2026/01/26 by Peng Xu, Jenny Ritchie, Elisabeth Jacob · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Art Education and Development #Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights #Indigenous and Place-Based Education
paper · doi:10.1080/00131911.2026.2619089
openalex publication_date 2026/01/26 · openalex created_date 2026/01/27 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/15
Currently, the dominant globalised discourses of children’s play in early childhood care and education (ECCE) are those from the West, and therefore non-Western pedagogies remain relegated. In Aotearoa New Zealand, Indigenous languages, cultures and pedagogies have been marginalised through the process of colonisation, which imposed Western pedagogies via an English language education system. Considering the limited scholarship on children’s play in relation to histories of colonisation, this paper aims to demonstrate the mobilisation of Indigenous culture in children’s play in Aotearoa and explores how this can be supported through the pedagogies employed by kindergarten teachers. A postcolonial perspective involving a critical analysis of discourses and power was employed to assist the analysis of this ethnographic study. Through analysing group interviews with teachers, videos of children’s daily play, and pedagogical documentation, this paper presents the data arranged by three themes which resonate with Te Whāriki, the Aotearoa early childhood curriculum: (1) Ngā hononga – children’s responsive and reciprocal relationships with people, places and things; (2) Whānau tangata – the engagement of children’s family and whānau; and (3) Whakamana – empowering young children in daily play. By examining how Indigenous culture was mobilised in children’s play in one Aotearoa kindergarten, this paper suggests that Indigenous worldviews can enrich Western understandings of children’s play and contribute to the empowerment of children through play.