Resistance Stories Tea Party: Generating dialogues of hope on children’s right to play in early childhood and the urgency of advocacy, activism and resistance to formal approaches to learning

The subject of this workshop is the urgency of addressing how in early childhood education and care (ECEC) settings, children's play is often marginalised. We propose there is an urgent dialogue required on how restrictions on play limit physically active, social and independent experiences. Drawing on recent research, we ask questions about why more formal instruction is prioritised through policies, assessment demands, and inspection procedures (Albin-Clark and Archer, 2023; Archer and Albin-Clark, 2022; Roberts-Holmes and Moss, 2021). Our workshop is designed to be a playful and dialogic space for tutors and students that takes the form of a tea party, with tea pots, cups, saucers and tablecloths. What we ask of participants is to bring biscuits and a willingness to engage in playful dialogue. Through using open ended questions on the themes of play, activism, advocacy and resistance, we aim to open dialogues over the teacups through a playful disturbance of the AcademicConferenceMachine (Bennozzo et al. 2019) by upending who has authority, knowledge and control of narratives. By posing questions, we aim to generate conversations about why resistance is needed; what can hopeful flourishing pedagogies do? how are resistances enacted? what impact can resistance stories have for generating hopefulness? In doing so, we aim to create hopeful dialogic spaces about why and how resistance happens and what kinds of actions are possible to generate and actively seek ways for play to flourish in higher education, research and in schools and settings.
Albin-Clark J, Archer N (2023) Playing social justice: How do early childhood teachers enact the right to play through resistance and subversion? PRISM: Casting New Light on Learning, Theory and Practice 5(2): 47–66.
Archer N, Albin-Clark J (2022) Telling stories that need telling: A dialogue on resistance in early childhood education. Forum (Chicago) 64(2): 21–29.
Benozzo, A., Carey, N., Cozza, M., Elmenhorst, C., Fairchild, N., Koro-Ljungberg, M. and Taylor, C., 2019. Disturbing the AcademicConferenceMachine: Post-qualitative re-turnings. Gender, Work and Organization, 26(2), pp.87-106.
Roberts-Holmes G, Moss P (2021) Neoliberalism and Early Childhood Education. Abingdon: Routledge.