‘Be careful!’ Using our words as a discursive exploration of early childhood educators regulating children’s play

Abstract

What early childhood educators say to children on playgrounds shapes children’s behaviour. ‘Be careful!’ may be the most common phrase uttered on playgrounds across Ontario, as early childhood educators manage children’s play and work to maintain their safety. These utterances, and the disciplinary practices that accompany them, shape what is acceptable and unacceptable for children to do and, ultimately, what kind of children they can be. Making use of analytic strategies derived from Foucault, I take some first steps to show that injunctions to ‘be careful’ and other similar utterances regulate children’s behaviour to produce a particular child-subject, while in the same moment revealing much about some of the discourses at work in the playgrounds of many early learning settings. I propose that these discourses – the discourses of safety, socialization and purposeful play, all embedded within an overarching developmental discursive framework – connect early childhood educators’ utterances and practices on playgrounds to concepts of discipline and governmentality. I also explore in this article how a Foucauldian perspective may provide educators a space to question established ideas regarding children and their play and explore new approaches for ensuring children’s safety without controlling them.

Introduction

Play nicely!…No running!…Be careful! Be Careful! BE CAREFUL!

On any given playground, at any early learning centre or child care or school in Toronto (Ontario, Canada), you are almost guaranteed to hear these words from early childhood educators (ECEs) over and over again. An overwhelming concern for children’s safety and a preoccupation with how children play has sterilized children’s play spaces. Rambunctious children are quieted, wild play is made orderly and an air of adult supervision and control floats over places that are ostensibly child-centred and built for play activities.

In Ontario, where I have worked as both an ECE and researcher, there is a strong emphasis on the importance of play in early childhood settings (Best Start Expert Panel on Early Learning (BSEPEL), 2007; Ontario Ministry of Education (OME), 2013, 2014b). Children’s right to play is enshrined in Ministry play-based curriculum documents and by the Office of the Provincial Advocate for Children and Youth (OPACY, 2015). Additionally, children’s access to outdoor play space and the role of daily physical activity for their well-being have been repeatedly acknowledged as being vitally important. Despite this, children’s play on the playgrounds of their learning settings is increasingly controlled. This control is imposed in a variety of ways – from rules regarding play activity on the playgrounds of early learning settings, the regulation and design of children’s play spaces and the ways ECEs talk to children (and others) about their play. This has had a deleterious effect on children’s freedom to engage with their environments on their own terms. It also imposes serious limits on how they can choose to express themselves (Bae, 2010; Isenberg and Quisenberry, 2002; Penn, 2008; Wood, 2012).

The policing of children’s play has become a focal point of much of early childhood programming, consuming much of attendant ECEs’ attention while on the playground. I maintain that the ways in which educators talk about and verbally shape children’s play on early learning playgrounds are a clear example of disciplinary technologies being used to instill what Foucault (1995) would refer to as the self-regulating gaze of governmentality. Watching over children at play, ECEs often reinforce a climate in which it is imagined that children need to be controlled for their own safety and to learn ‘correct’ modes of conduct – to meet appropriate developmental milestones, to become properly socialized or to learn how to be obedient citizens. One of their primary tools, and the one I explore in this article, are their words and statements. In this article, I take the popular admonishment ‘use your words’ and turn it into an analytic tool to examine the utterances of ECEs on playgrounds.

The first part of this article outlines two of Foucault’s salient ideas – governmentality and discipline – which I use to argue that ECEs’ practices impose control and become vehicles for popular discourses of childhood, conditioning children by inscribing the rules and limits of these discourses on children’s bodies and actions. I bring these ideas into conversation with knowledge gleaned from my own experience as an ECE and researcher. In the second part of the article, I outline some of the literature regarding how poststructural theory and ideas have been applied to children’s play in learning contexts. I then draw from the growing body of literature that applies poststructural ideas to children’s play to investigate how a Foucauldian perspective might help educators carve out a space where they are able to perceive children’s play differently, reflect on their own controlling practices and explore new approaches to children’s play and utterances that may meet the particular goals of early childhood education settings without imposing unnecessary control on children’s play.

Governmentality and discipline

Foucault (2003a) describes governmentality as the ‘conduct of conducts’ (p. 138). He developed the concept of governmentality to explain the ways that contemporary society organizes itself, maintains its power structures and manages its resources. Much of Foucault’s scholarly work involved what he referred to as genealogical analyses, which trace the history of the shifts in social knowledge from the 18th into the 20th century. In his genealogical examination of how societies manage the conduct of their populations, Foucault examined how sovereign power – the form of power that focused on exercising authority within a particular territory (i.e. the power of the prince) – shifted to the governmental power of the contemporary state. Foucault (1995) maintained that this change in the form of authority was brought about through the application of technologies of discipline, which regulate behaviours through training, education and enculturation. Dahlberg et al. (2007) apply this concept to poststructural perspectives in early childhood settings, stating that disciplinary technologies and practices achieve their goals by normalizing a particular conformity that is to be achieved.

Foucault’s thinking on discipline and control was particularly inspired by Bentham’s Panopticon (Bentham and Bowring, 1843), an architectural design created to maximize the gaze of the observer (often associated with prison settings). The concept helped Foucault to visualize how disciplinary technologies like punishment and control work to produce particular behaviours and subjects. According to Foucault (1995), in a panoptic enclosure the observed are arranged around the outside of the structure while the observer is positioned in a central tower that affords unobstructed visual access. Although the observed are constantly exposed, the observer is unseen, creating a dynamic where the observed never know when they will be watched and therefore conduct themselves as though they are always being watched. This has the effect of internalizing the gaze of the observer, causing the observed to govern themselves according to external conventions. Similarly, ECEs police and control children’s play using the disciplinary technologies of surveillance and observation as they monitor children at play from central vantage points on the playground and the disciplinary technology of punishment to correct any behaviour that deviates from ‘appropriate’ modes of play. I argue here that these are used to produce particular childhood subjects, who play in particular ways.

These disciplinary technologies and approaches reflect a more generalized climate of observation and regulation regarding children’s play, made manifest in provincial and municipal licensing rules and regulations for child care contexts regarding children’s safety – as well as in early childhood curricular designs, pedagogical approaches and ECE professional training programmes that instrumentalize play in the service of appropriate child development. Early childhood and child care regulation has received increased attention in Ontario in recent years – with the formation of the professional body of the Ontario College of Early Childhood Educators in 2009; the shift of the child care portfolio from the Ministry of Child and Youth Services to the Ministry of Education and the implementation of Full-day Early Learning for 4- and 5-year-olds across the province; and the subsequent Child Care Modernization Act in 2014 (OME, 2014c). ECEs are under increasing pressure to regulate their own behaviours and the behaviours of the children in the care. This pressure inevitably finds its way onto the playgrounds of early learning settings.

Blackford (2004) refers to the network of disciplinary technologies deployed on playgrounds as the ‘dynamic of supervision’. In some ways, the architecture and design of children’s play spaces recreate panoptic conditions, facilitating the disciplinary power of supervision. For example, many contemporary ECE playgrounds are designed to afford maximum visibility to the adults monitoring children’s play. In early learning settings, children are constantly watched by educators who stand ready to step in and redirect. Social interactions between children are often managed by adults to minimize disruption and promote (so-called) prosocial behaviour. Any behaviour deviating from established ideas of what is acceptable is usually viewed as an infraction and is penalized in degrees of varying severity, ranging from a disciplining statement such as ‘play nicely!’ or ‘be careful!’ to limiting children’s access to particular toys or areas or even to the limiting of children’s play privileges completely. I have seen this dynamic in my own experiences in early childhood education settings. On a long and narrow playground, educators stationed themselves at points of heavy traffic to be able to monitor the flow of children. On another, educators would position themselves at highest vantage point in the playground to ensure visibility of all parts of the playground. While this positioning is laudable from a safety perspective, in the context of this article it is necessary to ask how these vantage points contributed to the controlling of children’s play.

Additionally, according to Blackford (2004), playgrounds were originally constructed to contain children’s play, to remove them from the adult sphere and to reduce juvenile crime as part of the social reform of the mid-19th century. While this reform was done in the name of promoting children’s right to play, it has constructed play as being acceptable only in ways that reflect the dominant discourses of the times regarding children, childhood and play. Given the historically political and individually situated motivations for controlling children’s play, the sanctioning of play and the disciplinary practices undertaken by ECEs on playgrounds can be understood as being concerned with exercising adult power over children’s play.

For Foucault (2003b), power relations are the ways in which actions affect other actions. Power is inextricably intertwined with discourse, and discourse determines what knowledge and actions are acceptable, valid and ultimately thinkable and knowable. Power is not an object but is rather a process that is decentralized and reinforced by disciplinary practices as people become enculturated and adhere to the rules of a particular discourse (Dahlberg et al., 2007). The body is a site of particular interest for Foucault’s studies of power relations. He investigates how power works on and through the body, and how the body is a place where power and discourse manifest (Foucault, 1990). As discussed above, individuals internalize the techniques and practices that constitute a particular discourse, and in this way are made into a particular kind of subject (Foucault, 2003b). Foucault (1995) refers to this internalization of disciplinary techniques in Discipline and punish as the production of docile bodies.

The notion of a docile body is particularly useful in this discussion regarding children and children’s play. A docile body is a body that can be ‘subjected, used, transformed and improved’ (Foucault, 1995: 136). As in a panoptic configuration, docile bodies internalize the practices that condition them. A particular discourse will organize space in a certain way, proscribe certain behaviours and prohibit others, and promote social relations of a particular shape that impose a constant ‘subtle coercion’ using disciplinary technologies. In this way, the bodies of individuals within a society are constrained according to that discourse. ECEs are continuously organizing and re-organizing play spaces, allowing some forms of play and not others, and ensuring that children embody the ‘proper’ social behaviours. Adults dominate playgrounds, and this ongoing domination forces children to conform to certain standards, thus becoming docile bodies and ultimately the manageable populations of governmentality.

The production of docile bodies can be seen as the primary project of educational approaches to childhood – where children are read as wild creatures that need to be taught how to become acceptable humans. The dominant developmental perspective of children and childhood at the foundation of contemporary early childhood education reinforces this approach among ECEs (Gabriel, 2014; Penn, 2008). In this perspective, children are positioned as unfinished beings that require guidance and assistance to accumulate the skills and knowledge needed to become functioning members of society. Education is seen as the primary mechanism for enculturating and taming ‘wild’ children throughout their development, assisting them in integrating the knowledge and skills needed to become the right type of functioning subjects. It is possible to identify additional discourses at work in an early childhood setting, which also reinforce the inscription of governmental codes of conduct on the bodies of children but with different points of focus: a discourse of socialization or civilizing processes, a discourse of safety and a discourse of purposeful play. In the following sections, I will investigate how these discourses tie directly into concepts of discipline and governmentality, and how they show up in the words ECEs use to shape children’s play.

Children’s play and civilizing processes

Danny (a four year old in a preschool class I am visiting) is very interested in lions. He spent the morning talking about the nature videos he watches with his older sister at home. Once we are outside he begins to pretend to be a lion in the sandbox – growling and crawling around on all fours. He begins to roar, and his roars get louder and louder. Even though we are outside on the playground, and his lion play doesn’t seem to be bothering the other children, one of the educators on duty calls out: ‘Danny! That’s too loud. You are hurting our ears! Play more quietly!’

Cliff and Millei (2013) describe how children are perceived to be uncivilized bodies in their study of how the biopolitics of preschool bathrooms reveal aspects of governmentality in early learning settings. The authors note that early childhood settings are one of the first places encountered by children where their bodies are ‘constituted and regulated through institutional discourses and power relations’ (p. 352). In other words, these settings are where children’s bodies begin to become civilized. Children are brought to early learning settings to learn how to be a part of a group, to negotiate social situations and to begin to develop the skills that are deemed as necessary for working with others (Cliff and Millei, 2013; Denzin, 2010). All of these are passed on to children via explicit curricula (sharing, turn-taking, conflict resolution) and implicit cultural messages (listen to authority, the contours of acceptable behaviour, gender/sex roles). Utterances corresponding to a civilizing or socializing discourse of children’s play that I have witnessed on playgrounds include ‘play nicely’ called in a warning tone, the ubiquitous use of ‘friends’ as a way of describing groups of children and transitions from play or outside time to another form of programming routinized using songs and call and response.

ECEs’ disciplinary practices on the playground are a part of civilizing and socializing processes in that they teach children what behaviours are appropriate and expected, and what behaviours fall outside of acceptable limits. Foucault might perceive this as having the discursively imposed, unstated intent of producing docile bodies. Making children into docile bodies produces them as subjects that fit into the conventional ‘norms’ of the social order and has the effect of corralling children’s physical exuberance and enthusiastic verbalizations into ‘walking feet’ and ‘indoor voices’ (Dumais and O’Toole, 2012). ECEs civilize children by governing their social interactions during play. This allows educators to help children to become functional members of the population. The discourse of socialization operates through the practices of ECEs when they manage children’s play to produce an appropriate subject, who is manageable and malleable, a child who is obedient, undemanding, orderly and well-behaved.

Children’s play and the apparatuses of security

One day, the kindergarteners under our care developed a complicated running game in the painting area out in the playground, where they used the painting easels as obstacle course hurdles. The rushing bodies were brought to a halt when an educator noticed and said ‘Hey! That’s not safe – you know we don’t run here!’ The next day the area was reorganized with tables for quiet reading and snack.

Fear for children’s safety also inspires approaches for managing children’s play. Foucault writes that one of the ways governmentality manages the population is by enclosing it in apparatuses of security. Dean (1999) describes apparatuses of security as systems that ensure the welfare and safety of the population. These include armies and police forces as well as systems of health, education and welfare. These apparatuses exist to direct and manage populations, but also rely on the assumption that there are threats to the population’s external and internal well-being. Armies and police forces defend against the threat of misconduct from the outside and from within populations. Systems of health, education and welfare regulate the threats of physical, cognitive and social misconduct from within the bodies of the population themselves. The playground fence, that keeps children in while keeping potentially dangerous others out, is a physical example of an apparatus of security. By providing apparatuses of security, the state regulates the conduct of individuals (Dean, 1999).

This regulatory dynamic is of enormous concern regarding children and childhood, particularly when viewed from within a discourse of safety. Young children who are developing cognitive, motor and emotional competencies are vulnerable to their environment. This is extremely evident on a playground where the playfully exuberant and careening bodies of young children have to negotiate an often challenging physical, emotional, psychological and social terrain. Corresponding utterances I have witnessed in my experiences on ECE playgrounds range from disciplinary statements like ‘we don’t hurt our friends’ to the shouted ‘BE CAREFUL!’ of this article’s title.

Judging by the prevalence of disciplinary techniques deployed on the playground, educators operating within the limits of the discourse of safety engage in practices that frame children’s security as ensured only by limiting their choices and disciplining their bodies so that they fit within acceptable norms. In these instances, ECEs are also of course responding to their own regulation – as mentioned above, the increasing climate of professionalization and regulation of their behaviours as educators from state and institutional guidelines and attitudes inevitably diffuse into particular articulations of concern for children’s safety. In particular, legislation such as the Ontario Day Nurseries Act (Ontario Government, 1990) and the Child Care Modernization Act (Ontario Government, 2014) that replaced it provide strict directives regarding the design and organization of early learning spaces. These directives inform not only the physical but also the conceptual environment provided for children’s play.

Children’s play must be governed to ensure their own safety and that of others. So, ECEs manage children’s enthusiasms, redirect behaviours that are perceived as unproductive and protect children from the threats present in the environment or that emerge out of children’s own selves. In this way, early childhood settings and the choices ECEs make about controlling children’s play to protect them become parts of the apparatuses of security.

Children’s play and play-based curriculum

Charlotte, a toddler, has been using a stick to bang on the plastic side of the house structure in the playground. With each thump, the plastic reverberates and she grins in delight. The ECE notices, and redirects Charlotte from her play (which from the educator’s perspective appears unproductive) by saying: ‘Charlotte, what are you doing, silly! If you want to make music, come over to the music wall. Thumping on the side of the house is going to do you no good’. She takes the stick away and steers the child over to metal and wooden percussion instruments hanging from a frame.

Central to contemporary early childhood education is the concept of child-centred learning. Child-centred learning emerged as a counterpoint to more traditional forms of direct instruction in which children are passive recipients of knowledge transmitted to them by teachers and mirrors the (dominant) developmental discourse regarding how children learn (Shipley, 2013). The primary mechanism of child-centred learning in Ontario early childhood education is a play-based curriculum in which children’s play is operationalized to maximize their cognitive, physical, social and emotional development (BSEPEL, 2007; OME, 2014b). Ministry policy and standards recommend that early childhood learning environments be designed and organized to allow for children to engage in play-based activities that also promote skill development and accumulation in all of these domains. Play, from this perspective, is thus seen as productive and valuable, even purposeful.

It is in this moment, when play becomes conceived of as purposeful, that governing children’s play becomes important. Purposeful play can be understood as purposive play, which has extrinsic and adult-formulated value, and can become instrumentalized in the service of children’s development (Nolan and McBride, 2014). Whose purpose is play meant to serve in these instances – the teacher’s, the school’s, the school board’s, the state’s? What types of children’s play can be understood as purposeful, and what types serve no purpose? What of the purposes and meanings that children may themselves invest in their activities, that adult educators might not recognize, or might not be included in? What may look like nonsense or purposelessness to us may be richly invested in importance and meaning by the child engaged in the activity. Additionally, it is useful to think about where the constructions of purpose we deploy regarding play are originating. In 2014, the Ontario Ministry of Education published Achieving Excellence – a document which articulates the renewed vision for education in Ontario. On the first page, this quote appears:

Ontario is committed to the success and well-being of every student and child. Learners in the province’s education system will develop the knowledge, skills and characteristics that will lead them to become personally successful, economically productive and actively engaged citizens. (OME, 2014a: 1)

– demonstrating a particularly neoliberal and instrumentalized vision of education including the play-based early learning and kindergarten contexts.

On playgrounds, ECEs supervise children carefully to make sure that they are engaging in what is deemed as purposeful and appropriate types of play. Play that is not deemed to further children’s learning or development, such as rough-and-tumble play, running games or games that involve raised voices, is often controlled or policed by the practices of ECEs. I have heard ECEs on playgrounds making many statements consonant with this discourse, including ‘No thank you. We don’t play like that here’, ‘No running!’ and ‘I’m sorry, that is NOT appropriate. Go find something better to do. How about __________?’, redirecting play towards a more appropriate activity. While many ECEs are theoretically oriented to a framework that values expressions of children’s vitality, enthusiasm and energy, in practice educators often unintentionally embody discourses that position them as unproductive, disruptive, anti-social or indicative of developmental or behavioural issues. These discourses communicate messages of governmentality and, ultimately, lead to the internalization of regulatory practices.

This encoding of self-regulation techniques into children’s lives and onto children’s bodies is explicitly a concern of early childhood education. While children’s ability to organize their own behaviour, reactions and responses is an important characteristic to foster, one is led to question whether this ability is best learned through internalizing controlling models of governance that restrict behaviour. Producing docile bodies and governable subjects may interfere with how children participate and express themselves or limit other characteristics in children such as critical thinking, imagination and inquiry (Bae, 2010). It also runs counter to rights-based approaches to understanding children and childhood, which put forward ideas of children as capable social agents with rights to self-expression and participation in decision-making processes (Alderson, 2008; Wall, 2008). What alternative perspectives exist that might help ECEs to examine how their choices produce and reproduce dynamics of regulation? The following section investigates how Foucault’s ideas might offer ECEs space to reflect on their practices and imagine different ways of being on the playground.

Poststructural approaches to play in early childhood

This section briefly outlines some of the literature regarding poststructural ideas in early learning contexts before turning to poststructural encounters specifically with play and settling into applying these ideas to my question of ECEs regulating children’s play through disciplinary utterances on playgrounds.

While there is a growing body of scholarship that applies poststructural ideas to early childhood contexts, much of it centres on reframing early childhood education practice in general. For example, Dahlberg et al. (2007) examine questions of quality and evaluation, by problematizing the developmental basis of early childhood education and care and universalizing assumptions about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ practices in ECE. Through a poststructural lens and using a cross-cultural analysis comparing examples in Canada, Sweden and Italy, the authors consider how the philosophical issues at the heart of ECE practice have become increasingly subordinate to neoliberal regimes of meaning. Ryan and Grieshaber (2005) discuss practical strategies to enact postmodern ideas in ECE teacher education. They suggest three pedagogies – engaging with images, situating knowledges and engaging in and acknowledging multiple readings – as ways to embed postmodern interpretations of power, knowledge and subjectivity into the training of ECEs. Pacini-Ketchabaw (2010) suggests resisting the modernist ‘grand narratives’ of ECE by reconceptualizing theory and practice as a non-dichotomous dynamic that embodies poststructural or post-foundational ideas, and Pacini-Ketchabaw and Pence (2011) trouble the neutrality of curriculum, knowledge and practices in early learning contexts that view children and childhood as multiple, complex and situated within historical, political, cultural and social contexts.

Some postmodern scholarship specifically regarding play in early childhood has shaped my thinking in this article. Ailwood (2003) explores how play serves as a central organizing concept in contemporary ECE and questions how particular constructions of play follow and are followed by particular constructions of children. Grieshaber and McArdle (2010) challenge central assumptions made in ECE about play, wrestling with whether play is always fun, fair, natural, developmental or productive. The authors propose the generative argument that in learning contexts, adult power-holders control and guide children’s play activity both consciously and unconsciously, imposing assumptions and value-judgements on the bodies and actions of the children in their care, while their bodies and actions serve as the medium for perpetuating particular taken-for-granted attitudes. Mac Naughton (2005) puts Foucault’s ideas into practice in the field of early childhood. Writing with the express goal to trouble the dominant discourse of developmentalism in ECE, Mac Naughton introduces educators who work with young children to Foucault’s concepts of discourse, regimes of truth, power/knowledge and the politics of knowledge, as well as other poststructural ideas and tactics. Mac Naughton puts these concepts to work in collaboration with practicing ECEs, inviting them to use Foucault’s concepts to look at their own perspectives and behaviours in a critically reflective light. These ideas have been particularly supportive in developing the lines of thinking in this article.

Questioning discourse and troubling discipline

The dominance of the developmental discourse has left little room for educators to question alternative approaches to educating young children. Mac Naughton’s text, particularly in the narratives of the ECEs experimenting with Foucault’s concepts, illuminates practical ways educators are working to disrupt taken-for-granted ‘truths’ in early childhood education. She describes how troubling the ‘truth’ of the developmental perspective – that children mature and accumulate skills and knowledge following a universal and chronological process – can destabilize assumed ‘best practices’ in ECE and provide room to explore other approaches. She urges ECEs to question the beliefs that determine their approach and educational practices. In this article, I attempt at a similar troubling of the predominant discourses at work in the disciplining of children’s bodies in play.

For example, to trouble the discourse of safety, educators can think about the various elements involved in children’s play (exuberance, physical coordination, potential physical/verbal/social collisions) and consider how these are determined as threats to safety. Questioning whether children are actually made more secure by constant surveillance and management might lead to educators developing alternative approaches that could potentially share power and responsibility with children to reframe how they negotiate the physical and social environment. This would need to be thoughtfully and carefully negotiated and be tailored to each early learning context, as it is easy to see how situations where responsibility is shared can be construed as children merely internalizing adult-imposed safety rules. However, if educators communicate messages such as ‘on the playground, all the children are playing together, and so everyone needs to be a part of making sure everyone is ok’, conferring the responsibility of everyone’s well-being as being shared by everyone, more space is created for children and less management by educators may be necessary.

Troubling the discourse of socialization would follow similar lines. Questioning whether everyone needs to abide by behavioural norms in order to get along goes towards normalizing difference and creating a more inclusive social climate. An emphasis on common ground is important in helping children learn to take others into consideration. However, socializing children by imposing behavioural norms can set a dangerous precedent and sets up potentially inequitable dynamics. What of children who don’t conform to socially sanctioned norms – the boys who dress like princesses, the girls who build things out of sticks, the child in the wheelchair who can’t play in the sandbox, the loud or quiet children? Managing children’s play so that they are always ‘playing nicely’ or according to external standards can restrict children’s choices and exploration and make invisible significant differences that need to be taken into consideration. Fostering diverse forms of play can contribute to respectful interactions, where difference is understood as valuable and perceived as an alternative norm.

Finally, troubling the discourse of play-based learning, of the purposefulness of play, might be the most challenging as it is profoundly ingrained and highly valued in contemporary ECE in Ontario. Facilitating ‘play as learning’ is perceived by many ECEs as the cornerstone of their practice and as justification for the need for high-quality early learning contexts (Shipley, 2013; Thomas et al., 2011). However, positioning play as purposeful can lead to some play being seen as useful and necessary and other forms as being unproductive. This utilitarian approach ignores other aspects of play, such as expression and exploration, which may be marginalized or prohibited by educators seeking to manage children’s play so that it is ‘beneficial’ or ‘developmentally appropriate’. To move away from a purposeful perspective of play, ECEs must become comfortable with ideas that understand that children’s various forms of play can have many purposes, or that some forms of play can have purposes that are unknowable to those outside of the play, or that some forms of play might have no purpose at all.

Conclusion

Using Foucault’s ideas, in this article I argue that particular discourses of childhood – the discourses of safety, socialization and purposeful play – operate through the utterances of ECEs as they govern children’s behaviours, producing particular subjects on early learning playgrounds by disciplining their bodies and their play with words. Following scholars who apply poststructural ideas to children’s play such as Ailwood (2003), Grieshaber and McArdle (2010) and particularly Mac Naughton (2005), I have begun to rumple the smooth and unyielding contours of these discourses in order to create some conceptual space in which children’s play and ECE practices can be viewed in a different light. Reframing the field’s foundational beliefs and ‘best practices’ from this new perspective, we can see how many of our practices as educators of young children fit into a broad project of governmentality. By examining our practices as ECEs on the playground and our beliefs about play, as Foucault suggests we do, we may be able to develop practices that allow space for our perspectives about children’s play to be different. It is important to note that this article represents the beginning of a process of applying Foucault’s concepts and approaches to my ECE experience, and a next step might be along the lines of what Ailwood, Grieshaber and McArdle, and Mac Naughton promote – practicing ECEs actively working with these approaches to reframe their practices. Using Foucault’s ideas, we as ECEs can work to reconsider how we use our words to determine what play means not only for us but ultimately for the children we work with as well.