Understanding play participants’ perspectives in play-based learning: a cultural-historical analysis in a home context

ABSTRACT

There are some studies indicating that parents make a significant contribution to children’s conceptual learning through play, whereas very few studies have been done to identify parents’ pedagogical positioning in children’s imaginative play for supporting their learning and development. This paper is seeking how Indian-Australian immigrant parents involve themselves and support the development of abstract concepts by taking on their children’s perspectives in imaginative play. Vygotsky’s cultural-historical theory was used to analyse the data to answer the research question. The data have been collected through video, audio and semi-structured interviews from four Indian-Australian immigrant families. Approximately 17 hours of data were collected from four focus children’s families. The finding of this study show how to extend the play that the parent and child develop from an individual perspective by moving between inside and outside of the imaginative play. However, the study also reveals that the play participants might miss the opportunity to understand each other’s perspectives by only being outside of the play. The paper suggests that future research should concentrate on studying the pedagogical positioning of the adult, which is an important dimension for understanding adults’ involvement in children’s imaginative play for supporting learning and development.

KEYWORDS:

• Motives
• double subjectivity
• positioning
• imaginative play
• home context

Acknowledgments

The author would like to express her sincere gratitude to the children and families who participated in this study. Special thanks to the Ethics Committee members for ethical approval.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anamika Devi

Anamika Devi has completed her Ph.D. from the Faculty of Education, Monash University, Australia. Her thesis title is “Pedagogical positioning in children’s imaginative play: A cultural-historical study of learning and development of preschool children from diverse settings”. She has more than 8 years of teaching and industry experiences in early childhood education. She has experience to teach students from various cohort (undergraduate, postgraduate, diploma and cert III). Her research and teaching interests focus on play and pedagogy in diverse cultural context, theories in early childhood development, adults’ support in children’s learning and development in different settings, intentional teaching, STEM, and cultural-historical perspective on play. She has published a number of journal articles, book chapter and conference paper. She is the member of Early Childhood Australia (ECA).