This book demonstrates that teachers can experience childâs play beyond the constraints within which educational policymakers Enframe play. It identifies a problematic attitude towards play prevalent in the contemporary Western world, where play is being Enframed beyond its defining properties and functions. The question concerning play is interrogated phenomenologically and metaphysically to determine why play is intellectualised as a neoliberal tool for achieving standardised outcomes in early childhood curricula. A poietic liberation of play is suggested to modify entrenched attitudes towards play by allowing adults to arrive at subjective truths regarding the phenomenon by becoming part of its inner workings. This liberation of play was tested in the bookâs empirical part, which I have called âa framework for conceptual processingâ.
Virtual Reality technology (henceforth referred to as VR) was utilised to Deframe play in a metaphysical laboratory through a methodological process of seeing as poiesis. Such immersive experience of knowledge in VR enabled teachers to attain a transcendent state of being, where immersive pedagogies formed a cybernetic looking glass for seeing a multiplicity of alternative insights into the essential properties and inner workings of play.
This described process pertains to the researcherâs personal, educational philosophy, which is grounded in the belief that, for an idea to be fully realised, it needs to be developed through extensive reflection, musing and âplayingâ creatively with concepts, thoughts and theories, before they are trialled empirically in practice. The book, therefore, entails my personal reflections alongside philosophical theorising derived from my thinking and informed and validated by the thinking of others. It draws on an empirical study that arose from creative play with abstractions of the mind. Therefore, the following section focuses on the origins, intentions, and possibilities this book may offer.
This bookâs unique amalgam of play and VR as research subjects resulted from my involvement with and interest in early childhood education as a profession and an extracurricular fascination with modern technology, particularly VR. These separate interests converged in the quest to understand play.
Upon starting this book, I focused on making play visible to teachers through VR technology and devising a series of meanings in the form of universal truths regarding play that could be grasped, delineated and applied practically to the curriculum. However, as a deeper understanding of play
My interest extended to investigating the specific circumstances under which play discloses itself to the observer and how VR technology might aid observers to attain a state of being through which they could engage with the diverse inner workings of play. While the initial intentions for this study were to bring forth play as a visible objectifiable phenomenon to aid teachers in articulating play for learning purposes, it eventually transpired that these attitudes towards play were the very ones that limit how play is experienced. Consequently, such framing of play contributes to the ambiguity I was attempting to see past.
Therefore, while the initial assumptions that play would have been âseenâ more clearly if a broader range of senses to experience it immersively were involved were proven to be well founded, the initially intended application of the method to reveal play in a systematic, ordered way would have resulted in a further Enframing of play, rather than a liberation that would let it reveal itself freely.
This enhanced thinking prompted me to rethink my strategies regarding the use of VR technology. I decided to draw on my experience with the technology, aiming to bring forth a unique state of being for the body and mind I had experienced several times while engaged in many different virtual scenarios. What was notable about these situations was a sense of complete immersion in the virtual world, where it was possible to transcend the limitations of the selfâs worldly being by engaging completely with the digitally summoned experiences at hand.
In that state, one may find oneself highly susceptible to even the smallest of sensations and may manage to âseeâ the experiences with much-added vibrancy and richness: the self can, in a sense, connect with this state in a way that is intensely personal and encourages alternative insights through seeing phenomena from several new perspectives. I considered this state of being as, in some ways, related to the experience of play insofar as it also felt like an aesthetic, spiritual and esoteric experience. Consequently, the question arose: what new insights could be attained regarding play if it were to be examined in such a way? As VR can facilitate a state of being similar to the one in which play is experienced, I wondered if this relatedness would enable an observer of play in VR to experience it similarly to reality. The key to achieving this state
Phenomenology was found to be best suited for interrogating play through VR technology and to help explain the metaphysical entanglement of the two. The work that most grounded this book was Heimâs The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality (1993), particularly its focus on establishing a transcendental metaphysical laboratory in VR related to the philosophical underpinnings of Heideggerâs phenomenology. Heideggerâs key notion of Enframing enabled the interrogation of the contemporary Western attitudes towards play, which framed it as a standardised tool for learning and aided in explaining the application of the suggested VR technology. Current education policy implementation systematises, standardises and nationalises early childhood education to permit international competition and comparison while developing services in ways that serve the economy (Westbrook & Hunkin, 2020) and raises concerns that governments are using early childhood curricula to Enframe pedagogy in ways that meet their agenda.
The state of transcendent being referred to above is another notion that Heidegger draws on, poiesis. Poiesis is an aesthetic, esoteric and metaphysical term that elicits a multiplicity of meanings of phenomena. It is a unification process where the body and mind collapse with the observed phenomena, enabling a deeper insight into its essential nature. Consequently, learning through experiencing the world with the bodily senses became an important methodological positioning of the book, made possible by using embodiment theory, also rooted in the phenomenological paradigm.
Furthermore, methodologies and methods aligned to visual pedagogies (such as video) were adapted in the empirical part of the study to form the next step in the pictorial evolution under the newly proposed field of immersive pedagogies by employing a form of Virtual Reality called immersive video. The immersive video method was used to represent play experiences to teachers in an early years context so that the researcher could answer the research questions.
The results of the empirical study conducted in this book showed that the study participants were indeed able to achieve the aforementioned state of being, wherein they referred to themselves as the quiet observers who could see many facets of play while becoming part of its inner workings. Throughout the virtual experience, they were invested in play with body and mind while experiencing a raft of different emotions, including joy. They developed several alternative insights into play, and some prior attitudes towards play changed
The dramatic changes in teachersâ attitudes regarding play suggest that others, such as parents, researchers, and policymakers, would also be curated from the Enframed way of seeing play towards a deeper understanding and evolution of play.
The Enframed attitude towards play enabled discourses associated with the erosion of play to appear in ECE and school curriculum documents across the globe (Jarvis et al., 2014), as well as in contemporary learning ideologies that frame play as simply an instructional teaching method to achieve pre-set learning outcomes dictated by a progressivist rhetoric of play (Sutton-Smith, 1997). Vygotsky (as cited in Connery, John-Steiner, & Marjanovic-Shane, 2010) cautioned that if childrenâs needs, incentives to act and affective aspirations are not the motivation for learning and teaching, a terrible intellectualisation of play could occur. The widening agenda of commercialism that has influenced education is threatening to achieve just that, as it âinfluences (some would say manipulates) and helps shape ideas about play and the forms it might takeâ (Lewis, 2017, p. 11).
To help counter these discourses, the researcher proposes using the rapidly advancing Virtual Reality technologies as a form of looking glass to overcome the Enframed attitude towards play, make it possible to see past the illusion of play and attain alternative insights into its essential characteristics.
The book answers the following principal research question:
- âWhat is the potential for immersive video to transcend existing notions of âplayâ for teachers in ECE?
It also engages further inquiry with the following questions:
- âWhat are the specific circumstances under which play discloses itself as a phenomenon to early childhood teachers through VR?
- âWhat is the impact of teachersâ altered perspectives in relation to pedagogical practice concerning play?
- âWhat additional contributions can sensory and/or embodied engagements through VR make to teacher pedagogy?
- âWhat other contributions may VR hold for teacher pedagogy due to engagement with VR?
1
This book is broadly divided into a philosophical/theoretical interrogation and a methodological application of an empirical study, through which a proposition concerning immersive VRâs disruptive and expansive potential was tested in an educational setting to develop new, subjective insights and attitudes regarding play in the early years. The application is wrapped up in a philosophical examination concerning the nature of seeing and the consequences of Enframed attitudes. The empirical application of a newly developed methodology using immersive VR and teacher interviews is encompassed in this research, followed by a philosophical interrogation of its utility for understanding play.
The first chapter of this book discusses the importance of play, focusing on its diverse functions for developing physically and mentally healthy children. This chapter also introduces the tensions between play and learning, which are further expanded in Chapter 2, where perceptions of play in the contemporary Western world are considered. This chapter discusses how the elusive nature of play enables it to be framed in ways inconsistent with its essential nature and function. Different forms of play capture are discussed next, including their effects on early childhood pedagogy and curriculum. Contextual factors that create and influence play are also addressed in this chapter, together with some of the major concerns in the research of play. The chapterâs concluding section attempts to explain the metaphysics of play through a phenomenological lens, drawing on Heideggerâs notion of Enframing (Gestell).
The third chapter extends on those philosophical interrogations by examining Heideggerâs views on the concept of poiesis, which is then applied to the educational phenomenon of play to examine its current Enframed state. A possible application of poiesis is investigated in line with the phenomenological paradigm of seeing play in VR by employing a raft of theories regarding learning from first-hand experience via the bodily senses. This notion is further explored using embodiment theory, which is fundamental to this bookâs methodological orientation. Next, ways of seeing and representing knowledge are examined concerning pedagogy and a new subcategory, âimmersive pedagogyâ. Together, these generate new pedagogical insights about play through virtual immersion. Understanding the evolution of knowledge through time highlights why a return to learning from first-hand experiences is important to better understanding play. Lastly, the question of how immersive videos can become a âcybernetic looking glassâ of phenomenological research to support teachers in developing alternative insights regarding play is explained. The cybernetic looking glass refers to the ability of a person to move through
In Chapter 4, I explain the role of the researcher, followed by a newly developed analytical framework that enables effective video analysis. I then present the research design and ethical considerations.
The findings chapter starts with a comprehensive discussion of what meaning was derived from the results and how this is important for the bookâs focus. This is first discussed in relation to the analytical framework and afterwards in terms of the philosophical notions of Gestell and poiesis, drawing parallels throughout to relevant theory research. This is followed by conclusions drawn from the research. The studyâs affordances, limitations, and implications are outlined to conclude the final chapter.
The book is framed with a reflective musing in the form of a preface before the first chapter and an epilogue after the last chapter. This satisfied my need for playful thinking and writing regarding play and illustrates my motivation for undertaking this study. It also shows the growth and evolution in my understanding, perceptions, and insights regarding the matters investigated.