What if young students could explore science, technology, engineering, art, and math (STEAM) subjects through autonomous and creative play? What if children were treated like artists and encouraged to formulate and explore their thoughts, theories, and ideas starting at the age of 4? What if educators relinquished their traditional roles as…

Family-centered practices that involve direct participation of caregivers as part of intervention is critical to effective early intervention. However, regularly scheduled, in person service delivery is not always possible in remote communities, prompting a need for adaptations to the delivery of services, such as the use of live video…

Background: Teaching experientially in postsecondary education has challenges; institutional constraints, neoliberal management, and a colonized learning environment. We discuss playing as a form of experiential education. Purpose: We challenge conventional teaching and offer an alternative to enrich and broaden conventional pedagogies. We argue…

Early childhood education is steeped both in historical and ideological traditions which value play as a powerful pedagogy. From an Irish perspective, early years research tends to be framed with a sociocultural perspective. This research presents a reinterpretation of play episodes using a Foucauldian lens. It documents a re-imagination of…

In some Western contexts, the pedagogical practices of teachers are to intentionally involve in play-based learning through sustained shared conversations to extend children's thinking (Meade, A., Williamson, J., Stuart, M., Smorti, S., Robinson, L., & Carroll-Lind, J. (2013). Adult-child sustained shared thinking: Who, how and when? Early…

Guided play, a balanced approach to involvement in play that includes child- and adult-direction in learning activities, holds great promise for children's effective and engaged learning in education. Recent studies in laboratory settings show benefits for academic and socio-emotional outcomes, while retaining a focus on child-centred exploration.…

In the field of early childhood education, play has become synonymous with curriculum but is sometimes viewed narrowly as a pedagogical tool to enhance child development. However, it is known from a range of multidisciplinary work that child-initiated and child-guided forms and contexts of playing can offer rich insight into diversity in…

Object word learning can be based on infant-related factors such as their manual actions and socio-linguistic factors such as parental input. Specific input for spatial features (i.e., size, shape, features of objects) can be related to object word comprehension in early vocabulary development. In a longitudinal study, we investigated whether fine…

Decades of research support integrating play in kindergarten to benefit young students' social, emotional, and cognitive development. As academic readiness becomes a focus, time for play has decreased. As a result, there has been a demand for integration of play with content. This study modifies a project-based science curriculum about how living…

Humour, when engaged in the classroom, tends to be used as a means to hook youth into the 'real' material of school, when officially sanctioned at all. Humour can be dangerous, not-the-least in its potential to produce chaos, presenting difficulties in the rigid climate of accountability and standardisation. As we animate, humour can trouble…

Background: With standardization ever squeezing creative curricula in K-1 classrooms, creating time for a play-based multimodal writing curriculum that leverages children's strengths as storytellers is revolutionary. Due in part to accountability policy pressures, print-based writing and verbocentric writing feedback are still often privileged in…

This dissertation presents three studies on learning in children museums. The first study is a literature review of the research that was done on learning in children's museums between 2010 and 2021. In this review, I focused on presenting a current state of the field with insights into what research has been done and where there may be gaps in…

Contemporary discussions around gender roles, stereotypes, and play highlight the need for updated research on the influences of children's early play experiences and learning (Weisgram, 2018). Different types of play relate to different skills and vary by gender, such as spatial play and spatial skill (Jirout & Newcombe, 2015; Voyer, Voyer,…

Children experience a multitude of benefits in response to interactions with nature. Despite documented effects, children have increasingly spent less time outdoors over the last century and experienced higher rates of physical and emotional illnesses. Although child-centered play therapy (CCPT) is a culturally and developmentally responsive…

This paper reports on a study carried out by tutors and students on Early Childhood Studies degree courses at a University in England. The research explored perspectives of three to six-year-old children's outdoor play in Danish forest kindergartens with the aim of troubling and informing approaches to outdoor pedagogy. Inspired by Somerville and…