International Playworlds: Mixing Adult and Child Fantasy Play
The Playworld projects explore a historically new form of play, one in which adults and children enter into a common fantasy, often using folk stories recorded in books as a key organizing artifact. 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. These interventions are grounded in the theories of L. S. Vygotsky of Russia, G. Lindqvist of Sweden and Pentti Hakkarainen of Finland, and are designed to enable adults and children to engage in joint pretense as a means of promoting the emotional, cognitive, and social development of both children and adults. In 2003 playworld researchers from Finland, Japan, Sweden and the United States were able to work together for several months at LCHC. We staged the first U.S. playworld together, and applied for funding for future collaboration. In November, 2005 we held the first international playworld conference, Cross-cultural Perspectives on Learning and Development Through Art and Play, at LCHC, with funding provided by the Pacific Rim Research Program. The first resulting international joint publication will be in a special issue of Mind, Culture and Activity, devoted to varying cultural approaches to Playworlds. It will be edited by two members of the LCHC playworld project. A number of other presentations of this work are currently scheduled for international conferences during 2008. During the 2005 conference the Playworld group completed a detailed, joint analysis of data comparing our international set of playworld projects. This collaborative work enabled us to continue our joint data analysis through regular email exchange and video conferencing. The use of telecommunication exchanges engendered additional individual visits to foreign sites based upon locally available funds. In January, 2008 two playworld researchers from Finland, one from Sweden and one from Japan, are coming to LCHC for several months to complete publication plans and to initiate a new round of research covering the 2008-2011 period based upon the lessons of our prior efforts. For country-specifc descriptions of the various playworlds projects visit our Playworlds Page.