In this presentation we will present several projects that have taken place over the past year in three Swedish preschools. These preschools are inspired by approaches developed in the internationally-known preschools of Reggio Emilia, Italy and these preschools have been participating in a research project that combines their own pedagogy of exploratory learning with an educational activity, a form of adult-child joint play, called playworlds. Playworlds were originally developed by Swedish scholar Gunilla Lindqvist to study what she called the common denominator of art and play, have been further developed by Finnish scholar Pentti Hakkarainen and are based in L. S. Vygotsky’s theories play and creativity. The Swedish playworld projects that we will present can be considered to be forms of Imaginative Education particularly in their incorporation of cognitive tools for mythic understanding. Through their use of these tools they demonstrate the centrality of imagination in preschool “learning.”
Further information on the presentation:
This presentation will include films and slides so that our audience develops an experiential appreciation of the unique qualities of these projects. We will highlight the use of story, metaphor and abstract binary oppositions in these projects. We will use our understanding of Vygotsky’s theories of play and creativity, in which imagination and creativity are aspects of the same process, and in which this process is embodied, for young children, in play, to show the ways that these play projects were an integral part of the exploratory learning that was taking place in these preschools.
In our discussion of the projects we will explore with our audience the ways that the connections between imagination and learning can be understood by challenging the common divide between realistic thinking and fantasy. This divide is, we believe, at the core of positions that dismiss or overlook the centrality of imagination in “learning”. Early childhood is often officially ignored by such positions but, we will argue, preschool didactics is still profoundly (and (possibly increasingly) influenced by this divide.