Abstract
Learning through play is fundamental for school readiness and school performance because children learn and enhance their cognitive, emotional, and physical development through play. The modality of child play as pedagogy can be harnessed to assist student teachers in planning various play-based lesson types. However, the use of play to achieve curriculum goals is not widely prevalent in South Africa. A reason could be that teachers lack the skills needed to purposefully use play to teach curriculum themes. A review of the literature on guided play shows that there is very little written about preparing preservice teachers to purposefully use guided play to attain curriculum themes. To address this gap the study focused on preparing preservice first-year student teachers to purposefully incorporate guided play in their lessons.
The aim of the study was to evaluate the initial design of a course on guided play as a pedagogy for Grade R1 in a preservice teacher education programme, in terms of validity, feasibility and effectiveness, in order to arrive at well-grounded design principles for such a course. The research question that guided the study was: What design principles could constitute a valid, feasible, and effective design for a course on guided play for Grade R in a preservice teacher education programme?
The research unfolded in three phases. The first phase constituted analysis and exploration and involved problem identification, justification of the intervention based on the available literature, articulation of the initial design principles, and the design of the course. The second phase was the implementation phase which involved generating and analysing data based on guiding questions for data collection. Data were collected from first-year foundation phase student teachers who were enrolled in the B.Ed. foundation phase programme. Although the entire cohort was involved in parts of the study, twenty student teachers were selected to study in depth. The last phase was the final reflection phase which involved assessing the initial design principles using the criteria of validity, feasibility, and effectiveness.
1 Grade R is the equivalent of kindergarten in some countries (Van der Berg et al., 2013).
x
The study concluded that despite gaps, the design principles served the course that was developed well, and the refined design principles are sufficiently instructive to be useful for designing a similar course within other contexts.