Search

As more countries align their curricular frameworks with play-based and experiential pedagogies, this paper provides a critical insight into the benefits and challenges that arise in practice when a play-based approach to learning and teaching becomes a political directive in Northern Ireland primary schools. Drawing on socio-constructivist and post-structural thinking, the messages from Foundation Stage teachers and the learning experiences provided are unravelled through the researchers' interpretive lens, exposing for critique two key discourses about the relationship between play as policy and practice – namely play as learning and play as pedagogy. Although this study may have raised more questions than answers about the debate, the authors conclude, in so doing, it has facilitated an original troubling of the established discourse and added to the knowledge base about the politicisation of play as practice in the early years of primary schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There has been much debate in recent years about the future of primary language teaching in England, Scotland and Wales but relatively little discussion about the situation in Northern Ireland. This paper seeks to set the policy context in Northern Ireland where the provision for primary languages lags behind other regions of the United Kingdom and where the recently revised Northern Ireland curriculum has failed to make modern foreign language learning a statutory entitlement for pupils in primary schools. A number of positive but largely uncoordinated developments in primary language teaching in the province are examined but the conclusion is reached that, given the striking absence of languages as a statutory entitlement in the revised primary curriculum, the long-term future of language teaching in Northern Ireland remains regrettably insecure. A number of key proposals are outlined to remedy the situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]