Play, pedagogy and power: a reinterpretation of research using a Foucauldian lens
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Early childhood education is steeped both in historical and ideological traditions which value play as a powerful pedagogy. From an Irish perspective, early years research tends to be framed with a sociocultural perspective. This research presents a reinterpretation of play episodes using a Foucauldian lens. It documents a re-imagination of research which was originally concerned with sociodramatic play interventions. The research took place in settings with designated disadvantaged status, in the Republic of Ireland, with children aged 3–6 years. The new reinterpretation of the data outlined in this paper indicates that by adopting an alternative lens, new discourse around power dynamics in play emerges. The reimagining of the data offers new insights into play pedagogy and the ways in which children seek and find power in play episodes. The results are also used to illuminate how educators can work positively with an awareness of power dynamics. The results of the reinterpretation are used to present a challenge to dominant ideologies within the discourse of research in early childhood education.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.027 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.016 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.150 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.026 | 0.027 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".