ECE205: Produce a Manifesto for Play around the Purpose of play in the early year’s Curriculum: Play and Inquiry in Early Childhood Education Assignment, SUSS, Singapore

Part 1: Play Manifesto

You will produce a Manifesto for Play around the purpose of play in the early year’s curriculum.

Your Manifesto should:

• Outline a particular approach to play in the early years.
• Explain how this links debates and theories around play and the early year’s curriculum.
• Demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach in either developmental or educational terms.
• Produce an attractive and legible academic Manifesto.
• Make use of relevant and appropriate literature to sustain and develop a balanced and critical discussion.
• Follow the University’s referencing conventions.

Part 2: Reflection

You will write a short reflective account of the value base underpinning early years provision and practice. Your account should be no longer than 500 words.

Your critical reflection should:

• Draw upon appropriate literature to critically analyze the values associated with the role of play within early years practice.
• Critically reflect on your own values in relation to young children, families, and early years practice.
• Make use of relevant and appropriate literature to sustain and develop a balanced and critical discussion.
• Follow the University’s referencing conventions.

Part 3: Rationale

You will write a rationale for the role of play in the early year’s curriculum in response to one of the following quotations. Your rationale should be no longer than 2,000 words long.

You will need to ensure that you have read the article, chapter, or book that the quotation is taken from so that you can correctly summarise the author’s point. You will then draw upon appropriate literature to critically discuss the author’s position on play in the early years and to make a case for a particular approach to play in the early year’s curriculum.

1. A ‘pedagogy of play’ might be characterized by complexity and diversity of practice, the locus of interactions between the need and desires of children and those of adults, between ideological and pragmatic imperatives, between spontaneous and intrinsically motivated actions of the child and the demands of a standardized and politicized curriculum. Moreover, pedagogy tends to be defined principally from the adults’ perspective with less attention to how children respond to and make sense of pedagogical practices within the contexts of their play, remembering that play is widely described in the Western early childhood literature as child-initiated activity, free from externally imposed rules. (Rogers, 2011: 1)

2. Developmental psychology places fun and play as a beginning phase, a developmental stage on the way to eventual mastery. At this point, it is possible simply to have fun, exploring and experimenting, before the hard work, drill, practice, and roles apply. (Grieschaber and McArdle, 2010: 17)

3. Child-centred pedagogy is not in our view ‘laissez-faire’ pedagogy in which an adult would intervene little in a child’s actions or not at all. In a pedagogical sense, a completely ‘free’ choice does not exist, since before any choice is made the setting is already constructed, whether knowingly or not, reducing the degrees of freedom. [… A] teacher has an active and conscious role of balancing between child-initiated and adult-initiated activity, in favor of the former. As professionals, adults remain responsible for children’s learning and participation at all times. Thus, child-initiated pedagogy occurs within certain boundaries. (Robertson et al, 2015: 1817)

4. Historically, the play has indeed functioned as a reservoir of personal freedom, both the freedom “from” external constraint and consequence and the freedom “to” take on the world in new (and old) ways. Play has long served as a bulwark against the controlling impulses of adults and tyrants of every other description. However, anyone who has inhabited a schoolyard knows that much mischief and misery also occurs under the name of the play. Play can exemplify our noblest ideals, but it can also be mean-spirited and morally “bad” (See Pellegrini, 1995). Players themselves may exhibit generous and cooperative qualities: they can also be self-centered and fiercely competitive. Sometimes they pursue their ambitions in entirely independent ways; sometimes they allow themselves to be “organized” by others. Players bring into the world wonderful new things; just as frequently they dissemble and destroy. As Huizinga (1955) explains in the last sentences of Homo Ludens, play in the final analysis is not a moral affair. It is an engine that spews effects of many types and must be guided by conscientious souls. (Hendricks, 2010: 190)

5. From my definition, not everything that children do is play, even though educators may label it as such. For example, it is not played when teachers […] tell children to “play” a phonemic awareness game or require them to sing a scripted letter-sound correspondence song. (Pellegrini, 2009: 134)

The rationale should:

• Critically evaluate the statutory framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage (DfE 2017), with emphasis upon the role of play within this.
• Demonstrate a critical understanding of debates around the role of play in the early year’s curriculum together with the role of the practitioner in facilitating a play-based curriculum.
• Present a well-structured and coherent discussion incorporating appropriate practical examples and illustrations.
• Make use of relevant and appropriate literature to sustain and develop a balanced and critical discussion.