Play Against Efficiency

A Synthetic Analysis of Children’s and Teachers’ Play as Resistance to Privatization and Control in U.S. Early Childhood Education

Abstract

In our meta-ethnographic synthesis of two separate studies, we analyze the lived realities of early childhood educators and children in Oklahoma, U.S. navigating the persistent and intensifying pressures of efficiency and normative accountability metrics. Both studies are centrally concerned with advancing play-based curricular contexts in ECE, during the COVID-19 pandemic in Oklahoma, U.S. The first study engaged teacher action research with six pre-kindergarten-third grade Oklahoma teachers to understand how the increased pressures of standardized curricula and testing impacted teachers’ capacity to enact play-based learning. The second undertook a two-year critical participatory ethnography with six ECE children in a pandemic homeschool cooperative. The study investigated practices of anti-authoritarian community and play-based inquiry as a process of authorizing children’s perspectives in their learning alongside the pressures of readying the children to return to public elementary school. Through an interpretive and iterative process, we suggest that play can be conceptualized as children’s and teachers’ educative enactment of public space-times and reclamation of agency and autonomy. We read and understand play as a form of resistance to curricular tendencies toward order, control, and top-down authority.