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Record W4414204692 · doi:10.1080/21594937.2025.2544480

The risk of risky play to pedagogical possibilities

2025· article· en· W4414204692 on OpenAlex
Tatiana Zakharova

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.

Bibliographic record

VenueInternational Journal of Play · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicEducational Environments and Student Outcomes
Canadian institutionsEducation and Early Childhood DevelopmentCapilano University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsRisk perception

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Risky play considerations currently drive much of the discussions about children’s play (particularly outdoors) and play environments, with praise-filled dithyrambs solidifying its naturalization and benefits for children’s development. Through critical discourse analysis of ten Canadian provincial early-learning and care framework texts, which hold influence over regimes of professional practice and milieu of early childhood education, this article investigates risky play as a responsibility of both children and educators. I argue that narrow conceptualizations of risky play, combined with the unexamined popularization of the construction itself, is harmful beyond simply being insufficient. That is, in the way it is currently understood and promoted, risky play forwards a neoliberal figure of a child obligated to put themselves in pathways of potential harm, and a figure of educator-technician tasked with remaining objective and rational. Through analysis of these figurations, I suggest that dominant discourses around risky play foreclose the formation of pedagogies able to address the density of complex problems of the twenty-first century, precluding the possibilities of early childhood education as a political practice.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.420
Threshold uncertainty score0.194

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.034
GPT teacher head0.424
Teacher spread0.389 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it