ABSTRACT
Playwork is a field orientated around and responsive to the play of children. Playworkers recognise the vital importance of children's experiences, which perhaps often, as adults, they cannot fully comprehend. It seems that such valuing of the unknowable permeates many aspects of a playworker's self-identity. However, a discernible tension can be seen between such arguably integral vocational disposition and the processes of distillation and abstraction necessary to professional representation of playwork within theory, text and policy, which also forms the core of playwork curriculum. This paper describes the journey of a research project nurturing and supporting playwork students in their own discoveries of playwork identity, working with raw, unedited, unfixed explorations of self-contributed by recognised playwork theorists and practicing playworkers across the field.
