The authors discuss loose parts -- pipe cleaners, acorns, fabric, stones, and so forth -- as versatile materials not originally intended for children's play that they can manipulate, modify, and use in their play activities. The authors review the historical foundations of loose parts play, focusing on influential individuals and theories, and…

Increasingly concerns are expressed about the formalisation of early childhood education and the loss of opportunities for children's play in a range of European and European heritage countries. This paper takes up this challenge by discussing, from a cultural-historical perspective, the relations between play and learning in pre-school settings.…

Drawing on evolutionary theory, the author questions which cognitive processes underlie the capacities to play and to pretend play and the degree to which they are present in both humans and nonhuman animals. Considering cognitive capacities not all-or-nothing phenomena, she argues they are present in varying degrees in a wide range of species.…

Caroline Pratt, the founder of the City and Country School, is one of the few educators who tried to work out a program that would engage and develop students' imaginations. Along with other progressive educators, however, she has been criticized for her child-centeredness, that is, valuing children's spontaneity at the expense of planning and…

This paper engages with the question of how ethnographers in the field of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) can respond to the ontological turn in the social studies of childhood. Against the background of ECEC's deeply sedimented orientation towards the uniqueness of the individual child, the paper wishes to complicate the rationale of…

The paper brings Froebel's philosophy into conversation with that of Deleuze. We focus on "the fold" and "on self-activity" as key concepts that hold a special place in the monist philosophies of both thinkers. One point at which their (very different) ontologies coincide is their conceptualization of a cosmos in which…

This paper presents data from a multi-year ethnography of a rural preschool in the United States in which children engaged in substantial free and structured imaginative play. An unexpected parent death during the course of the data collection period was followed by a spate of death-related play and storytelling by the children, with varied adult…

This paper engages with the medically established view that individuals with autism are not capable of play or being imaginative. This paper resists this idea by reflecting on psychobiographical research conducted on the life of Temple Grandin. By re-witnessing creative experiences in her life, dialogue surrounding the imaginative capacities of…

In this article, I have sought to develop an understanding of the contribution of imaginative and nature appreciation in early childhood environmental education dealing with old, cultural nature myths and beliefs. The argument rests on the belief that the basis of a child-environmental education is in imagination which resonates with play,…

The purpose of this essay is to propose a manifesto of young children's rights in the early childhood classroom based on Vivian Paley's many formal classroom investigations into children's thinking, learning, and social emotional development. Analysis establishes, first, Paley's license to speak for young children by positioning her in the only…

The opposition between learning as a process of self-cultivation ("Bildung") and learning as a form of vocational training for the workplace ("Ausbildung") is becoming ever more deeply entrenched in the twenty-first-century university. In language education in particular, the distinction between these two competing aims…

Career agency is a vaguely defined concept that is usually explained in terms of cultivating self-reliance, while it is at the same time being critiqued as a difficult to reach goal as a result of societal pressures. Instead of viewing agency through the lens of these opposing viewpoints, focused on people either being self-reliant or determined…

The French utopian socialist Charles Fourier is a key figure in Walter Benjamin's "Arcades Project". For Benjamin, one of the most significant aspects of Fourier's utopian vision was its conceptualisation of work as a form of play. According to Fourier it would be possible to build a world around people's inherent desires. In such a…

In an environment that encourages co-construction and participatory practices, and especially in an educational environment saturated with media and images in which children are considered to be valid and competent contributors to knowledge construction, children's visual literacy becomes increasingly important to the development of educational…

Strangers, Gods, and monsters are all names for the experience of alterity and otherness within and amongst us. We need monsters in our lives. In this paper we use philosophy as a method to explore language, developmental and cultural instabilities, and terrifying (and discursive) monstrosity located within children's literature and childhood…