New Open eBook publication: Play-based Teaching Approaches
A new open eBook invites educators to look more closely at learning through play
Play can look light, spontaneous and wonderfully unfinished. But within it, children are testing ideas, building relationships, making choices, taking risks and showing us how they understand their worlds. That rich and sometimes messy learning landscape sits at the heart of Deakin’s newest open eBook, Play-based teaching approaches: Assessing learning through play. Edited by Dr Naomi David, Kat Cain, Professor Andrea Nolan, Dr Natalie Robertson, Sarah Fennelly, and Christian Bass, the resource invites educators to explore what play can reveal about learning and how assessment might sit alongside play without reducing it to a checklist. It’s designed for educators working across early childhood settings and primary schools. Interactive activities, reflective exercises, practical examples and multimedia elements encourage readers to do more than move through information. They’re invited to pause, notice, question, try things in practice and return with new observations.
This book focuses on the potentials in play-based approaches to enrich children’s learning. It is also however a tool to support teachers. The OER platform recognises the important role that teacher’s play in a national landscape. As a product the aims of the book are to be engaging, interpretative and socially just in its access. – Dr Naomi David
A resource that has been peopled
This eBook has been a long time in the thinking, doing, rethinking and making. Its development reflects the philosophy of Peopling Technologies, an approach that asks us to begin with people, relationships and experiences rather than with the technology itself. An eBook isn’t automatically engaging because it’s digital. Nor is a resource meaningfully open simply because it can be downloaded. The real design questions are more human ones. Who will arrive here? What knowledge and experience will they bring? What will help them feel invited into the ideas? Where can they interact, reflect and make the learning their own?
An open eBook shouldn’t feel like content has simply been placed on a screen. It should feel like someone has thought carefully about who will arrive, what they might already know, what will invite them in and what could help them take the next step in their practice. That’s what peopling technology means to me. – Kat Cain
Those questions shaped both the resource and the way it was made. Teaching experts, educational designers, video developers, open education practitioners and other contributors brought different ways of seeing to the work. The result isn’t one person’s content polished into a digital product. It’s a shared learning experience, built through conversation, creative negotiation and the joining together of different kinds of expertise.
Open, so the ideas can keep moving
The project began with the support of a Deakin Library OER Grant awarded in 2021 and is the latest open textbook to be published through Deakin Open eBooks. Publishing the resource openly allows its ideas to travel. It can move into classrooms, teaching teams, professional learning conversations and new educational settings. Educators can encounter it in different places, bring their own experiences to it and use it to begin further conversations about play, learning and assessment.
Deakin Library warmly thanks and congratulates everyone who contributed to the resource: Professor Andrea Nolan, Dr Naomi David, Dr Natalie Robertson, Kat Cain, Professor Louise Paatch, Associate Professor Liz Rouse, Dr Virginia Kinnear, Associate Professor Anne-Marie Morrissey, Deb Moore, Sarah Fennelly, Emeka Anele, and Christian Bass.
Explore Play-based teaching approaches: Assessing learning through play on Deakin Open eBooks.
Register to attend the book launch, 2:00 – 2:45pm, August 18, 2026 (online event, open to the public): Play-based Teaching Approaches – Book Launch
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