ABSTRACT
In line with many other Westernized educational contexts, a play-based pedagogy is proposed as the principal approach to teaching young children in South Korea (Korean Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, 2008: 76). However, as in many other countries play-based teaching and learning is not without its problems, including the dichotomized thinking which exists between play and work, and instrumental approaches to teaching, where the value of play is interpreted only as an instrument for learning. Play, then, automatically comes to be viewed from a teleological perspective as a vehicle to get ‘there’, and therefore the genuine nature of play itself is not understood for its own sake. Within early childhood settings the play/work dichotomy is understood by children themselves (Rogers and Evans, 2008; Wing, 1995) as well as teachers, working in the pragmatic conditions of early childhood classrooms (Bennett et al., 1997). Despite the fact that teachers may agree on the importance of free play they may still express a degree of perplexity, that they might miss something of educational value if the focus is only on the playful aspect. By concentrating our attention only on the surface ‘educational’ values of play, which lie outside play itself, we may neglect many important aspects which lie inside children’s play (cf. Rogers and Evans, 2008). Goldman (1998: 18-47) says that behind our belief in the play/work dichotomy there lies the logic of representation developed throughout the historical traditions of play theories. From this perspective, children’s play and an objective reality are seen as united together in a one-to-one corresponding relationship, and the value of children’s play comes to be estimated by the degrees of representation. Children’s role play is a good example of this. Because of the imitative nature of role play activity, its prime value has been simply assumed to represent adults’ roles in an objective reality. Although the representational function is certainly one important element we should consider regarding children’s role play, it cannot in any sense exhaust the pedagogical significance of this kind of play in educational settings. Similarly, Huizinga (1955: 2), reflecting on the traditional theories of play argued that ‘Most of them only deal incidentally with the question of what play is in itself and what it means for the player . . . without first paying attention to its profoundly aesthetic quality’.
