This study is about contemporary Korean parents' social tensions and the cultural meanings around digital play. Through interviews with 13 middle-class Korean parents, they discussed their perspectives on digital play, including their views of popular culture, high-technology, and learning, which created inner conflicts and negotiations with their…

In the European context, Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) is seen as the foundation for later success in life in terms of educational performance, well-being, and social integration. The Nordic model is known for recognizing the inherent value of childhood and organizing ECEC services around children's play, cooperation, and…

Ten teachers in kindergarten and grade one classrooms in remote northern Canadian Ojibway communities, and two consultants from a First Nations Student Success Program participated in focus group discussions about the place of rough and tumble and superhero play, and teachers' roles in preventing relational and physically aggressive play in…

While the issue of boys' dominance of the curriculum has a long history, the article examines this phenomenon in a contemporary context, through an empirical study with female teachers designing English curriculum around girls' media in a coeducational secondary school in Victoria, Australia. In this space, teachers, and the researcher, produce…

Children's experiences and understandings are often marginalised in discussions of their own television viewing. Moreover, rarely is attention paid to the meaning children make "from" and "with" the ideas and images in media, much less in horror movies. This inquiry examines the horror media talk of a preschool girl in a poor…

Play is well documented as a purposeful, authentic way for children to engage in literacy practices. Although the benefits of play are widely agreed upon, there is some debate regarding its place in school. In fact, play is often marginalized in place of "back to the basics" language instruction. For kindergartners, this means word…

Focusing on the drag king performances of Christie Whisman, who lived and worked in Columbus, Ohio, USA, from 1999 to 2001, this essay argues that rhetorical bodily performances have the capacity not only to subvert normalised notions of identity categories, but that such performances can also create alternate pedagogical sites that persuasively…

This issue of "Bank Street Occasional Papers" explores the value of time outside of school. Educators have given relatively little scholarly attention to young people's nonschool lives. Ignored or valorized, nonschool spaces show up in educational research only as a backdrop, implying that school learning is the yardstick by which to…

This paper examines the ways in which Mattel's "Barbie Girls" and "Xtractaurs," online sites aimed at girls and boys of six years of age and up, respectively, offer markedly distinct literate and semiotic resources for their young users. Analysis focuses on the multimodal layers of meaning and the mediating tools,…

The authors investigate the nearly ubiquitous cultural icon for girls' play, the princess. They survey historical instances of princess play from the beginning of the American republic to the New Millennium, look at the literature concerning princesses in various periods, and discuss the individual recollections about princess play of a number of…

A preeminent play-theory scholar reviews a lifetime devoted to the study of play in a lively, even playful, recounting of his illustrious career and some of its autobiographical roots. The author covers the development of his three major theories of play--as a viability variable, as culturally relative play forms, and as a co-evolutionary…

Barbie is presented as the perfect cultural site for interrogating margins, borders, and contradictions in females' lives. This article illuminates such issues by interrogating the "cumulative cultural text of Barbie." Texts criticized are: Barbie collector cards; "Barbie" and "Barbie Fashion" comic books;…