#269: Breaking Rules and Breaking Machines: Kindergarteners’ Negotiation of a Mathematical Playworld

This study investigates how kindergarteners negotiated their teacher’s established playworld and the mathematical implications that followed. Drawing from the literature on playworlds, we consider how children’s opportunities for defining playworlds, particularly in ways that are mathematical, are more or less constrained by the logics of K-12 schooling, the context of our analysis. Employing classroom video data, we examine the dimensions of one play-based task as they are reflected, extended, or challenged by three focal children, connecting those dimensions to their opportunities for mathematical learning. We find that children were generally more willing to negotiate contextual, social, and material rules of the playworld, but hesitant to play with mathematical expectations, thereby limiting the scope of their inquiry. We end by advocating for the inclusion of children’s negotiating power in school-based playworlds, as such contexts are arguably the most reluctant spaces to follow children's leads, particularly in relation to disciplinary content learning.