Early Childhood Education Commons^™

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 …