Education Commons^™

"When Do We Play?": Administrator, Teacher, And Parent Perceptions Of Play In A Catholic Kindergarten Classroom, Aimée Eva Ramirez

LMU/LLS Theses and Dissertations

Educational reforms have created a climate of accountability and high academic pressure that has resulted in a pushing down of the curriculum into early childhood education. Once a prominent pedagogical feature, play is disappearing from kindergarten. The following is a doctoral dissertation that studied administrator, teacher, and parent perceptions of play and its role within the kindergarten curriculum at a Catholic elementary school in the Los Angeles Archdiocese. Using a qualitative case study method, the study noted how play was utilized in transitional kindergarten and traditional kindergarten classrooms at the school site. Interviews, classroom observations, and document review of school …

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 …

Play As A Social Justice Issue In Early Childhood Education, Britt Kroll

Graduate Student Independent Studies

Play is a vital part of the early childhood experience to develop in cognitive and social-emotional realms. Schools are taking away an important tool for children to process new information and build skills needed for lifelong problem-solving by allowing less time for play in early childhood classrooms. This research combines data gathered to show the unique benefits of play in both cognitive and social-emotional areas, as well as qualitative data collected in a play-based and a non-play-based classroom.

The research defends the importance of play-based learning in early childhood and equips teachers with rationale to use play as a tool …