Understanding Young Children's Learning through Play: Building Playful Pedagogies

Understanding Young Children's Learning through Play: Building Playful PedagogiesPat Broadhead and Andy Burt New York: Routledge, 2012. References, index, images. 170 pp. $47.95 paper. ISBN: 9780415614283Play, Learning, and Children's Development: Everyday Life in Families and Transition to SchoolMariane Hedegaard and Marilyn Fleer New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. References, index, images. 231 pp. $99.00 cloth. ISBN: 9781107028647Pat Broadhead and Andy Burt's Understanding Young Children's Learning through Play is an insightful analysis of openended, free-choice play in the Early Years Unit (part of the United Kingdom's Early Years Learning Framework curriculum) for children aged three through five at a primary school in York, England. The book consists of a series of vignettes that include interviews with staffmembers and the children's interpretations of events as they watched themselves on video. Book chapters focus on the role of adult involvement, what can be learned from risk and conflict, and the ways in which children progress from new child to master player.Although the book discusses play throughout this early-childhood program, an outdoor play area dubbed "the whatever you want it to be place" becomes the centerpiece for the study. This area lacked traditional play equipment, but teachers stocked it with such loose parts as milk crates, boards, barrels, cable reels, ropes, tarps, and tubing that children could turn into whatever they wish. Given that the indoor space had direct access to the outdoors, the inside area also began gradually to evolve into a "whatever you want it to be space" through the addition of netting to create a den, curtains to form a stage, and gallery space for the display of artwork. Through observing the children and participating where appropriate, staffhelped facilitate the development of the children through their play.Broadhead and Burt also provide a brief history of the British National Curriculum (1988) and the effect of the standards movement on the way the English typically incorporate play into earlychildhood programs. Their research shows how much children learn when teachers build on children's free play rather than dominate it. As a result, early-childhood practitioners and researchers will find this book a useful read. Practitioners will gain ideas for open-ended materials to spark initiative in children as well as ways to learn from and become involved (but not overly involved) in children's play. Researchers can also learn from the authors' innovative methodology of video recording children's indoor and outdoor play as the school moved from teacherdominated children's play toward a model in which the children's play guided the teachers. The authors showed these videos to the children and teachers to get their interpretations.In Play, Learning, and Children's Development: Everyday Life in Families and Transition to School, authors Mariane Hedegaard and Marilyn Fleer explore play and routines in the lives of four families- two in Denmark and two in Australia- with young children. Each of the book's four sections compares issues confronting several families and draws on the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and psychology to interpret them.The authors, one in Denmark and the other in Australia, worked with research assistants who visited the families over the course of ten to twelve months. …