ABSTRACT
One of the productive challenges of working in early childhood education and care is combining researchers’ and teachers’ knowledge and ways of knowing. This chapter presents findings from studies that combine researchers’ perspectives and teacher’s insights. We suggest that a certain type of adult–child joint play, called playworld, (Lindqvist, 1995), can be a means for preschool teachers to bring their personal selves, not just their professional, teacher selves, into their work with young children (Ferholt & Schuck, forthcoming; Nilsson et al., 2018). We begin from a relational pedagogical perspective (Aspelin & Persson, 2011) where concepts of co-existence and co-operation are central. This conceptual framework is applied in a case study using observations from a two-year ethnographic investigation of three Swedish preschool teachers implementing playworld pedagogy for the first time. Their work was influenced by a pedagogy of listening and exploratory learning, originating from the municipal preschools of Reggio Emilia.
