Playing Social Chess: Children's play and social intelligence

Humans live in complex social environments. By the time they reach adulthood, most people have developed highly sophisticated social skills, including the ability to infer the 'invisible' mental states in others, and to act upon those inferences; they have become experts at 'social chess'. This paper draws upon research from developmental and evolutionary psychology, primatology, as well as studies of autistic children, to explore the processes by which children acquire the complex skills underpinning social interaction. It also examines obstacles to social skill acquisition. In light of ethological studies of social play in humans and other primates, it is argued that play is a fundamental medium for acquiring social skills.     

再论《大雅堂杂剧》的思想内涵——抒写文人的时代困惑

汪道昆是明代徽州著名的政治家、军事家、文学家,其戏剧集<大雅堂杂剧>从上世纪起就被研究者关注,现有的成果多肯定其剧作形式的革新,而鄙薄其思想内涵.从汪道昆忧虑愤激的思想、明代杂剧抒情写心的创作动机以及戏剧文本等几个方面进行分析,可以揭示<大雅堂杂剧>抒写文人的时代困惑这一思想内涵.     

基于英语戏剧表演的大学英语教学模式实证研究

英语戏剧表演以面部表情、手势、动作等为载体进行语言交流,它既能激发学生学习英语的兴趣,提高学生英语交际能力,又能使学生更好地了解英语国家的文化,所以被看成是一种行之有效的英语教学模式。本文结合英语教学理论与教学实践,从理论和实证两方面探讨了这种教学模式应用于大学英语教学的可行性,并分析了对英语教学的典型意义。     

Playing with others: Head Start children's peer play and relations with kindergarten school competence

Time-sampled observations of Head Start preschoolers’ (N = 264; 51.5% boys; 76% Mexican American; M = 53.11 and SD = 6.15 months of age) peer play in the classroom were gathered during fall and spring semesters. One year later, kindergarten teachers rated these children's school competence. Latent growth models indicated that, on average, children's peer play was moderately frequent and increased over time during preschool. Children with higher initial levels or with higher slopes of peer play in Head Start had higher levels of kindergarten school competence. Results suggest that Head Start children's engagement with peers may foster development of skills that help their transition into formal schooling. These findings highlight the importance of peer play, and suggest that peer play in Head Start classrooms contributes to children's adaptation to the demands of formal schooling.     

The gamework

This article outlines the gamework, a neologism designed to help scholars attend to the various kinds of work involved in computer game development, play and analysis. This work is integral to computer game artifactuality yet tends to be obscured by the aesthetic, narratological, mechanical, and economic aspects of games and gaming. We offer the gamework as a means for theorizing computer games as a form of culture that motivates work as much as (if not more than) play. Specifically, we point to how computer games participate in (1) labor culture; (2) an emergent culture determined by a work/labor/play dialectic; (3) artistic culture; and (4) cultural criticism.     

Project work in the graduate classroom: Teachers as students apply skills beyond the classroom

Abstract

Through the use of a long‐term project in a graduate teacher education course on the importance of play, students learned skills beyond those usually required in a graduate classroom. Students used their understanding and knowledge of play, constructive practice, and project work to develop a family play day at the university lab school. As part of the project, students helped to develop a play‐style instrument that served as a self‐study for their own classrooms as they observed the play among their own students. The project culminated with the students hosting the families of the lab school at a fun day and preparing a brochure that gave families information about the importance of play.     

Games and ideal playgrounds

Even though many sport philosophers have worked to delineate clear definitions of play and games, typical language usage often conflates the two phenomena and even provides an undue normative bias toward games as play. In this paper, I argue that a better understanding of games and ideal playgrounds is required to alleviate this normative bias. To carry out this argument, I first examine previous definitions of play and games and how the concepts are often conflated. Secondly, I provide a definition of ideal playgrounds using prior philosophy on play and human conventions. Third, I present an analysis that examines how both game and non-game activities can act as ideal playgrounds. Finally, I argue that changes to the way we use language can help to alleviate this problem.     

Teaching in a play-based curriculum: Theory,practice and evidence of developmental education for young children

This article focuses on the possibilities of teaching in a play-based curriculum, which has become an issue of international relevance. As a domain of study, the Developmental Education approach was taken in the early grades of Dutch primary schools (grades 1–4, ages 4–8). The article describes the theoretical basis of the approach and how it is elaborated in a play-based curriculum for early years classrooms. Particularly the teachers’ strategies for the promotion of development will be discussed in more detail. Finally, the article presents a piece of the evidence base of this approach by reporting a research on vocabulary acquisition. Despite methodological limitations of the empirical study, the evidence suggests that teaching in a play-based curriculum is not only theoretically plausible and practically feasible, but also seems to be effectively useful for the attainment of positive outcomes (on vocabulary learning) as compared to a strictly teacher-driven approach.     

Figuring out the statistics of the ICC World Cup 2011

This paper deals with the analysis of cricket match results from the ICC World Cup 2011. We believe that such data provide good material for interesting classroom exercises.     

Relational play-based pedagogy: theorising a core practice in early childhood education

A commitment to long-standing child-centred ideologies and recent emphases on academic outcomes have both perpetuated narrow interpretations of play-based pedagogy in early childhood education. Instead, teachers might proactively and spontaneously deepen children’s thinking and understandings related to children’s own interests and motivations during thoughtful pedagogical interactions that arise from play. This paper draws on findings from a qualitative case study in Aotearoa, New Zealand where teachers used their professional expertise to engage with children’s thinking and understandings. We analyse the professional knowledge, strategies and skills teachers brought to these relational and play-based interactions. We offer new conceptualising of teaching in highlighting the need to position a sophisticated blending of play, learning and teaching within participatory and relational pedagogies as a core practice of early childhood education. Further, we argue that two constructs – everyday and scientific concepts, and the zone of proximal development – position theoretically ways in which teachers’ knowledge, expertise and engagement might contribute to these ‘in the moment’ rich, thoughtful understandings of what we term relational play-based pedagogy.