Editorial provocations

Children and adults living and playing alongside each other through worlds and languages of drama, drawing and music are themes in these three chapters. We read about children (and adults) playing with creating socio-dramatic fantasy scenes, with creating drawing and with creating music.

Does creativity always involve some play?

In Chapter 1, Robertson describes the excitement and the meaning-making possibilities for children engaged in seriously playful digital drawing. Children in these vignettes playfully explore and imaginatively extend mark-making possibilities through using screen technology to create complexly-layered imaginative stories. Teachers support by empowering children to experiment and learn the technology that supports these narrative co-creations. Teachers teach without disrupting the flow of shared experience. This style recalls the learning that can happen when children have the freedom to explore and play with stuff. In this case “stuff” is the technology associated with other ways of imaginatively and creatively making meaningful marks.

How might educators integrate freedom with play-based pedagogy?

Imaginary worlds created through play are central to the playworld work referred to by Ferholt, Nilsson and Lecusay in Chapter 2. These researchers explore the complex relational dynamics that can emerge within the adult–child joint fantasy play of playworlds. They courageously interrogate intimate nuances that teachers disclose when bringing their personal selves into their actor roles within playworlds, making links to teachers and children learning relational competence through play.

What do readers think and feel about teachers playing and feeling, like children?

Do – or should – teachers play like children? Why?

Perhaps child-attuned teachers are also attuned with their own inner child?

The metaphor of attunement leads nicely into musical worlds explored by Barrett in Chapter 3, where she skilfully maps musical landscapes to extend adults’ musical ways of being alongside. These include “shared playful music-making”. As Barrett points out, “Singing and song-making appear to be a universal feature of human culture and a common element in the early life experiences of infants” (Chapter 3). Movement, rhythm and play underpin musicality across cultures. While researching the role of indigenous music in the promotion of children’s cognitive development in Zambia, Reuben Mukela (2013, p. 1) points out: “In Africa the term ‘music’ … pervades many social activities that include “dance, songs, and play. African words for music sometimes also refer to play.” Similarly, the ancient Greek word for music – mousike – encompasses the temporal arts: music, dance, drama, poetry. These are time-based arts that move when played into creation and in turn move us with feeling.