International Perspectives on Early Childhood Education and Development 26 Niklas Pramling · Cecilia Wallerstedt Pernilla Lagerlöf · Camilla Björklund Anne Kultti · Hanna Palmér Maria Magnusson · Susanne Thulin Agneta Jonsson · Ingrid Pramling Samuelsson Play-Responsive Teaching in Early Childhood Education International Perspectives on Early Childhood Education and Development Volume 26 Series Editors Marilyn Fleer, Monash University, Frankston, Australia Ingrid Pramling Samuelsson, Gothenburg University, Göteborg, Sweden Editorial Board Jane Bone, Monash University, Frankston, Australia Anne Edwards, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom Mariane Hedegaard, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark Eva Johansson, University of Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway Rebeca Mejía Arauz, ITESO, Jalisco, Mexico Cecilia Wallerstedt, Gothenburg University, Göteborg, Sweden Liang Li, Monash University, Frankston, Australia Early childhood education in many countries has been built upon a strong tradition of a materially rich and active play-based pedagogy and environment. Yet what has become visible within the profession, is essentially a Western view of childhood preschool education and school education. It is timely that a series of books be published which present a broader view of early childhood education. This series seeks to provide an international perspective on early childhood education. In particular, the books published in this series will: • Examine how learning is organized across a range of cultures, particularly Indigenous communities • Make visible a range of ways in which early childhood pedagogy is framed and enacted across countries, including the majority poor countries • Critique how particular forms of knowledge are constructed in curriculum within and across countries • Explore policy imperatives which shape and have shaped how early childhood education is enacted across countries • Examine how early childhood education is researched locally and globally • Examine the theoretical informants driving pedagogy and practice, and seek to find alternative perspectives from those that dominate many Western heritage countries • Critique assessment practices and consider a broader set of ways of measuring children’s learning • Examine concept formation from within the context of country-specific peda- gogy and learning outcomes The series will cover theoretical works, evidence-based pedagogical research, and international research studies. The series will also cover a broad range of countries, including poor majority countries. Classical areas of interest, such as play, the images of childhood, and family studies will also be examined. However the focus will be critical and international (not Western-centric). Please contact Astrid Noordermeer at [email protected] to submit a book proposal for the series. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/7601 Niklas Pramling • Cecilia Wallerstedt Pernilla Lagerlöf • Camilla Björklund Anne Kultti • Hanna Palmér • Maria Magnusson Susanne Thulin • Agneta Jonsson Ingrid Pramling Samuelsson Play-Responsive Teaching in Early Childhood Education Niklas Pramling Cecilia Wallerstedt Department of Education, Communication Department of Education, Communication & Learning & Learning University of Gothenburg University of Gothenburg Göteborg, Västra Götalands Län, Sweden Göteborg, Västra Götalands Län, Sweden Pernilla Lagerlöf Camilla Björklund Department of Education, Communication Department of Education, Communication & Learning & Learning University of Gothenburg University of Gothenburg Göteborg, Västra Götalands Län, Sweden Göteborg, Västra Götalands Län, Sweden Anne Kultti Hanna Palmér Department of Education, Communication Department of Mathematics & Learning Linnaeus University University of Gothenburg Växjö, Sweden Göteborg, Västra Götalands Län, Sweden Susanne Thulin Maria Magnusson Faculty of Education Department of Education & Teachers’ Kristianstad University College Practice Kristianstad, Sweden Linnaeus University Kalmar, Kalmar Län, Sweden Ingrid Pramling Samuelsson Department of Education, Communication Agneta Jonsson & Learning Faculty of Education Gothenburg University Kristianstad University College Göteborg, Västra Götalands Län, Sweden Kristianstad, Sweden ISSN 2468-8746 ISSN 2468-8754 (electronic) International Perspectives on Early Childhood Education and Development ISBN 978-3-030-15957-3 ISBN 978-3-030-15958-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15958-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019. 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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Foreword One of the central problems facing early childhood education is the push down of an academic curriculum. The pressure for the schoolification of play-based settings has become increasingly prevalent in many Northern Hemisphere continents. Sweden – where the content of this book has been conceptualised and studied – is no exception. Despite the Swedish early childhood education system being unrivalled for qual- ity, this country does not appear to be immune to an academic agenda. Consequently, the research problem that has emerged internationally has been the relationship between play and learning. This is conceptualised differently in many southern countries, mostly because of the need for a more playful curriculum. In these coun- tries, such an approach is thought to contribute to the development of creative and innovative students. Even with differing societal needs globally, the central problem of the relations between play and learning is the same (Fleer and van Oers, 2018). Contemporary play scholars, such as Elena Kravtsova and Bert van Oers, have theorised the problem in different ways: the former drawing upon cultural-historical theory to conceptualise the transition from play to learning within children’s devel- opment and the latter drawing upon activity theory to tease out play activity after studying pedagogical practices in the early years of school. This theoretical diver- sity adds to the tapestry of work being done to examine the central problem of the relations between play and learning. This book written by Swedish researchers focused on early childhood education contributes both empirically and theoretically to this central problem. The authors bring to scholarship a serious study and theori- sation of what they have conceptualised as play-responsive teaching in early child- hood education. What is intriguing and theoretically important is that the authors do not engage in a dichotomy of play and learning – as is common in the play literature. What will become apparent through reading the pages of this book is that the dialectical rela- tions between play and learning emerge through the pedagogy of the teacher (adult’s perspective) and the activities of the children (child’s perspective). The authors remind the reader throughout the book to read their work with this in mind. They conceptualise this dialectical position through cultural-historical (sometimes named v vi Foreword as sociocultural) theory. No part of what they introduce should be considered as either play or learning, but rather it should be conceptualised as a synthesis. With this theoretical backdrop, the book unfolds to reveal empirical studies on areas of international significance, such as teachers’ ability to play, and the place of chil- dren’s agency in play and learning. What role teachers take in children’s play is contested, theoretically, empirically and ideologically. The authors of this book argue that it is often the latter that has driven our understandings of play and learning and what teachers should do in early childhood settings. The content of this book foregrounds the importance of studying the relations between play and learning to leave aside the question of ideology. The empirical studies on play-responsive teaching open up a new narrative on one of the big silences in research (and ideology), that is, the traditional place of child-initiated play and what contemporary early childhood teachers should do in their settings to promote learning. What the authors of this book argue is that play- responsive teaching means that the teachers’ participation in children’s play requires a high level of responsivity to the children’s perspectives. Their role is not just to shadow children and to simply observe them and contribute very little to their play. What is argued is that teachers need to find the ways to introduce the seeds of new directions and give new possibilities for the children’s play – but without compro- mising children’s agency and play narrative. That is, teachers need to work with child-initiated play and develop the children’s play through the introduction of new content that aligns with the cultural tools of the children’s lives – such as literacy. In my own work, learning concepts can also be about social development and emotion regulation. In other countries, such as Australia, this is referenced as intentional teaching. What matters in responsive teaching is children’s agency in play. This is seen through how the seeds or opportunities to develop children’s learning are always supporting children’s play narrative and activity. In my own work, I have referred to this as concepts acting in the service of the children’s play (Fleer, 2018). Importantly, the authors argue that responsive teaching involves teachers being close to children’s play, so they know when and how to introduce new opportunities into children’s play. This can mean being involved in their play, and the authors argue that this is difficult for early childhood teachers. In early childhood settings, there is usually more than one teacher, and this gives different possibilities for teachers than those who are in primary classrooms. Elena Kravtsova has introduced the practice of pair pedagogy to support teachers in building developmental condi- tions for children in early childhood settings. She discusses how teachers can be with the children in their play, can lead children’s play by initiating something new, can position themselves as following children’s lead or can act in a primordial we position where they join together with the child as though one. In this book, there are also many different ways that teachers interact with children, and we can find the unique ways in which teachers redistribute the agency of adults and children in the rich vignettes of practices in the different centres and corresponding play activities of the children. The data presented go beyond traditional laboratory-based research and into the lives of children and teachers in early childhood settings. As such, a richness of pedagogical practices is illuminated in all of its complexity within the Foreword vii daily practices of early childhood education. Play-responsive teaching captures and names the complexity of teachers work in teaching in early childhood settings whilst also preserving the integrity of child-initiated play and children’s agency. The conceptualisation of play-responsive teaching will help teachers with the chal- lenge of how to responsively introduce concepts into children’s play. Therefore, play-responsive teaching as a concept builds upon existing work being done in other countries, such as Russia, the Netherlands and Australia – to name just a few tack- ling this problem. The message of this book is that play-responsive teaching is not simply a child- initiated play with the hope of some learning taking place (child’s perspective only) and it is also not a teacher-guided learning built into play activities (teacher’s per- spective only). Rather, the focus is on preserving both the child’s agency and the narrative of the play, where children initiate complex play activities and change the meaning of actions and objects in imaginary situations – the Vygotskian (1966) conceptualisation of play – and through this, children realise new understandings. That is, children iteratively move back and forth between ‘as is’ and ‘as if’ to deepen their play and to build new conscious understandings about the rules and roles of culture in which they live – where ‘what if’ thinking can be introduced. What devel- ops in the theorisation of a play-responsive teaching approach is a playful sense- making context in which children appropriate the cultural tools of their community. This book is timely because it deals with a pressing research problem around the relations between play and learning. It makes an important empirical contribution to the play literature. It also makes an important pedagogical contribution because it is based on jointly undertaken research with practitioners in the context of their prac- tice – so it requires no translation work to make it meaningful to teachers. Finally, the book makes a major theoretical contribution because it shows how dialects from cultural-historical theory can realise new understandings of the relations between play and learning as a synthesis and, in so doing, productively puts forward a new theoretical concept of play-responsive teaching. Monash University Marilyn Fleer Melbourne, VIC, Australia February, 2019 References Fleer, M. (2018). Conceptual playworlds: The role of imagination in play and imagi- nation in learning, Early Years. https://doi.org/10.1080/09575146.2018.1549024 Fleer, M., & van Oers, B. (2018). International trends in research: Redressing the north-south balance in what matters for early childhood education research, In M. Fleer & B. van Oers (Eds.), International handbook on early childhood edu- cation, Volume 1 (pp. 1–31). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer. Preface A pressing challenge faced by contemporary early childhood education is to support children’s learning, particularly of what is sometimes referred to as academic knowledge. This political pressure has resulted in much debate on the nature of institutions such as preschool. This debate tends to take form through positioning adversaries in dichotomous poles: either preschool is seen as preparation for school (i.e. as preschool) or it is seen as a sanctuary from such pressures and being charac- terised by free play. In the former account, how to promote children’s learning can be seen unreflectedly as traditional instruction; in the latter account, preschool teachers, and hence teaching, have no place in children’s play. The instructional stance is not responsive to the tradition and practices of early childhood education as characterised by organising for children’s learning and development in more holistic play-based ways and in social activities; the free-play stance shies away from the fact that an institution such as preschool has a complex task, not only to cater for children’s well-being and social development but also to introduce them to forms of knowledge that they would perhaps not have come in contact with if not participating in this institution. Taking a meta-perspective on this debate, we argue that such simplified dichotomies are inadequate for understanding preschool as an institution with its complex tasks to support children’s learning and development. Another premise for our work is that in order not to succumb to simplified dichoto- mous poles, a concept of teaching (and in extension what we will call didaktik, not to be confused with didactics) needs to be developed; the concept of teaching as historically characterised by school cannot simply be reproduced in preschool since it builds on a different institutional framework and goals (in school: lessons, subject matter studies, instructing teacher and receiving children, goal-fulfilment). A third premise of our work is that a concept of teaching relevant to early childhood educa- tion (in our case preschool for children 1–5 years) needs to be developed on empiri- cal basis. There are many claims and opinions about teaching in preschool today (in Sweden and elsewhere), but the vast majority of these are based on ideologies and/ or philosophies. However, we argue, how we outline (conceptualise and organise for) teaching in early childhood education cannot be based on such grounds. What critically distinguishes empirically grounded conceptions from ideologically/ ix x Preface philosophically based ones is that the former are continuously revisable in light of what actually plays out in preschool and how children and teachers participate in activities and indicate that they take with them from this participation. Empirically grounded knowledge claims are therefore the only ones that are inherently respon- sive to the nature of the institutional practices about which it makes claims. Most critically, we argue, we need to know more about how teaching as relevant to pre- school can take shape in response to play, since play is historically and contempo- rarily the basis for organising for children’s learning and development in preschool (in Sweden and in many other places). Evidently, against this background, tradi- tional schooled instruction will not do. In the study presented in this book, a group of researchers in collaboration with preschool personnel – preschool teachers, heads and developmental leaders – have tried to take on the challenge of theorizing teaching relevant to preschool as organis- ing for children’s learning and development through play. It should go without saying – but in the current heated polemic about teaching in preschool, it cannot – that what we study and make claims about is one part of pre- school. As we have already mentioned, preschool has a complex task and serves the need of many stakeholders (children, caregivers, politicians). That we focus on teaching in relation to play does not mean that we do not consider children’s care and well-being critical to preschool work. It should here also be pointed out that we do consider teaching important not least to provide more equal opportunities for children and thus, in the long run, for children’s well-being and care. It also needs to be pointed out that our take on play is not that it is ‘merely for’ children’s learn- ing; clearly play has a value of its own. Neither do we suggest that preschool teach- ers should at all times participate in children’s play; at times, when immersed in joyful and fulfilling play, children need to be able to do so without being inter- rupted. What we do claim is that preschool teachers with a task to support children’s development and learning in a preschool founded on play need to find ways of giv- ing contributions in response to children’s play as well as, at times, contribute to develop children’s play. In collaboration between preschool personnel and research- ers, we have made a collaborative effort to contribute to generating insight into how this can be done through empirical study. The research presented in this book was funded by a grant from the Swedish Institute for Educational Research (Skolfi 2016/112), which we hereby gratefully acknowledge. Gothenburg, August 2018 Niklas Pramling Cecilia Wallerstedt Pernilla Lagerlöf Camilla Björklund Anne Kultti Hanna Palmér Maria Magnusson Susanne Thulin Agneta Jonsson Ingrid Pramling Samuelsson