Recontextualising ‘Play’ in Early Years Pedagogy: Competence, Performance and Excess in Policy and Practice

Abstract

This paper traces the way discourses within early years policy and practice impose meanings onto the signifier 'play'. Drawing on Bernstein's conceptualisation of recontextualising strategies, we explore how these meanings regulate troubling excesses in children's 'play'. The analysis foregrounds an underlying question about the hold the signifier 'play' maintains within discourses that appear antithetical to traditional understandings of 'play'.

Early years learning, play pedagogy and social class

“…As mentioned, Rogers and Lapping (2012) (QCA, 2000). The latter, in particular inserted 'ideas of purpose, quality and the market into the understanding of play in the early years, setting an agenda for a more explicitly regulated and accountable educational provision for all three and four year olds' (Rogers and Lapping, 2012, 249).…”

“…Its protagonists (see The Telegraph, 2013) in what Bernstein (1975) called the pedagogic recontextualising field (PRF) have come to see the more expressive, child centred, 'competence' based play pedagogies of EYE (Rogers and Lapping, 2012) threatened by too much formality, testing and assessment, as government Ministers in England have with increasing persistence viewed it simply as a preparation for school. Such major actors in what Bernstein (1990, 192) termed the 'official recontextualising field' (ORF) (particularly specialised departments and sub agencies of the state and inspectorate) had, for much of the period from the fifties to the seventies in the UK allowed individuals and agencies in the (PRF) (particularly specialist educational practitioners in schools, colleges, teacher educators and other specialist institutions of education, publishers and the specialised educational media) a high degree of relative autonomy with respect of curricula, teaching modalities and forms of assessment.…”

“…But ought we to focus simply on matters of improving access and opportunity, positioning EYE itself as a primary source of cultural capital and educational resource? Is it, the wrong place to centre attention (see Ball, 2009;Evans and Davies, 2010) rather than on the dynamic between family and individual perceptions and transactions within EYE centres (Rogers and Lapping, 2012;MacLure, Jones, Holmes and MacRae, 2012) and state ideologies as to the purposes of EYE and education generally where reproduction of extant social and cultural inequalities in the UK is to be found? These issues are addressed below.…”

Movement, meaning and affect: the stuff childhood literacies are made of

“…Whilst open-ended approaches to pedagogy are prevalent in Early Years provision (See Chapter 2.4) the ways in which play has been conceptualised in policy and valued in school contexts has often been problematised (see for example, Wood, 2014, Rogers andLapping, 2012). The problem inherent in such conceptualisations is how play is often evaluated, in how far it is seen to promote or facilitate progress towards curricular or pedagogical goals.…”

“…Similarly, in previous work (Daniels, 2013), I have discussed the tensions I experienced as a classroom teacher when observing children's activity and charged with the role of assessing against the Early Years statutory framework. Rogers and Lapping (2012) highlight how there are inherent tensions between understandings of play and the aims of schooling, describing play as a 'contested resource in the turbulent terrain of Early Years policy and pedagogical practice' (Rogers and Lapping, 2012, p247). Such tensions, the authors claim, arise from 'paradigms of liberal romantic philosophy where play is associated with childhood innocence and the expression of instinctive desires', and 'developmental psychology where the emphasis lies with the functions and benefits of play to cognitive development' (Rogers and Lapping, 2012, p247).…”