Representations of play. A praxeological analysis of Norwegian ECEC research on play 2020-2023
This article analyses Norwegian research on play in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) published between 2020 and 2023. Rather than treating play as a stable object of inquiry, the study examines how current research practices within higher education ECEC environments enact specific understandings of what play is and what it is for.
Researchers who publish about play in ECEC are also teachers and professional premise providers in the kindergarten teacher education. As agents with a dominating position within their field of knowledge, researchers’ understandings of play will have a high symbolic value. It is therefore reasonable to assume that the views on play that dominate the research literature also circulate into the ECEC education, which is supposed to be research-based, and so, stand as the dominating understandings of play in kindergarten teacher education. At the same time, academic ECEC environments are highly heterogeneous, composed of staff from a broad range of disciplines, each with their epistemological and ontological foundation. This suggests that the understanding of play within academic ECEC as a field may be equivocal.
To identify and develop an understanding of current understandings of play in ECEC, the study analyses and discusses how researchers, methods, institutional traditions and political guidelines are part of an interaction that both shapes and limits what play is and can be in the ECEC field.
The study shows that dominant research practices construct play primarily as a means for learning, regulation and measurable outcomes. Such practices make certain understandings institutionally powerful while more existential, relational or imaginative dimensions of play are less conspicuous. The study argues that the field’s methodological and discursive orientations do not merely describe play but co produce and shape the conditions for how play is valued, facilitated and lived in contemporary ECEC. Reasoning in line with praxeological perspectives, we call for more explicit and deeper reflexivity regarding researcher positionality, institutional dependencies, and the normative consequences of the research and the knowledgebase transferred to ECEC student teachers.
Researchers who publish about play in ECEC are also teachers and professional premise providers in the kindergarten teacher education. As agents with a dominating position within their field of knowledge, researchers’ understandings of play will have a high symbolic value. It is therefore reasonable to assume that the views on play that dominate the research literature also circulate into the ECEC education, which is supposed to be research-based, and so, stand as the dominating understandings of play in kindergarten teacher education. At the same time, academic ECEC environments are highly heterogeneous, composed of staff from a broad range of disciplines, each with their epistemological and ontological foundation. This suggests that the understanding of play within academic ECEC as a field may be equivocal.
To identify and develop an understanding of current understandings of play in ECEC, the study analyses and discusses how researchers, methods, institutional traditions and political guidelines are part of an interaction that both shapes and limits what play is and can be in the ECEC field.
The study shows that dominant research practices construct play primarily as a means for learning, regulation and measurable outcomes. Such practices make certain understandings institutionally powerful while more existential, relational or imaginative dimensions of play are less conspicuous. The study argues that the field’s methodological and discursive orientations do not merely describe play but co produce and shape the conditions for how play is valued, facilitated and lived in contemporary ECEC. Reasoning in line with praxeological perspectives, we call for more explicit and deeper reflexivity regarding researcher positionality, institutional dependencies, and the normative consequences of the research and the knowledgebase transferred to ECEC student teachers.
Publisert i Praxeologi – et kritisk refleksivt blikk på sosiale praktikker, 2026
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