Socio-dramatic play is an everyday occurrence in early childhood education as children create narratives together in shared imagined worlds. The teacher's role in this type of play is less clear and this paper draws on a study using Lindqvist's "playworlds" approach to gain insight into how teachers participate in children's play. In…

Playing is an activity that affects significantly the psychological development and learning in preschool age. Opinions among researchers and practitioners are divided about adults' role in children's play. Despite being a children's activity, high-level, complex social play hardly appears without adult mediation. According to the narrative play…

Ambivalence is a relatively little advanced concept for studying young people's engagement in education. We present a case study in which a teacher of a kindergarten-first-grade classroom works within an activity called a "playworld" to engage a child who had been excluded from certain classroom practices, after having been perceived by…

Inquiry-based media literacy is an increasingly important component of an educator's toolbox. The author's own concerns about definitions of media literacy have given way to a focus on establishing clear goals for media literacy education. The National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) articulates these goals: "The purpose of media…

This article argues that it is possible to look at children's texts in relation to the lens of literacy events and practices from the New Literacy Studies, and apply this perspective to an understanding of creativity. Teachers can then use the possibilities within a text to ask children different kinds of questions. Drawing on a 2-year…

Learning through the arts has the potential to stimulate open ended activity that encourages discovery, exploration, experimentation and invention, thus contributing to children's development in all areas of learning and helping to make the curriculum meaningful to them. In this book, the author draws on her extensive experience of promoting young…

Drawing on existing work in the area of creativity and early years education, this paper maps the process of an exploratory study which sought to identify what characterizes "possibility thinking" as an aspect of creativity in young children's learning. With the aim of developing a framework for identifying "possibility…