Defining play has plagued researchers and philosophers for years. From describing play as an inaccessible concept due to its complexity, to providing checklists of features, the field has struggled with how to conceptualize and operationalize “play.” This theoretical piece reviews the literature about both play and learning and suggests that by viewing play as a spectrum – that ranges from free play (no guidance or support) to guided play and games (including purposeful adult support while maintaining playful elements), we better capture the true essence of play and explain its relationship to learning. Insights from the Science of Learning allow us to better understand why play supports learning across social and academic domains. By changing the lens through which we conceptualize play, we account for previous findings in a cohesive way while also proposing new avenues of exploration for the field to study the role of learning through play across age and context.
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. Often, these studies feature an experimenter with one child or a small group. In contrast, educators in early years classrooms often need to support 20 children or more. To realise guided play's promise, we need to explore the enactment of guided play in classroom settings, and how educators can engage young children in responsive ways to promote opportunities to learn in play contexts. We offer a cross-cultural comparison of guided play that occurred in 12 Canadian and 8 South African early years classrooms. Using a qualitative, thematic approach, we analysed video-recorded observations for: 1) the frequency of educator involvement in play contexts, 2) the role of the educator in those contexts, and 3) learning opportunities that emerged due to this involvement. Based on our analysis, we consider how educators can achieve guided play in classroom settings. Implications are discussed for practice, including barriers and enablers of guided play in culturally diverse settings.
In this article we discuss the relationship between cooperation and coordination around six children with special needs who attend Norwegian day care centres. The children in focus have 'individual plans', in which goals, roles and activities at the centre of the cooperation are documented, and are as such a coordinating device. Each child has a cooperative team consisting of parents, representatives from day care centre, the child's special educator, the public health nurse and, for instance, their physiotherapist, family doctor etc. to support them. The cooperating teams are headed by a coordinator, who in most cases is the public health nurse. Methods used in the study are individual interviews with at least four representatives from each cooperative team, as well as two focus group interviews with representatives from two different specialist units. The research design is action oriented, and involves, in addition to data collection, two seminars with parents and practitioners from the day care centre and social/health sectors. Departing from the empirical findings in the project we discuss how the coordinating practices, such as the individual plan and the designation of coordinators, influence the cooperation in the teams around each child. Our findings indicate that cooperation benefits from a bottom-up process, in which it is the cooperation that structures the coordination, rather than vice versa.
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