Postdevelopmental Approaches to Play

Professor Jayne Osgood editor Victoria de Rijke editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Publishing:24th Apr '25

£90.00

This title is due to be published on 24th April, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

Postdevelopmental Approaches to Play cover

This book deconstructs traditional developmentalist logic around play and explores play in the broadest sense.

It deconstructs traditional developmentalist logic around play where the focus is on what play enables children’s bodies and brains to do and become. This book includes contributions from academics and practitioners based in Australia, Canada, Finland, South Africa, the USA and the UK and explores play in the broadest sense, making space for the myriad forms that play takes for both children and adults connected to children in childhood contexts. By broadening the definition and being open to the ways that play emerges through research and pedagogy this book disrupts and extends existing ideas (and practices) in early childhood. The contributors offer alternative ways of thinking about play in childhood, including those emerging from indigenous, posthumanist, feminist new materialist, social semiotic, socio-cultural, aesthetic and multimodal approaches to childhood.

Challenging established understandings of play and its contributions to children’s lives and learning, this engaging book proposes other reasons for valuing play, other means of encouraging it to emerge. Descriptions of play, paired with personal reflections and theoretical contexts, invite readers to imagine possibilities for ‘being child’ no matter our age. -- Christine Marmé Thompson, Emeritx Professor, Penn State University, USA

ISBN: 9781350439474

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

160 pages