ABSTRACT

What kind of pedagogy is a ‘pedagogy of play’? How and in what ways do pedagogical practices shape the play experiences of young children in early childhood classrooms? Answers to these questions are surprisingly difficult to find in spite of a vast literature on the subject of play in early childhood classrooms. Insights from theoretical and empirical studies illustrate powerfully that young children demonstrate an inherent capacity to play and that it appears to be central to their early learning. Few would dispute this. Yet how such insights are to be translated into pedagogical practices across diverse social and cultural contexts has presented the international early childhood field with some of its most enduring challenges. As I have argued elsewhere (Rogers, 2010), the coupling of play and pedagogy in early childhood education is problematic for several reasons: first because traditionally, the concept of play has been positioned in marked opposition to its apparently more worthwhile counterpart, work (play versus work). The division between play and work characteristic of many early childhood classrooms may prevent the integration of play into pedagogical practice. Second, theorising ‘play as work’ as Gibbons (2007: 303) argues, may in fact obscure the ways in which play may become ‘a technique of social control and a means of transmitting assumptions and beliefs regarding the nature and purpose of childhood: the child must work at being a child’ (see also Ailwood, 2003; Cannella and Viruru, 2004). Third, the pedogogisation of play (Rogers, 2010) seen in countries across the globe has meant that play has increasingly become an instrument for learning future competencies; emphasising social realism rather than the transformative, mimetic and life-enhancing qualities of play (see also Guss, this volume). These mixed and sometimes paradoxical conceptions of play provide an important context for this chapter and indeed this book. Put simply, a consensus about the value and benefits

of play exists within dominant Western early childhood educational discourse. Yet there appear to be inherent and widespread difficulties, both conceptual and practical, in realising the potential benefits of play, what I have termed here a conflict of interests between the competing imperatives of play in early childhood pedagogy. Alongside these difficulties, there has been widespread migration of educational policy and pedagogy (Edwards and Usher, 2008) so that Western models have been imported into developing economies such as the Indian subcontinent (see Gupta, this volume). By the same token within the West, alternative pedagogic practices have been widely disseminated and influential (see for example the Reggio Emilia approach).