'Playing Social Justice': How Do Early Childhood Teachers Enact the Right to Play through Resistance and Subversion?

In this paper we narrate how playful pedagogies can resist the single story of formalised learning discourses in early childhood education and care. According to Wood (2015), play is fundamental to learning and established in international literature. In addition, through international treaties, children have the right to play (OHCHR, 1989). Yet, in contemporary outcomes-driven policy, formalised teaching has become normalised. Play is thus marginalised and positioned as a privilege, rather than as a right. Here, we position play in relation to democracy, equity, and social justice, by storying how two teachers facilitate the right to play, and we argue this is a fruitful sub-context for resistance. From this perspective, teachers' resistances do not just enable play, they embody and enact representative and democratic justice. First, the teachers in our study story representative forms of social justice in moral and ethical terms. They describe making play happen as an embodiment of 'being the right thing'. Second, teachers enact democratic forms of social justice through resistance actions. Such actions are positioned as moral acts described as 'doing the right thing' but carry risks as they attract scrutiny that entangles an emotional vulnerability.