International Handbook of Early Childhood Education

Abstract

Play is one of the natural strengths of childhood through which children acquire and also practice critical language, cognitive, and socio-cognitive abilities. This long-standing belief has widely shaped curriculum in early childhood, mainly in the form allotting time and space for free play. However, lately the effectiveness of play for early childhood development and consequently its place in the early childhood curriculum are under attack especially in the USA. Policy makers are substituting playtime with didactic instruction aimed at imparting decoding skills that speak to a narrow set of literacy and school readiness skills. Their decision to make the early childhood classroom a more didactic, adult-directed teaching environment is seemingly supported with recent reviews of play research that show minimal or inconsistent effects. We propose that playful learning deserves careful consideration before we discard play as a learning and instruction strategy. In this chapter, we review some of the newly emerging evidence for the effectiveness of guided play, a form of play that is situated on a continuum between adult-directed didactic instruction and child-directed free play. In the light of reviewed evidence, we propose that playful learning should be implemented to target specific learning objectives such as numeracy, vocabulary, narrative competence, and knowledge of science concepts. We discuss the need for comprehensive playful learning programs

Early Childhood Education (ECE) Philosophies and Services

“…EC teachers will need an appreciation about what philosophical ideas and/or approaches to hold on to and what to jettison. In an age of increasing globalization, early childhood services can be expected to continue to respond to sociocultural contexts and trajectories (Fleer and Oers 2018;Pearson and Degotardi 2016).…”

Process quality, curriculum and pedagogy in early childhood education and care

“…For example, Ritchie (2016[14]) explains how indigenous ways of belonging centre on human and non-human relationships [or what others describes as 'more-thanhuman', e.g. Duhn (2018 [15]); Ham (2019 [16])]; whereas Western-European perspectives on ECEC quality centre on human-to-human interactions. When the human-to-human is emphasised in these contexts, young children's cultural meaning making experiences are not always fostered, short-circuiting the rights of children to ECEC that allows full and productive participation in their society.…”

Undervisning i förskolan – en företeelse i rörelse

“…Den svenska förskolan har influerats av internationella strömningar, men placerar ändå in sig inom en nordisk tradition (Broström, Einarsdottir & Pramling Samuelsson, 2018;Hammer, 2012;Vallberg Roth & Holmberg, 2019;Wagner, 2006). Därigenom har det urval av forskning som här presenteras huvudsakligen begränsats till nordiska och nationella studier.…”