ABSTRACT
Adults’ diverse understandings and curiosity towards rethinking and exploring different views of play are connecting threads running through the chapters in Section 2 of this volume. The three chapters highlight the different ways in which personal experience and social and cultural contexts shape educators’ diverse understandings and practices around play, playfulness and play-based curriculum, from both macro and micro perspectives. It is perhaps not surprising that educators – despite working with children playing – understand and practice play in different ways. Not only are understandings of play shaped by experience but also play is notoriously impossible to define in any one way. The very act of pinning down play by attempting to define complex processes and ways of being involved in playing is contradictory. These chapters challenge educators to reflect openly, positively and critically on their pedagogical and personal understandings and practice of play.
