"Play Therapy: Basics and Beyond" is a comprehensive and insightful guide to the practice of play therapy. Presenting foundational and advanced skills with humor and fun, this book brings the practice of play therapy to life through real-life examples, interactive exercises, and thought-provoking reflections. For those new to play…

This is an Open access book. This work addresses the presence and participation of adults in play with children. Rather than discussing this issue on ideological ground, the international contributions build on empirical data and report research conducted in many different contexts and settings around the world. Responding to the many forms it…

This article considers ways in which toys have featured in children's play throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Whilst often dismissed as trivial novelties, toys can be seen as a significant aspect of material culture, both reflecting and constructing ideas of childhood. A multimodal social semiotic perspective is used to examine a selection of toys…

In recent years, Conversational Analysis (CA) has seen an increasing interest in longitudinal studies (Deppermann & Pekarek Doehler, 2021). The recurrent experience of interactional practices leads interactants to develop routines that may sediment into entrenched patterns over time (Dreyer, 2022). Longitudinal CA thus aims to track the…

Child-centered play therapy (CCPT) is an empirically endorsed approach for children facing specific clinical concerns and life circumstances alike. The majority of research to date has accrued data about clients from secondary sources, such as adult report and observation. The purpose of this study was to explore children's perceptions of…

The author introduces the playful-tension model, a new theoretical concept, to harmonize the gap in play design between general play theory and its actual use in designing playthings. By synthesizing a broad selection of general play theory into a single theoretical concept, the playful-tension model accentuates the delicate interplay of what he…

Autistic children's play has routinely been determined to deviate from accepted trajectories and patterns and is consistently interpreted as a deficit requiring remediation. An extensive review of the literature on functional play in autistic children led to the identification of 10 articles comparing autistic and typically developing children's…

The purpose of this study was to examine the involvement of early childhood pre-service students (PSSs) in children's constructive play and highlight how this involvement supported children's play skills towards advanced play behaviours as seen by previous literature. Drawing from the conceptual framework of the Zone of Proximal Development, as…

This manuscript, as a conceptual article and communication piece, offers insights into the pedagogy of play as a philosophy of education and a wide-ranging set of methods and techniques. It intends to encourage readers to invest (further) in playful learning in language learning. To this aim, playful learning is first problematized within language…

In this artistic essay using (re)photography, we analyse two interactions in a Washington DC, classroom that features a play-based approach to child development. The pioneers of early childhood education helped frame play as a method of learning. However, the racial memory of a place continuously disturbs this pioneering conceptualisation of the…

Questioning the common practice of treating texts as property that can be stolen and instead exploring the social and rhetorical dimensions that define what is owned (and what is not), as well as what can be taken and appropriated, I drew on data from a yearlong qualitative investigation of young children writing with technology to interrogate how…

Historically, schools were solely places of learning, but this is changing. Schools are now "dwelling spaces" where individuals spend much of their day developing and connecting. This book highlights the educational quality of these spaces, seen as both relational systems and physical objects shaped by educational intentions. The book…

This study investigated the impact of a 'Jewellery Club' on girls with social, communication and interaction difficulties. The project focussed on three girls aged seven who participated in an intervention using similar principles to the 'Lego Therapy' intervention. An action research approach was followed, where two phases of the intervention…

Play and playfulness have been central to progressive pedagogies since the birth of the kindergarten. Yet their position in many contemporary education discourses is often ambivalent and at times fragile. In the Global North, many critics warn of a 'play crisis' and 'play deficit'. This essay attempts to trace a cultural and intellectual history…

This article explores the usefulness of detective role-play as a research method to facilitate young children's critical thinking. The study examines four specifically designed detective play experiences, adopting an ethical rights-based approach to research with children. This qualitative multiple-case study is grounded in play-based pedagogy…