In the following presentation, pedagogy and play in childhood education were investigated; with the purpose of identifying scientific production about pedagogy and play in childhood in the educational context, from January 2018 to December 2022.

The research was quantitative, descriptive cross-sectional. It was implemented through a systematic review of literature, which allowed us to know the main contributions to the study and enable the interpretation of the data in a specific period of time, to examine the definitions, characteristics and conditions about the three key terms of this research: pedagogy, play and childhood. All this, as a state of scientific advance.

From a quantitative perspective, the main results were: the year of greatest production was 2022 (36.36%); The three countries with a significant number of published articles are South Africa, the United Kingdom and Chile; An important part of the documents analyzed have as population and sample, boys and girls from 3 to 7 years old; The most used type of research and design is qualitative (63.60%) and case study (27.3%).

Regarding the qualitative analysis, the most relevant findings were: pedagogy is connected to sociocultural theory and one of the most significant exponents is María Montessori. It is characterized by interaction with peers and adults and the main mediator is play; The game is defined as an activity between two people and has a purpose and rules. It has two characteristics, the first one is its social value and the second one is the technology-education connection to support educational practices; Finally, childhood is associated with sociocultural theory based on a reciprocal action between natural development, the individual and other people. One of its main aspects is the game as a facilitator of learning, development of social skills and norms.

From the study it is concluded that the production of knowledge about pedagogy and play in childhood in the educational context is linked to the sociocultural development of the boy and girl and that the main mediator is the game.

Keywords: Pedagogy, play, childhood, systematic literature review.