Relation of play and learning

In early childhood education and care (ECEC) play is important, although its’ relationship to learning is often taken for granted. This article covers empirical research over a 40-year period and how the authors have used the concepts of play an learning. The conceptualization of the relation between play and learning has gone through changes during this period in a number of ways towards what is called Developmental Pedagogy. Children’s perspectives and teacher’s sensitivity and responsiveness are important features in preschool pedagogy.

Author: I. Pramling Samuelsson & C. Björklund

Source: I. Pramling Samuelsson & C. Björklund (2023). The relation of play and learning empirically studied and conceptualized. International Journal of Early Years Education, 31(2), 309-323. https://doi.org/10.1080/09669760.2022.2079075

  • There is consensus in early childhood education and care (ECEC) that play is important in education.
  • However, the relationship between play and learning has not been self-evident during the past 40 years.
  • Traditionally, learning has been viewed as an activity planned and organized by the teacher for distributing knowledge, while play has been considered to be the child’s own initiative and a world of fantasy.
  • However, there is ambiguity of separating these two aspects and this article enlightens this problem and takes a step towards integrating them.
  • The aim is to elaborate on how the relationship between play and learning is conceptualized and empirically studied within Developmental Pedagogy.

Background

  • Play is an important part of preschool curricula globally.
  • A key element in ECEC is ‘learning through play’, or ‘playful learning’, in which children have agency and control over their experience.
  • Play can be organized and executed in different ways on a continuum from child-initiated to teacher-designed activities.
  • ‘Play-based’ or ‘play-oriented’ followed by ‘preschool’, ‘education’, ‘pedagogy’, ‘curriculum’ and the like are frequently used terms, although there is no consensus of their differences and similarities, and combinations of them.
  • Play-based pedagogy in ECEC includes first, that the child is an agent in his/her learning, and second, that the role of the teacher is not to be just an instructor, but rather an enabler that prepares an exploring-friendly environment.
  • Nevertheless, there is still debate about if, how and why teachers should involve themselves in play for educational purposes.
  • Developmental Education for children 3–8 years of age developed by Van Oers (2012) emphasizes the individuality of the children.
  • Thus, teachers should work in design research studies, be critical of and creative in their practice with children, and allow children to actively exercise their agency. Making play as a key concept in education.
  • A play-based curriculum takes playfully formatted cultural activities as contexts for learning.
  • Central in play-based pedagogy is a close relationship between teachers and children and experiences of common everyday situations, through which a mix of everyday and scientific concepts is explored.
  • Teachers’ knowledge, expertise and engagement should be based on the Vygotskian concept Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD).
  • According to Lindqvist (2002), the teacher’s role is to act as an mediator and offer a common ‘play world’ to help child develop their skills of reproduction (memory) and production (creativity and imagination) in play through dramatized stories (literature).
  • Fleer (2011) has developed ‘Conceptual Play-worlds’, a systematic approach where children and teacher jointly play, thus the teacher takes the role of both mediator and playmate.
  • In conceptual Play-world, teacher participates throughout the play activity, aiming to offer children experiences of concepts that otherwise would be difficult to explain to young children.
  • Play can be perceived as a continuum with high teacher participation in the choice of content and context offered to children on one end, and low teacher participation and interference on the other end.
  • From the 1980s onward, interest in learning to know the child’s perspective as an outset for teaching and learning grew, emanating in a pedagogical approach called Developmental Pedagogy, thus play became a central feature of research.

Child perspective and children’s perspectives

  • Child perspectives direct adults’ attention towards an understanding of children’s perceptions, experiences, and actions in the world.
  • Children’s perspectives represent children’s experiences, perceptions, and understanding their life world.
  • The authors’ have taken child’s perspective as the outset for both learning and play, meaning that learning starts from the child’s subjective world, but will lead to a new subjective world, which could be a qualitative new way of understanding something or expanding their world to become more extensive.
  • The authors have taken a phenomenological approach where their interest is to identify and describe the phenomenon ‘play and learning’ as it appears in the research.
  • The play-learning relationship particularly comes through in how the teacher’s role is reflected.
  • The analytical approach is thereby holistic and driven by what emerges as essential and what is foregrounded in the research studies

Play and learning in developmental pedagogy research

  • Research has been interested in learning and the methodological relationship to phenomenography – how the learner’s perspective/understanding is both the starting point and the result of learning.
  • Play and learning recur as central concepts in the research, and four themes emerge:
    • (1) play as part of practice for learning
    • (2) the playing learning child as an individual
    • (3) play and learning integrated in education
    • (4) play-responsive teaching

Play as part of practice for learning

  • Teachers plan the play as part of the practice that primarily directs attention to the learning of specific content.
  • For example, teacher and children built a ‘supermarket’ in preschool, and teacher planned play activities related to the content (s)he wanted children to focus on and learn about, e.g. advertisement by cutting out ads from magazines and attending to various packages in the shop. Afterwards, (s)he discusses with the children, asking them to relate their experiences visiting shops and their ideas of how shops work.
  • Play was the underlying concept used as activities to influence learning towards an intended goal.

The playing learning child as an individual

  • Especially younger children do not separate play and learning.
  • They are simply focusing on something in their surrounding world and trying to make sense of it.
  • Children are playing and learning by extending their experiences while playing, pretending and imitating what to them are interesting phenomena.
  • Result is a view of children as playing, learning individuals – individuals that do not play at one time and learn at another.
  • What is leading to children’s understandings and change of conceptions:
    • 1) communication on two level, i.e. as children’s spontaneous communication and a metacognitive reflective dialogue when the teacher is involved
    • 2) similarities between play and learning, i.e. children communicate in play and use meta-communication spontaneously
    • 3) variation is a source for play and for learning, i.e. variation in children’s ways of making sense of concept that teaching is used for giving children experiences of something
  • This directs attention to the similarity in children’s play and learning that motivate the consolidation of play and learning in ECEC.
  • Children’s perspectives are both the beginning and the result of the learning.

Play and learning integrated in education

  • There are instances where playing and learning are integrated by teachers sharing focus with children, communicating and allowing both fantasy and reality to come into play in a shared situation.
  • During interactions characterized by instruction and ‘formal teaching’, this kind of integration which allows fantasy to take place in a learning situation is absent.
  • Integration of play and learning is found to be related to the enacted communication between the teacher and the children as a joint process where fantasy and reality came hand in hand.
  • Teacher can position herself on the same level as children and challenge children to explore new ideas and perspectives opening up a space for both play and learning in the same situation.
  • Play has taken a step forward in the pedagogy and play and learning are integrated as a whole.
  • Teacher is to be active and interact with the children about the content areas she wants the children to become aware of.

Play-responsive teaching

  • Children involve teachers in their play and learning for different reasons: to get help, to be acknowledged, to make the teachers aware of other children breaking rules, to get information about and confirmation of how things work but also just to include teachers in their play.
  • In Developmental Pedagogy, teaching relies on the communicative practice of ECEC, and thus in it is central about what and how communication takes place.
  • Play-responsive teaching was derived from the project where teachers actively tried to take part in children’s ongoing play to observe what happens and see how they could contribute to the progression of children’s play by supporting the development of a narrative within which children could play.
  • Intersubjectivity, narrative and meta-communication are important to support the progression of play and to introduce alterations that challenge the boundaries and experiences in the ongoing play.
  • Teachers have to plan for the play to be able to participate. Play cannot be taken for granted, it has to be conditioned on equal terms as any other activity in preschool. In this way, teachers can introduce academic content and skills into a frame of play, and children become agents in their own learning.
  • When children’s initiatives are taken as the starting point and the teacher adds some value or alternative meaning to what meaning the child expressed, it upholds the necessary intersubjectivity between the teacher’s and child’s perspectives and also offers learning potential.
  • Teaching can be concluded as successful, when it depends on a balancing act between shared perspectives and alterations that stretches the boundaries for what is known and accepted within the context of that ongoing play.
  • Thus, the teacher needs to focus both on the child’s perspective and current knowledge as well as how certain content can be made meaningful for the child’s play to progress.

Conclusions

  • The concept of play in children’s learning is highlighted in UNICEF’s goal for sustainable development concerning children’s right to education.
  • play is
  • Play is a relevant feature of learning; however, conceptualizing the relation between play and learning is a complex effort, which is often influenced by policy on education, e.g. it is reflected in the curriculum and Education Act.
  • This article shows the development from considering play as an ‘activity arranged by the teachers for children to process their learning’ to taking play as the outset for teaching content to be meaningful for children, building on the idea that ‘play and learning have to be integrated in pedagogy’.
  • It is critical that teachers take part in children’s play without destroying or interrupting the play.
  • The communication processes then comes into the foreground, a process in which children and teachers are involved in all kinds of activities moving between reality (as is) and fantasy (as if) while upholding sufficient intersubjectivity and thereby sharing experiences and meaning that facilitate the learning of meaningful content.
  • The relation between play and learning has changed from a more or less taken-for-granted process, to an interest in better understanding and theorizing how learning and play work as intertwined features of a teaching practice suitable for preschool.
  • There is a continuum of teachers’ roles and involvement in children’s play and learning, from facilitators to mediators and co-players.
  • It is not enough to engage children in talking about their surrounding world, taking the Developmental Pedagogy approach also means to use metacommunication to get children to become aware of what is focused on in the communication, i.e. holding children’s perspectives as key.
  • Earlier, the content on which children were to express their perspectives was introduced by the teacher. In later research, the teacher picks up on the child’s directed attention and contributes experiences that expand the child’s perspective. The recent approach has also a feature of responsiveness to the child’s intentions as a starting point for teaching.
  • In Developmental Pedagogy, the communication processes are fusing the concepts of play or learning together building upon their similarities in character, not separating them.
  • Play-responsive teaching brings for important insights of how to interact with children to enable play and learning through a balancing act of establishing intersubjectivity and offering alterations.
  • A pedagogy for the twenty-first century ECEC adheres to the child’s perspective and offers the child the best opportunities to broaden and develop experiences and skills through play and learning.
  • Consequences for policy is that curricula have to be revised and considered about play and learning is a new way.
  • Implications for teachers are to take part in children’s play, following and contributing to the development of the play and of the content knowledge in focus, e.g. through meta-communication of what is going on.

References:

Fleer, Marilyn. 2011. “‘Conceptual Play’: Foregrounding Imagination and Cognition During Concept Formation in Early Years Education.” Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 12 (3): 224–239. doi:10.2304/ciec.2011.12.3.224.

Lindqvist, Gunilla. 2002. “Lekens estetik.” Psyke & Logos 23: 437–450

van Oers, Bert. 2012. “Developmental Education: Foundations of Play-Based Curriculum.” In Developmental Education for Young Children. Concept, Practice and Implementation, edited by Bert van Oers, 13–25. Dordrecht: Springer.