Abstract
Play is natural to children of different cultures and places. In play, we see how children manifest their imaginations, test out their theories, interact with others, challenge themselves, relive their experiences and so forth. Though play is a seemingly natural thing for children to do, the notions of play are subject to varying cultural and social interpretations. To what extent are children allowed to engage in risky play? Is play perceived as a child right, or is it secondary to serious work like academic learning? Are children's creative ideas in play valued by adults? The list of questions can go on. Differences in the forms of play can be easily reduced to an East-West dichotomy. For example, the West may privilege risk-taking, creativity and play as a child right, while the East may see play as less productive than formal learning. Such dichotomy may not help us understand the multifacetedness of play that is culturally and socially manifested in various Asian contexts. While there is a great need for more understanding about children's play in Asia, the globalisation of the Western notions of play seems to have made the task far more daunting.
Asia is increasingly exposed to the globally circulated discourses of free play and play-based learning. Underlying these discourses is the assumption that play constitutes an essential part of early childhood curriculum. It is not clear how local early childhood settings may have taken on and/or problematised these global discourses to produce something different or innovative in the forms of play. Governments may also actively promote free play and play-based learning as the reform goals and pedagogical tools for early childhood settings, but at the same time conceive policy initiatives to ensure pre-determined outcomes and universal standards influenced by neoliberalism. This neoliberal logic may be antithetical to the spirit implicit in play which welcomes openness, spontaneity and improvisation. Against the backdrop of play being culturally and socially specific, how may early childhood settings in Asia resolve and transform the global tensions into alternative forms of play that serve the interests of local children?
This special issue has collected five articles and one colloquium on children's play within the Asian contexts. In our initial call for proposals, we intended to focus on ‘innovative forms of play’ in Asia. It turns out that there is less focus on innovative forms of play but more questioning about the Western notions of play and childhood that have been imposed on local practices through policy and curriculum imperatives in different cultural and social contexts. This questioning heightens the global-local tensions induced by such binaries as play vs. learning and play vs. working. The first two articles of this issue take us to the policy level to understand the problems. The third article discusses an alternative professional practice to create an in-between space to disrupt the play-learning binary. The fourth and fifth articles adopt a bottom-up approach to research the less noticed or valued forms of play performed by children. Returning to our original focus on innovative forms of play, we definitely see creative examples in the last three articles. The colloquium that comes after the articles echoes back what has been said with regards to understanding children's play in Asia.
The critical discussion of this special issue begins with Playing with happiness: Biopolitics, childhood and representations of play. Sue Okerson Saltmarsh and I-Fang Lee problematise the dominant discourses of play embedded in policy and practice in various parts of the world. These discourses, conceived in the West and heavily promoted as desirable to children's learning, development and well-being, have been made normative for understanding and advocating children's play. The authors challenge this taken-for-granted assumption, which in effect constructs a presumably good and universal happy childhood as the ultimate goal and endpoint of children's play and the cure for a wide array of problems and issues in contemporary society. Drawing on the onto-epistemological perspectives of poststructural theorists, including Foucault, Certeau and Ahmed, the authors analyse visual representations of children and childhood in the policy documents and reports of Hong Kong, Singapore, the United States and UNICEF. The analysis reveals the common but often silent co-implication of play and happiness, suggesting the biopolitical governing of children and childhood to steer neoliberally imagined educational developments.
Regardless of its global prominence in the quality discourse of early childhood provision, play is seldom defined in clear terms in Asian policy frameworks. In Play in Asian preschools? Mapping a landscape of hindering factors, Alfredo Bautista, Jimmy Yu, Kerry Lee and Jin Sun question the wide-spread government practice of policy borrowing without attending to cultural and contextual differences of the local. This practice tends to bring contradictions and problems in policy enactment. The authors propose instead the notion of glocalisation to reconcile the global-local tensions. Based on this premise, the authors systematically review curriculum documents in three jurisdictions, namely, India, Mainland China and Hong Kong, as well as local studies on teachers’ professional practices in these jurisdictions. The three narrative portraits produced as a result point to specific hindering factors in each jurisdiction and yet they share similarities in some regards, especially when it comes to academic learning. Bautista and his team suggest the glocal notion of ‘child-led activities' as an alternative to replace the problematic concept of play. This notion, as the authors argue, would accommodate the development of the hybrid or third culture spaces in which both adults and children can contribute to the construction process.
Switching the focus from policy to practice, the third article Blurring the play-drama boundary: A case study investigating of the teaching and learning of a drama-integrated curriculum in a Hong Kong kindergarten presents an interesting attempt to realise the policy initiative of learning through play. Po-Chi Tam observes the problem of lacking clear official guidelines and support for local teachers to achieve the initiative while being trapped by binary thinking about play and learning in the Hong Kong context. Arguing that process drama can bridge the boundaries between play, teaching and learning, the author examines its benefits with the teaching team of a kindergarten after making sustained effort to integrate it into the curriculum. The empirical data, analysed and organised in terms of drama teaching and learning through, before, in and after play, offer illustrative examples of complex and yet innovative, playful and spontaneous processes of boundary-crossing between drama and play. These processes require purposeful preparation and constant role-switching of teachers as children's co-constructors, facilitators and playmates. The study reveals that a drama-integrated curriculum can help encourage children's active, imaginative and emotional engagement in playing(drama) and at the same time enhance subject- and non-subject-based learning.
In Children's playful musicking: Peer culture within a daycare setting in Singapore, Sirene Lim looks beyond the narrowly defined notions of play as curriculum and pedagogy to investigate child-initiated forms and contexts of playing. This ethnographic study is informed by a range of literature that discusses the deficit and agentic views of children, children's rights, as well as children's play, musicking and peer culture. Musicking in the study is understood as a form of social play among children for meaning making of the everyday world. It includes the acts of both making and listening to music that contribute to children's playful musical interactions with their peers. In the context of Singapore with limited adult attention given to child-initiated play activities and the government's promotion of children's rights, the author argues that it is necessary for adults to understand more deeply this creative and improvised form of musical play used by children to navigate the ‘unofficial’ space in early childhood settings, turning play into a way of knowing the world and building their peer culture. Such understanding enables adults to see children from their perspectives and discover that their process of knowing also adds to the various aspects of learning and development.
Moving away from formal institutional contexts, Vina Adriany, Lia Aprilianti and Euis Kurniati contest the prevailing binary between playing and working in Indonesian street children's negotiation of playing. This binary legitimises playing as mandatory for children and working as harmful to children. The authors argue that the binary has marginalised street children whose childhood is often seen as something that has gone wrong. They critique the colonial and Western construction of childhood embedded in the convention of children's rights, especially regarding child protection, which in turn is sustained by international donor agencies. Adriany and her team draw on Bourdieu's concepts of field, capital and habitus to investigate the ways street children negotiate between playing and working and their ways of playing. They visited the street regularly, made observation and conducted ongoing conversation with young street children and their guardians over a period of six months. The ethnographic data shed light on the complex interplay of adult-child power dynamics, resistance to learning/schooling and fluid transformation of the street into a playground.
The colloquium Relocating the frame of reference on play: Reflections from the fieldwork in Chinese rural pre-schools by Yeh Hsueh, Tenglong Liu and Taylor Mule brings this special issue to a nice closure. Hsueh and his team critically reflect on their own Western assumptions that have been made implicit in academic scholarship and graduate study. These assumptions often privilege play in urban pre-schools over play in rural pre-schools in China. The authors suggest ‘Asia as method’ by Kuan-Hsing Chen as an alternative frame of reference for research and practice in culturally different contexts.
Scott Cameron reviewed the book Decolonising place in early childhood education, authored by Fikile Nxumalo (Routledge: New York, 2019).