Playing Heritage: Loose Parts and Traditional Emirati Play as Pathways to Culture and Identity in Early Childhood

Author Information

Alueshima Jennifer Shaapera, Blossom Nursery & Preschool, United Arab Emirates
Nguyilan Shaaji, Emirates National School, United Arab Emirates

Abstract

Early years settings commonly approach culture through what can be seen and displayed: national day celebrations, dress-up corners, food festivals, and themed weeks. Such experiences have their place, but they tend to hand culture to children as content rather than as something children live and remake. This paper reports an action research study carried out across five early years settings in the United Arab Emirates, in which educators drew on traditional Emirati play to design open-ended loose parts invitations for children aged three and four. The materials were deliberately ordinary—shells, stones, seeds, sand, fabric, baskets, and recycled objects—chosen both for their resemblance to what Emirati children once played with and for their refusal to dictate a single use. Across successive cycles of planning, enactment, observation and reflection, we generated pedagogical documentation, educator reflective journals and structured observations, and analysed them thematically. Loose parts worked as cultural mediators: shells became pearls, lengths of fabric became majlis spaces, and sand became terrain for storytelling and role play. Values associated with hospitality, generosity, collaboration and community recurred across all five settings, and they surfaced in what children did rather than in what they could say. Children also departed from the traditions that had inspired the invitations, folding in their own preoccupations and inventing variants—behaviour better described as interpretive reproduction than as transmission. We argue that culturally grounded loose parts play offers early years settings a workable alternative to representational approaches, and that it positions young children as participants in cultural life rather than as its audience.

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• Category: Learning Experiences, Student Learning & Learner Diversity

Posted by James Alexander Gordon

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