ABSTRACT
Here are a selection of different problems I have given playwork students to reflect on and analyse, over the years. They can be explored at any level by any level. More than anything they are intended to facilitate the analysis of topics and issues and to encourage and enable playworkers to articulate rationales for their practice. Not only asking, ‘What would you do?’, but asking ‘Why do you do what you do in the way that you do it?’ Perhaps a complicated way of saying it, but important. It is not enough to do, as playworkers have intuitively operated for years. Now anyone who works with children should be able, for example, to explain on some level both how and why, and perhaps even more importantly, why that way, and not another way. Our rationales, however embryonic, need to be brought out into the conscious realm, and not hidden as they have been for so long, inside the unconscious realm.
