This book re-theorizes the relationship between pedagogy and play. The authors suggest that pedagogical play is characterized by conceptual reciprocity (a pedagogical approach for supporting children s academic learning through joint play) and agentic imagination (a concept that when present in play, affords the child s motives and imagination a critical role in learning and development). These new concepts are brought to life using a cultural-historical approach to the analysis of play, supported in each chapter by visual narratives used as a research method for re-theorising play as a...

This book makes an original contribution to researching child-community development so that those with specific interests in early childhood education have new theoretical tools to guide their research practices. The book explicitly theorises the use of digital visual tools from a cultural-historical perspective. It also draws upon a range of post-structuralist concepts for moving research and scholarship forward. Examples of visual technologies from research in different cultural communities are foregrounded.

In particular this book introduces contemporary methodologies for...

Employing visual methodologies to help bring the chapters to life, the varied research studies presented concern babies' and toddlers' relationships and cultural contexts.

The authors suggest that pedagogical play is characterized by conceptual reciprocity (a pedagogical approach for supporting children's academic learning through joint play) and agentic imagination (a concept that when present in play, affords the child's motives and imagination a critical role in learning and development).