ABSTRACT
Play has always been considered an essential part of childhood. Philosophers and educators alike have used such terms as ‘spontaneous’, ‘inevitable’ or ‘natural’ when describing the playful activities of young children which implies that play is something that all children do in one form or another (Isenberg and Quisenberry, 2002; Elkind, 2007). However, with increasing pressure for formal pedagogies in early childhood classrooms, it is opportunities for the most elaborate forms of play, the ones that take longer for children to develop that are most at risk. For example, while most toddlers still engage in playful exploration of objects, in some cultural contexts it is increasingly hard to find preschool and school-aged children creating fantasy worlds together and enacting these self-generated elaborate scenarios without adult participation (Levin, 2008; Rogers and Evans, 2008). This heterogeneity of play as well as differential effects of different types of play on child development and learning means that questions about the pedagogy of play should be answered differently for different types of play. Here we will focus on only one kind of play – make-believe play also known as role-play or dramatic play – and the role of adults in scaffolding this play in preschooland kindergarten-aged children. We will view this kind of play from the perspective of Cultural-Historical Psychology by first revisiting Vygotskian insights into the nature of play and then by discussing post-Vygotskian contributions to research on play and their implications for Early Childhood Education.
