Play Pedagogy and Playworlds

Abstract

The founder of play pedagogy, Gunilla Lindqvist, grounds her educational approach in a lesser known work of Vygotsky, entitled “Imagination and Creativity in Childhood.” 2 Lindqvist embraces Vygotsky’s cultural approach to children’s play and argues for a play-based pedagogy. In a practical realization of this approach, she and her students worked together with 3to 8-year-old children to create Playworlds, an educational practice that includes adult-child joint pretense and dramatization of texts from children’s literature combined with the production of visual art. Playworlds are dramaturgical classroom interventions that focus on emotional experience and aesthetic relation to reality through involving children and adults in staged as well as spontaneous pretend play. Children and adults bring a piece of children's literature to life through scripted and improvisational acting, costume and set design, and multimodal rehearsal and reflection. 3