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.