Play and the Production of Subjectivities in Preschool

European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 2016

The aim of this study is to uncover the emergence of cultural mathematical understandings and communications in young children's spontaneous pretend play. It is based on Vygotskian cultural-historical perspectives and socialsemiotic theory, informed by research into 'funds of knowledge' and considers how children's informal knowledge of family practices enriches their play and cultural mathematical understandings. Longitudinal, ethnographic data were gathered in an inner-city mainstream nursery in the southwest of England. Data include written observation and graphics of seven children aged three to four years of age engaged in social pretend play. The findings reveal that many play episodes included aspects of mathematics and that these increased through the year: they show how the children's home cultural knowledge underpinned their pretend play and informed their mathematics. The children's graphicacy to communicate mathematics within their pretend play was also evident. The findings show also that where children are immersed in mathematical-and graphical-rich environments, bridging home and early childhood cultures becomes a natural feature of their pretend play. They will add to our understanding of cultural mathematical knowledge in young children.

Læring i et Vygotsky-perspektiv: Muligheter og konsekvenser for opplæringen

This chapter examines the complicated relationship between children’s play, learning and development in early childhood from the perspective of cultural-historical theory. Recent widespread practices that aim to integrate play and learning into school instruction are often superficial, and do not propose a unified systemic approach. Cultural-historical theory that develops general stage models of child development, as presented by El’konin (1999), Bozhovich (2004), and Slobodchikov and Zuckerman (2003), highlights the main difficulty in separating cultural development and learning from each other. The new learning of young children occurs in social spaces through internal psychological processes, which cannot be directly observed. The solution to the problem could be to accept the claim of Vygotsky and his followers that early childhood pedagogy must focus on personality development and creative imagination as the core psychological function of early age. Creative activities such as...

Nordisk barnehageforskning, 2015

This article investigates a map-drawing activity in a Swedish preschool from the perspective of how children are positioned as being or becoming mathematicians by the children themselves, the teacher and the researcher. The children positioned themselves as being mathematicians, who were capable of expressing and using their own experiences and skills. The researcher also focused on the children’s expertise and so positioned them as being mathematicians. Nevertheless, there were times when the children acknowledged their need for more skills and knowledge to solve a problem and thus positioned themselves as becoming mathematicians. Similarly, some of the teacher’s questions also focussed on developing children’s mathematics skills, which thus emphasized children’s incompleteness or state as becoming mathematicians. By contrasting the teacher’s role with those of the children and the researcher, it is possible to identify how the teacher affects children’s socialisation and learning ...

This article describes the responses of academic researchers and teachers to Vygotsky's paper on play, published in Russian in 1966 and, in a new translation, in the present issue of this journal. That paper has had a major influence on research in play both in Russia and in the West. Its cultural-historical view of the development of play, and its key theoretical and methodological ideas, have continued to reverberate and to generate and influence a huge body of work. The article identifies the key trends in these responses to Vygotsky's paper, reviewing the work by major scholars in this field, such as Elkonin, Leonte'ev, and Zaporozhets. The article also describes how Vygotsky's ideas in this paper became the foundation of the national curriculum for early childhood in the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s. The article critiques some of the research which, using the 1978 translation of Vygotsky's paper, presented his approach as that of a cognitivist or as a social constructivist and argues that these reflect a tradition in the West of simplifying Vygotsky's cultural-historical theory and methodology. It also reviews some contemporary studies by researchers working within the cultural-historical approach to play. These are making original contributions to the cultural-historical conception of play or bringing new insights into play as a leading activity in children's development.

Abstract There are many theories that have informed early childhood education, including cultural-historical and activity theories. In this chapter, we present a dis-cussion of cultural-historical and activity theories, beginning with the foundational logic that has informed both these theories – dialectical logic. We focus our discus-sion specifically on play and learning because this is the period of development being addressed by this handbook. Beginning with the original conception of play, learning and development proposed by Vygotsky, this chapter moves forward to the contemporary context of early childhood education, where we specifically illustrate key concepts from cultural-historical and activity theories through the research and theoretical writing of leading early childhood scholars. Cultural-historical concepts have been extensively used in the contemporary literature, as foundational for the key themes of: Play pedagogy; Pedagogical models that support the development of play; Play from the perspective of children; and Digital play. Together, these point to how cultural-historical concepts have been used by scholars to inform their work, as well as setting out the challenges and future directions in early childhood education.

Springer eBooks, 2023

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THE IMPORTANCE OF PLAYING IN PRE-SCHOOL: SOME POSSIBILITIES FOR THE CONSTRUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE BY THE CHILD (Atena Editora), 2022

This article addresses the importance of Play in preschool: Some possibilities for the construction of knowledge by the child. It seeks to value play in a pedagogical vision, in which the space of Early Childhood Education and Preschool became a space to play and rescue the joy of being able to experiment, discover, live and create. Aiming to show the need to create an environment that favors play and play, where the Preschool space facilitates the adaptation and socialization of the child. The methodology used for the study was a review of already written works, being a bibliographic review. Citations from documents such as the National Curricular Reference for Early Childhood Education (1998), authors such as Freire (1996), Rinald (2002), Piaget (1975), Vygotsky (1998), among others, were used. It is concluded that playing and ludic are of fundamental importance in children's training, as well as educators, must promote learning spaces, such as recreation, music, art and affection that are present and that moments of pleasure can be created.

2014

Researchers rarely discuss methodological issues in regard to preschool mathematics education and if they do, they do not take their starting point from reconceptualisations of what mathematics might be for preschool children. This paper presents as an analytical tool the "didaktic space" that arose when responding to issues related to the analysis of data collected in a Swedish preschool. The issues that arose from categorising situations using Bishop's six activities required some reconsiderations of the methodology in relationship to the research questions. The paper discusses how methodological decisions can affect the analysis and the future possibilities that the didaktic space offers. Methodological issues in understanding preschool mathematics Clements and Sarama (2007) in reviewing literature on preschool mathematics education research identified the different theories (empiricism, neo-nativism and interactionism) that have been used to discuss how children learn and use mathematics-"mathematical ideas are represented intuitively, then with language, then metacognitively, with the last indicating that the child possesses an understanding of the topic and can access and operate on those understandings" (p. 464). However, most of the research that they reviewed assumed that preschool mathematics can only be understood in relationship to school mathematics. Such a starting point is problematic because of the many differences between school and preschool. School students encounter mathematics in mathematics lessons and associated homework, that is, in situations clearly labelled and demarcated as mathematical. Therefore, it is possible to define school mathematics as a social practice as defined by Fairclough (2003): Social practices can be thought of as ways of controlling the selection of certain structural possibilities and the exclusion of others, and the retention of these selections over time, in particular areas of social life. (p. 23

2018

There are many theories that have informed early childhood education, including cultural-historical and activity theories. In this chapter, we present a discussion of cultural-historical and activity theories, beginning with the foundational logic that has informed both these theories – dialectical logic. We focus our discussion specifically on play and learning because this is the period of development being addressed by this handbook. Beginning with the original conception of play, learning and development proposed by Vygotsky, this chapter moves forward to the contemporary context of early childhood education, where we specifically illustrate key concepts from cultural-historical and activity theories through the research and theoretical writing of leading early childhood scholars. Cultural-historical concepts have been extensively used in the contemporary literature, as foundational for the key themes of: Play pedagogy; Pedagogical models that support the development of play; Pl...