ABSTRACT
Since 1800 theorists have talked about play and the problems in conceptualizing what it is. In a comprehensive literature review, Sutton-Smith (1997) identified what he calls the ‘ambiguity of play’. He demonstrates play’s scope as a concept by differentiating between seven rhetorics of play. In one rhetoric of play, Sutton-Smith (1997: 159) asks us to think of children’s play ‘like a traveling troupe of medieval players who arrive, set up their theatre, and then begin performing. It is a world that is run more like a theatre is run than like an everyday world’. This resonates with Sara’s conception of classrooms as theatrical spaces where the children play within a story setting they have co-created. Like the world of Max, the main character in Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (2000), the learning environment becomes a place where ‘the walls become the world all around’, enabling children to connect with the story as living and thinking characters, and as embodied ‘beings’ rather than actors. Stories are central for the stimulation of philosophical play, whether they be fairy tales, picture books or the re-telling of the stories overheard and written down from observations of children at play.
