Unsettling the Play-based Approach by thinking with ghosts and haunting

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this artistic essay using (re)photography, we analyse two interactions in a Washington DC, classroom that features a play-based approach to child development. The pioneers of early childhood education helped frame play as a method of learning. However, the racial memory of a place continuously disturbs this pioneering conceptualisation of the play-based approach. Adopting Avery Gordon’s (2008) notion of haunting, this essay unsettles the play-based approach to learning by evoking our sense of unease, which derives from articulating children’s play with the racial history of the local community. We invite the readers into our affective connections with the place to show how child’s play becomes a gesture by which to create a space to remember or honour a ghost. In doing so, we hope to show how we critically mobilised the pioneering conceptualisation of the play-based approach.