The risk of risky play to pedagogical possibilities

Risky play considerations currently drive much of the discussions about children’s play (particularly outdoors) and play environments, with praise-filled dithyrambs solidifying its naturalization and benefits for children’s development. Through critical discourse analysis of ten Canadian provincial early-learning and care framework texts, which hold influence over regimes of professional practice and milieu of early childhood education, this article investigates risky play as a responsibility of both children and educators. I argue that narrow conceptualizations of risky play, combined with the unexamined popularization of the construction itself, is harmful beyond simply being insufficient. That is, in the way it is currently understood and promoted, risky play forwards a neoliberal figure of a child obligated to put themselves in pathways of potential harm, and a figure of educator-technician tasked with remaining objective and rational. Through analysis of these figurations, I suggest that dominant discourses around risky play foreclose the formation of pedagogies able to address the density of complex problems of the twenty-first century, precluding the possibilities of early childhood education as a political practice.