Abstract
This book follows a cultural-historical line of argument that Marilyn Fleer has developed in collaboration with Mariane Hedegaard in their previous work: Studying Children (2008) and Play, Learning and Children’s Development (2013). It is also directly linked to Fleer’s other book, Play in the Early Years (2013), which explicates a variety of cultural perspectives on understanding children’s play.
Theorising Play in the Early Years attempts to argue for the movement from the biologically oriented models of play to looking at play as the dialectical relationship between children’s psychological functioning and their social and material world. The author stresses the point that any meaningful analysis of play and understanding its role in children’s development requires a close examination of people’s activities from their own cultural and historical perspectives. Similarly to her previous work with Hedegaard, Fleer has made an attempt to extend the dialectical method to inquire about children’s play and development. This book is conceptualised from a Vygotskian perspective and draws on work in the area of cultural-historical psychology, especially that of Elkonin (1976) and Hedegaard (2008, 2009). Thus, play is seen as the dialectical interplay between motives, emotions and mental functioning. This book is especially targeted at researchers who work in the larger Vygotskian tradition. Taking a Vygotskian approach, the book defines play as a cultural-historical activity that creates space for recreation and the representation of children’s understandings of events and roles.
Divided into seven chapters, the book argues the case for the psychological value of role play and play as pedagogical tools to support children’s development and learning. Chapter 1 presents a detailed theoretical argument about the cultural-historical approach to play. The author is critical of age-driven theories of play. She describes how demands in different situations influence children’s thinking, for children’s play is a different setting than a preschool or the social context in which children live. In play situations, children operate on the borderline between the imaginary and the real world.
In the book following Vygotsky and Luria (1990), Fleer has argued that “the ideal form or full expression of a situation, role or event needs to be present in children’s environment before it is possible for them to understand or re-enact these experiences in play” (p. 10). The engagement of children in role play is the reflection of real-world interactions, although these reflections are more complex than being the mirror image of real-world contexts. The author puts a lot of emphasis on the role of children’s agency in their play. Children in play situations operate with the rules and roles that exist in the real world through the use of imagination, control and free will. In the process, children also acquire and internalise societal rules and structures. In this chapter, Fleer also emphasises that role play serves as a context for concept development in children.
Chapter 2 describes how play is developed and initiated in Australian families of low socio-economic status. It extends the argument presented in chapter 1 that play needs to be seen as being developed in a cultural context rather than natural biological development. Very similar to Vygotsky’s argument that movement between everyday and scientific concepts leads to children’s learning, Fleer explains that, in play situations, children move from ‘objects to the idea of an object, and then working in concepts’ (26). On the basis of data from the Australian families, Fleer argues that play is also used by parents to negotiate with children about activities which are often not agreeable to them, such as doing homework or eating at the dinner table. She describes how parents create play situations that help them to make children do work which they would otherwise avoid engaging in.
Fleer claims that children’s play activities are mediated by the active engagement of adults. They facilitate both the material conditions and the imaginary processes that guide children’s thinking and play. Fleer presents case studies of two families, both of low socio-economic status but with marked differences in the way play is organised and facilitated by the parents, to show how human agency plays an important role in the organisation of play. It reasserts Hedegaard’s (2012: 10) argument that: ‘Children create conditions for their own learning and development of personal competence and motives’. Moreover, it also shows that value-laden demands in the family setting influence children’s play activities. Thus, Fleer argues that play is a cultural activity which is created and facilitated by the conditions that adults create.
Chapter 3 primarily presents the different cultural expressions of imaginary play. In this chapter, Fleer argues that imaginary play is a human invention, is learnt and develops as a result of dialectical relations between beliefs, values and cultural practices. She emphasises the role of adult mediation in the higher psychological development of children during play.
Chapter 4 examines Western research in the area of role play with a special focus on the role of metacommunicative activities in the development of play. The chapter then moves on to talk about the nature of collective play. A cultural-historical perspective is used to better understand the dynamic movement between reality and fantasy during group play activities, and also between collective and individual imagining. Metacommunicative activities like prompting, questioning and storytelling, which help to relate collective and individual thinking, are presented as important activities for the development of collective play.
Through tracing the cultural-historical development of toys, particularly digital-tablet technologies, chapter 5 emphasises the central theme of the book – that play is a culturally developed practice and not biologically determined. The important point discussed in this chapter is the way digital-tablet technologies can be used to make play conscious to children by capturing their fantasies and imagination, and by reproducing their play explicitly. The use of a digital tablet allows the child to create a meta-imaginary situation or to make a world from their imaginary thinking. Therefore, the use of a digital tablet creates the possibility for the child to engage in a process of reflection. Further, the point is made that the use of digital-tablet technologies and meta-imaginary situations provides new possibilities for the psychological development of children.
Chapter 6 explains how role play provides the context for the union of cognition and emotion. The author draws on a very important Vygotskian concept, perezhivanie, which captures the emotionally lived experiences of children. It explains how the child becomes aware of, makes sense of and emotionally relates to their social and material world or environment. The chapter puts forward Vygotsky’s (2004) view that emotions and feelings act as a fulcrum between reality and the imagination.
Chapter 7 provides a holistic view of how role play develops in society and how it develops a child. This final chapter provides concluding remarks, where the author emphasises that role play develops as a form of cultural practice in communities which changes as communities change and as the members of the community develop new needs and motives for play practice. As societies evolve, so also does their conception of play, which creates the demand for the development of new theories and perspectives on play. As a cultural-historical approach to play assumes that role play is learnt from others, the role of adults is crucial in supporting children’s learning and development. The author regards role play as a political activity as its development depends to a large extent on society and its institutions. The author appeals to the research community to make this politics of role play visible and value the agency of children by keeping a close eye on the intentions of society and the intentions of children.
Theorising Play in the Early Years could be a valuable resource for practitioners and researchers in the area of early childhood development and education. The book makes cogent arguments in favour of developing a holistic approach to studying children’s role play. Extending her previous arguments and research with Hedegaard (Hedegaard and Fleer, 2008, 2013), Fleer has tried to develop a wholeness approach to researching role play. Figure 7.4 on page 153 uses one of the models developed by Hedegaard and Fleer (2008) in Studying Children to show the relationship between societal, institutional and individual perspectives. The model shows how these three perspectives together contribute to developing a wholeness approach to studying children and their everyday activities.
Instead of seeing play as an activity in which children create situations for their own play, Fleer regards the role of families and adults as crucial in creating situations for children’s play and in negotiating the many things that children might not like to do otherwise. Adults use children’s play as a leading activity in their preschool years: ‘Adults help children to move beyond the functional use of the objects; they change the meaning of an object to the new idea of the object, or to the concept of an imaginary situation’ (36).
Theorising Play in the Early Years has primarily limited itself to the work of Hedegaard and specific cultural-historical approach which Hedegaard, Edwards and Fleer (2012) have collaboratively developed. Moreover, as the case studies included in the book are of families in an Australian context, cross-cultural dimensions are lacking.
In conclusion, it is important to state that this book provides a new (cultural-historical) perspective for conceptualising play in the early years and strongly argues the point that play emerges as a result of the dialectics between children’s psychological functioning and the social and material conditions afforded in their environment.