In developing the Early Years Foundation Stage in England, and the Foundation Phase in Wales, many early childhood specialists fought long and hard to ensure that play was recognised as one of the main ways in which young children learn and develop. Both these policy frameworks reflect this perspective, but at the same time, provide clear guidance on the ways in which play can be used for educational purposes.
Areas of agreement in the English and Welsh documents include the importance of high-quality learning environments, both indoors and outdoors, access to a wide range of resources, and supportive interactions between children and adults that aim to stimulate children's learning processes such as thinking, problem-solving, motivation, showing interest, engaging, concentrating.
In addition, they include research that shows how learning outcomes can be embedded naturally in play activities and resources. For example, puzzles, sorting and matching games provide varied opportunities for spatial and mathematical language and concepts. Providing literacy materials in role-play areas engages children in reading and writing for different purposes and audiences, both real and imaginary. Outdoor play helps children to develop their loco-motor skills such as running, skipping and cycling, and gross motor skills such as climbing, twisting, hopping and jumping.
Given that the early childhood community can draw on positive validations for play, why should I be writing an article that argues for more challenging scrutiny of 'the play way'?
I have been researching and writing about play for many years, and continue to challenge my own ways of looking and thinking about play. It is precisely because we now have these positive validations that we, as a community, should be considering the truths of some of these claims, particularly in the context of working with children and families from very diverse communities in the UK, and ensuring a commitment to provision and services that take seriously issues of equity, diversity and social justice.
I would argue that the universal commitment to play (which is sometimes seen as the way of learning in early childhood) needs to be examined in light of research that asks some uncomfortable, but pertinent questions about the broad assumptions we make about play. I aim to provide some questions that will provoke debate and discussion, and hopefully will inspire practitioners to look at their practice with fresh insights.
The Umbrella Problem
Play remains ambiguous and highly complex in relation to the form and content of children's activities, social interactions, symbolic meanings and communicative languages, and the environmental resources that mediate play and playfulness. Play continues to be used as an umbrella term that includes a wide range of activities that may be adult-led or child-led, and may be free or structured.
If we look carefully at children's self-chosen activities, not everything they do can or should be classified as play. For example, children may choose to read, write, practise sums or just hang out with their friends for a chat. Their choices are influenced by their experiences in different social and cultural worlds, their individual identities, mood states, peer affiliations and personal preferences.
Play and Diversity
Many theories and pedagogical recommendations about play make universal assumptions that play is developmentally significant for all children. These assumptions tend to gloss over the complex dimensions of diversity, such as gender, social class, language, culture, ethnicity, or additional needs.
We know that there are wide variations in children's capacities and capabilities to play, according to their early life experiences in family, community and educational settings. For example, it is sometimes the case that children with special or additional needs will experience highly structured approaches to play, in which activities are used to teach basic skills or help them learn how to engage socially with others.
Where such activities are predominantly adult-led, and shaped by specific goals, those children may not have sufficient opportunities to express their own choices and interests, and to develop the social and emotional skills that are required in more complex forms of play. Children may be in what appears to be an inclusive environment, but may experience that environment in many different ways.
When considering dimensions of diversity, it must be acknowledged that not all children know how to play, not all children play easily or spontaneously, not all play is fun, and not all play is free, even when it is conducted beyond the gaze of adults.
Research by Liz Brooker shows that children who have not been enculturated into typically western forms of play may experience educational play environments as limiting rather than enabling their participation, which may put them at a disadvantage in accessing the curriculum.
Curriculum policies emphasise the importance of practitioners identifying children's needs and interests, and planning for personalised learning. However, it is important to ensure that children should have the opportunities to accommodate diverse needs and interests in their own ways.
How Free is Free Play?
Many practitioners have strong commitments to free play and free choice. However, when I engage with practitioners on CPD courses, their critical reflections on this commitment often reveal contrasting approaches.
In educational settings, play is always structured by institutional cultures - rules, use of space, provision of resources, organisation of time, adults' interactions, what forms of play are allowed or banned. In contrast, if we take the children's perspectives, free choice and free play are about subversion and inversion, order and disorder, chaos and stability, inclusion and marginalisation. This is where issues of choice, power, agency and control are played out.
Meanings are produced dynamically, drawing on the resources of the players, including their ability to understand 'this is play'. Rules and boundaries that are set by adults are often challenged by children, both overtly and covertly.
The work of Penny Holland provides some fascinating insights into these issues, and challenges the zero-tolerance approach to war games and superhero play. Holland argues that rather than banning these forms of power plays, practitioners should encourage children to understand what power entails, and how it can be used wisely. At the same time, they can gain insights into children's cultural worlds - their interest, ideas and cognitive transformations.
Similarly, Helen Tovey looks at risk, safety and challenge in outdoor play, and argues that children should have opportunities to be adventurous, and to push the boundaries of their activity, even when the outcomes may be uncertain or possibly scary.
Practitioners continue to face a fundamental tension: truly free play is open-ended, controlled and directed by the players according to their choices, meanings and intentions. In contrast, structured (educational) play attempts to harness children's learning and development in line with curriculum frameworks and wider societal expectations. So, adults and children's priorities are not always in synchrony.
Whose Choices, Whose Freedoms?
Although children are typically given some choices and freedom in early years settings, adults frequently exhort children to 'play nicely'. But play is not a neutral activity, and some research shows that children exercise power, agency and control with, but sometimes over, others (see Wood, 2008).
Children who are skilled players can organise and motivate their peers, set imaginative play themes into action, and develop rules, roles and ideas as the play progresses. These are all pro-social aspects of play activities. However, some children may stray into the 'dark side' of play, where teasing becomes bullying, or where the boundaries between play fighting and real fighting become blurred. Power may be exercised in a way that limits the choices and full participation of their peers.
The process of recognising that power relations exist in children's play may be uncomfortable for practitioners. Recognising how those power relationships are played out presents another discomfort, because it requires practitioners to see play as a political space, and to focus on issues of power and control between adults and children, and between children. Practitioners need to be critically aware of the repertoires of choice and activity in their settings, specifically the ways in which some children may be advantaged over others, as the following case study demonstrates.
CASE STUDY
Some of these issues were addressed in an action research project which was instigated by teachers in a school in Wales as they implemented the Foundation Phase. The teaching teams decided on their research foci, using similar cyclical research approaches, including observation and documentation of play with still and video images, narrative accounts, reflective team discussions, joint observations and reflective discussions with the researcher, and action plans for change.
The school community was very diverse. The majority of children belonged to ethnic minority groups, ranging from established second and third generation British Asian families, to newly arrived economic migrants from Eastern Europe and refugees from the African and Asian continents.
Research conversations with the Foundation Phase team revealed their concerns about the different starting points of the children, which reflected their prior experiences, home values and cultures, and varied child-rearing practices.
In addition, the parents had contrasting expectations of schooling, including their understanding of play-based approaches. For some children, the freedom and flexibility enshrined in a 'free play/free choice' environment was unfamiliar and difficult to negotiate without support and guidance from the adults. The play-based approaches advocated in the Foundation Phase presented many challenges to the children, their families, and the teaching teams.
The nursery team focused on the quality of language used during imaginative play, which reflected their concerns about the involvement and participation of children from different ethnic groups, whether children's interactions were better when they used their first language, and whether this influenced the quality of the play.
However, many of the observations revealed little verbal communication between peers, with children often playing in parallel rather than co-operatively (even with same-language speakers). Because of their beliefs in the value of free, imaginative play, the adults tended to involve themselves in table-top activities such as creative art, puzzles and games.
Those children who did not enjoy (or perhaps not understand) imaginative play tended to orientate to table-top activities. The team members discussed whether this reflected some children's sedentary home-based activities (which were determined variously by lack of space, lack of play materials, as well as child-rearing practices).
In reflecting on their data, the team realised that their interventions in play were often focused on their own agendas, rather than the children's. Therefore, they needed to take more time to ensure that their interactions, especially in imaginative play, were sensitive to the child/group in terms of their meanings, intentions and choices.
The area of language and communication, especially for children with English as an additional language, influenced the extent to which the children were able to access the curriculum through play. So, the team decided that adults should be able to take the lead in play, for example through demonstrating and modelling imaginative play, as well as being led by the children. However, it was not just language differences that were problematic, but children's cultural understandings of what was expected in a play-based environment.
Observation-based assessment was used in reflective team discussions, resulting in collective decisions about 'next steps' for individual children. This was particularly important in a diverse community with wide variations in children's interests, talents, and cultural influences.
The team members made a distinction between using observation as a means to understanding play in itself and for itself, and identifying learning outcomes in play activities that could be mapped against curriculum goals. The former taught them a great deal more about children's repertoires of activity and participation, and the ways in which children gradually learned to bridge their home and school cultures. This was a necessary transition process towards accessing the curriculum through play.
The Foundation Phase team also reflected on their theoretical knowledge of child development, because it did not serve them well in such a culturally diverse community. As a result, they sought the help of parents and language support assistants in developing culturally situated understandings of home and community beliefs and practices, which more accurately reflected the dimensions of diversity in the school.
This vignette illustrates the ways in which practitioners can reflect critically on the free choice/free play agenda. The following questions can be used to provoke considerations of equity and social justice in early childhood settings.
- Whose choices are privileged in settings?
- Which children are choosing which activities?
- In what ways are children's choices influenced by dimensions of diversity?
- Who is being included/excluded in play and free choice activities?
- Who is leading/following?
- Who is exercising power through the free choice/free play agenda?
- How do children determine their own power, agency and control?
- Does the free choice/free play agenda enable or constrain equality of access and opportunity?
MORE INFORMATION
- Brooker, L (2008) Supporting transitions in the early years. Maidenhead, Open University Press
- Holland, P (2003) We don't play with guns here: war, weapon and superhero play in the early years. Maidenhead, Open University Press.
- Tovey, H (2007) Playing outdoors: spaces and places, risk and challenge. Maidenhead, McGraw Hill
- Wood, E (2008) 'Everyday play activities as therapeutic and pedagogical encounters' in European Journal of Psychotherapy and Counselling, 10:2, pp. 111-120
