Chapter 13: Serious Learners or Serious Players?: Revisiting the Concept of Learning Through Play in Hong Kong and German Classrooms

This chapter discusses learning through play in Hong Kong kindergartens¹ by examining the impact of Chinese culture on the ways in which play is enacted in the early years classroom. The challenges and dilemmas of play-based learning and teaching in the Hong Kong context with respect to the Western philosophical concepts of play are highlighted. Traditionally, Chinese children are required to be serious about their learning, and they are constantly encouraged to be guai ( well-behaved) and jing ( sedate or placid) in their daily lives. However, play-based learning, an imported pedagogical approach, emphasizes freedom in play; that is, children should be active learners, and play is their work. Such a view contrasts sharply with Chinese culture, in which learning is highly valued and play is deemed as unimportant or even a distraction from learning. In this chapter, we explore the interesting influence of this embedded cultural perspective on the behavioral expectations of children. Moreover, in view of the influence of jiao (: to teach) culture, Chinese teachers focus on their teaching repertoires instead of children’s learning, and tend to intervene in children’s play to ensure that the desired learning outcomes are achieved. As a result, the role of teachers as facilitators of learning through play may contradict their own concept of being a teacher. Therefore, not only their actions, but also the perceptions of their role are challenged by this pedagogy. By presenting a comparison of the enactment of play in a German classroom, this chapter examines the concept of learning through play by juxtaposing it in the European and Chinese contexts. From this, seriousness in learning/playing is identified as the tenet of practice in both Hong Kong and German classrooms. The chapter also revisits the conceptualization of learning through play from a sociocultural perspective.