ABSTRACT

In many early years classroom settings it is possible to witness how teachers claim the play discourse, leading, directing, redirecting, approving or rejecting children’s utterances as they attempt to identify and work, in a Vygotskian sense, within children’s ‘zone of proximal development’ (Vygotsky 1978: 85). This may take children’s performances towards pre-ordained curricula outcomes and ‘allowing’ play, while accounting for it in nationally recognised terms enables teachers to be creatively compliant (Lambirth and Goouch 2006). However, this approach also appropriates or hijacks children’s play intentions and sends direct messages to them in relation to choice, freedom, control and dominance. In such circumstances, Wertsch asks the ‘Bakhtinian’ question ‘Who is doing the talking?’ and challenges the privileging of some texts and some speech genres over others (Wertsch 1991). There are echoes of Bernstein here and, as play, by some definitions, has now been legitimised (DfES 2007), it is possible to see that some teachers, without understanding the depth and complexity of the play, may use the opportunity to capitalise on the way children ‘exteriorise’ themselves through play, offering opportunities for ‘surveillance’ and screening (Bernstein 1997: 60). Play and the outcomes of play can then simply be reinterpreted and reshaped according to the prevailing requirements of the system and the explicit intentions of the teacher rather than to serve the intentionality of the child. Neutral positions though are also impossible and equally, as Bakhtin claims, ‘there can be no such thing as an absolutely neutral utterance’; teachers and other adults involved directly in children’s learning are, by their adulthood, at least involved in implicit culturally related transmissions. Bakhtin further explores this idea that utterances or speech acts are not isolated or ‘indifferent’ to each other:

Our speech, that is all our utterances (including creative works) is filled with others’ words, varying degrees of otherness or varying degrees of ‘our-ownness’ varying degrees of awareness and attachment.