A tapestry of playworlds: a study into the reach of Lindqvist’s legacy in testing times

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses the tapestry of playworlds found in the literature and examines the contributions made since Gunilla Lindqvist originally researched play and culture in preschools and developed the esthetics of play or creative pedagogy of play – sometimes collectively referenced as playworlds. The goals of this paper are to examine the central concepts that theoretically bind the system of pedagogical practices she developed and to review how her work has been deployed by the next generation of scholars within the contemporary context for greater educational outcomes in some countries and creative and innovative citizenship in other countries. With this backdrop, it is argued that playworlds have advanced over time helping educators to push against schoolification, but also giving support to those seeking new ways to make the learning of concepts in preschools more playful. This paper seeks to make a theoretical contribution to this body of work.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the reviewers of MCA who with the guidance of the editor Julian Williams, have helped transform an ordinary paper into a more cogent and richly theorized paper. I am appreciative of their expert knowledge of playworlds, and their historical understandings of the development of playworlds research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.