Thought of/on the Edge: Playing (with) the Resistance(s) in(/of) Kindergarten Practice

Abstract

If I say this would be the story of the importance of play in early childhood education, it might sound a bit boring – at least, nothing new. An idea of the educational value of play is being promoted, well-established and seemingly well-accepted through decades. Only in Serbia theories of early childhood education have argued 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 – for half a century. With the New Curriculum Framework (Godine uzleta, 2019) and the greatest reform of Early Childhood Education in Serbia yet, play as a capacity of flexibility in action officially came at the core of the entire educational process. But only declaratively. The trouble with play begins on the level of specific situations of educational practice – the very moment play actually starts to unfold. Faced with the continuous disappointment with the ways and forms through which the proclaimed understanding of play lives up in practice, as well as the global need for rethinking education in a more-than-human manner, I’ve set out into playing with children and teachers of one kindergarten group, striving to understand the situational unfolding of play and resistances (through) which (it) arise. Diffracting the idea of play as a capacity of flexibility in action with the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari and further – diffracting through/with/in the very situations of play, I strive to take us into the molecular flows of play unfolding in the kindergarten practice to see which lines orient us towards the resistance in the Deleuzian sense – opening new potentials for educational practice as a whole – and which rise as (or turn into) the very boundaries that need to be resisted.