The Role of Place and Play in Young Children’s Language and Literacy

Dominant assumptions about place tend to be defined in relation to urban communities. To assume a singular construction of urban places misrepresents the experiences, perspectives, and identities of urban children, making their identities become invisible to researchers, educators, and curriculum developers.

Sharing a wide range of perspectives, The Role of Place and Play in Young Children’s Language and Literacy sheds light on language and literacy learning in play-based early childhood settings where place plays an important role in teaching and learning. Drawing on geographic contexts, including northern rural and Indigenous communities, and giving voice to educational leaders in Indigenous professional learning contexts, as well as speech-language pathologists, this book joins forces with literacy and early childhood education researchers to create an interdisciplinary collage of theory, research, and practice.

Bringing place and play together, a concept Shelley Stagg Peterson and Nicola Friedrich call playce-based learning, this book provides new and compelling ways to think about equity and educational opportunity in the language and literacy development of young children, and offers spaces for them to construct their own identities in positive ways.

Shelley Stagg Peterson is a professor in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at University of Toronto.
Nicola Friedrich is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at University of Toronto.