The Play of Art: Propensity and Pedagogy in Contemporary Chinese Early Childhood Education

Abstract

The standard educational gesture—in defense of its perceived secondary status relative to the “real world”—is to embed everything within its purview, such that even conceiving education as an art becomes a pedagogic imperative. In Anji County, China, we find an early childhood program (Anji Play) that uncouples play from this hierarchy of educational subordinations. Anji Play also appears to mirror Western examples of the integration of play and art, while at the same time suggesting a distinctly Chinese approach to play and to aesthetics. This article introduces some elements and principles of Anji Play, while proposing that they may prompt us to rethink the relations among art, play, and education in light of the current historical, cultural, and theoretical context.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.