ABSTRACT
Global concerns about the nature and purposes of education for young children inevitably raise questions about the extent to which and how play is valued as a vehicle for early learning. In many ways the coupling of play with pedagogy is problematic, not least because traditionally in Western discourses of early childhood, the concept of play has been positioned in opposition to its apparently more worthwhile counterpart, work. This division is marked not simply by the ways in which play is often relegated to specific times and places, but also in the ways in which play, wherever it is enacted in early childhood settings, is shaped by the pedagogical and contextual features which surround it (Rogers, 2010). A ‘pedagogy of play’ might be characterised by complexity and diversity of practice, the locus of interactions between the needs and desires of the children and those of adults, between ideological and pragmatic imperatives, between spontaneous and intrinsically motivated actions of the child and the demands of a standardised and politicised curriculum. Moreover, pedagogy tends to be defined principally from the adults’ perspective with less attention to how children respond to and make sense of pedagogical practices within the contexts of their play, remembering that play is described widely in the Western early childhood literature as a child-initiated activity, free from externally imposed rules. Against this background, the chapters in this book problematise the intersection of play and pedagogy and draw on a range of perspectives including post-developmental, critical and cultural analyses of that intersection. With this in mind, the chapters address some emerging issues surrounding play and pedagogy in the twenty-first century. These include:
• Application of critical and socio-cultural analyses to play in early childhood; • Renewed interest in the ethical, aesthetic and affective dimensions of play in early
childhood education;
• Competing discourses of ‘performativity’, market forces, social reconstruction and child-centredness;
• Children’s voice and participation within educational settings; • Globalisation, migration and cultural pluralism; • The role of digital technology in early childhood education; • Diversity, identity and social justice within early childhood settings.
