The standard educational gesture--in defense of its perceived secondary status relative to the "real world"--is to embed everything within its purview, such that even conceiving education as an art becomes a pedagogic imperative. In Anji County, China, we find an early childhood program (Anji Play) that uncouples play from this hierarchy…

This article draws from a 2-year TLRI-funded research project looking at how four early childhood centres constructed positive outcomes for children from migrant families. The research questions focused on how the people, places, and practices in early childhood settings support a sense of bicultural belonging to Aotearoa New Zealand, sustain…

The article describes Tools of the Mind--an instructional program developed 25 years ago and now implemented in a variety of early childhood settings across the United States and in Canada. Based on the principles of cultural-historical psychology, this program addresses developmental and learning needs of young children by offering a…

This qualitative study investigated Chinese and German teachers' and parents' conceptions and understanding of learning at play. A total of 28 teachers and 12 parents took part in this study. Among the participants, 12 kindergarten teachers (6 German and 6 Chinese) were interviewed to obtain their perspectives on learning at play. These…

This paper reports on findings from four case studies, as part of a large-scale study undertaken to evaluate the KindiLink initiative across Western Australia in remote, regional and metropolitan communities. KindiLink is an educator-led playgroup initiative in public school sites in Western Australia targeted at Aboriginal children and their…

This article reports on research examining the social purposes of Indigenous kindergarten children's language and their construction of Indigenous cultural knowledge within and through interactions with peers during dramatic play and play with construction materials. The participants are three teachers and 29 children from two rural northern…

This article contextualizes the dark sides of play from a cultural-historical perspective using Fraser's theory of social justice based on the concepts of recognition and redistribution. Through a micro-ethnographic analysis of a kindergarten's daily life and play situations between 2 five-year-old girls, the article describes the dark play from a…

Drawing on the theory of dialogism and the literature on children's culture and cultural resistance, this article investigates the contextual and textual features of the cultural making of a group of children in sociodramatic play in a Hong Kong kindergarten. Different from other, similar studies, this study reports that under the gaze of the…

More than 20 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, scholars and educators continue to engage with histories under socialism and re-evaluate the consequences of those education systems for everyday lives then and in the present. This article develops an understanding of how kindergarten teachers understand their historical work in the socialist…

This article reports on three salient socio-cultural and systemic factors that are influential in play in Abu Dhabi Education Council's (ADEC's) kindergarten (KG) framework from the teacher perspective. Anecdotal evidence suggests that during ADEC's progressive educational reform, emphasis has reverted to academic performance outcomes rather than…

Commonalities and distinctions in Hong Kong-Chinese and German kindergarten teachers' conceptions of play and learning were examined. Six video clips of play episodes reflecting common play behavior and themes were selected from observations made during free play in two kindergartens in Hong Kong and two in Germany. Ten Chinese and seven German…

Socio-dramatic play (SDP) creates a zone of proximal development in which optimum cognitive development occurs. To participate successfully in this kind of play children and their partners must create shared meaning, or what is referred to in the socio-cultural literature as intersubjectivity. Based on intersubjectivity and SDP, this study…

Beginning with Lev Vygotsky's long-established assertion that the play of children always involves both imaginary play and rules of behavior, this article argues for a theoretical framework that connects such play with the construction of social identities in kindergarten peer groups. It begins with a discussion of Ivy Schousboe's model of the…