The Politics of Play

Abstract

 By challenging the discourse of play as innocent, this paper argues that children enact and maintain social inequalities in their play in the early years classroom and ways that and social injustices that exist in society that are acted in children’s play which create conditions for children to consciously exclude others.  Thinking with poststructural theories, this paper examine how dominant theories play in early childhood education create the social conditions in the classroom that allows for inequalities and injustices in society and to be recreated in children’s play. This paper uses Foucault’s notion of power, to examine how issues of power regulate children’s play and examines how issues of power is related in children’s play and how it creates social injustices and inequalities. I argue that when educators do not attend to the issues of power exists in children’s play children are marginalized and excluded in the classroom. When children are seen as innocent, educators fail to recognize that children do attend to the politics of race, gender, and size and consciously and unconsciously exclude others based on the injustices and inequalities created in society. Most importantly, I shed light on the conditions in the classroom that educators unintentionally embed dominant thinking and practice in their pedagogies, policies and procedures. I argue for the importance of educator’s to self-reflect and take action through daily practice in their role of constructing dominant discourses and stereotypes in the classroom. I argue how integral it is as an educator to be aware of our responsibility to educate children on social inequalities and injustices.