Young children’s concept formation: A cultural-historical study of children’s imaginative play within everyday family practices in China

Stereotypes tend to pervade the debates on Chinese parents’ expectation of their children’s academic achievement and if or how they value play. Yet little is known about the relationship between play and concept formation, as well as how play and conceptual learning are set up through specific activity settings in Chinese families. Vygotsky’s (1966) concept of play is the creation of an imaginary situation. From this point of view, children’s engagement in play may largely be directed towards a process of abstraction and generalization of the meaning, which is in the essence of concept formation (Vygotsky, 1987a, 1987b). This study is aimed at investigating the links between play and young children’s concept formation in Chinese families.
   
   This study adopted an in-depth qualitative case study following the dialectical-interactive approach within the cultural-historical paradigm. Four parents and two children (a boy and a girl) participated from two families (with only one child in each) in Mainland China. The children were around three years at the beginning of this study. The two participating families were recruited through educators in a public kindergarten, and were intentionally selected considering their similar socio-economic status. The data were collected over two main observation periods (3.5 months and 3 months with an interval of 10 months) through digital video observations of children’s participation in everyday family activities (especial family play), videoed parent interviews and parents’ participated filming of the activities they are valued. The analysis of data has been carried out by means of three main levels of interpretations, namely, common sense interpretation, situated practice interpretation, and interpretation on a thematic level (Hedegaard, 2008c) in order to get rich and comprehensive understanding of children’s everyday family practices in relation to play and learning within Chinese cultural context.
   
   This thesis is conducted in the format of a thesis by publication. The important study results are reported through the four publications. Overall, the study finds that the shared imaginary situation between parents and a child in family collective play provides the conditions for the child’s concept formation. The shared sustained imaginary situation created through family collective play shows its importance in a child’s motive orientation towards parents’ valued conceptual learning (Publication 1), in the child’s potential conscious awareness of certain scientific phenomenon (Publication 2), in mediating the child’s conceptual thinking through sharable pretend signs (Publication 3) and in fostering the child’s exploration of the ideal descriptions of certain conceptual rules (Publication 4). The findings indicate that children’s family collective play is in relation to their concept formation in Chinese families. In this study it has been demonstrated that play has its role in creating the potential (or ZPD) of a
child’s concept formation.
   
   A new conception of children’s imaginative play and its role in their concept formation has been synthesized, which provides extended understanding of Vygotsky’s concept of play. Methodologically, this study is evident in how meaningful the cultural-historical approach can frame the study to investigate a child’s process and mechanism of concept formation during family play. In addition, this study provides the local knowledge in relation to the links between play and learning in informal settings, which pedagogically contributes to how play can be understood and utilized in informal settings in early childhood education.