A play-based curriculum for emancipation and cultural competence

When schools aim at fostering children’s flourishing, that is, supporting the personal and social development of children and improving children’s ways of participating in sociocultural practices, new ways of classroom teaching are badly needed. Instead of equipping children mechanically with twenty-first- century skills and pieces of academic knowledge, we should assist them in building the social and cognitive competences they need for better participation in relevant sociocultural practices. In this chapter, I will reconceptualize the notion of play from the perspective of cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT). I will argue that a play-based curriculum starting from this view of play provides optimal conditions for all children to build the desired cultural competences and to use these in an emancipated (reflective and self-dependent) way. In a play-based curriculum, all children can be invited to participate on a voluntary basis, share in the control of the current practice, and be addressed for their personal and social qualities, due to the open and rule-guided character of play activities. The argument in this chapter will be supported by examples taken from research and classroom practices in Developmental Education schools in the Netherlands, which starts from a CHAT point of view.