Twisting paths: Chasing Play through the Affective Field of Kindergarten Practice

Abstract

For many decades, theories of early childhood education in Serbia have promoted the understanding of play as a capacity of flexibility in action (Marjanović, 1979) – the backbone for cultivating transformative potential as a distinctive characteristic of human beings. As such, and even through official Curriculum Framework, play is recognized as a value for itself in an educational process (Godine uzleta, 2019). Faced with the continuous disappointment with the ways and forms through which this understanding lives up in practice, as well as the global need for rethinking education in a more-than-human manner, we’ve set out with the feeling that there is something-more in the promoted understanding of play which can not be grasped nor perceived through theoretical frameworks that dominate our field, nor through the well-established methods of social sciences, but from which the already initiated rethinking and reworking of early childhood education might benefit deeply. Through the theoretical elaboration of the idea of play as a capacity of flexibility in action, we found strong resonances with the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, and in their rethinking of science and methodology, we recognized the potential to follow play by putting the very capacity of flexibility to work. Playing with the ideas, with the affective ethnography, with data-creation and diffractive analysis – all of which through playing with children and with kindergarten teachers in developing educational practice in one kindergarten group – we’ve ventured into an affect of something-more to discover – situationally and processually – how play originates and develops, what is its educational potential and how it can be cultivated through the everyday kindergarten practices. Playing with play, the paths of our research shifted and twisted as we moved, looming in the upheavals, shaping through motion-with-excess and establishing themselves through faith in the common process – the very way play originates and develops in everyday practice, provoking us to focus our search for ways to cultivate play not on the possible pathways, but on the possible ways of movement – whatever path you take. On the basis of our experience of playing through different levels of kindergarten practice, but also on different levels of academic research, we wish to discuss the possibilities, but also tensions and dangers which such an understanding of play unfolds in education.