Internationally, children experience an increased focus on learning in early childhood education (ECE), reducing the time they play during ECE. At the same time, children’s free play areas are being reduced (Korkodilos, 2016), along with the opportunity for play due to organized leisure time after school (Broch et al., 2022), and because children are starting school earlier. Paradoxically, play is important for children’s learning and contributes to increased curiosity, wonder, and learning motivation. It is also important for children’s sense of belonging in society, social relationships, and physical and mental quality of life (e.g. Russ et al., 1999; Brussoni et al., 2015). In Norway, a new curriculum demands that pupils learn about increased life quality through interdisciplinary teaching but also suggests that play should be included in teaching to promote creative and meaningful learning (Ministry of Education and Research, 2017). Research shows that teachers often let pupils play, but they have little experience and knowledge of how play can both promote learning and secure the quality of life of their pupils (Bjerknes & Skalstad, 2022). By constructing a “Conceptual PlayWorld,” familiar from early childhood education in Australia (Fleer, 2019), one teacher educator and six student teachers set out to teach pupils in 2^nd grade. The certified teacher was an observer together with another teacher educator. We asked, how can applying CPW as a teaching approach in science contribute to holistic learning in elementary school?

Through interviews, we asked what all adult participants experienced and observed. We then used thematic analysis to categorize the themes.

Our results show that the Conceptual PlayWorld not only taught pupils within-subject concepts and understanding but also promoted pupils’ quality of life and interdisciplinary understanding during their learning process.  

Six student teachers (STs) and their teacher educator (TE) set out to construct a CPW in a classroom with 18 pupils. They followed the CPW model for teaching science in play-based settings (Fleer, 2019). In general, this model contains five steps: 1) chose a story for the play, 2) make a PW that the pupils and teachers can enter together, 3) enter the PW, 4) plan for concepts and challenges through which learning can take place, and 5) assign the pupil and teacher roles. In this study, the CPW took place in different rooms in an imaginary hospital. In Table 1, we show how these steps were played out in our study. The STs/TE entered the hospital rooms together with the pupils, where they had roles as assistant doctors together with the pupils (who were patients and/or doctors). The STs/TE used scientific concepts during the play. After visiting all five hospital rooms, the pupils and STs/TE exited the CPW together. The following day, the pupils used BookCreator to write digital books in Norwegian class called “My day in the hospital.” In these books, the pupils presented their experiences during the CPW in both text and pictures. The books were used as part of the pupils’ homework to train their reading and writing skills. We used semi-structured interviews. Semi-structured interviews offer additional depth to information supplied by questionnaires or fully structured interviews by inviting dialogic exchange. By doing so, the researcher actively constructs knowledge in partnership with the respondent, who constructs answers to questions that may require them to consider issues in a depth not explicitly previously explored (Fontana & Frey, 2000). All three audio recordings were transcribed verbatim and anonymized before analysis. The method of thematic analysis was used to evaluate the data (Braun & Clarke, 2006), consisting of six steps: 1) familiarization with the data, 2) generating initial codes, 3) searching for themes, 4) reviewing themes, 5) defining and naming themes, and 6) producing the manuscript. Notably, this method of analysis is recursive, meaning that each subsequent step in the analysis might have prompted us to circle back to earlier steps in light of newly emerged themes or data (Kiger & Varpio, 2020).

Our research adds to the limited knowledge on how CPW can be used as a teaching method in school. We saw that CPW promotes learning within subjects in school and contributes to learning interdisciplinarily, authentically, and socially. Because learning was perceived as meaningful, relevant, and fun, the pupils were motivated to take part in the activities and to gain new knowledge, which may have contributed to their well-being. The fact that the CPW was perceived as relevant, as the pupils experienced that they needed the knowledge to solve the tasks, was an important factor in this respect. The CPW also contributed to positive relationships both between the pupils and between the pupils and their teacher. These positive experiences in a learning process, together with an experience of being in a safe place where they could be themselves, may have contributed to facilitating later learning. The STs, TE, and CT had positive experiences with using the method and found it to be a suitable method for elementary school. Having enough time is essential when planning to use a CPW in school. It is also important that the teacher has faith that the method works. Thus, the results show that the use of the CPW as a method for teaching science in school contributes to holistic learning in the forms of both academic and social learning. The pupils learn through practice-oriented, relevant experiences in which academic and practical learning are set in a relevant context.

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