Reconstructing the Vygotskian vision of play, learning and development in early childhood

Abstract

This chapter examines the complicated relationship between children’s play, learning and development in early childhood from the perspective of cultural-historical theory. Recent widespread practices that aim to integrate play and learning into school instruction are often superficial, and do not propose a unified systemic approach. Cultural-historical theory that develops general stage models of child development, as presented by El’konin (1999), Bozhovich (2004), and Slobodchikov and Zuckerman (2003), highlights the main difficulty in separating cultural development and learning from each other. The new learning of young children occurs in social spaces through internal psychological processes, which cannot be directly observed. The solution to the problem could be to accept the claim of Vygotsky and his followers that early childhood pedagogy must focus on personality development and creative imagination as the core psychological function of early age. Creative activities such as explorative experimentation and imaginative play must become central elements in early education, giving the child a leading role and, thus, supporting their self-development processes. The mediated learning of children in narrative playworlds developed in the Play Research Lab in Finland is a possible solution.