Within the Turkish early education context, play is a strongly recommended teaching practice in the national curriculum. Similarly, play-based teaching strategies are valued worldwide as the most developmentally appropriate practice for early education (Copple & Bredekamp, 2009). However, there is still little consensus on a formal definition of play (Sutton-Smith, 1997), and the type of activities that can be considered play (Cheng & Johnson, 2010). This lack of consensus causes a discrepancy in beliefs about how play should be integrated into the early years of schooling (Bubikova-Moan et al., 2019). On the other hand, in the literature, there are some agreed-upon conceptions observed in various play definitions such as “joy, intrinsic motivation, individuality, autonomy, and learning opportunities” (Rodriguez-Meehan, 2021, p.2) that support the basis of the developmental perspective of teacher education programs.

In recent years, the developmental perspective toward play, the foundation of play-based strategies, has been criticized. Researchers warn us that “pedagogization of play” (Rogers, 2013) and controlling children’s play could reduce it to learning outcomes instead of a rich and multifaceted activity (Wood, 2009). However, it is not possible to suggest that the developmental perspective is fully implemented to practice to observe these criticized outcomes. Research shows that teachers have difficulty conceptualizing play due to the complexity of this concept (Fesseha & Pyle, 2016) and implementing play-based teaching strategies in their classrooms (Copple & Bredekamp, 2009). Therefore, the relevancy of these discussions needs to be addressed in teacher education research.

Pre-service teachers construct new conceptions about play shaped by the preconceptions they have brought into the learning environment and agreed-upon definitions of play thought in their professional training, and these conceptions could influence their future practice (Sherwood & Reifel, 2010). Thus, it is crucial to investigate pre-service teachers’ conceptions of play to develop effective teacher education programs and support better play-based teaching practices. Findings of research utilizing single semiotic data sources like interviews or surveys suggest that early childhood pre-service teachers’ often connect play with learning in their conceptions of play (Fernández-Oliveras & Oliveras, 2014; Lewis, 2014), or they consider play less important and not essential as children’s development and learning. (Sherwood & Reifel, 2010). In contrast, findings of research collecting data from multiple semiotic sources combining interviews, visual aids, documents, or other data sources suggest that pre-service teachers could not easily connect play and learning and overlook the skills embedded in play that could be related to learning outcomes (Rodriguez-Meehan, 2021). When pre-service teachers are directly asked to define play, the answers might align with the definitions introduced in their training but not represent the meaning or the conceptions they associate with play. The discrepancy observed in the research findings on children’s play could be attributed to their different methodological approaches. Therefore, this study investigates early childhood pre-service teachers’ conceptions of children’s play through the multimodal discourse analysis of their written and visual representations presented in self-prepared posters.

This study investigates early childhood pre-service teachers’ conceptions of children’s play and whether these conceptions are context-dependent. Utilizing Kress’s (2013) multimodal discourse analysis framework, and postulating that reaching a comprehensive account of the pre-service teachers’ conception of play requires information gathered from multiple semiotic sources, this study investigates the pre-service teachers’ written and visual representations of play in their self-prepared posters. Convenient sampling was used for this study. Among the pre-service teachers enrolled in a course on ‘Children’s Play,’ during the 2020-21 academic year at a public university in Turkey, 30 of them agreed to participate in the study by giving written consent. The participants consisted of mostly females (3 males and 27 females), which was similar to the percentage of the gender distribution of the program. Pre-service teachers received a semester-long course on children’s play. Towards the end of this course, they were asked to prepare two posters representing “What play is?”. Participants were given simple instructions regarding the posters. Posters should include written slogans and clear visuals to represent their conception of play. Still, they were allowed to be creative and use any available material without restrictions. The posters were intended for two different audiences, namely children and adults to investigate whether/how pre-service teachers’ representation differs for different age groups. Posters were analyzed separately by both researchers untill a consensus was reached, providing two distinctive perspectives since one of the researchers was the instructor of the course and the other had no interactions with the participants. The obtained data were divided into two groups based on their audience. The same analysis procedure was followed for each group. First, the analysis of the written text, the slogans, was conducted; common themes and shared characteristics, as well as the exceptional cases, were determined. Second, visuals used in the posters were analyzed to reveal the common themes and shared characteristics, as well as the exceptional cases. Also, each poster was analyzed individually to reveal whether the text and the visuals were consistent, or if observed discrepancies suggested any alternative conceptions. After these analyses, posters were analyzed as a whole to reveal the participating early childhood preservice teachers’ conceptions of play based on the specific audiences. Finally, for each participant, whether/how his/her representations differ for different age groups was analyzed and general tendencies observed regarding the conceptions of play in the whole data were investigated.

The preliminary multimodal analysis of the pre-service teachers’ posters revealed that in general, their conception of play is comparable, embedded, and closely connected to life and the world around them. ‘Play is life’ was the most frequently observed phrase and images of the world were frequently used in the posters. Moreover, the posters that were designed for children and adults alike emphasize the desire to play at any age. On the other hand, in the posters designed for children, the preservice teachers emphasized being fun and joyful while pointing out the role of play in children’s development and the ways it supports their social skills in the posters designed for adults. Of the 30 participants, only two of them addressed play as an aid for learning. These posters contained the definitions of play that were presented to them during the course. These findings suggest that pre-service teachers have some shared conceptions about children’s play which are general and metaphoric. The findings also show us that even though some essence of pre-service teachers’ conception of play does not change according to their audience, some aspects of their conception could be dependent on the social settings and audiences. Therefore, how they communicate with researchers and how they communicate with children based on these conceptions might differ. Even though the data was collected after a semester-long course on children’s play discussing how play can be used for teaching and assessing young children, the results suggest that “pedagogization of play” (Rogers, 2013) was not part of pre-service teachers’ conception of play. Considering the discussions regarding the pedagogization of play in the field, this conclusion also raises the question of whether what we discuss in academia actually translates into practice, and how relevant our efforts are to future teachers’ professional lives.

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