Multifacetedness of Play: Are We Ready to Embrace?

• In Event: Early Childhood Curriculum for the 21st Century: Rethinking Developmentally Appropriate Practices

Abstract

This session addresses the complexity of understanding play in early childhood education based on the document analysis of play from newly released Developmentally Appropriate Practice (DAP) by National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC, 2020) in relation to play literature from multidisciplinary fields. Play in early childhood has narrowly been defined, understood, and largely influenced by knowledge and research from traditional developmental psychology and education. However, play has been studied by multiple disciplinary areas including anthropology, biology, philosophy, neuroscience, folklore, leisure studies, etc., contributing more in-depth understanding of play beyond early education. Advanced understanding of play in human development from multidisciplinary fields has not been fully grasped by early childhood educators. As a result, the value of play is only recognized for its contribution to a child's learning and development, missing out its importance in life span development and broader society. Play scholars advocate for play in life long human development beyond childhood. This is a particularly important concept for early childhood educators because adults need to play to understand its value and role in child development as well as their own development.
This session will introduce three issues related to play in the revised DAP: 1) what is play? 2) technology, 3) lessons from implementing play-based curriculum.
1) What is play? There are multiple definitions and different opinions on how we define play. Some researchers define play as self-chosen and self-directed activities (Gray, 2011; 2017), while some others acknowledge the challenges of defining play and consider it as a undefinable term because whether certain activity is play or not depends on player’ state of mind (Brown & Vaughn, 2009). Previous version of DAP has been criticized by its emphasis on mature high-level play such as socio-dramatic play over other types of play (Kushner, 2012) implying a quality difference in different types of play. Perhaps In response to the critics, the revised DAP explicitly includes broad types of play and uses the definition of play as a continuum (Zosh et al, 2017).
2) Technology: Some scholars voiced a concern around the addition of technology as one of the principles of child development and learning in the new DAP. A major concern was about the perspective of technology as a learning tool vs. a principle in child development. As technology play becomes more prevalent during early childhood, there are growing concerns over increased use of technology and lack of other types of play relatively. Adding technology as a principle of child development in DAP could have huge unintended consequences.
3)Lessons from play-based curriculum: Teachers who use a play based curriculum need intensive training and an in-depth understanding of play as well as self-active play experience. Adults need to know when and how to support children’s play using various techniques. It is important to understand that guided play and playful learning is a good alternative to direct instruction or other traditional methods but not meant to replace independent or unstructured free play because free play provides opportunities for more comprehensive development (Author 3 & Colleague, XXXX).

Author

• Myae Han, University of Delaware