Play in Northern Rural and Northern Indigenous Canadian Classrooms: Affordances of Play in Place Learning

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 18
  In Roundtable Session: Innovations in Teaching and Learning in Rural Schools and Communities

Abstract

This study uses critical pedagogy of place and collaborative action research method to analyze the potential of play as a tool with which young children construct knowledge about the social, cultural, historic, economic and geographic characteristics of their northern rural and northern Indigenous Canadian communities. Classroom vignettes highlights the teachers’ decisions to replace homogenized play opportunities with opportunities intentionally linked to the children’s lives in their rural communities. In so doing, the children were actively positioned as place makers and participants in the socio-political processes that constitute the rural social space in which they live. The teachers engaged the young children at school as people in a place. We understand this as a radical act.

Authors

• Karen Eppley, The Pennsylvania State University

• Shelley Stagg Peterson, OISE/University of Toronto