Play-responsive teaching as an alternative way of perceiving the relations between play, teaching and learning

Play, teaching and learning are notions that can be understood in many different ways. In this article which builds on many years of empirical studies in preschool we have developed an approach to early years education, labelled play-responsive ECE (Pramling et al., 2019). Together with preschool teachers we have tried out what happens when teachers enter into, or invite children to play. These situations are video-recorded, and analysed jointly between the teachers and researchers. In this process we discovered that it could be of help for the teachers to get input about intersubjectivity and alterity, metacommunication and narrative, which we gave them and they and they had to practise in every-day life in preschool. We also realised that the notions of as if, focusing on imagination, how something can become play and as is, culturally established knowledge – fact, both jointly become the way forward for the development of the present approach for teaching and children's learning.