Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, Volume 4, Number 3, 2003
Governing Early Childhood
Education through Play
JO AILWOOD
Charles Sturt University, Australia
ABSTRACT Play serves as a significant nodal point in the discursive relations of
early childhood education. The aim of this article is to ask how play has come to
appear so necessary to early childhood educational settings and how this
perceived necessity governs the behaviour of both adults and young children. To
do this the author make use of concepts provided through Foucault’s notion of
governmentality, or the conduct of conduct. The article begins with a thematic
overview of some of the dominant discourses of play. It then considers some
critiques of play discourses in early childhood education. Following this, it
considers how play has been produced as a technology of governmentality in
early childhood educational settings.
Play in early childhood education forms a significant nodal point at which
understandings and discourses of childhood, motherhood, education, family,
psychology and citizenship coagulate and collide. Play has become, as
Pellegrini & Boyd (1993) point out, ‘an almost hallowed concept for teachers of
young children’ (p. 105). My interest in this article is to ask how it is that such
an array of discourses have come together to establish play’s central position in
early childhood education and what effects such a position can potentially
produce.
I approach my discussion of play in this article from the perspective
provided through Foucault’s ([1978] 2000a) notion of governmentality.
Governmentality revolves around questions about the ‘conduct of conduct’
(Foucault, [1978] 2000a); that is, how we manage ourselves, how we manage
others and how others manage us. Such a perspective begins from an
understanding of ‘the non-necessity of what passes for necessity in our present’
(Burchell, 1993, p. 279). This means that my starting point in this article is
understanding play as ‘non-necessary’ in our present as early childhood
educators. By this I do not mean that play should be abolished; rather, I aim to
question ideas about play in ways that potentially create space for rethinking
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and re-evaluating the place of play in early childhood education. Viewing
current understandings of play as ‘non-necessary’ enables questions to be asked
about how play came to be such a dominant pedagogical force in early
childhood education, and further, how dominant discourses of play produce
and manage children and adults in early childhood settings.
Governmentality
Studies of governmentality are essentially practical; they consider how subjects
come to be produced as thinkable and manageable. Rose (1999) refers to the
practical ways in which we are all governed and govern as technologies of
governmentality. He suggests that technologies of governmentality are those
tactics, strategies, ideas and knowledges that delimit and shape ‘... conduct in
the hope of producing certain desired effects and averting certain undesired
events’ (p. 52). As will be discussed through this article, understandings of play
can be considered as technologies of governmentality that shape the conduct of
both adults and children in early childhood educational settings.
Language and knowledge are essential to the production of technologies
of governmentality. The establishment of a language and the spread of
particular knowledges make available frameworks within which subjects can
come to be thinkable and manageable. In producing such frameworks of
‘knowability’, particular tactics and strategies – or technologies of
governmentality – become established and normalised. There are wellestablished languages and knowledges, such as that of Developmentally
Appropriate Practice (Bredekamp, 1987), that function as technologies of
governmentality, enabling the management of the lives of all in early childhood
educational settings.
Studies of governmentality are not necessarily critiques that expose a fake
or a mistake; rather, they are investigations that ask questions of how (Rose,
1999). In terms of this article, therefore, I am not necessarily setting out to
expose understandings of play as somehow ‘wrong’ or ‘bad’, but rather to
question how it is that play has been assembled in early childhood education
and identify the practices and strategies that maintain its valorised position. To
begin asking the question of ‘how’ first requires a brief genealogy, or a
historical overview of sorts, that outlines some of the dominant discourses of
play in early childhood education. These are considered in terms of the
discourses and contexts from which they emerge and some of the material
consequences they potentially produce. After discussing these discourses the
article closes with a discussion of play as a technology of governmentality,
where play is understood as a significant tactic for the management of preschool childhoods.
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Discourses of Play
Studies of play are multidisciplinary. Play has been studied across, for example,
anthropology (Goldman, 1998), art (Escobedo, 1999), and evolution and
biology (Sutton-Smith, 1999). However, few authors writing about play would
be brave enough to profess to a final definition of play. It seems play is an
elusive concept that has refused to be pinned down. As a scholar and advocate
of play in early childhood education, Moyles (1994) likens defining play with
‘trying to seize bubbles’ (p. 5). Rather than attempting a definition of play here,
I instead consider three of the dominant discourses of play discussed in the
early childhood literature: (1) a romantic/nostalgic discourse, (2) a play
characteristics discourse, and (3) a developmental discourse. These discourses
all exist alongside and in competition with each other and many of the infinite
definitions of play to be found are various combinations of these ideas. The
purpose of identifying and unpacking these discourses here is to provide a basis
upon which I can then consider the way in which play functions as a
technology of governmentality. It is not meant, therefore, to be a
comprehensive and detailed account of play in early childhood – a task beyond
an article such as this.
Romantic/Nostalgic Discourses of Play
Many discussions of play resonate with common-sense and nostalgic regimes of
truth about childhood. Sutton-Smith (1995) has referred to this point of view as
the ‘play as progress’ rhetoric. In this rhetoric play is assumed to be always
positive, the negative aspects being conveniently ignored. It is also linked to
notions of nature, where childhood is a time of innocence and purity. Such
discourses of play may be traced back to those writing and working within the
context of the Enlightenment and Romantic eras, especially Rousseau,
Pestalozzi and Froebel. This idealism was also reflected in the nursery school
movement in the USA, particularly early in the twentieth century amongst
those who followed Dewey (Bloch, 1987). Romantic/nostalgic discourses of
play are woven into the early childhood literature and often constitute a thread
that links various definitions of play.
Romantic/nostalgic discourses of play regularly take the form of an
anecdote or story. For example, in writing about play as curriculum Wardle
(n.d.) states that:
many of our children do not have access to the natural play experiences we
experienced as children. They don’t walk in the park collecting leaves,
throw stones in the water to see the ever-expanding ripples, play racing-ofthe-sticks under the bridge, build muddy castles on the banks of a cold
stream, or create a frontier fort with their buddies. (p. 1)
Many children do not have access to the play described above by Wardle now,
and many did not have access to such play in the past. I suggest that such play
is largely unavailable in early childhood educational settings. However, such a
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position is reflective of the dominant Western view that children need play; and
of the emotional, common-sense appeals used to ensure they get it (Caplan &
Caplan, 1974; Moyles, 1989, 1994).
Once transposed to early childhood educational pedagogy, this romantic
vision of play is broken down, divided up and constantly observed. After the
emotional appeal above, Wardle (n.d.) goes on to divide play into
motor/physical play, social play, constructive play, fantasy play and games
with rules, describing each in developmental terms. This division of play into
types reflects the dominance of developmental psychology (physical,
intellectual, emotional and social development) and tends to be based upon the
theories of Piaget and/or Vygotsky.
A Play Characteristics Discourse
The romantic/nostalgic discourse of play is closely linked to the second
dominant discourse addressed here, play characteristics. Despite its various
inconsistencies, a play characteristics discourse is very common. MonighanNourot et al (1987) assert that play behaviours are characterised by: ‘(1) active
engagement, (2) intrinsic motivation, (3) attention to means rather than ends,
(4) nonliteral behaviour, and (5) freedom from external rules’ (p. 15). Perry
(1998), while reiterating these characteristics, added a few more:
Play is:
Pressure free – players have a sense of freedom
Intrinsically motivated
Controlled by the players
Free from external rules
Non-serious – in the sense that the consequences of play actions are not real
Enjoyable
Often social – but doesn’t have to be
Often in pretend or ‘as if’ mode. (p. 9, emphasis in original)
These lists of play characteristics are a conglomerate of various constructions
and discourses of childhood and the place of play in the lives of young children.
Important sources for these characteristics are the romantic/nostalgic
understandings of play as natural, intrinsic and free, and progressivism’s
version of ‘free-play’. The ‘freedom’ and ‘intrinsic motivation’ mentioned in
both these lists are a reflection of this. The ‘non-serious’ or ‘nonliteral’
characteristics of play are also important as they contribute to the
reinforcement of the separation of play and childhood from adulthood and
rational maturity. The play characteristics above are also relatively context free,
and the childhood in which they exist tends to be cut off from social and
contextual factors.
Many of these play characteristics are not readily available in early
childhood settings. On the simplest level, for example, most early childhood
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settings are regulated via a timetable that often includes inside and outside time
where the play in which children are enabled or constrained to engage during
these times is necessarily regulated. Inside time, for example, is often divided
physically into block area, home corner, wet area, puzzle table, collage table
and book corner.
A Developmental Discourse of Play
The most dominant influence on the many current discourses of play in early
childhood education stems from a recipe made up of the psychological theories
of Piaget and Vygotsky, with significant reference to Erikson and Kohlberg.
This is produced, in part, through the influential Developmentally Appropriate
Practice (DAP) text (Bredekamp, 1987). Play is defined in the first edition of the
DAP text as:
a primary vehicle for and indicator of [children’s] mental growth. Play
enables children to progress along the developmental sequence from the
sensorimotor intelligence of infancy to preoperational thought in the
preschool years to the concrete operational thinking exhibited by primary
children ... in addition to its role in cognitive development, play also serves
important functions in children’s physical, emotional, and social
development ... Therefore, child-initiated, child-directed, teachersupported play is an essential component of developmentally appropriate
practice. (Bredekamp, 1987, p. 3)
Immediately clear in this quotation is the use of the discourses of
developmental psychology. Also evident are references to Piaget’s stages of
cognitive development: sensorimotor, preoperational and concrete
operational. While the focus of DAP seems to be the cognitive aspects of play,
there are also references to the benefits of play for social, emotional and
physical development. The reference to ‘teacher-supported’ play links to the
Vygotskian (1978) notion of zone of proximal development.
These developmental discourses of play are understandably dominant,
given the broader influence and significance of psychology in making sense of
oneself, particularly throughout the twentieth century (Rose, 1999). The
developmental discourses of play evident in the DAP text, however, also suffer
from the silences, exclusions and critiques of DAP and developmental
psychology; that is, despite an attempt to ‘add on’ social and cultural aspects of
life, the play at issue here usually occurs in a social and contextual vacuum.
Within this vacuum, the rational child unfolds individually on the
developmental journey to a finite adulthood.
Play as a Regulatory Regime of Truth in Childhood Education
Play in pre-schools and other early childhood settings is always already
regulated by the physical space in which it occurs, the resources available and
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the presence of adults. Along with the institutional space of early childhood
settings come relations of power between teachers and children, and between
children and other children. Taking these contexts and relationships into
account enables a consideration of the regulatory aspects of play. That is, it
enables an examination of the governing of childhood both by adults and by
other children in terms of gender, sexuality, race, class, school readiness, social
competence and morals.
Anning (1991) and Bennett et al (1997) assert that little empirical evidence
has been found for the pedagogical value placed on play in early childhood
education. Anning (1991) points out that play is one ‘of those words that tends
to be used at a slogan-like level by teachers of young children’ (p. 30). In their
study of teachers’ theories of play, Bennett et al (1997) critiqued the ‘longestablished tradition which emphasizes the central role of play in early learning
and development’ (p. 1). Their point is that the rhetoric surrounding the
position of play in the curriculum is rarely borne out in practice. In many cases
the educative potential of play was not realised and they refer to studies where
play activities in early childhood settings have been found to be repetitive,
often isolating, and recreational rather than educational. The teacher in such
contexts was regularly reduced to a role of monitoring and cleaning. Critiques
emerging in Australia (Fleer, 1998; Danby, 1998) maintain the position of play
as central but question its valorisation, particularly in terms of its ethnocentrist
and often masculinist underpinnings. It is interesting to note that Fleer’s (1998)
chapter critiquing the dominance of Western understandings of play is
preceded by a one-page justification from the book’s editor defending its
inclusion in a text considering play in early childhood.
Here I discuss three critiques of play found in early childhood literature.
First, the discourse of pleasure surrounding play in early childhood education is
questioned. Second, I note the use of play as a separating device, a tactic that
produces childhood and adulthood as separate and oppositional spheres. Third,
and flowing from the second point, is a consideration of the separation of play
from work. I reiterate here that I am not arguing against the importance of play
in the lives of children, but rather, investigating how particular discourses of
play have become established as technologies of governmentality.
‘It’s All Fun and Games until Someone Loses an Eye’:
pleasure, power and play
Throughout the early childhood education play literature there is an almost
constant reference to the pleasure and fun of play, while the potential for pain
and distress is marginalised (Monighan-Nourot et al, 1987; Moyles, 1994; Perry,
1998). For example, ‘Following rules and taking roles in play is a pleasurable,
intrinsically motivated experience for children’ (Monighan-Nourot et al, 1987,
p. 18), or ‘Play comes naturally to 3-5 year-olds and is a thoroughly enjoyable
activity’ (Perry, 1998, p. 1). Play, however, is not always fun. As Burman (1994)
argues:
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the glorification of play as functional, voluntary and co-operative soon
turns out to be idealised, since this ignores the coercive, cruel and dangerous
aspects of many forms of ‘play’, both in the form of personal hobbies or
institutional school activities. (p. 166, emphasis added)
Very early last century, Vygotsky (1978) pointed out that ‘to define play as an
activity that gives pleasure to the child is inaccurate for two reasons’ (p. 92).
First, he argued, there are other activities the child participates in that may be
enjoyable – but not considered play. Second, play is not necessarily pleasurable
in and of itself. Indeed, even for some other early childhood educational leaders
who advocated play, such as Froebel and Montessori, the pleasure play may
provide for children was not a reason for its inclusion in pre-school curricula.
For these influential individuals working in different places at different times,
play was a tool through which young children might learn – about their path to
Unity (Froebel, 1897), about how to be human (Montessori, 1946) or how to
develop intellectually and socially (Vygotsky, 1978). Play was, therefore, the
means to a managed end – spiritual, moral, intellectual or social.
One reason for the current valorisation of play in early childhood
education is offered by Bishop & Curtis (2001), who point out the tight
discursive linking of ‘tradition’ with ‘good’. Further, they assert that for some
adults ‘good’ games are ‘traditional’ games, such as hopscotch, marbles,
skipping or swinging. Some adults may selectively remember such play as the
play of their childhood. This nostalgic vision, however, conveniently forgets
that ‘practical jokes, initiation rites, games involving forceful physical contact,
racist and sexist joking, nicknaming and taunting, are equally as traditional’
(Bishop & Curtis, 2001, p. 10).
Policing the social life among children in the playground, including
gender, sexuality and race, is an integral function of children’s play (Thorne,
1993; Danby, 1998; Bishop & Curtis, 2001; Strandell, 2000). In this way, play
functions to manage and organise relationships between groups of children and
between children and adults, and recognising this enables play to be viewed as
a technology of governmentality in early childhood.
Separating Childhood and Adulthood through Play
One regime of truth produced through the pleasure–play linkage is that play is
‘a highly differentiated and separate activity – an activity that separates children
from the real, adult world’ (Strandell, 2000, p. 147). Strandell’s point is that play
is often viewed as something that children engage in while waiting to enter
into the ‘real’ adult society. Both Strandell (2000) and Thorne (1993) refer to
the trivialisation of play when it is coupled with the word ‘child’, as in ‘child’s
play’. In this critique there is a sense that play is something easy, fun and
therefore not rational, sensible or real.
The concept of ‘child’s play’ contributes to the separation of children
from adult society where play is a world of its own with little connection to the
‘real’ adult world. This separation also contributes to the production of
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childhood and adulthood as oppositional spheres of existence. One
consequence of this, as Thorne (1993, p. 6) suggests, is the way in which the
trivialisation of children’s play results in a distance from the ‘real’ adult world,
which also then enables the consequences of power relations to be discounted.
Reiterating this, Sutton-Smith (1995) argues that through the separation of
childhood play from adult play, similarities can be ignored and childhood play
may be valorised and romanticised while the social and power relations evident
in childhood play are trivialised.
Separating Play from Work
As Hendrick (1997) has suggested, the production of separate child and adult
worlds has not occurred quickly, and it has not occurred in isolation from
broader social issues. Several important factors have contributed to the
separation of childhood from adulthood and play from work. Two suggested
by Hendrick (1997, pp. 42-47) are the production during the late eighteenth and
into the nineteenth centuries of the ‘delinquent child’ and the ‘schooled child’.
From these discourses, particularly in Britain and other Western nations, laws
were developed that defined and regulated childhood. For example, legislation
in Britain early in the nineteenth century concerning child labour prohibited
particular employment situations for children under the age of 9 years and
regulated the working hours of children aged between 9 and 13 (Hendrick,
1997). Towards the end of the nineteenth century, as discourses of the
‘schooled child’ became more dominant, universal, compulsory schooling
legislation was enacted. These shifting discourses of childhood produced
changing regimes of truth and practice through which children were regulated,
and within them the ‘proper’ place of children shifted from work to school.
Creating the notion of play as the work of childhood has been one
powerful regime through which early childhood has been produced and
separated from adulthood. For example, one early childhood text links play
with work habits:
When a parent complains, ‘All they do is play!’ a teacher’s response might
be, ‘How fortunate you are. A child who plays hard is learning to work
hard. He [sic] is establishing the work habits and values of a lifetime’.
(Lindberg & Swedlow, 1980, p. 3)
Given this adult discourse of play as the work of childhood, it is not surprising
that children’s definitions of play are almost invariably linked to the level of
adult presence and influence over an activity (King, 1983, 1992).
Central to the work of children in a pre-school setting is the discourse of
school readiness (Bloch, 1987; Romero, 1991; Grieshaber, 1998). School
readiness not only involves being exposed to various adult-defined pre-literacy
and pre-numeracy activities and knowledges, it also involves learning how to
function successfully in the institutional setting of a classroom. The knowledge
of how to ‘do’ school, how to sit and listen to a story in a large group,
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remembering to put your hand up before you speak in a large group, having
‘inside’ and ‘outside’ voices are as important as pre-literacy or pre-numeracy
skills.
Learning to be ‘school ready’, however, may also involve learning how to
resist classroom routines creatively without being caught (Romero, 1991).
Romero (1991) suggested that children seemed to ‘actively challenge and
attempt to redefine the organization of work and play in ways that
incorporated their needs and interests in play. Thus play in the classroom
becomes a form of resistance’ (pp. 129-130). Romero (1991) offered several
examples of children resisting the classroom routine of clean-up time,
sometimes through play. She suggested that children resisted clean-up time by
beginning an activity they know will not be stopped by the teacher, such as
painting at the easel, or by choosing clean-up activities that could be rendered
playful in the process.
The first parts of this article have provided a relatively brief overview of
some of the dominant discourses and critiques of play in early childhood
education. This background provides the basis on which to build an analysis of
the way in which play governs the lives of both adults and young children in
early childhood educational settings.
Producing Play as a Technology of Governmentality
The dominant language, knowledge and discourses of play in early childhood
education have shifted, merged, coagulated or disappeared at certain points
over the last 150 or so years. Influences beyond the hallowed play space of the
pre-school have been significant in shaping the activity that occurs in that
space. Government policy, rational ‘scientific’ research, common-sense regimes
of truth, economic imperatives and popular culture, for example, have all
contributed to the production of discourses that function to regulate the
conditions of possibility and technologies of governmentality available in preschool classrooms.
Although brief, the overview provided so far in this article now enables
me to consider two mutually constitutive technologies of governmentality that
have evolved in early childhood education: the rationalising of play and the
observation of play. The rationalising of play refers to the languages and
knowledges that are used to talk and think about play in early childhood
educational settings. The observation of play manages both adults and
children, delimiting (in part) the kind of activities that early childhood teachers
undertake and the kind of activities that are considered important for young
children. These two technologies of governmentality have been, and remain,
central to the ways in which adults construct and manage early childhood
education.
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Rationalising Play
Language is central to the establishment of technologies of governmentality. It
is the ‘intellectual technology’ (Rose, 1999, p. 28) that enables early childhood
educators to work out what it is they can, should and could do in their
classrooms. A whole language has been created for describing the play of
young children; for example, as natural, spontaneous, pleasurable,
developmentally appropriate, fine motor, gross motor, dramatic, parallel, free,
rough and tumble, pretend, exploratory, representational, manipulative, block,
water, sand, creative, and so on. Such a language enables the rationalising of
play – rendering play workable, knowable and practical. For, as is evident
through the discussion in this article, play is a heterogeneous bundle of ideas
and knowledges that have merged and collided over time. Importantly, the
language of play enables talk and thought about what is normal play, including
understandings of age-based phases of play and types of play. Thus, what is
considered normal produces matrices of regulation that contribute to the
formation of conditions of possibility for understandings of childhood play in
pre-school settings.
The classification, division and normalisation of play in early childhood
education is reflective of Foucault’s arguments in Discipline and Punish (1977).
That is, the more an activity is divided, the more it is regulated, monitored and
governed. Timetables, checklists, floor plans and assessment and observation
pro formas are all ubiquitous in early childhood education – young children
often cannot even go to the toilet in early childhood settings without the
potential for an adult gaze monitoring their ‘progress’, deciding if they are
taking too long or just ‘playing’ around. Within this heavily regulated space,
play has been a key concept through which adults have tried to produce,
understand, monitor, regulate and govern childhood.
The establishment of various matrices of play has been central to the
production and rationalisation of young children. These matrices are excellent
examples of thought made rational, technical and practical. In other words,
they provide a highly effective and deeply practical means of managing play in
early childhood. For example, in the West in particular, the DAP text
(Bredekamp, 1987) has constructed an influential ‘tableaux vivants’ (Foucault,
1977, p. 148) of young children. The ‘tables of life’ found in DAP create an
imaginary order out of complexity, messiness and disorder. Despite the critique
DAP has received, particularly as ethnocentrist and masculinist, it remains
stubbornly embedded in the soul of early childhood education.
The rationalising of play, that is, the establishment of a specific set of
language and knowledge about play, has been a significant tactic for the
governing of early childhood education. The development of matrices of play
that classify and divide play are significant not only for what they explicitly
produce, but also for what they silence and marginalise. The next section
considers the way in which matrices of play can be used as the framework for
observing, and managing, young children.
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Kid Watching: mapping pre-school childhood
Open any text on early childhood teaching practice and there will be a section
on the importance of observations for planning an appropriate early childhood
curriculum. Indeed, one text (Puckett & Black, 2000) goes into great detail
regarding ways in which this observational task may be managed, suggesting
(with an accompanying photograph of a woman wearing a small, frilly,
embroidered apron) that teachers wear a small apron or tool belt that holds
appropriate notepaper, ‘stick-it’ notes and pens. Thus, as Walkerdine (1984) has
pointed out and any early childhood teacher could tell you, ‘observation of play
is singled out as an activity for the teacher to engage in’ (p. 162). Adults within
early childhood education are trained to observe the play of young children in
ways that identify a child’s individual needs. This training is supported through
a plethora of props such as developmental checklists and developmentally
appropriate toys and equipment.
Further, as Dahlberg et al (1999) have asserted:
the purpose of ‘child observation’ is to assess children’s psychological
development in relation to already predetermined categories produced
from developmental psychology and which define what the normal child
should be doing at a particular age. The focus in these observations is not
children’s learning processes, but more on the idea of classifying and
categorizing children in relation to a general schema of developmental
levels and stages. Viewed in this way, ‘child observations’ are a technology
of normalization, related to constructions of the child as nature [sic] and as
reproducer of knowledge. (p. 146)
I extend this thought to assert that this has been an astoundingly successful
technology for the governing of pre-school childhoods. While the often
romantic and nostalgic language of play described earlier in this chapter is
evident in early childhood educational texts and settings, it is the DAP version
of play that remains dominant in practice. One example of this is the story of
‘Anne’ in MacNaughton’s (2000, p. 64) study of gender and early childhood
education. Anne built her classroom programme upon the developmental
observations of individual children that she diligently collected, as per her
teacher education. Gender, and other social aspects of identity formation, were
excluded from the DAP picture created through her observations. Viewing her
classroom practices through a ‘gender lens’ was therefore a significant shift for
this particular teacher. Particularly telling in this story is Anne’s reference to
DAP observations as normal, where gendered observations are something to
be done apart from the ‘normal DAP’ classroom processes.
Taken together, the rationalising of play and the observation of play are
two significant strategies that enable the governing of young children and their
teachers. In other words, they provide both the intellectual and practical tools
for articulating what it is that early childhood education should be, and what
early childhood educators and their young students should be doing. As a
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technology of governmentality, play is absolutely central to managing the
production and reproduction of early childhood education.
Conclusion
Foucault ([1981] 2000b) has suggested that ‘To do criticism is to make harder
those acts which are now too easy’ (p. 456). It is easy to accept that play is vital
to early childhood education and young children; however, this article has
argued that while this may be so, it is also important to be vigilant about the
circumstances and discourses through which play’s vital place has been
produced. In other words, it is necessary to think through ‘the contingent
conditions under which that which is so dear to us has taken shape’ (Rose,
1999, p. 60).
Thinking through the historical and contingent circumstances that have
produced play as necessary to early childhood education has entailed a
discussion of three of the discourses that currently produce and dominate
thought and practice about play. I also addressed some of the critiques that are
emerging in the literature. This ‘genealogical’ overview provided the basis on
which I could then briefly investigate two ways in which play may be viewed
as a technology, or tactic, or governmentality.
In undertaking this analysis, my aim has been to think about how it is that
the dominant discourses of play have become one of the central and ‘natural’
reference points for a normal, appropriate early childhood education. Studies of
governmentality are a means of opening up spaces where that which is
considered so necessary to us may be considered unnecessary and contingent.
The spaces that emerge from making such analyses are places in which
different ways of thinking about and understanding who we are as early
childhood educators may develop.
Correspondence
Dr Jo Ailwood, School of Teacher Education, Charles Sturt University,
Bathurst, New South Wales 2795, Australia ([email protected]).
References
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Bennett, N., Wood, L. & Rogers, S. (1997) Teaching through Play: teachers’ thinking and
classroom practice. Buckingham: Open University Press.
Bishop, J. & Curtis, M. (2001) Introduction, in J. Bishop & M. Curtis (Eds) Play Today in
the Primary School Playground, pp. 1-19. Buckingham: Open University Press.
Bloch, M. (1987) Becoming Scientific and Professional: an historical perspective on the
aims and effects of early education, in T. Popkewitz (Ed.) The Formation of School
Subjects: the struggle for creating an American institution, pp. 25-62. New York: Falmer
Press.
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