Transforming early childhood educators’ conceptions of “dark play” and popular culture
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In an online graduate-level early childhood education course, the authors sought to playfully disrupt and transform educators’ conceptions of children’s “dark play,” as provoked by contemporary popular culture. Embracing the imaginative potential of darkness and liminality, the course participants problematized and expanded their thinking concerning what constitutes children’s play scripts focused on themes of fear, power, and violence. Cognizant that some educators are reluctant and even refuse to allow children opportunities to engage in play centered on troubling social issues, the educators co-authored a fantastical tale, inspired by the Disney animation film Frozen, and included course topics, classroom observations, and their own childhood memories of “dark play.” Vivian Paley’s ideas about the connections between storytelling and play provided a creative impetus to the fictional narrative-imagining exercise, as did Hans-Georg Gadamer’s notion of Spiel. Eliciting the literature of children’s play experiences through fictional story-writing, and “play” as a contemporary aspect of creative thinking, the educators entered imaginary worlds of their own making. Unlike a traditional online graduate course format that often incorporates textual readings, posts, and responses, the authors strived to foster a virtual space in which the educators buttressed theories about play and imagination in a deeply felt, experiential, and playful manner. In creating an imaginary story based on the film, the participants gained a different understanding of the nature of play, and came to recognize how popular-culture play themes can provoke and strengthen children’s imaginative and abstract thinking, problem-solving skills, and emotional development. Likewise, this narrative experience showed the potential and role of “dark play” in initiating new ways of thinking and talking with children about the complex issues of the modern world.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".