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Play Support Strategies of Preschool Teachers with Different Perspectives on Play and Its Role in Child’s Development
Developmental Psychology
Play Support Strategies of Preschool Teachers with Different Perspectives on Play and Its Role in Child’s Development

The recognition of play importance does not always lead to the creation of good conditions for its development. An attempt to turn play into classes, to use it for teaching, leads to the disappearance of spontaneous play from kindergartens. There is a gap between the declared pedagogical aim and real practice. This may be due to understanding the key features of play and its role in child’s development. The purpose of the study is to study what criteria teachers use to distinguish between play and a pseudo-play, how the understanding of play is related to the strategy of its support. Structured interviews, including commentary on 2 videos, were conducted with 34 preschool teachers. The assessment of the conditions for play development was carried out using the scale "Play Environmental Rating Scale" in 28 preschool classrooms (13 kindergartens). The average total score is 3,35 (sd=1,31; med=3,43), which corresponds to the minimal quality level of conditions for play. Key deficits are the participation of the teacher in joint play with children, the provision of conditions for multi-age interaction. Significant differences are revealed in the strategy of play support among teachers with a contrasting understanding of the pseudo-play video. Teachers who distinguish between play and pseudo-play and emphasize the developmental value of spontaneous children's play create a multifunctional play environment and more often participate in joint play as partners. Teachers who do not distinguish between a play and a pseudo-play are more often too didactic or outsiders, they create a realistic play environment. The results of the study can be used in elaboration of programs for teacher’s professional development.

Psychology of Laughter in a Structural-Dialectical Approach
Cultural-Historical Psychology: Traditions and Innovations
Psychology of Laughter in a Structural-Dialectical Approach

The article is devoted to the discussion of the psychology of laughter from the perspective of its functional purpose in culture. Addressing the topic of laughter is needed to describe its counterintuitive nature, consisting of dialectical contradictions. The study of the formation of laughter in children's subculture and its inclusion in the subject area of developmental psychology is of immediate interest. The purpose of the study is to determine the psychological significance of laughter in culture as a system of normative situations. We assumed that in a normative situation such as a biosocial unit of culture, laughter will manifest itself as a phenomenon of a binary nature, containing contrasting relations. The structural-dialectical method of analysis, which consists of the search for contrasts, made it possible to build an explanatory model of the phenomenon under study. In the capacity of binary pairs in the study of laughter as a psychological phenomenon, such antinomies as "freedom-fear", "good-evil", "world-antiworld" were singled out. Laughter as a psychological phenomenon has a dialectical structure in which fear gives rise to the desire for freedom; the cultural mission of laughter is associated with the discovery of evil as a violation of the norm and good as the inviolability of culture. The condition for overcoming fear and achieving illusory freedom through laughter is the displacement of evil into the unreal world, which leads to the supra-situation of the subject.

Determinants of Blended Teaching-Learning Performance in New Normal Environment: Exploring the Role of Teachers' Technostress as Mediation
Educational Psychology
Determinants of Blended Teaching-Learning Performance in New Normal Environment: Exploring the Role of Teachers' Technostress as Mediation

This research desires to analyze the determinants of blended teaching-learning performance in the new typical environment by exploring the role of teachers' technostress as mediation. This study uses a quantitative approach. Quantitative research methods aim to test the hypotheses that have been set. This approach uses numerical results from measurements made using a questionnaire about the study's variables. Using the complete sampling technique, which involves selecting the whole population as the research sample, it consisted of senior high school teachers in South Sumatra. The researchers used 712 research data in this investigation. The research used the structural approach of the Equation Model (SEM) and the intelligent application of PLS for analysis. According to the outcomes of this investigation, understanding technical and pedagogical content has a considerable positive impact on blended learning and teaching performance and teachers' technostress. Teachers' self-efficacy has a considerable positive impact on combined learning-teaching performance and blended teaching-learning performance and is significantly mediated by teachers' technological stress. Teacher experience significantly impacts teachers' technostress and is mediated considerably by teachers' technostress. Administration and school support show a considerable positive impact on blended teaching and learning performance and teachers' technostress, which is significantly mediated by teachers' technostress. Teachers' technological stress has a large positive effect on combined teaching-learning performance.