The objective of this chapter is to define socio-dramatic play from a cultural-historical perspective and to describe how teachers can become co-players with children in their play. To do this we present case studies from research and a pedagogical toolbox to support children’s participation, learning and development. The chapter begins by outlining children’s socio-dramatic play using a cultural-historical perspective to focus on interactions in shared play. In socio-dramatic play, imagination and creativity are central as children create narratives together. Play creates conditions for children to express and construct meaning with others and to become co-players in a shared imagined world. Adults in early childhood settings traditionally support children’s play by planning, resourcing and observing, although their role as co-player is less understood.

For early career educators, it can be challenging to navigate and orient themselves within the field of early childhood education. Increasing demands on, and accountability for, early childhood educators around the provision of a high-quality curriculum and clear learning outcomes for children are significant in their own right; however, for early career educators the lack of clarity around ‘how we know’ children are learning can be uncomfortable. In Australia, the Early Years Learning Framework supports early childhood educators to shape their pedagogy, providing a high-quality early childhood curriculum in a holistic way that outlines what children’s learning could look like, and not what it will look like. This is an important distinction, as it reinforces that early childhood education must focus on context and not content; learning opportunities are influenced by the learner, and early childhood educators need to be aware of the role they adopt in supporting learning.

Play is an innate need. It’s a biological behaviour all humans engage in and is essential for children’s wellbeing and development across all domains: social, cognitive, emotional and physical. While play has long been seen as the key vehicle through which young children explore the world, researchers have now recognised the benefits of play to learning 21st century skills such as innovative thinking, problem-solving and collaboration. Intrinsic motivation is an inherent quality of play and a vital aspect of learning; without it, children can lack enthusiasm and willingness to engage, lack effort and persistence in tasks, give up easily and fail to develop independence in their learning. So how can we motivate and inspire learners so they become passionate advocates of their own development through self-driven exploration, questioning, problem-solving and discovery? Play is the key. This chapter discusses the benefits of play and explores how a ‘playful’ pedagogical approach enhances creativity, problem-solving and critical thinking, and can be used to effectively engage, motivate and stimulate learners from early childhood to adolescence in the HASS learning area.

Chapter 10 returns to broader issues of the cultural politics of metaphor, examining the tensions between ethics and aesthetics in illness experience and healing. While the focus on language allows us to mobilize the richness of literature to explore illness experience, in doing so we may inadvertently downplay the material circumstances that determine health disparities and inequities. Against this apparent opposition, I argue that attention to the aesthetics of language and the creative functions of imagination and poeisis can help us understand the mechanisms of suffering and affliction and devise forms of healing that better respond to the needs of individuals within and across diverse cultures and contexts. Every choice of metaphor draws from and points toward a form of life. The critique of metaphors that begins with an appreciation of the qualities they confer on experience, and then moves out into the social world to identify ways that systems and structures are configured, rationalized, and maintained. A critical poetics of illness and healing can contribute to efforts to improve our institutions and achieve greater equity not only by recognizing and respecting difference and diversity but also by engaging with the particulars of each person’s experience.

Humans have historically devised, and continue to devise, various strategies to make their gods present in the mortal realm. The introduction explains how technologies should be understood as one such strategy employed in ancient Greek religion to solve the ‘problem of divine presence’. Key terms including technology, mechanics, art, and technē are explained, and the relationship between these terms is discussed. Various themes important to the book are also introduced: theoretical frameworks to access the agency of technological objects which conditioned ancient religious experience (including a reassessment of Alfred Gell’s theory of art objects); what we should make of apparently conflicting epistemologies in a topic such as this which combines ‘rational’ scientific knowledge and sacred experience; and how concepts of play and the playful were crucial both to religion and to technology in Classical antiquity.

On 18 October 1932, the young Samuel Beckett, highly uncertain about his poetry, wrote a letter to his friend, the poet and critic Thomas McGreevy, drawing a distinction between conscious, agential events, and reflex actions. The tension between the conscious, agential subject, and automatic bodily events comes to constitute a key concern in Beckett’s writing, which dedicates meticulous attention to those bodily functions that fall between intentional and non-intentional acts, such as sexual reflexes, breathing, habitual actions, and even, at times, the production of speech itself. In staging this tension, Beckett is in search of a literary form to accommodate an emerging understanding of the self that has its origins in a finding of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century neurology: the discovery of the autonomous nervous system as independent or near-independent from the conscious, intentional subject.

This chapter provides a preliminary Latinx literary history of both the representation of Latinxs in video games and how games shape narratives of Latinidad in the twenty-first century. The chapter first examines how non-Latinxs have dominated Latinx narratives and representation, shaping a narrow concept of who is Latinx and what it means to live as a Latinx person. While AAA games continue to circulate stereotyped images of Latinxs, more recent game narratives authored by Latin American and Latinx creators and distributed through independent publishers challenge these representations. The chapter provides close readings of Guacamelee! and Guacamelee! 2 from Drinkbox Studies and Minority Media’s Papo & Yo, both created by Latin American immigrants to North America. These games subvert gaming tropes and use characterization and worldbuilding to showcase the diversity of Latinidades. Finally, the chapter assesses video games that expand representation (including AfroLatinidades and trans Latinidades) as well as narratives that use ludic structures, such as Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House: A Memoir and Nona Fernández’s Space Invaders.

Educators have always harnessed the power of ludic activities for facilitating learning in low-tech teaching contexts, including for the teaching of foreign and second languages (L2s). Most current research on L2 learning with games has focused on informal (naturalistic) learning, has adopted a technology-centric perspective that prioritizes digital games which are ill-suited for most teaching contexts, and, particularly, has neglected the role of teachers. As teacher mediation is critical for enabling student learning, this chapter surveys work that shows how language teachers can leverage the opportunities inherent in games and play with a view to strengthening the naturalistic learning of their students. We spotlight the key role of the teacher in mediating learners’ language and literacy development, before, during, and after L2 activities through and around games. We also consider how the purposeful use of digital technology around games and play supports both learners and teachers in reaching their goals. We illustrate this through exemplary studies that are grounded in various pedagogies, and utilize both analogue and digital games that can be implemented in real classrooms. In doing so, we give equal importance to tools and technology (ludic materials), language learning goals, and pedagogical rigor.

Understand how children direct their own learning and learn from others; describe the importance of imitation, play, and instruction; explain how children transfer what they know across different contexts.

Understand why the cross-cultural perspective is important to understanding children’s development; consolidate what you learned in Chapters 1–5; revisit the ideas you came across in Chapters 1–5 in a cross-cultural context.

Part 2: Through a reading of the works of Horace Walpole, this book shows the ludic as a mode of play unconditioned by any preconceived judgment or intended outcome. As bourgeois taste is increasingly tasked with dispelling the material conditions of risk, uncertainty, violence, and death that underwrite Britain’s growing colonial wealth, it becomes increasingly hostile to funniness – any kind of oddity, proclivity, or quirk that disrupts an engineered sense of safety, stability, and predictability in the lived world. Borrowing from Brian Massumi’s theorization of “ludic play” between dogs, I invoke eighteenth-century philosophy’s interest in “animal spirits” to show how Walpole coordinates his own ludic scenes. Ludic play, I offer, is a technique for strategically disorganizing the rituals and conceits of civility and good taste, retooling them from techniques of disavowing violence to a means of grappling with violence in its most diffuse and ever-present forms.

Since manipulation is a relation involving power over another, it is alleged that it necessarily manifests disrespect toward persons. The analysis in the chapter explores this claim and rejects it. The following broad arguments are advanced: (1) The essence of manipulation is treating others as if they are machines (mechanification); it is therefore natural to examine whether manipulation manifests the same disrespect involved in objectification. The analysis rejects this possibility. (2) The dichotomy between “respectful influence through rational persuasion” and “disrespectful influence via (soft) power” is deconstructed. It is important to treat others “as rational,” but this can involve various elements of soft power, and thus manipulation need not be disrespectful. (3) Even “treating as rational” is not necessary for respect – there are other modes of interaction and influence which manipulations can exhibit that are not disrespectful. Play is analyzed in this regard. (4) Manipulation is often essential for promoting respect for persons through politeness and shielding privacy. The chapter ends by considering the virtuous person as regards the use of manipulation.

Claus Jacobs and Jane Lê discuss the role of play in strategizing. While play and games have been linked with strategy for quite some time, it is only very recently that strategy scholars have focused explicit attention on the role of play. The authors start with a discussion about different approaches to play. This leads them to identify and elaborate on four purposes of using play can be used for in strategizing: achieving novelty, improving understanding of complexity, suspending norms and inviting experimentation, and skill development. They conclude with a discussion about three potential areas for future research on play in strategizing: enriching our conceptual repertoire of play, extending our empirical repertoire of play, and exploring play across all parts of the strategy process.

Chapter 1 provides an overview of screen time concerns reported in the media and research, with consideration of relevant learning and interaction theories which indicate that face-to-face social interaction, talk and play are essential for the linguistic and cognitive development of children. This chapter also revisits the fundamental multimodality of face-to-face interaction. The shift from face-to-face to online multimodal interaction therefore requires users to make complex linguistic and interactional adaptations to be able to achieve understanding and affiliation with interlocutors in online contexts, as occurred with the advent of the telephone. This is especially true of the most common form of online interaction, text chat, which is a unique hybrid form of social written interaction, with its own specific affordances and constraints for children’s social and linguistic development. This chapter presents key interactional differences between face-to-face and written online interaction, based on conversational resources available (or unavailable) to users in either setting, including videogame settings. This discussion provides a necessary basis for investigation of children’s written interaction in subsequent chapters.