This paper discusses a study of playworlds, arguing that this study provides an example of the study of emotion in educational settings that does not segregate emotion and cognition. Playworlds are created from a relatively new form of play that combines adult forms of creative imagination (art, science, etc.), which require extensive experience, and children’s forms of creative imagination (play), which require the embodiment of ideas and emotions in the material world. In playworlds, adults and children enter into a common fantasy that is designed to support the development of both adults and children. Our research group understands playworlds and the study of playworlds holistically, as ways of being; and thus, our research is in line with participatory approaches, which study education through long-term researcher-practitioner collaboration. In the study discussed in this paper, the segregation of emotion and cognition was avoided by the researchers appreciating that playworlds are, in part, art, and designing their methods accordingly. 

Gunilla Lindqvist (1995), a foundational scholar of Vygotsky’s theories of play, art and development, designed playworlds to identify and study the “common denominator” of play and aesthetic forms. Lindqvist (1995) calls this denominator “the aesthetics of play” and we have described playworlds as “an art of development” (Marjanovic-Shane et al., 2011). It is difficult for scientists who are working alone, without artists, to adequately describe art or subjects that are art-adjacent. The researchers in the study under discussion, thus, followed insights from an artist’s study of art – a study which avoided the segregating of emotion from cognition – and so collected observations of playworlds that the responts “fell in love with” from playworld reasearchers and practitioners (including teachers, artists, children and imaginary characters); generating an unusual corpus of insights for analysis. 

We investigate the concept of care in adult-child joint play through two cases that illustrate ways in which the development of care relations among researchers, pedagogues, and children—and the imaginary characters they create through their joint play—shape and sustain early childhood education and care research and practice. We focus on the ways that early childhood education and care pedagogues’ approaches to care provide insights into practices of social sustainability, specifically social inclusion. The cases we present are drawn from recent studies of early childhood play. The studies belong to a corpus of international research projects that are researcher-teacher collaborations. These studies explore a unique form of adult-child joint imaginary play known as playworlds. Playworlds are based on cultural historical theories of development and art, Gunilla Lindqvist’s studies of playworlds, and local theory and practice of early childhood education and care. Our analyses of playworlds are based, in part, on Winnicott’s concept of transitional objects. The two cases are drawn from ECEC playworlds in Finland and the US. Each exemplifies how playworlds, as forms of participatory design research, make social sustainability possible. Furthermore, these cases highlight how, by working with the boundaries between and moving between real and imagined, the participants are able to develop new ways of being that are radically inclusive. We argue that they do so by facilitating and maintaining the development of care relations among researchers, teachers, children, and, importantly, imaginary characters, in ways that create what we call transitional subjects. We conclude that social sustainability, like care, should be conceived of as an ecology of caring practices.

Den här artikelns fokusområde placeras i forskningssamtalet om hur undervisning kan förstås i förskolans praktik. Mer precist undersöks kopplingen mellan förskollärares reflektioner om sin undervisning och förskolans kultur med stöd av forskningsfrågan Hur beskrivs och arrangeras undervisning i den här förskolan? Studiens deltagare representerar två arbetslag på en förskola som beskriver sig arbeta utifrån välkomnandets och lyssnandets pedagogik. Empirin består av material från ett reflektionssamtal utifrån dokumentationer som förskollärarna menar berört dem eller haft betydelse för undervisning i ett pedagogiskt hållbarhetsprojekt med fokus på växtrötter och teckenskapande. Utformningen och analysen av reflektionssamtalet utgick från kommunikation ur kulturellt förhållningssätt (Carey, 1992; Dewey, 1916) och en förståelse för förskolor som idiokulturer (Fine, 1979, 2012). Analysen resulterade i tre områden: Undervisningsprocesser i rörelse, Förskollärarnas deltagande och närvaro och Urskiljande av kunskapsområden genom lyssnande. Resultatet diskuteras genom förskolans undervisningskultur, hur läroplanen visar sig i barns göranden och undervisningens relationer.

In this article we focus on the ongoing research discussion concerning how the concept of teaching can be understood in preschool practice. In particular, we examine the connection between preschool teachers’ reflections on their own teaching and the culture of the preschool in which they work. This study is guided by the research question: How is teaching described and arranged for in the teachers’ preschool? The seven participating preschool teachers were drawn from two departmental teams that described themselves as working from a Pedagogy of Welcoming and Listening. The empirical materials are drawn from reflection conversations held with the preschool teachers in which the teachers discussed documentation they considered personally significant for their teaching in a recent education for sustainability project focused on play roots and semiotic production. The design and analysis of these conversations was based on cultural theories of communication (Carey, 1992; Dewey, 1916), and an understanding of preschool education as a situated cultural development process, preschools as idiocultures (Fine, 1979, 2012). Our analysis led to the description of three perspectives representative of the preschool teachers’ meaning-making in relation to teaching: Teaching processes in motion, Preschool teachers’ participation and presence, and Discernment of knowledge domains by listening to children’s actions. The result is discussed in terms of the preschool’s teaching culture, the ways in which the national preschool curriculum is manifest in the children’s actions, and the social and material relationships underpinning teaching.

Playworlds are a form of participatory design research based in Vygotksy’s theories of play, art, imagination, and creativity.  Playworlds are designed to support all participants’ development. Our playworld research group considers playworlds to be an ‘art of development’ and a ‘way of being’: multivocal, researcher-participant, collaborative acts of creation that, we find, are very difficult to represent for study using traditional methods.  This session experiments with new ways to discuss playworlds, ways that themselves exemplify playworlds.  It will include the voices of, and photographs and performances by, playworld researchers, artists, teachers, children, administrators, and imaginary characters. The session will be grounded in a discussion of six themes concerning playworlds as care practices: truth, time, human magic, infinite possibilities, fun, and the enriching and intensifying of the real. Examples from playworlds internationally (Japan, Finland, Sweden, Serbia, US) and in various settings (preschool, school, after-school, foster care, senior center) will be included.

This roundtable brings together researchers who work closely with teachers and carers to develop their work to change some of the problems in the current educational practices to an anti-deficit lens. In situations where there is a need for doing otherwise, educational/care interventions often look to the future with the idea of moving beyond the (unsatisfying, unpleasant) present. However, this hurrying onwards, the need to resolve instead of staying with and tolerating (the impossibility) of the present may also miss opportunities for change, opportunities which trying to stay with and sustain current dilemmas may already entail. The question we examine together is the potential of this ‘(im)possibility’ of the present as a source of change. The studies in this roundtable all focus on circumstances in which the participants develop novel practices in their work while at the same conceive the present as difficult if not ’impossible’ to change.

In UNESCO’s recent publication Education for Sustainable Development: A Roadmap the idea of community is described as playing an important role in the organization of education for sustainable development as a means of supporting transformations towards sustainability. In the present study we examine the relationship between community and the organization of Early Childhood Education and Care for Sustainability (ECECfS). This examination is based on case studies of Swedish preschool teachers’ perspectives and practices in relation to ECECfS. Drawing on Cultural Historical Activity Theory and the concept of ontological Communities of Learners, we describe ways in which community-based characteristics of the preschools shape and are shaped by cultural tools used to pursue ECECfS. Themed-Project Work (TPW), a common means in Swedish preschools of organizing day-to-day activities, emerged as an important practice through which to examine questions of community within and across preschools. We describe organizational tensions concerning how pedagogical practices like TPW change from being tools to support a preschool’s activities, to being objects toward which these activities are oriented. Such changes can enable or constrain a preschool’s possibilities for building pluralistic and democratic ECEC environments. We also discuss how the said organizational tensions are rooted in how community is conceived of in preschool provision. Community is constituted not only through the relationships among members of individual preschools but also through the relationships that preschools have with other preschools in their administrative networks. We discuss contradictions that emerge in this matrix of relationships that shape how preschools enact good governance in the pursuit of ECECfS.

Gunilla Lindqvist argued that in playworlds teachers “step(ping) out of their ‘teacher roles’” and “dare(d) to try new attitudes and ways of acting” (1995, pp. 210-211).  This paper presents cases of adult playworld participants’, ie. teachers and researchers’, ways of being in five playworlds in a variety of institutional settings in four nations: We believe that the quality of children’s experiences in these playworls depends on the quality of the experiences of the teachers, and also of the researchers participating in the projects.  Teacher and researcher descriptions of their own and other participating adults’ ways of being in these playworlds was collected from completed and ongoing playworld studies, and from interviews conducted specifically for this study.  Data was, thus, derived from various research projects, each at their own research sites.  Different methods of analysis were used at each research site, although some forms of participatory observation, focused on the theme, narrative and process of artwork production, were common across all sites.  Also allowing for the necessary coordination, while taking difference as a starting point for understanding human development, the playworlds examined in this paper were created in Sweden, Finland, Japan and the United States but were all inspired by the work of Pentti Hakkarainen; and all developed, over the past 17 years, within the International Playworld Network (IPWNW), which originated at the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition at the University of California, San Diego.  Analysis took place using an intentionally diverse collection of theories, which reflect the diversity of perspectives that makes the IPWNW productive: Gadamer’s theories of play to describe the playworlds “playing” the teachers and researchers as play “plays” the child; Hadley’s theories of adult participation in play to understand experiences of adults playing “inside the flow” of playworlds; Miyazaki’s theory, drawing on the work of Bakhtin, of the triadic relationship between an imaginative world, children and adults; Rainio’s theorizing of dialectics of agency in adult-child interaction in playworlds; and recent developments of Participant Design Experiments.

This paper discusses the playworlds of the Playworld of Creative Research (PWCR) research group. Play- worlds are created from a relatively new form of play that can be described as a combination of adult forms of creative imagination (art, science, etc.), which require extensive real life experience, and children’s forms of creative imagination (play), which require the embodiment of ideas and emotions in the material world. In playworlds, adults and children (or teenagers or seniors) enter into a common fantasy that is designed to support the development of both adults and children (or teenagers or seniors). The PWCR understands play- worlds and the study of playworlds as ways of being. In this paper we present unique, individual playworlds that we truly love from the perspective of researchers, artists, teachers, children, administrators, and imagi- nary characters, who participate in playworlds. We use a master fiction writer’s words on the love of literature to frame our discussion of playworlds, focusing on truth, time, human magic, infinite possibilities, fun, and the enriching and intensifying (and so, creating) of the real in playworlds in Japan, Finland, Sweden and the US.

В статье обсуждаются игровые миры исследовательской группы Playworld of Creative Research (PWCR). Игровые миры конструируются на основе относительно новой формы игры, которую можно охарактеризовать как сочетание взрослых форм творческого воображения (искусства, науки и т. д.), тре¬бующих обширного жизненного опыта, и детских форм творческого воображения (игры), предполагаю¬щих телесное проживание (embodiment) идей и эмоций в материальном мире. В игровых мирах взрослые и дети/подростки/люди старшего возраста оказываются в едином фантазийном пространстве, спроекти¬рованном для их совместного развития. С точки зрения PWCR, игровые миры и их изучение — это спо¬собы бытия. В данной статье мы описываем уникальные, ни на что не похожие игровые миры, которые мы искренне любим, с позиций исследователей, художников, учителей, детей, администраторов, а также выдуманных персонажей, участвующих в игровых мирах. Опираясь на слова великого писателя о любви к литературе, мы строим обсуждение игровых миров вокруг истины, времени, человеческого волшебства, бесконечных возможностей, веселья, а также рассуждаем об обогащении и укреплении (а значит, и о со-творении) реального в игровых мирах в Японии, Финляндии, Швеции и Соединенных Штатах.