Ghosts, Bodyguards and Fighting Fillies: Manifestations of Pupil Agency in Play Pedagogy

The aim of this article is to discuss the concept of agency in relation to learning in school. Recent educational research shows that the methods of mainstream education easily fail to support children’s motivation, engagement, self-development and problemsolving abilities in classroom work (i.e., Engeström, 1991; McNeil, 1999; Sarason, 1996; Zuckerman, 2003). In this article the problem is conceptualized as a lack of pupil agency. Special focus is given to narrative-based methods such as the use of play, drama and stories in the classroom. Three different empirical examples of pupil participation in a narrative classroom activity are introduced through which the challenges and possibilities for pupil agency can be illustrated

Horses, Girls, and Agency: Gender in Play Pedagogy

This is a study of the development of student agency from a gender perspective in a Finnish classroom. Thedata originates from an ethnographic research project in an elementary school classroom engaging in a playpedagogy project called a “playworld.” The article has two purposes. The first is to examine the potential ofimagination and improvised fantasy play in the development of agency. The second is to investigate the role of gender as a social category in shaping the students’ possibilities for agency in the play pedagogical setting. The creative use of imagination is at the center of the playworld pedagogy. However, it has rarely been studied in relation to the potentially uneven or stereotypic consequences of cultural tools, symbols, and categories.The analytical focus is on the gender-related categorization of a ‘horse girl’ and the role it played in the development of the agency of two seven-year-old girls as they participated in the playworld. I have used a multidisciplinary analytical framework to sensitize myself to the data. In the article I combine Vygotsky’s ideas of double stimulation, Sacks’ categorization analysis and, Holzkamp’s concept of action potence. The results show that the playworld pedagogy that explicitly aimed at developing children’s agency and collaboration was strongly gender categorized and thus was constraining for the girls in this study. On the other hand, the girls’ unplanned fantasy play, which took place on the sidelines of the classroom activity, contained important agentive elements. It gave thegirls a sense of agency crucial to their enactment of agency in the wider playworld setting. It is argued that the girls were able to become agentive players in the activity through questioning the gendered categories openly in the classroom

Micro-policies of adult-child joint play in the context of the Finnish ECEC system

Peer reviewe

Caring about and with Imaginary Characters: Early Childhood Playworlds as Sites for Social Sustainability

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

Caring about and with Imaginary Characters: Early Childhood Playworlds as Sites for Social Sustainability

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

‘Singing is no longer forbidden to me – it’s like part of my human dignity has been restored.’ Adult non-singers learning to sing : An explorative intervention study

Peer reviewe

Playworlds as Ways of Being, A Chorus of Voices : Why are Playworlds Worth Creating? The Playworld of Creative Research

This paper discusses the playworlds of the Playworld of Creative Research (PWCR) research group. Playworlds 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 playworlds 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 imaginary 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.Peer reviewe

Teacher professional dialogues during a school intervention : From stabilization to possibility discourse through reflexive noticing

Background: Teachers' limiting conceptualizations of students influence students' learning opportunities. We analyze teachers' professional conversations to understand how dialogues can expand teachers' conceptualizations. Methods: We examine professional dialogues from nine whole-school intervention meetings. Drawing on discursive psychology and activity theoretical notions of learning the study conceptualizes teachers' collective assumptions as a lived ideology actively sustained by stabilization discourses. We analyze the discursive devices through which the teachers' talk about their students limits/expands their sense of what is possible in their teaching and their dialogic effects. Findings: Our analysis finds a range of discursive strategies that sustain or re-stabilize the lived ideology. Even when challenged by contrary evidence (e.g., surprises), dilemmatic tensions and reframing repair actions are found to close potential dialogic openings. Importantly, we identify a form of discourse that avoids immediate closure, characterized by sustained reflection on the students' challenges developing a need to change. We term this reflexive noticing: it is enabled through sustained puzzle, constructing dilemmas as origin of change and discursive consciousness of stabilization. Contribution: We illustrate why contrary evidence often fails to shift limiting conceptualizations about students and show the discursive mechanisms generating possibility knowledge. Implications for teacher learning are discussed.Peer reviewe