Reimagining Play: Navigating the Contemporary Challenges in Early Childhood Education
University of Iceland School of Education, Hagatorg 1, 107 Reykjavík Directions
Thu Oct 08 2026 10:30
Reimagining Play: Navigating the Contemporary Challenges in Early Childhood Education
Play is essential for children’s early learning, yet its role in education has diminished amid academic pressures and standardized assessments. This keynote highlights the need to reassert play as a legitimate pedagogy, emphasizing its role in fostering higher-order thinking, problem-solving, resilience, and creativity-skills vital for literacy and lifelong learning.
Teachers face challenges balancing demands for measurable outcomes with parental concerns and misconceptions about play’s value. Social inequities further complicate access to rich play experiences, deepening educational disparities. The keynote advocates for recognizing play as children’s authentic work, a culturally grounded and cognitively rich mode of learning that surpasses isolated skills instruction in building literacy foundations.
Reclaiming play requires specialized teacher preparation, careful observation, and honoring children’s natural ways of meaning-making. This renewed commitment is crucial to ensuring equitable, effective early childhood education that nurtures holistic development and lifelong learning.
To illustrate innovative approaches and evidence-based practices in play pedagogy, research projects from the Discovery Play Centre will be shared, providing valuable insights and practical examples.
Anne Burke Bio
Dr. Anne Burke is a Professor in Literacy Education, Early Learning & Digital Media in the School of Education at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada.
She is the Project Lead for the Discovery Play Centre at Memorial’s Faculty of Education. She researches and writes in the fields of children’s play lives, children’s voices and agency, visual literacy and children’s literature, multimodality, teacher education, and the growth of children’s digital and immersive lives. Much of her research embraces social justice pedagogies and is conducted in partnership with cultural institutions, schools, and early years centres.
Her current research in Canadian classrooms focuses on advocating for children’s voice and agency through innovative teaching pedagogies in community partnerships. Anne has published numerous books, book chapters, and peer-reviewed articles
