The Sociology of Early Childhood by Norman Gabriel

Author:Norman Gabriel [Gabriel, Norman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446272992
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Published: 2017-06-22T00:00:00+00:00

5 Young children’s play – challenging the adult establishment

Introduction

Play has long been characterised as a defining activity of young children. It is one very important field where we can observe young children developing their own distinctive stocks of cultural and social capital. As directors of their own play-material they are always trying to develop their own separate play culture, and within that, resist adult power and authority. This chapter will argue that young children’s play should be framed within a relational context: young children create their own cultural practices through the appropriation of adult-centred discourses, but they do not mimic or passively accept the adult world.

Play can take on many forms but builds on the idea that young children’s learning needs to be ‘hands-on’, enjoyable and self-directed: building with blocks, exploring sand and water, playing pretend, listening to stories, singing and dancing are just a few of the many examples. While many kinds of play can allow such self-expression, pretend play and the production of narratives is considered to be the epicentre of such activity (Paley, 2004) and will therefore be the main focus for our discussion. Pretend play is a key source for young children’s intellectual, social and emotional development (Hirsh-Pasek et al., 2009), fostering skills of role rehearsal, self-regulation, turn taking, joint planning and negotiation. As young children use substitute objects in imaginary situations, for example, a broom can become a horse, they become adept at distinguishing symbols from real-life objects. Consequently, they become better able to use words, gestures and other symbols as tools for managing their own behaviour.

I will begin by reviewing the developmental stage theories of play that were proposed by two major developmental psychologists, Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky, both of whom were discussed in the previous chapter. Play provides important benefits for learning and developmental processes, as well as for disciplines in curriculum areas (Bodrova, 2008). For Piaget, play is assimilation – young children experiment with different behavioural and cognitive schemas and gain pleasure from the cognitive mastery that stems from self-styled repetition. Vygotsky focused on the role of mediating adults or peers in young children’s development – through relationships with such guiding figures, they are led towards a more complex understanding of their world. Play activities are considered to be particularly effective for young children’s communicative, narrative and representational competence, through symbolisation and multi-modal forms of expression such as painting, modelling, collage, sculptures and drawing (Carruthers and Worthington, 2011).

We discuss Corsaro’s (2003) interpretive approach to play as an alternative to this linear perspective, where young children pass through developmental stages acquiring cognitive and language abilities in preparation for their later adult life. His concept of ‘peer culture’ is a vital step in overcoming such a narrow instrumental view of play and can help to explain young children’s interpretations of their surrounding culture. These interpretations are shaped by their ability to represent the perspective of others and to use objects, body movements, gestures and language. Studies on peer cultures suggest that children, aged

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