 emotional expression, physical play 256 emotion regulation 48–9, 51, 244 enculturation 32 Enlightenment 128, 129 environment cultural differences 357–8 infant and toddler play 310 media as 405 see also outdoor equality home and educational play connection 378 outdoor play 398–9 race 69, 71 see also inequality equity 6 gender 115–16 mathematical learning 221–3, 224 physical play 257 Erikson, E. 14–15, 44, 159 ethico-aesthetic approach 109, 110, 112 ethics 6, 103–14 children’s perspective 319, 322 materialisms 87–8 ethnographic approach 349, 357 everyday life mathematics 217 peer culture 344, 347–9 popular culture 403 executive function 43, 47, 50, 51, 180 Experiential Education 172 explorative interplay 173 fabula 241, 245, 249 fairy tales 241 fantasy 14, 15, 16, 44, 183, 284 private speech 46 thematic-fantasy play 187 feminism 115–27 folklore 93–5 folk tales 241–3, 247 Forest Schools 143, 260, 396, 397–8 formalistic interplay 173 free learning 243–4, 250 free play 62, 142, 146, 147–9, 177, 182–3 content knowledge 198 content learning 193 Froebel 162 insider’s view 188 mathematical learning 220 peer culture 165 physical play 260 society 163 Freud, S. 14, 37–8, 44, 159, 163, 216 friends see peers

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417

Froebel, F. 11, 159, 161–2, 164, 170, 171 funds of knowledge 143, 144, 192, 198–9, 201 games category-maintenance work 98 digital play 332, 337–8 folklore 93–5 gender 257 mathematical learning 217–19, 220, 223 primary intersubjectivity 368–9 queer theory 119 with rules 15–16, 24, 25, 26, 29 gender borderwork 116 childhood studies 93, 98–9, 100 digital play 334 discourses 115–27 globalization 122 literacy development 237 mathematical learning 221–2 outdoor play 398–9 peer culture 344, 346–7 performativity 119, 120 physical play 255, 256–8 superhero play 108–9 girlhood 121, 124 Goffman, E. 344 Gonzalez-Mena, J. 68 graphic play 236 Groos, K. 11, 357 Group Games 187, 188 habitus 337 Hall, G. S. 11, 159, 162 Haraway, D. 3, 6–7, 86–7 Harlow, H. 13 head cameras 314–15 Head Start programmes 164, 345, 382–3 literacy development 229, 232, 237 health and safety regulations 207, 256, 258–9, 397 hegemonic masculinity 121 heteronormativity 119 heterosexual matrix 119–20 HighScope 164, 172, 185–6, 382 home environment affordances 393–4 digital play 330–8 educational play connection 378–90 role 33 Home Interaction Program for Parents and Youngsters (HIPPY) 383 Home Learning Environment 279, 380, 386–8 Howard, D. 93 Huizinga, J. 12, 59–60, 62 identity co-construction 366–77 ethics 110–11

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identity cont. gender 117, 257 hyperperformance 358 narrative turn 240 race and culture 68–9, 71–2, 75, 358, 360–2 imaginary companions (ICs) 49–50, 51 imaginary situation 22–3, 28–9, 60–1, 241 imagination 22, 23, 24, 36 ethics 109–10 playfulness 273 imitation 43 infant and toddler play 307–8 improvisation 187–8, 210–11, 236 Indigenous cultures, infant and toddler play 315 Indigenous knowledge 68, 74, 76 individual attention 369–70 inequality 279–80 home and educational play connection 379–80 peer culture 350–1 see also equality; racism infant schools 172 history 170–1 infant and toddler play 306–18 co-construction of identity 366–77 peer culture 347–8, 350 inside interventions 184–5 inside perspective 373–4 insider’s view 188 integrated pedagogies 192, 195, 200–1 integration 35–6, 172–3, 176 International Association for the Child’s Right to Play (IPA) 158 Internet consumption 287 virtual playgrounds 410–11 Web 2.0 290 see also digital media interpretive reproduction 343, 349 intersectionality, gender 117 intersubjectivity 39, 197, 308–9, 366, 368–9 Intervention Programme (IP) 269 interviews, children’s perspective 321, 323, 324 intimacy, primary intersubjectivity 368–9 intra-action 81, 83 intrapersonal processes 374 joint attention 309 joint play 245–6, 249 juxtaposition model 181 Kaleidoscope 356–7 Kant, I. 103, 159 key competencies 265, 271–2 kindergartens 161–2, 170, 171, 172, 229–30 laboratory school play 162–4 language -based play 109 co-construction of identity 366

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language cont. cultural-historical perspective 58 infant and toddler play 309–10 peer culture 344 race and culture 360–1 see also literacy development Lazarus, M. 10 leading activity 21–2, 24, 27–8 learn-and-teach-through-play approach 182–3 learning dispositions 271–2 learning stories 266, 271–2, 273 Leont’ev, A. N. 56, 60–1 liberal humanism 128, 145 life-activity 27–8 ‘lines of flight’ 301 literacy 143, 150–1 development 228–39 digital play 337 media characters 290 Locke, J. 10, 159 Lurija, A. R. 56, 57 mark-marking 321 masculinity studies 121 material discursive 80, 83, 84–5, 86 materialism 76, 79–90 materiality 80, 82, 85 play provisions 183–4 material turn 80, 81–8, 89 mathematical learning 143–4, 197, 216–27, 345 matter 128, 135, 137 Mead, G. H. 37–8 media popular culture 403–14 -related play 285–8 supersystems 405 mediated attention 369–70 mediation 56–8 mediational thinking 197 meta-cognition 176 Millennium Development Goals 141 mimesis 407 mind 297–8 theory of 49–50 Tools of Mind (ToM) 50, 185–6, 242, 244–5, 249 mixed-reality environments 411 Mode 1 knowledge 306–10, 313–16 Mode 2 knowledge 306–7, 310–16 modernism 103–6, 159 ethics 109, 110–12 modernity 128, 129–33 molecular interaction 135 Montessori, M. 11, 216 Montessori school 46, 268 moral behaviour 105 moral development 96, 104 ‘more-than-human’ 76, 81, 83, 120 Mosaic approach 321 motion-controlled games 331, 332

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Index

motor ability 307 motor development 393–4 multicultural approach 68–71 multimodal literacies 151 narrative, narratives competence 242–3 frame 244 interplay 173 mode 243 key aspect of play 229, 240–51 turn 240, 241 National Association for the Education of Young Children 171, 208 natural environments 123, 261, 346, 358, 395–8 natural learning 160, 162 neuroscience 374 ‘No Child Left Behind’ 180 non-classical psychology 21–30 non-directive play therapy 14 non-verbal negotiations 311, 312 number 218–19 obesity 259, 288, 392 observational learning 33 ontological framework 120 ontology 80, 135 posthumanism 120 relational 81–2, 83, 86–7 Opie, I.and P. 93–4, 406, 407 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 172, 271 outdoor classrooms 259–61 outdoor environment 281 Outdoor Learning Project 398 outdoor play 258–61 opportunities and affordances 391–402 ‘out-of-play’ world 165 outside perspective 373–4 Parents Early Education Partnership (PEEP) 384–5 Parents Involvement in the Child’s Learning (PICL) 384, 385–6 Parten, M. 12 participant observation 321, 323 participant perspective 367 participation intent community participation 192–3 legitimate peripheral participation 33 participatory approaches 131–3 pathways 394 pedagogy 141–75 developmental 142, 169–79, 188–9 developmental play 157–68 ethics 108–10 of listening 172 learner-inclusive pedagogy 188 literacy development 228–39 mathematical learning 216–27

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pedagogy cont. narrative understanding 240–51 physical play 252–63 play interface 145–56, 264 play provisions 180–91 professional preparation 204–15 see also developmental pedagogy peer culture 161, 342–53 belonging 344, 350 free play 165 interpretive reproduction 343, 349 primary and secondary adjustments 325, 343, 344 peer play 16 infant and toddlers 310, 311, 314 peer relationships 148, 279 children’s perspective 325–6 infant and toddlers 308, 311, 314 Peers Early Education Partnership (PEEP) 384–5, 386 Pen Green approach 385–6 performativity 80, 81, 86, 87 Perry Pre-school project 382 perspective-taking 109, 110 Pestalozzi, J. H. 11 phenomenography 169, 173–5 photographs, children’s perspective 321, 323, 324 Piaget, J. 6, 15–16, 37–8, 44, 129, 130, 137, 159–60, 164, 171, 241, 244, 378 ‘Plan, Do, Review’ strategy 164, 185 Plato 9–10, 159 Play, forms of: accepted, curtailed and cultivated 34, 45 adult-guided or supported 147, 149–51, 309 aggressive play 360 animal play 11, 12, 13, 17 big body play 254, 256 block play 16, 163, 217–18, 220–1 child-initiated play 146, 147–9, 154, 181, 183, 245–7 complex play 309, 314 conceptual play 150, 189, 312 contact play 255 didactic play 21, 182 director’s play 24, 26, 28 educational play 142, 145–55 epistemic play 194–5 facilitate-play approach 182 imaginative play 43 instrumental play 308 interpretive and inventive pretend play 36–40 literacy/literature play 24, 25, 27, 187, 410 ludic play 194–5 make-believe play 43–55 movement in play 393, 394 mythic play 108 object play 307 physical play 207, 252–63 practice play 15, 36 puzzle play 218, 220, 221 rough and tumble play 143, 207, 254–9, 261

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THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PLAY AND LEARNING IN EARLY CHILDHOOD

Play, forms of: cont. sociodramatic play (SDP) 45, 50, 51, 52–3, 146, 148–9, 184–7 superhero play 108–9, 207, 258, 409 symbolic play 44, 52, 159–60, 162–4, 309 systemic play 159 teacher-directed or guided 181, 183 technicist/policy-driven 147, 151–3, 265 theatre play 24, 25 thematic-fantasy play (TFP) 187 theoretical play 241 therapeutic play 14 transgressive play 289 ‘play ethos’ 297 play fighting 207, 255 play frame 12, 37, 38, 61 playful learning 249 playful pedagogies 200–1 playground surfaces 394 Playing Out project 301 play spaces see spaces for play play therapy 14, 27 playworlds 142, 187 narratives 240, 241, 247–50 plot-role play 24–5, 26, 28–9 policy studies, teacher education 208–9 politics materialisms 87–8 professional learning 206, 211–12 popular culture 403–14 postcolonialism 7, 67–78 gender 121–2, 123 post-Confucianism, gender 122–5 postdevelopmentalism 7, 67, 71–5, 98, 116, 154 gender 117–25 posthumanism 81, 82, 128, 133–7 gender 120 postinterpretivism 83–4 postmodernism 104, 128, 133 poststructuralism 71, 84, 98, 116, 133, 137, 154, 404 content knowledge 197 gender 118–19, 123–4 potentiality 111–12, 113 power relations 70, 72, 73, 98–9 child-initiated play 149 children’s perspective 325–6 ethics 105 gender 116–17, 118, 124 imbalance 322 right to play 296 Practical Epistemological Analysis 313 pretend play/pretence 5, 15, 16, 34, 36–40, 164, 166 assessment 266 digital play 338 infant and toddlers 308 narrative competence 242 self-regulation 43–55

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private speech 46–7, 51 problem-solving 12, 164 content learning 194–5 production, peer culture 343 productive consumption 410 ‘produsers’ 410 professional development 259 professional learning, pedagogy 204–15 Progressive Era 96, 284, 291 progress rhetoric 296–7 psychoanalysis 14, 44, 145, 163 public health concerns 392, 393 queer theory, gender 119–20 questionnaires, children’s perspective 321 race dolls 289 gender 117, 125 impact 354–65 inequality 280 mathematical learning 222 postcolonialism 121–2 racialization 71, 72, 75 racism 99, 355–7, 359 anti-racist approaches 67–78 intersectionality 117 reading literacy development 230, 233, 235 see also narrative recreation theory 11 Reggio Emilia 172, 185–6, 200 assessment 270, 273 peer culture 347 physical play 259–60 relational-historical research approach 374 relationality, infants and toddlers 314 relational ontology 81–2, 83, 86–7 relationships 22–3, 280 engagement 375 see also peer relationships rhetorics of play 296 right to play 294–305, 357 risky play 207, 360, 396 rituals 15, 62, 94 role models 106 role play 182, 186, 210, 242 adult participation 247–8 children’s perspective 324 rough and tumble play 143, 207, 254–9, 261 Rousseau, J. J. 10, 11, 193–4, 277–8 rule-oriented talk 234 rules of activity 61–2, 63–5 safety 97 regulations 207, 256, 258–9, 397 scaffolding 45, 46, 48, 51, 52, 130, 146, 185, 249, 309, 348 Schiller, F. 10, 159 second-person perspectives 373–4

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segregation model 181 self care of 108 emergence 373 narrative turn 240 self-directed play 164 self-directed speech see private speech self-regulation 16, 43–55, 57, 180, 182 narratives 242, 244, 249 self-scripts 266 self-talk 50 self-valuable activity 27–8 sensory development 253 sensory richness 395 Sesame Street 286 sex play 115 shared focus of attention 371–2 shared intentionality 308–9 siblings 34–5 situated knowledge 3, 6–7, 141 skills assessment 267–9 real-world 36 social 254, 367 social class gender 117 mathematical learning 222–3 peer culture 345 social competence 180, 254 social construction 82–3, 163, 320, 354 gender 117 peer culture 350 race and culture 72, 362 social-emotional development 108 social history 93–7 socialization 11, 32, 45–6 gender 116–17 peer culture 342–3 social justice 6, 71, 76 social knowledge domains 349–52 social learning 163 social media 338, 411 social order 347 peer culture 350–1 social organization strategies 348 social-pedagogical approach 172 social referencing 308–9, 314 social reforms 96, 104 social relationships, assessment 265, 269–70 social representation 58–60, 63 social reproduction 104 social rules 44, 47, 52, 63 social situation of development 369 social skills physical play 254 soft knowledge 367 social space, infant and toddlers 310 social style, infant and toddler play 310–11 social worlds 34–6

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socio-cultural perspective 197, 270 digital play 338 infants and toddlers 313 socio-cultural phenomenon 13–14, 17, 162–3 soft knowledge 366, 367–8, 372–3, 375 solitary play 37, 49, 51 spaces for play 278–80, 299–302 natural vs traditional 395–6 peer culture 346 play provisions 183–4 social occupation 351 spatial learning 218 gender 221 spectatorial perspective 367 speech, subject of 23 Spencer, H. 10 sport, gender 257 standards-based movement 165 Steiner-Waldorf 172, 185–6 stereotypes 212 gender 119 peer culture 346 physical play 256–7 story-acting 187 story-telling 187, 242 structured play 146–7 sustained shared thinking (SST) 152 symbolic learning 230–2, 237–8 synchronic simultaneity 175 syncretism 407 teacher-directed or guided play 181, 183 teachers confidence 196–7, 198 content knowledge 195, 196–8 involvement 197, 198, 210, 212 mathematical learning role 219–21 peer culture 346, 347–9, 351–2 physical play 256–7 professional learning 204–15 race and culture 360 roles 184–5 as stage manager 184 views of play 206–8 see also adults technical rules 63–4 technology 278–9, 280 digital play 330–41 infant and toddler play 314–15 media and popular culture 403–14 virtual playgrounds 410–11 television 285–6, 289 digital play 333, 334, 337 -related play 406–10 Te Whāriki 150, 264–5, 271, 357–8 theatre play 24, 25 thematic-fantasy play (TFP) 187 theory of mind 49–50

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THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PLAY AND LEARNING IN EARLY CHILDHOOD

therapeutic approach 374–5 third-person perspectives 373–4 time play provisions 184 right to play 294, 295, 299, 301, 302–3 Tools of Mind (ToM) 50, 185–6, 242, 244–5, 249 toys 92, 94, 96–7 attention to objects 369–70 as commodities 283–5 character-based toys 284, 286, 287–90 educational toys 284 infant and toddler play 310 media supersystems 405 peer culture 346–7 transcendental ontology 81 transition peer culture 348 play-pedagogy interface 153 transmedia intertextuality 405 ‘triadic’ exchanges 366 trust-in-play approach 182 Turkish Early Enrichment Project (TEEP) 383 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child 294–9, 302, 319, 320, 357, 378 ‘underlife’ 325 UNESCO reports 332, 357 universal codes 103–4

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variation 169, 174, 175–7 video cameras 321, 349, 360 virtual playgrounds 410–11 visual narrative 245, 248 visual reasoning 217–18 Vygotsky, L. S. 6, 16, 21–30, 37–8, 44–5, 46, 47, 50, 56–65, 130, 146, 148, 159–60, 164, 229, 230–2, 362 digital play 338 engagement 375 interaction 378 leading activity 21–2, 24, 27–8 lytic periods 23 narratives 240–1 social context 165 social situation of development 369 ‘War on Poverty’ 382 well-being 298 whiteness 70, 72 ‘whole child’ development 160, 162–3 Wii 331, 332, 335, 336 Workshop Pedagogy 187 writing, literacy development 231–2, 234–7 Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) 38, 45–7, 130, 146, 148, 152, 159–60, 240, 338

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