The Association for the Study of Play (TASP) (www.tasp.org) is the sponsor of volume twelve in the Play & Culture Studies series. TASP is a professional group of interdisciplinary researchers who study play. Polyphony, defined as having many tones or voices, was used by the Russian philosopher Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin to describe the immense plurality of experiences in relationships. The chapters in volume 12 of Play & Culture Studies address the polyphony or many voices in the study of play from an interdisciplinary cadre of scholars in the fields of anthropology, education, psychology,...

Education, according to John Dewey, should be viewed as dynamic and ongoing with direct teaching of integrated content knowledge. This volume offers readers an examination of the content areas in early childhood curriculum that honor Dewey's belief in active, integrated learning. When young children learn in a way that is most natural to them, they unconsciously integrate subject areas into a complex whole based on their current interests. The ability to apply and integrate academic skills such as language arts, numeracy, scientific investigation, social studies, technology, and health and...