Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Education
Critical Play: Agency, Interdependency, And Intersectionality In An Early Childhood Classroom, Maria Persons
Critical Play: Agency, Interdependency, And Intersectionality In An Early Childhood Classroom, Maria Persons
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This critical ethnographic exploration of play analyzes how preschool children use fantasy play to understand gender, race, and ethnicity as they navigate social hierarchies, power, and identity. Theoretically, I frame play as agentic social action, with particular attention to how micro-interactions within the childhood classroom push against larger macro-ideological and pedagogical discourses. My central focus is on children’s exercise of agency through fantasy play, which I argue does not take place within a separate children’s culture but is interdependent and interconnected with adult culture and adult-controlled social structures and ideologies within the relational space of the classroom. My dissertation research …
Development Of Authoring And Agency In Early Childhood Through Play, Pi-Chun Grace Ho
Development Of Authoring And Agency In Early Childhood Through Play, Pi-Chun Grace Ho
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
The recent national focus on universal early childhood education programs has drawn attention to the challenges of organizing learning contexts and practices in which children can thrive as learners and community members. Preparing children for school and improving the quality of early childhood education face limits, however, when the role of play is dismissed or reduced to merely instrumental activity. Framed in Vygotsky’s cultural-historical theory, Bakhtin’s dialogic approach, and Stetsenko’s transformative activist stance, I reframe play as a process of authoring that fuels children’s passion for being agentive actors in the world and their own lives. This approach addresses how …