Play as Writing for All: Reclaiming Play as Relational, Semiotic, and World-Making Practice in Early Childhood Education

Play continues to occupy a paradoxical position in early childhood education. It is simultaneously celebrated in rhetoric and marginalised in practice; positioned as both foundational and expendable depending on policy context and accountability pressures. Despite repeated assertions of its importance, play is still frequently framed as a preparatory activity rather than a legitimate epistemological system in its own right.

This tension has been widely critiqued within early childhood scholarship. As Nilsson, Ferholt and Lecusay (2018) argue, the persistent dichotomy between play and learning is a constructed division rather than an empirical reality, shaped largely by schooling logics that privilege direct instruction and measurable outcomes. Similarly, Ailwood (2003) highlights how play functions as a “technology of governance” in early childhood systems, shaping both what children are expected to do and how educators are required to justify practice.

From a Froebelian perspective, such reductions are particularly problematic. Froebel did not position play as preparation for life, but as life itself in its earliest and most expressive form. Contemporary Froebelian scholarship continues to emphasise play as “wallowing in ideas, feelings and relationships” where inner and outer worlds are integrated through lived experience (Bruce, 2012; Froebel Trust, 2020). In this framing, play is not an activity added to learning; it is the medium through which human becoming unfolds.

Yet despite this philosophical lineage, dominant policy discourse continues to narrow the ontology of play. The increasing demand for visible outcomes, documentation, and measurable progress has contributed to what Moss (2014) describes as the “colonisation of early childhood by schoolification,” where pedagogical value is determined by proximity to

formalised learning structures. Within this paradigm, play is often tolerated rather than understood.

Reframing play: from activity to epistemology

This article proposes a different conceptualisation: play as writing for all.

This is not writing in the narrow sense of symbolic inscription through alphabetic systems, but writing as semiotic production—the making of meaning through embodied, material, relational, and symbolic processes. From this perspective, play is not simply expressive; it is epistemic. Children are not rehearsing meaning; they are actively producing it.

This aligns with sociocultural theories of learning, particularly Vygotskian accounts which position meaning-making as socially mediated and culturally situated. Within this view, thought is not pre-existing but formed through participation in shared activity. Play becomes the site where this participation is most visible, dynamic, and expansive.

Helen Hedges and Maria Cooper (2018) extend this argument through their concept of relational play-based pedagogy, which positions teaching as an in-the-moment, responsive practice that arises from children’s interests and thinking. Importantly, this framing disrupts linear assumptions about knowledge transmission. Instead, it suggests that pedagogy is co-constructed within relational encounters.

Within such encounters, play operates as a form of “writing” in at least three interrelated ways:

• Embodied writing: meaning expressed through movement, gesture, and spatial negotiation
• Material writing: meaning constructed through objects, environments, and resources
• Relational writing: meaning co-authored through interaction, dialogue, and shared imagination

Taken together, these forms destabilise narrow definitions of literacy and reposition play as a foundational semiotic system.

Theoretical critique: what is lost when play is narrowed

A persistent issue in early childhood policy is the tendency to translate play into outcomes that can be measured, recorded, or standardised. While accountability frameworks aim to ensure quality, they also risk what Biesta (2010) describes as the “learnification” of education, where complex pedagogical processes are reduced to simplified learning outputs.

Within this framing, play is often justified only insofar as it produces observable developmental gains. This creates a conceptual inversion: what is most valuable in play—its openness, ambiguity, and emergent meaning—is precisely what becomes least visible in systems of accountability.

Froebelian scholarship resists this reduction by emphasising play as intrinsically motivated, non-linear, and integrative (Bruce, 2012). Tina Bruce’s articulation of free-flow play highlights its resistance to external goals and its capacity to integrate cognitive, emotional, and relational experience into unified action. From this perspective, play cannot be fully captured through outcome-based frameworks because its value lies in process rather than product.

The implication is significant: when play is over-structured or over-documented, its epistemic function is altered. It becomes performance rather than meaning-making.

Relational pedagogy and the role of the practitioner

Reconceptualising play as writing also reshapes the role of the educator. The practitioner is no longer positioned as external observer or assessor of learning outcomes, but as participant within a shared meaning-making system.

In relational pedagogy, the educator’s task is not to extract evidence from play, but to engage with its unfolding logic. This requires attentiveness to children’s symbolic systems, narrative constructions, and relational negotiations. It also requires ethical restraint: recognising when interpretation supports meaning-making and when it risks closure.

This aligns strongly with Scottish early years frameworks such as Realising the Ambition: Being Me (Education Scotland, 2020), which emphasises responsiveness, relationships, and children’s agency. It also reflects the Care Inspectorate’s emphasis on high-quality interactions as central to children’s wellbeing and development.

Within this context, play is not an “activity area” but a pedagogical stance.

Inclusion and ethical dimensions

Understanding play as writing also carries implications for inclusion. For many children, particularly those with additional support needs, play provides a primary mode of communication. It enables expression beyond linguistic or cognitive constraints, allowing identity, emotion, and understanding to be communicated through alternative semiotic systems.

From this perspective, limiting recognition of play to verbal or recorded outcomes risks excluding forms of knowledge that are embodied, relational, and non-verbal. A more expansive understanding of play therefore becomes not only pedagogically robust but ethically necessary.

Concluding reflections

Reframing play as writing for all invites a shift in how early childhood education understands knowledge itself. It challenges the separation between play and learning, between literacy and play, and between pedagogy and experience.

Within Froebelian and relational traditions, play is not preparation for meaning-making—it is meaning-making. It is the process through which children come to inhabit, interpret, and transform their worlds.

To recognise play as writing is therefore to recognise children as authors of meaning from the very beginning of life.