Literature Review: Sand Play Therapy

750 Words3 Pages

1.0 LITERATURE REVIEW

1.1 Sand Play According to Burgess (2015), sand play therapy has been defined as a psychotherapeutic method that enables consumers to organize small figures in a sandbox or sand tray to create a ‘sand world’ compared to numerous extensions of his/her social reality. Vygotsky and his followers have argued, therefore, that children learn most effectively through social interaction, when they are involved in jointly constructing new understandings within their ZPD (Zone of Proximal Development). The use of sand in children’s programs has a long history, starting with a series of sand gardens developed in Berlin in the 1880s. These play areas, consisting of piles of sand encased in wooden borders, inspired the construction of America’s first supervised playgrounds: ten sand gardens in poor areas of Boston in 1887 (Frost 2010)
Learning is student-centered. The idea of student-centered learning is not a new, modern idea. It is, however, a characteristic of the educational theory known as constructivism. Educational theorists such as Dewey, Malaguzzi, and Piaget all wrote about student passion and curiosity acting as the driver of curriculum, rather than the traditional idea of memorization and recall (Hung, Tan &Koh, 2006). Dewey’s belief was that the subject areas of curriculum should come from the social activities of the child, and should not be taught in isolation of each other. (Bash, 2015) He wrote, “if education is life, all life has, from the

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