The article analyzes the aesthetic dimension of play installations designed by university students of Early Childhood and Social Education in a Spanish interuniversity project. These installations respond to the complexity of children's spontaneous play by highlighting its pedagogical value and the importance of the aesthetic dimension. The…

A decline in children's opportunities for outdoor play was observed during the past decades. Expanding opportunities for outdoor play through intergenerational programs for children and elders could benefit their mental and physical health. This study explores the learnings that Canadian grandparents and their 3- to 5-year-old grandchildren…

In this article we examine young children's outdoor narrative play as animated by the possibilities of running. Guided by posthuman perspectives, the provocations of sociomateriality, and the capacities of mycelial networks, we consider how stories and storying might occur in and as movement. We draw on interdisciplinary understandings of moving…

The author, using extensive interviews, researches the play of working elementary school teachers to discover how they engage in such activities, both in and out of the classroom, to relax, enhance learning, and connect professionally. She discusses how these experiences offer rich insight for strengthening teacher well-being, training, and…

As technology becomes ubiquitous in the homes of many families, children learn to incorporate touchscreen devices into their everyday activities. The present study explored young children's role in shaping their gaming experience to maintain social interactivity. Twenty-nine children at 2.5 years old in the U.S. played a non-educational game on a…

Access to equitable, quality, and inclusive early childhood education (ECE) has positive effects on school readiness, transition, and overall development and learning in all children. This paper seeks to explore barriers and facilitators to the implementation of learning through play (LtP) for preschoolers in Kenya with a view to enhance…

This paper investigates affect as part of children's sensemaking in the context of a play-based mixed-reality science learning environment. We build on theories of affect as disciplinary work by investigating the multiple layers of affect that are essential to children's scientific inquiry and to identify pedagogical moves that recognize, value,…

The early years of education are a crucial time to develop a strong foundation of critical mathematical skills. A growing body of research continues to demonstrate that this foundational knowledge can be successfully built through teacher-facilitated, or guided, approaches to play. Despite its benefits, the implementation of guided play is…

This article, a conceptual and theoretical piece, opens a window on "playful learning" as a philosophy of education and a suite of diverse pedagogical approaches, methods, and techniques. The paper criticizes the serious ambience of adult education with its high levels of instrumentalism and performativity. It argues for playful learning…

Objective: Listening to children has been frequently adopted by researchers working within a child's rights paradigm, as an uncontested method that veritably represents children's 'voices'. Whether children can be understood to participate, and their voices represented veritably, when their lives are culturally situated and co-constructed with…

In the Fall of 2018, the author embarked on her dissertation research, focusing on the critical issue of enhancing early childhood programs through the lens of early literacy development facilitated by play. At that time, many districts' early childhood curricula were heavily skewed towards academics, such as English/Language Arts (ELA) and Math,…

Role-playing games (RPGs) are storytelling activities that mediate co-authorship through a variety of in-game, out-of-game, and intertextual relationships. Liminal interactions sometimes occur during RPG play that blur these categories. To understand the purposes and processes of "liminal play," this study analyzed data from a yearlong…

Children on the autism spectrum experience difficulties with social interactions, often resulting in lower quality of friendships. As such, children with autism often benefit from support with social skills, which are usually delivered in school settings. Social skills are not limited to school settings. Playdates are defined as prearranged…

This paper reports a small-scale qualitative inquiry in the discipline of Early Childhood Studies in Higher Education that explores how playfulness in pedagogy might create an environment in which people within the Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) sector (including students) engage in dialogue about structural injustice. Participants in…

New sociomaterial and performative directions in literacy research on digital technologies and play in early childhoods may complicate the established concept of digital play. This study contributes to this line of research by empirically expanding on the concept of the postdigital. In the study, postdigital refers to how both "digital"…