Representations of play. A praxeological analysis of Norwegian ECEC research on play 2020-2023

A praxeological analysis of Norwegian ECEC research on play 2020-2023

Abstract

This article analyses Norwegian research on play in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) published between 2020 and 2023. Rather than treating play as a stable object of inquiry, the article examines how research practices within higher‑education ECEC environments enact specific understandings of what play is and what it is for, assuming that views on play affect practices in kindergartens and thus the conditions under which children grow up in the 21st century.

Researchers who publish about play in ECEC are also teachers and professional premise providers in the kindergarten teacher education. As agents with a dominating position within their field of knowledge (ECEC), their understandings of play will have a high symbolic value.  It is therefore reasonable to assume that the views on play that dominate the research literature also circulate into the ECEC education, which is supposed to be research-based, and that they are subsequently reproduced in kindergartens' practices. In this sense, the research has direct consequences for how play is understood, legitimized and organized in children's everyday lives.

To identify views that may currently influence ECEC practices, we examine not only what research says about play, but how research practices might shape understandings of play. To develop an understanding of this, the article analyses how researchers, methods, institutional traditions and political guidelines are part of an interaction that both shapes and limits what play is and can be in the ECEC field.

The article shows that dominant research practices—short observational sequences, developmentalist framings, and policy‑aligned utilitarian logics—construct play primarily as a means for learning, regulation and measurable outcomes. Such practices make certain understandings institutionally powerful while silencing more existential, relational or imaginative dimensions of play. By analysing how these knowledge practices circulate from research through teacher education and into the everyday upbringing of children, the article argues that the field’s methodological and discursive orientations do not merely describe play but co‑produce and shape the conditions for how play is valued, facilitated and lived in contemporary ECEC. Reasoning in line with praxeological perspectives, we call for more explicit and deeper reflexivity regarding researcher positionality, institutional dependencies, and the normative consequences of the research and the knowledgebase transferred to ECEC personnel and how this materialises in educational the practices.