It is widely acknowledged in the research literature that due to cultural differences across countries and communities, creating a universal definition of play that applies everywhere is challenging and perhaps even undesirable. In education, Play and Play-Based Learning (PBL) are culturally and socially situated constructs. Consequently, people from different cultures vary both in how play is perceived and in their understanding of the practices best designed to pedagogically support children’s learning and development through play. In the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the Early Childhood Education curriculum is based on the understanding of play and PBL identified and accepted in Western countries as best practice for supporting children’s learning and development. However, the Saudi social, cultural, and religious contexts differ markedly from those in Western educational settings and could therefore be expected to influence preschool teachers’ perspectives and practices of play and the relevant pedagogies they utilise, which may influence how preschool teachers understand and implement it. In this study, I explored Saudi female preschool teachers’ perspectives on play and how they conceptualised and enacted play and PBL in their teaching practice. This study was guided by a qualitative research design informed by social constructivism as a framework, and an indigenous methodology. The participants were 23 preschool teachers working in public, private, and charity-based settings. The data collected for this study were through first and second semi-structured interviews, lesson plans, and focus groups. The data were analysed manually using an inductive thematic approach. The findings showed that Saudi social, cultural, and religious factors played important roles in the preschool teachers’ constructions and understandings of play and PBL in supporting children’s learning and development. The teachers shared their understandings of different types of play, which included Outdoor play (Allaeib fi Alkharij) routines aligned with school, social, religious, and cultural contexts; Interest area activities (Allaeib fi Alarkan) as scripted play informed by the curriculum and society’s cultural norms and contexts; and Refreshment play (Allaeib Altanshitiu ) for when children had a little spare time at the end of a group activity. In each of these areas of play, teachers shared their understandings of how to support children’s learning through different pedagogical strategies.
The roles that preschool teachers enacted in these different forms of play varied based on their social, cultural values, the curriculum goals and their perspectives on the purpose for children’s play. Teachers’ roles were classified as: Mukhatat (Planner), Laeib Musharik (Co-player), Alqayid Almuyasir (Facilitating leader), Musharaf Al Muraqib (Supervising Observer), and, Mutawir Al Daeim (Developing Supporter). The preschool teachers also identified key challenges to implementation of the curriculum-based PBL practice, which arose from the entrenched societal gender-specific norms and expectations of mothers regarding their children’s educational activities and outcomes, together with the demands of supervisors and administrative performance evaluations of preschool teachers.
To overcome these barriers, I have proposed a practical model to culturally meld the Western and Saudi Arabia notions of play and PBL by creating a metaphorical model entitled, “Using a Date Palm Tree Metaphor for Play-Based Learning in the KSA”. ’The aim of this model and other recommendations arising from the study is to improve the cross-cultural transferability of the Western concept of Play-Based Learning and to offer a suitable and consistent framework for supporting children’s learning and development in ways relevant and applicable to the Saudi educational setting.