Caring About and With Imaginary Characters: Early Childhood Playworlds as Sites for Social Sustainability

• In Event: Care and Compassion in Educational Settings: Cultural-Historical Perspectives

Abstract

Play has been central to CHAT since Vygotsky (1978) first focused on the key role of play in human development. Playworlds have been a primary mode of exploring play’s potential as a method of study and as a practice to promote the development of adults and children, in CHAT, since Gunilla Lindqvist (1995) and then Pentti Hakkarainen (2004) developed and led the study of playworlds in Sweden and Finland. This work started in the 1980’s and playworlds are now being created and studied in growing numbers in Australia, China, Japan, and the US, as well as in the Nordic countries. However, while the current pandemic has increased attention to related areas of lack, from climate care to health care, and from early childhood care to elderly care; and may, thus, lead many to focus their attention on the study and promotion of care; playworlds, with their intergenerational joint creativity, have yet to be designed and understood as unique ways of being, which have the potential to offer insights into care, and radically reconceptualize care, in collaboration with those whom, by definition, we adult humans care for (and who will be the next generation). In this paper we argue that it is all of our responsibility to push CHAT to its most radical and least “domesticated” potential, at this time; and that some of this potential may reside in care understood and designed by our youngest scientists, when they ask their adults (often in their domiciles … ) to “play with me.”

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, children, and the imaginary characters they create through their joint play, shape and sustain ECEC research and practice. We focus on the ways that ECEC pedagogues’ approaches to care provide insights about practices of social sustainability. The cases we present are drawn from recent studies of early childhood play belonging 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 Lindquist’s studies of playworlds, and the work of Winnicott (1971) and Wartofsky (1976) on transitional objects and tertiary artifacts, respectively. The two cases are drawn from ECEC playworlds in Finland and the US. Each exemplify how playworlds, as forms of participatory design research, make social sustainability possible. 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. Furthermore, these cases highlight the importance of participants moving beyond traditional (adult and, in some instances, western) dichotomies between reality and fantasy; cognition and emotion; and unidirectional, linear understandings of time. We conclude that social sustainability, like care, should be conceived of as both an ecology of caring practices and a will to live (care not despair).

Authors

• Beth Ferholt, Brooklyn College - CUNY

• Robert Lecusay

• Anna Pauliina Rainio, University of Helsinki