Conference Agenda

One of the key issues of contemporary education is about conditions created for preparing children for the uncertainty and polyphony of positions that prevail in the modern world. Previous studies have shown that it is important to start at the Early Childhood Education level (Sylva et al., 2014). Activities such as pretend play are of particular interest since situations of uncertainty are modeled in the play process (Schulz, 2022) and play has an imperative role in children’s development (Liu et al., 2017; Smith & Roopnarine, 2018).

In play, a child can build an imaginary situation, take the initiative in constructing and transforming a plot, and solve challenges that arise in communication (Brėdikytė et al., 2015). Research shows that in mature pretend play, prerequisites arise for developing various functions – executive functions, imagination, and the ability for decentration. According to Vygotsky, pretend play is a leading activity that “represents the ninth wave of child development” (1967).

Research on play has highlighted the role of the adult as an important variable for the richness of play. This has been conceptualized in combination with Early Childhood Education Pedagogy. Besides the organization of the setting, one crucial condition for play development is joint play with the mediator of play culture (adult and/or older playful children). In the preschool setting, teachers can create special scaffolding situations and provide indirect and direct play support, creating a special subject-spatial environment that fosters play (Vygotsky, 1967; Wood, Bruner, & Ross, 1976). Recent studies show that preschool teachers in different countries prefer being outsiders instead of playing as partners with children (Devi, Fleer, & LI, 2018; Bredikyte, 2022) which, along with intensive schoolification, has been leading to the disappearance of play from Early Childhood Education centers.

The symposium includes empirical studies shedding light both on the power of play for developing children’s learning and on teachers’ perspectives on play, its role in pedagogy, and their play support strategies. The objective of the Symposium is to contribute to a research-based agenda for Early Childhood Education teachers’ play education. The Symposium combines perspectives from 3 countries and creates the space for dialogue between researchers to elaborate on the following research questions: how can teachers support the developmental potential of children's play, its impact on children's readiness to face situations of uncertainty in other contexts, for example, when solving non-standard problems; what strengths and deficits of play support strategies may be considered as specific or universal ones; how teachers’ education and professional development can be organized to make the shift (from didactic and outsider positions in joint play to partner) more sustainable.

The most important task of the Symposium is to highlight areas of professional learning that need to be further elaborated so that teachers can become playful, spontaneous, and ready to support children's play.

Pretend play contributes to the development of emotions, self-regulation, and imagination (Singer & DeHaan, 2019), gives children the possibility to follow rules and at the same time – degrees of freedom (Oers, 2014), allows them to merge into the process, challenge themselves, co-construct meanings and meet uncertainty in symbolic space. Replacement of play with structured planned activities, and its exploitation for teaching, leads to the disappearance of play from kindergartens (Loizou & Trawick-Smith, 2022). There is a gap between the declaration of the importance of play and real practice due to the distortion of teachers’ understanding of key features of play and its role in children’s development. The objective is to study how teachers’ perspective on play is related to the strategy of its support. The theoretical framework is a cultural-historical approach to play (Vygotsky, 1967; Pramling et al., 2019; Bredikyte, 2022). This is a mixed-methods study, interpretative paradigm. Participant's consent was obtained. Data were anonymized. The research is conducted according to MCU's ethical code. Semi-structured interviews, including commentary on 2 videos, were conducted with 34 preschool teachers. Thematic analysis of interviews revealed 13 positions of the adult in joint play and 3 subthemes: overvalue the adult's role, undervalue the child; trust children, undervalue the adult; and search of balance. The assessment of the conditions for play development was carried out using the scale "Play Environmental Rating Scale. ECERS-3 Extension" (Shiyan et al., 2024) in 28 preschool classrooms (13 kindergartens). The average total score is 3,35 (sd=1,31; med=3,43), which corresponds to the minimal quality level of conditions for play. Key deficits are the participation of the teacher in joint play with children, and the provision of conditions for multi-age interaction. Significant differences are revealed in the strategy of play support among teachers with a contrasting understanding of the pseudo-play video. Teachers who distinguish between play and pseudo-play and emphasize the developmental value of spontaneous children's play create a multifunctional play environment and more often participate in joint play as partners, supporting more uncertainty in the environment and in the relationship with children. Teachers who do not distinguish between a play and a pseudo-play are more often too didactic or outsiders, they create too realistic play environment and destroy the spontaneity of children’s play by their desire to control and organize the process of play. The results of the study can be used in the elaboration of programs for teacher’s professional development.

Bredikyte, M. (2022) Adult participation in the creation of narrative playworlds: challenges and contradictions. International Journal of Early Years Education, 30, 1-15. Loizou, E., & Trawick-Smith, J. (Eds.). (2022). Teacher Education and Play Pedagogy: International Perspectives (1st ed.). Routledge. Oers, B. (2014). Cultural–historical perspectives on play: Central ideas. In. L. Brooker, M. Blaise, & S. Edwards (eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Play and Learning in Early Childhood (pp. 56-66). SAGE. Pramling, N., Wallerstedt, C., Lagerlöf, P., Björklund, C., Kultti, A., Palmér, H., Magnusson, M., Thulin, S., Jonsson, A., & Pramling Samuelsson, I. (2019). Play-Responsive Teaching in Early Childhood Education. Springer. Singer E., & De Haan D. (2019). Igrat', udivlyat'sya, uznavat'. Teoriya razvitiya, vospitaniya i obucheniya detei. Publishing MOZAIKA-SINTEZ. Shiyan, I.B., Iakshina, A.N. et al. (2024). Play Environment Rating Scale (PERS). ECERS-3 extension. Teachers College Press (in press). Vygotsky, L.S. (1967). Play and Its Role in the Mental Development of the Child, Soviet Psychology, 5:3, 6-18.

Playing and creativity are united by the fact that in both cases a person is faced with an open situation of uncertainty. However, in the first case, we are talking about constructing imaginary situations (Kravtsov &Kravtsovа, 2019), and in the second – about solving non-standard problems (Craft, 2007; Veraksa, 2019). We set out to analyze • what are the conditions for play development and creativity in preschool classrooms; • are the quality of the conditions for play and the quality of the conditions for creativity related to each other? An assessment of educational conditions in 39 preschool classrooms in Russia and Kazakhstan was carried out using ECERS-3 extensions: “Play Environment Rating Scale” and “Creativity Environment Rating Scale”. Both instruments assess quality on a 7-point scale (from unsatisfactory to excellent). The conditions both for play and creativity are at a level below the minimum: The average score for the conditions for supporting play is 2.62 (with sd = 0.84), minimum score = 1.00, maximum = 4.43; for the development of creative abilities 2.33 (with sd = 1.09), minimum score = 1.00, maximum = 5.50. Deficiencies in the conditions for supporting play include the rare participation of the teacher in joint play with children, as well as the unavailability of unstructured materials for play. Deficiencies in the conditions for the development of creative abilities include rare joint discussions of problematic situations related to children's lives, including situations of divergent points of view and contradictive situations, with different development options. There are no correlations between the conditions for play and the conditions for creativity (the relationship is not significant at both the 0.01 and 0.05 levels; the correlation coefficients are weak (correlation coefficient 0.28, P-value = 0.0826)), which indicates that kindergartens tend to focus on either one or another group of conditions, and these efforts are not systematically coordinated. The identified deficits allow us to draw a conclusion about the skills that teachers lack: the ability to work in situations of unpredictability and surprises, which is required by both accompanying the play (spontaneity, playfulness, readiness to react sensitively and non-directively joining in the play) (Hännikainen, 2013) and stimulating the resolution of conflicting situations (ability to notice a problem, organize a discussion, support the diversity of children's answers) (Siraj-Blatchford, 2009).

Belolutskaya, A. K., Vorobyova, I. I., Shiyan, O.A., Zadadayev, S.A., & Shiyan, I.B. (2021). Conditions for the development of a child’s creative abilities: results of testing a tool for assessing the quality of education in kindergarten. Modern preschool education, 2, 12–30. Craft, A., Cremin, T., Burnard, P. & Chappell, K. (2007). Developing creative learning through possibility thinking with children aged 3-7. In. A Craft, T. Cremin, & P. Burnard (Eds.), Creative Learning 3-11 and How We Document It. Trentham. Singer, E. & van Oers, B. (2013). Promoting Play for a Better Future. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 21(2), 165–171. Kravtsov, G.G., & Kravtsova, E.E. (2019). Play as a zone of proximal development of preschool children. Psychological and pedagogical research, 11(4), 5–21. Siraj-Blatchford, I. (2009). Conceptualising progression in the pedagogy of play and sustained shared thinking in early childhood education: a Vygotskian perspective. Education and Child Psychology, 26(2), 77-89. Veraksa, N.E. (2019). Dialectical thinking: logic and psychology. Cultural-historical psychology, 15(3), 4–12. Yakshina, A.N., Le-Van, T. N., Zadadayev, S. A., & Shiyan, I. B. (2020). Development and testing of a scale for assessing the conditions for the development of children's play activity in preschool groups. Modern preschool education, 2, 21-31.

The relationship between content knowledge and play in Early Childhood Education (ECE) has been complex (Figueiredo, 2022). Acknowledging the relevance of content in ECE requires attention to the pedagogical appropriation of knowledge but also to the view of knowledge itself. When a sociocultural perspective is assumed, it is about using knowledge as a potential tool for transformation that allows the individual to build himself subjectively and intersubjectively (Pramling et al., 2019). Research has also highlighted how teachers’ lack or inadequacy of knowledge of a certain area of the curriculum can harm children's learning by leading to opportunities that are not explored (Siraj-Blatchford, 2010), while feeling security about their knowledge leads to a greater probability of recognition and learning enhancement in children's play experiences (Hedges & Cooper, 2018). ECE teachers tend to undervalue their content knowledge even though they use it to add depth to children’s learning during play and can use pedagogical content knowledge for organizing play environments (Oppermann et al., 2016; Figueiredo, Gomes, & Rodrigues, 2020). The particular case of introducing algorithmic thinking in ECE contexts in Portugal opened the opportunity to study this connection between play and content knowledge. Computational thinking and algorithmic thinking have been promoted in several educational systems as preparation for the challenges of the future, including uncertainty and openness. Algorithmic thinking, in particular, has long traditions in different scientific areas and can be connected to all curricular areas of ECE in Portugal (Figueiredo et al., 2021). With a focus on problem-solving together with thinking and creativity skills, teachers and curriculum developers are being challenged to foster algorithmic thinking skills starting from the preschool period (Strnad, 2018). Based on a common practitioner research approach, two studies were conducted on Portuguese ECE centers that explored play as a context to develop algorithmic thinking with children from 3 to 6 years old. The practitioners were unfamiliar with the concept and used the research on practice as a learning experience. The reports from those studies were combined with in-depth individual interviews with the teachers to explore how they perceived the relationship between their knowledge and their actions regarding children's play. Results from the content analysis on the combined data set show that a focus on play from a new content area perspective highlighted the role of the adult in supporting play and revealed areas where the adult intervention was relevant.

Figueiredo, M. (2022). Tensions and (re)transformations in the Portuguese ECE curriculum. In S. Almeida, F. Sousa, & M. Figueiredo (Eds.), Curriculum autonomy policies (pp. 45-58). CICS.NOVA. Figueiredo, M., Gomes, H. & Rodrigues, C. (2020). Mathematical pedagogical content knowledge in ECE: Tales from the ‘great unknown’ in teacher education in Portugal. In B. Perry & O. Thiel (Eds.), Innovative approaches in early childhood mathematics (pp. 535–546). Routledge. Figueiredo, M., et al. (2021). Play, Algorithmic Thinking and ECE. In 2021 International Symposium on Computers in Education (pp. 1–4). IEEE. Hedges, H. & Cooper, M. (2018). Relational play-based pedagogy: Theorising a core practice in ECE. Teachers and Teaching, 24(4), 369–383. Oppermann, E., Anders, Y. & Hachfeld, A. (2016). The influence of preschool teachers’ content knowledge and mathematical ability beliefs on their sensitivity to mathematics in children’s play. Teaching and Teacher Education, 58, 174–184. Pramling, N., et al. (2019). Play-Responsive Teaching in ECE. Springer. Siraj-Blatchford, I. (2010). A focus on pedagogy. Case studies of effective practice. In K. Sylva, et al. (Eds.), Early childhood matters. Evidence from the EPPE Project (pp. 149–165). Routledge. Strnad, B. (2018). Introduction to the World of Algorithmic Thinking. Journal of Electrical Engineering, 6, 57–60.