Play enables preschoolers to build relationships with their peers, to represent their potentials, complaints, limits or needs and to satisfy the needs or release negative emotions in a positive way. Indeed, play exerts an influence on young children's...
Play enables preschoolers to build relationships with their peers, to represent their potentials, complaints, limits or needs and to satisfy the needs or release negative emotions in a positive way. Indeed, play exerts an influence on young children's every part of life and overall development. But it should be noted here that play couldn't produce expected effects once the substance of play is removed, which is freedom and voluntary choice. In other words, it's quite important for preschoolers to play when they are motivated to do that. In early childhood education, educational institutions where young children spend a lot of time should assist them in playing voluntarily by being driven by their own inner motivations. In fact, however, they are sometimes forced to play with things designated by their teachers or according to specific plans in many educational institutions, though a variety of structural things to play with are provided. But they continue to attempt to satisfy their curiosity or interest through play while they spend time in educational institutions according to daily schedules, and curiosity and interest become motivations at that time. An effort to read their minds by making continuing observations of their play makes it possible to help them to play in a more extended and enriched manner, and gives a crucial clue on the right directions for early childhood education. However, it's not actually easy for researchers to keep observing young children while they play.
The purpose of this study was to examine play situations among the preschoolers in an educational institution where this researcher worked. It's basically meant to analyze the characteristics and significance of spontaneous early childhood play in the field of early childhood education.
A research question was posed:
1. What are the phenomenological characteristics of spontaneous early childhood play in the field of early childhood education?
The subjects in this study were the young children in a class of western age 3 in a kindergarten located in an urban community. Participant observations, videotaping and recording were all carried out to gather data. This researcher received guidance from an expert about how to make participant observations in advance, and then made participant observations of the play situations among the selected preschoolers during all the normal classroom hours to collect data on the types and meanings of spontaneous early childhood play. In the stage of observation, this researcher observed the young children while they play, and interacted with them only when they wanted to do that. The teacher who was in charge of the class was informed about what's observed without making it known to the preschoolers as much as possible. In this way, the observations were fulfilled according to the stages of sequential research that reduces time intervals between the stages of analysis, and what's observed was transcribed each day. In addition, all the preschoolers and their homeroom teacher were interviewed, and the interview data were analyzed to have a more perfect understanding of the significance of spontaneous early childhood play in the field of early childhood education. The collected data were analyzed to categorize the characteristics of spontaneous early childhood play according to Hatch(2008)'s inductive analysis theory that is to classify the characteristics of a phenomenon by grouping significant themes together.
As a result, verbal playfulness, projection of home and life, display of concerns, conflicts and reconciliation, and leading and extended learning.
Verbal playfulness appeared during their murmuring, imitating sounds, repeating words, combining words, exchanging lyrics, repeating lyrics, changing lyrics, picking at what one said, and word chain. That meant to take pleasure in speaking itself. As for projection of home and life, the young children's daily experiences at home, educational experience and other sorts of experience were unveiled through play. Concerning display of concerns, various things that they were interested in were represented. As to conflict and reconciliation, there were scenes of "conflict" when they failed to resolve their differences and when they denied each other's request, and there also appeared scenes of "reconciliation," which was done by soothing, suggesting, explaining or teacher intervention. Regarding leading and extended learning, the preschoolers led or followed each other while they played together, and then they played in applied or extended ways.
The findings of the study suggest that it's required to shed new light on the phenomena of play that take place in early childhood educational institutions where preschoolers spend many time in this era characterized by a crisis of play. Taking a phenomenological look at the actual cases of play among preschoolers makes it possible to categorize the characteristics of spontaneous early childhood play and to realize the importance of early childhood play once more.
But the findings of the study are not sufficient enough to find a solution for the crisis of play, because some extreme cases of spontaneous play were just mentioned without making any further efforts to categorize the characteristics of the cases or consider their meanings.
Finally, there are some suggestions on future research efforts:
First, observation data should be gathered both in and outside educational institutions to find out where and when spontaneous play frequently takes place in order to consider what limitations there are to spontaneous play in the educational institutions.
Second, it's necessary to suggest the right directions for spontaneous play in early childhood by squarely facing problems with spontaneous play among preschoolers in early childhood education institutions and by listening to the voices of early childhood educators. That will serve to determine the right direction for play in these educational institutions because that makes it possible to take a new phenomenological approach based on the perspectives or opinions of participants other than the researcher himself or herself.
If more extensive research is made to approach spontaneous early childhood play from a more critical perspective by making closer observations, by collecting more detailed data and by gathering opinions from various groups of people concerned, it will contribute to shedding new light on early childhood play and to leading educational institutions in the right direction.