In recent years, play-based learning (PBL) has attracted attention, debate and controversy across different national contexts. There is no definitional consensus which may have undesirable consequences for enacting its potential in professional practice. The aim of our study was to synthesize international research on ECE practitioners' views on PBL. Based on a meta-synthesis of 62 studies from 24 national contexts, we show that they have differing views on the degree of conceptual compatibility between play and learning. While they may adopt numerous roles in PBL, they also express uncertainties as to how and when to get involved. Lastly, practitioners report on experiencing many challenges in enacting PBL, most importantly, policy and curricular delivery pressure. Throughout our review, we underscore both general trends and local nuances.
The study investigates how parents of Polish ethnic background, resettled in Norway, reflect on their children's learning in Norwegian early years educational institutions through 19 qualitative interviews. With narratives of experience as the main theoretical and analytical vantage point, their negotiations of positioning towards the Norwegian educational practice are explored in the narrative worlds they construct, in the interactional context of the interview and in the wider socio-cultural contexts. While questioning, challenging and deliberating the observed practice through a variety of narrative formats and discursive means, their positions are shown to range from open contest to variable forms of ambivalence and acceptance, subject to thematic variation. The study thus provides a platform for the interviewed parents to orchestrate unique situated voices engaged in a discursive process of reflection on their children's new educational reality.
This study investigates parent-teacher dialogues on child language learning as constructed in 19 interviews with migrant parents of Polish ethnolinguistic background, resettled in Norway and caring for young preschoolers and school-goers. Targeting reported speech as a linguistic resource for enacting agency in discourse, the focal interest is in tracing how the interviewed parents draw on this resource to enact and negotiate their agency vis-à-vis their children's educators. The analysis reveals that the parents use reported speech as a strategic discursive tool to variably claim their agency across time and space. While L2 emerges as the most prominent theme of the dialogues, the participants also display a sense of ownership of the meaning-making processes involved in their children's L1 development. Through constructions of concerted bilingual home-pre/school support, the parents thus propel their capacity to imagine their children's membership in the host and home language communities to the fore.
Building on a view of both narration and argumentation as dynamic concepts, this paper considers ways of assessing the credibility of narrative arguments constructed in empirical examples of conversational discourse. I argue that the key in any such exercise is to pay close attention to both structural and pragmatic details, particularly how conversational storytelling gets embedded in the surrounding discourse and how the way this is discursively accomplished vis-à-vis the narrators’ multilayered audience may be reflective of their argumentative goals.
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