Beyond uniform reproduction: Exploring children’s imaginative play through the lenses of their teacher

Abstract

The voices of both early childhood education teachers and children tend to be weak in the choir of agents that constitute the aims and practices of early childhood education. In this article, a video that a teacher made of four children playing dragons, followed by open-ended interviews exploring why she found this particular activity of interest and then open-ended interviews with the involved children while watching and commenting on the video, forms the basic material for discussing how children’s imaginative play can inform what might be valuable activities in early childhood education. The theoretical framework and concepts for analysis draw on an understanding of cultural formation and a cultural-historical approach that outlines children’s development through participation in activities framed by contextual conditions. By tracing conflicts caused by differences in the involved children’s values and motives while meeting conditions and demands in their context, at the personal, institutional and societal levels, the exploration of friendship, danger, space, institutional rooms and what good play ‘is’ are depicted in children’s imaginative role play. From this, imaginative play is seen as being endowed with valuable activities in early childhood education and forms a contrast to the emphasis on future academic competences that are far removed from the children’s experiences.

Introduction

There is both a growing and a changing political interest in early childhood education (ECE) in Norway. The growing interest can be explained by the rapid expansion of ECE institutions in Norway. From being a desired option for the few (18% in 1980) (Falnes-Dalheim, 2004), there are now ECE institutions available for most Norwegian children (91,3% april 2018) (Statistics Norway, 2018). Therefore, most citizens, including parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, are personally engaged in how ECE institutions are contributing to their children’s education. In some urban geographical areas, the owners of ECE institutions compete to attract parents. Families are viewed as customers within the framework of competitive local institutions regulated as a market for meeting the individual’s needs for future education.

Political interest in ECE institutions is changing. Not only are ECE institutions viewed as a political tool for gender equality by paving the way for women’s role in the labour market (Korsvold, 2005: 21), but they are also seen as an arena for resolving a variety of contemporary problems. Through early interventions, ECE institutions are supposed to neutralize class differences (NOU, 2009: 10; Stortingsmelding nr. 41, 2008–2009), provide school readiness for bilingual children (Drange and Telle, 2011; NOU, 2011: 14; Stortingsmelding nr. 17, 1996–1997; Stortingsmelding nr. 49, 2003–2004), and prevent behavioural problems and school dropout (Webster-Stratton, 1999). This also seems to be an international trend (Biesta, 2015: 1): in our contemporary society, education is often presented in a uniform and universal way to solve contemporary problems. From an economic perspective, education paves the way for early intervention, so that the outcome can be achieved in the least ‘costly’ way possible. This can be seen in the constant pressure to start teaching academic skills at a progressively younger age in Russia and the West (Bodrova, 2008: 358). Politicians and parents are thereby strong agents – representing both economic and political resources – when it comes to defining the content and methods of ECE, which frame important conditions for ECE institutions.

In contrast with this customer- and economics-based approach to education, Nordic ECE institutions have a historical tradition of emphasizing play and children’s perspectives in their curriculum and practices (Johansson, 2010: 229; Synodi, 2010: 187). Research shows that ECE teachers, who are part of this tradition, do not often clearly conceptualize and advocate their understanding in the public debate (Hogsnes, 2007: 55; Johansson, 2010: 229). Some research indicates that ECE teachers’ education, knowledge and values are poorly expressed because the teachers are isolated as the single educated voice in dialogues with their less-educated assistants in their daily practices (Steinnes, 2014: 491). As such, teachers have not been using the vocabulary of professionals to develop and influence their daily practices or political and public opinion. In addition, children’s participation in educational practices is often presented in research as fulfilling the democratic rights of children to participate (Grindheim, 2014: 8), but seldom is their participation conceptualized and constituted as an important contribution to inform the aims and daily practices of ECE. Therefore both teachers’ and children’s approaches to ECE are easily appropriated by strong economic and political interests.

With the goal of strengthening the voices of teachers and children in the choir of agents that constitute the aims and practices in ECE, this article starts with the teacher’s point of view. The material for analysis is a video of children playing dragons that their teacher found to be of specific interest, followed by open-ended interviews exploring why the teacher found this particular activity of interest and then open-ended interviews with the children while watching the video. Therefore a teacher’s explanation and reflection about the video she made of four boys playing dragons is central to this article, which is structured around the following research question: How can children’s imaginative play inform what might be valuable activities in ECE? By tracing what the children are exploring and why their teacher finds this exploration of specific interest, I am highlighting and exploring some activities in ECE that are of importance from the perspectives of the children and their teacher. These activities are seen in light of Ødegaard and Krüger’s (2012) outline of cultural formation and Hedegaard’s (2009) cultural-historical outlines of children’s development through participation in activities framed by contextual conditions. These theoretical approaches serve as a departure point for illustrating and discussing how and why this kind of imaginative play can serve to inform what could be valuable activities in ECE.

Exploring the aims and practices in ECE by considering children’s play activities

There is interesting and important research in play that outlines the ambiguity of play (Sutton-Smith, 1997), how play and context interrelate (Schousboe, 1999), how play and learning interrelate (Samuelsson and Carlsson, 2008), how playful imagination in telling, playing and acting out fairy tales mediates higher forms of mental development (Fleer and Hammer, 2013), and how emphasizing children’s exploration can overcome the dichotomy of play and learning (Nilsson et al., 2017). Most of the research outlines what the involved children can achieve while they are engaged in play. Moreover, there is research that provides a vital understanding of children’s expression and what interests, values and opinions they are expressing in play (Greve, 2007; Johansson, 2007; Løkken, 2000). Fewer studies outline explicitly how children involved in play can provide insight that challenges practices in ECE, but some play researchers illustrate this possibility.

In the Norwegian context, I point to Johannesen (2013: 291–292) to illustrate how young children’s bodily expression in play educates their early childhood educators and is therefore implicated in developing pedagogical work. Also, Sadownik (2017: 142) outlines how children’s activities that are conceptualized as dark play depict how inequalities in parental care, the recognition and misrecognition of good clothes, and the recognition of enjoyable experiences are mirrored in the children’s role playing. This type of play illustrates vital knowledge that indicates how the egalitarian Norwegian kindergartens have to face challenges to rethink their aims and practices to provide social justice in terms of varied, but good, childhoods. Further, an analysis of children’s play that depicts conditions for democratic participation in role playing, doing jigsaw puzzles and playing hide-and-seek challenges the understanding of ‘good play’, limited to role playing, and indicates the importance of making room for a variety of types of play in ECE (Grindheim, 2017: 634).

These research examples illustrate a valuable contribution that challenges uniform and universal approaches to what constitutes valuable activity in ECE when considering children’s play. This underlines that interesting and important contributions to the aims and practices of ECE can be perceived by considering the activities performed by a variety of stakeholders in the field. As already expressed, contributions from the teacher and the children are at the core of this article.

Theoretical framework

Before presenting the methods, material and analysis, I will set out the theoretical framework and concepts for analysis.

The tension between children’s values and motives while meeting conditions and demands in their context (Hedegaard, 2009: 59) is interpreted as conflict. The ways children deal with these conflicts through playing activities are understood as ways of exploring something that is important to them. According to Hedegaard:

The easiest way to understand a child’s intentions is to note when there is a conflict where the child cannot do what he or she wants to do and cannot realise the projects in which the child is engaged, and the intention the child shows through his or her actions. (Hedegaard, 2008: 19)

Although there are a variety of reasons for children’s exploration in imaginative play, conflict is the central concept for exploration in my analysis.

In order to trace what children explore, I take departure from Hedegaard’s (2009) model for analysis, which illustrates three interrelated levels of context: the personal, the institutional and the societal. Children’s development is thereby seen as dynamic and in interaction with societal conditions (Hedegaard, 2009: 73). The contextual conditions can be depicted by tracing the conflicts that occur between children’s values and motives versus the conditions and demands at the three levels in Hedegaard’s model. This model is outlined from Hedegaard and in line with her fellow psychologists who have criticized research approaches that study child development from a functional view. She argues that ‘demands for a scientific approach have led to several one-dimensional conceptions of development, where the focus has been on the development of different psychological functions and competencies’ (Hedegaard, 2009: 64). In line with sociologists and anthropologists (Corsaro, 1997; James et al., 1998; Rogoff, 2003), she emphasizes the need to study children localized in time and space. For this article, her model serves as a tool to trace what the involved children are exploring.

The children in my material are engaged in imaginative role play, which caught their teacher’s interest. Role play is also referred to as pretend play, fantasy play, imaginative play, free-flow play, dramatic play or socio-dramatic play (Bruce, 1991; Fleer, 2010; Sadownik, 2017). In these kinds of play, the manifested imaginary situation gives a latent and implicit indication of what roles the children might occupy; the children act out their performance attuned to the imaginary situation (Winther-Lindqvist, 2009: 61). Role play can also be understood as interpretive reproduction (Corsaro, 1993: 64–65), whereby children in play do not merely internalize the external adult culture, but also contribute to its reproduction through their creative production of peer cultures. In my analysis, I build on my understanding of Vygotsky’s (2016) outlines of play, referred to as imaginative role play.

Vygotsky (2016: 16) outlines how play creates the proximal development of the child – a zone where children are managing more than what they can in reality. The proximal zone of development determines the domain of transitions to which the child has access (Vygotsky, 1987: 210). According to Vygotsky (2016: 4), play is the leading line of development in the preschool years. Play, according to Vygotsky, has three components: in play, children create an imaginary situation, take on and act out roles, and follow a set of rules determined by specific roles (Bodrova, 2008: 359; Vygotsky, 2016).

Vygotsky (2016: 9) outlines that all imaginative situations contain rules in a concealed form. He states that there is ‘no such thing as play without rules and the child’s particular attitude towards them’ (Vygotsky, 2016: 7); thereby, the understanding of play as free and spontaneous is challenged. In imaginative role play, children are balancing the paradox that through play, on the one hand, they realize unrealizable desires in an imaginary situation. On the other hand, children in play regulate their behaviour within the rules of play. Children manage to control their behaviour in play in accordance with rules that are hard to relate to in reality – such as postponing desires at the same time as unsolved desires are leading the way for play.

In play, children are also starting to separate object and meaning. This separation indicates the transition towards higher forms of consciousness, in which thought and speech mediates problem solving separated from the real situation (Vygotskij et al., 1987: 24). Although it is hard for young children to separate meaning from object, children begin to act independently of what they see, by using objects independent from their meaning in their imaginative play, for example, using a bench as a cage for dragons. Children use another object (the bench in a certain distance from their ‘home’) to act as a pivot, to make meaning (for a cage), but not any object can be used for meaning making (Vygotsky, 2016). Their need of/use of certain objects, illustrate how reality and imagination are interwoven in imaginative play.

From my understanding of Vygotsky’s outline of play, I see the imaginative dragon play as a possibility for the involved children to explore their unsolved desires, experiences, everyday life and cultural institutions. As collaboration and imitation are performed in imaginative play, children can create something new (Vygotsky, 2004: 7) – they created an activity that was hard for their teacher to define beforehand.

In line with Vygotsky (2016) and Hedegaard (2009), children are viewed as active agents at the core in learning and cultural formation. Children’s learning and cultural formation are contextualized, situated, mediated and embedded in their given cultural context. Building on Ødegaard and Krüger (2012: 21), cultural formation is understood as an always present and continuous process. Ødegaard and Krüger present cultural formation as a descriptive concept that depicts an act of humans in relation to the conditions in their given culture. Both the process (act) and the result of being a part of the activity are embedded in cultural formation (22). The children, the process, the activity and the context are all parts of my understanding of the involved children’s exploration. Understanding both the process and the result as cultural formation leads to the realization that children are being formed by their culture at the same time as they are influencing their own formation, the people they are involved with and their contexts. Institutions, processes and the types of activities that are seen as valuable are changing and competing. The use of the concept of cultural formation paves the way to emphasize variety and complexity in ECE.

Variety and complexity can give voices to children and teachers who have a wide range of experiences that represent differences in class, gender and race, and can contribute not only to their own development, learning and social identities, as well as those of their peers, but also to what activities to validate. As such, cultural formation contrasts with the uniformity and universality in customer- and economics-based approaches to education.

In the video, the children are depicted as active agents involved with all their knowledge, experiences and emotions, transformed to imaginative creators together with their peers, making/performing a story together in an educational institution framed by educational aims. By considering the children’s involvement in everyday activities and why their teacher found this activity interesting, conditions for cultural formation can be depicted; these are conditions that can be challenged, preserved or removed to constitute children and teachers as important contributors in the choir of agents that inform the aims and activities in ECE practices. The presented theoretical framework offers multidimensional concepts for a theoretical analysis to broaden the insight into what might be valuable with regard to ECE aims and activities.

Method, material and analysis

Most often, empirical material that informs analysis in research which emphasizes everyday activities is, at the first stage, collected from the researcher’s physical position in the field (Denzin and Lincoln, 2008: 29). This is not the case in this project. The primary position of what materials to collect comes from the teachers’ understanding of what activities they found interesting. In spite of this, my concerns and aims for the project, and the way I cooperated with the teachers, have also rightfully influenced their choices.

The material that forms the basis for my analysis is from a study done in collaboration with an ECE institution in Norway from April 2016 to August 2017. My primary concern was to find an ECE institution for this cooperative research method where the teachers were interested in recording videos and doing interviews that involved both themselves and the children, even though the teachers were probably already overloaded with important tasks in their everyday working life. I had previously made contact with some of the staff in the institution during an international cooperation project at my university. With a relationship already established, the way was paved for this cooperative research, which is in line with my aims to obtain broader insight by pursuing variety and seeking out the values of involvement of multiple stakeholders. The institution is located in an urban area on the west coast of Norway. During the period of this research, 63 children aged from one to six were attending the institution. They were divided into four age-specific groups. The staff comprised seven teachers and nine assistants.

Five teachers at this ECE institution made videotapes to illustrate children’s activities that they found to be of special interest and value. I visited their institution to pick up the videos and interview the teachers who recorded the activities, meeting one teacher at a time as well as the children in the particular video(s). I visited the institution 11 times for two to four hours to conduct the interviews. Altogether, I obtained 13 videotapes of activities that range in length from 1.11 minutes to 10 minutes, and all are followed by comments from the teachers who made the recordings. Seven videos also include comments from the involved children. The videos contain activities that took place over the period of one year and involve different teachers, children, activities and places, but all from the same institution. Following my first analysis, which provoked more questions about the teachers’ values and motives for the activities they found of specific value and interest, their opinions about play, and the conditions and demands they meet in their daily practices, I did a group interview (about 90 minutes) with four of the five teachers who had made the videotapes. In addition, I participated in two staff meetings (one hour each) – the first to introduce and discuss my aims and research interest, the second to present and discuss my findings.

The material that forms the basis for my analysis to obtain insight into how children’s imaginative play can inform what might be valuable activities in ECE is a video (9.17 minutes) of four boys playing dragons. Three of the boys were five years old and one was four years old. Among the 13 videos, this video best illustrates the sophistic nature of children’s imaginative role play. In addition, the transcribed conversations with the teacher who recorded the video, the transcribed conversations with the involved children and their teacher, the local curriculum for this year in their ECE institution, the aims for ECE in Norway and our Western (Christian) traditional interpretation of dragons are material for my analysis.

The analysis builds on Hedegaard’s (2009) model, which paved the way for tracing conflicts between the involved children’s values and motives versus the conditions and demands in their context, at the personal, institutional and societal levels. The recorded activity forms the basis for the analysis throughout all three levels. At the personal level, material from the transcription of the open-ended interview with the involved children and their teacher provides additional material for analysis. At the institutional level as well, material from the transcription of the open-ended interview with the teacher and the involved children provides additional material for analysis. At this level, the teacher’s comments about institutional conditions for such play, and the local curriculum for this year in their ECE institution, represent much of the material. In addition, some of the children’s comments were seen as relevant to this level. At the societal level, additional material for analysis includes political documents for ECE and our Western (Christian) traditional interpretation of dragons.

The Norwegian Centre for Research Data approved the project. The teachers who made the recordings signed an agreement form as data processors; all the staff and the parents of the children who were recorded gave their written informed consent to participate in the study and had the opportunity to withdraw from the study at any time. In addition, the involved children had the opportunity to withdraw from being recorded or watching the video. Most of the children found that watching the video was amusing, but the conversation about what happened in the video did not always appear as interesting. If the children signalled that this was of limited interest, we ended the conversation. If the children preferred to continue with their ongoing activities when invited to come and watch the video and talk with their teacher and myself, we did not interrupt them.

What are the children in the video exploring while playing dragons?

Since the activity forms the material basis for the analysis, I start the outline of the outcome of my analysis by presenting a short summary of the activity:

Four boys were playing dragons, ‘flying’ while running with their arms spread, using most of the room. They were sleeping in the area for family play, then sitting down on a bench making stories involving dragons, which soon led to acting out the story instead of telling it. As dragons, they ran from the area for family play and were suddenly caught in a cage. Luckily, they were soon able to escape when one of them realized that they were able to blow fire and thereby melt the lock on the cage. The dragons were also fighting, rolling over each other on the floor. Occasionally, they were transformed into crocodiles and firefighters, and they drove a car while being attacked by other dragons. Thereafter, they were all involved in a war. After some time, one of the boys withdrew from the physical play and offered water to the dragons. A second boy also started to play a lesser part in the physical involvement, although the two who played lesser parts apparently still related to the theme of the play. After several minutes, the boy who served water to the dragons uttered that he wanted to play with Lego. He suggested it several times to the other boy, who also withdrew from the physical game. By the end of the video, the four of them had split into two groups of two, where one group played with Lego and the other group continued with their game of dragons.

The teacher who recorded the video told me that this game had gone on for 10 to 15 minutes before she started recording. The teacher outlined why she found this activity of specific interest and value: ‘These four boys do have their individual needs and are seldom involved in peer groups and in play for longer periods’. The activity took place during the part of the day when the children, according to the daily and weekly schedule, were playing inside, divided into groups that were required to be in specific areas/rooms. The rationale for the teacher to divide the children into particular rooms was, according to the teacher:

to protect play activities. In my experience, there should not be too many children playing together in role play. If there are more than six children in the same play, it most often ends up with play in two groups.

The room where the dragon play took place was the largest available room for play. There were two tables, each for around 12 persons, a corner for family play, easy accessible material for drawing, painting and craft activities, and books.

Conflicts at the personal level

From the video, a conflict seems to occur between the four boys playing together, and they split into two 2-person groups. This might indicate that the children are exploring interaction as friends in a peer group. This interpretation was clarified by the children’s comments while watching the video: ‘We became friends’ (while playing). According to the teacher, the four boys had never played together before. The teacher also mentioned that all of them had problems when involved in groups of several children: ‘I have not observed these children involved in peer groups before’. Their common play was the reason she recorded this activity. The children’s values and motives are thereby understood as making friends and being at play. Building on Vygotsky (1987), we see that their personal conditions and demands, which had been described as having a problem with involvement with several children over a period, are transitioned to social play in a peer group in their imaginative play.

The exploration of friendship and how to interact in a peer group is also underlined by a comment from the attacking child while watching the video, where the dragons are obviously fighting: ‘We did not fight – I tickled you’. This is interpreted as a conflict between the children’s values and motives for making friends and the conditions and demands in the ongoing play. There seems to be a conflict between being dragons and being friends. Tickling is friendlier than fighting, but fighting is closer to how dragons relate to others. It appears as though the rules of the game and the rules of friendship were in conflict. This conflict can illustrate a paradox of play as realizing unsolved desires of joining a peer group, and the rules in the dragon play. The way the children explored friendship by balancing this conflict might be traced from the way the children added new themes, such as being crocodiles and firefighters, and being involved in a war, which are all imaginative situations in which the children were facing danger together. In addition, the theme of danger in the imaginary situation forms a conflict with the comfort of facing danger together. Perhaps facing danger together can be considered a crucial part of friendship. In so doing, the rules according to the theme of danger in the imaginative role play and the rules for friendship are balanced. In this activity, the children had opportunities to explore both danger and being a danger.

In addition to exploring friendship and how to be part of a peer group, this play can be understood as an activity wherein children are exploring friendship, danger and evil, and even being a danger or evil.

Conflicts at the institutional level

At the institutional level, two conflicts can be observed. One is between the children’s values and motives for playing an activity that required a lot of space for running, moving and fighting and the institutional conditions and demands, according to the teacher, of most often using the room for quiet table activities, such as drawing, doing puzzles and painting.

When I asked the children if they played dragons often, they told me that ‘this was the first time the four of us played dragons together inside’, but some of them had played dragons outside. The advantage of having the opportunity to perform this imaginative role playing inside is that their teacher regulates them in a group. This condition and demand made their creative imaginational interaction possible. In addition to this practical arrangement of regulating the boys in a group, their teacher had an expressed interest in social play, which conditioned her rearrangement of how to use the room:

There are too few episodes of these kinds of social play [like playing dragons]. These kinds of play offer a space for freedom, especially for the boys involved. Some of them have complicated lives, and imaginative play forms an escape from reality where the children are in charge and can do what they want to do. It is freedom when you do what you want and have fun. There are limited possibilities for play that requires more space – for example, role playing in which the theme indicates that the involved children need to walk around playing the pirate Captain Sabeltann and mutineers have to ‘walk the plank’ and jump into a sea full of sharks.

The involved children’s and their teacher’s values and motives are in conflict with taken-for-granted understandings of good play and what can be played indoors.

The same conflict between the children’s and the teacher’s values and motives versus an understanding of good play and what play to perform indoors or outdoors can be traced from the conditions and demands at the institutional level that are manifested in the guiding documents of the institution. In the plan for this particular ECE institution, play is emphasized and described as activities that ‘give the children opportunities to face scary themes and the unknown. In play, they can cultivate each other and cultivate emotions and experiences’. As I interpret the plan, play is seen as important for the cultivation of emotions such as anger and fear. In the dragon play both anger and fear are explored, but the original furniture and plan for what activities should be carried out in the biggest room indicate more quiet activities with less movement, sitting at a table. In this room, there was also a family corner, which can be interpreted as a condition for imaginative role play forming a family, but not play involving roles that need a lot of space. The plan and how role play was facilitated can be interpreted as a more or less conscious understanding of what good play ‘is’. Several researchers point to the strong preferences regarding good play in Scandinavian ECE institutions (Bratterud et al., 2012; Helgesen, 2012; Øksnes, 2011), and how these preferences lead to a strong regulation of play (Tullgren, 2004). The teacher’s reflection on the fact that this dragon play occurred in the room that used to be reserved for quiet activities led her to conclude that she made the right choice when changing the use of the room: ‘Here they have room and time, and all four boys are engaged in play’. From this, I suggest that the children are exploring what play can be performed indoors in their ECE institution. Through her reorganization of the room and her reflections watching the video, the teacher did the same.

The second conflict is traced from interpreting the video and children’s comments as the children’s values and motives for being in control, in contrast to the institutional conditions and demands that are aimed at predefined competences for play. The previously defined competences to play in peer groups, which it is easy to believe these children had not reached, were turned upside down: it could be the available theme for playing that conditions their lack of ability to play together. The teacher explained it as follows: ‘this recorded activity indicates that four children with different challenges are able to interact and cooperate as long as the conditions make it possible’. Drawing on Vygotsky (2016), children in play are starting to act independently of what they see, but they still need an object to make meaning. The children involved in the dragon play needed other kinds of objects than were first available in order to make meaning in their imaginative role play. The video indicates that they needed a big bench far from their home (the area for family play) to make a cage for the caught dragons.

From this, I conclude that at the institutional level, both the children and their teacher are exploring what good play ‘is’. In addition, the children are exploring space, place and to what extent they can be in control of what and how to play.

Conflicts at the societal level

At the societal level, I suggest that there is a conflict between the children’s values and motives related to their experiences and the conditions and demands for ECE education to meet the competition among ECE institutions, and uniform and universal ways to meet contemporary concerns.

In Western culture, where the involved ECE institution is located, dragons are most often presented as evil and dangerous (Kværne, 2012). Dragons do not go to school and they are not very smart or concerned about the future. Nor do they have social competence – they operate alone most of the time. They even have to resort to abducting a princess to have company, which is sad because the princess does not interact with the dragon; she is put in a tall tower, all by herself. She would most certainly prefer to join a character who plays a very different role in fairy tales – the prince. The prince is most often part of a loving family; he is popular with all the girls in the country and willing to risk his life for the one he loves.

By playing dragons, I suggest that the children are exploring how to be members of a social group of peers. The involved children, like dragons, are not regarded as socially competent, but in their creative, imaginative role play, in their proximal zone of development, they are balancing the contradictions between the rules set by the theme of the play and the rules of friendship. They are cooperating and participating in a peer group: ‘In play it is as though he were a head taller than himself’ (Vygotsky 2016: 16). Expectations for their future life, like abstract formal intellectual competences, are not of interest or perhaps not even reachable for them yet. They are out of their proximal zone of development. On the contrary, their creativity and imagination through play are reachable and in line with their experiences. Therefore, children playing dragons can be interpreted as their exploration of if and how creativity and a variation of themes and experiences of importance for the involved children can be a part of the content of ECE. On a general level, it raises the question of how to socialize and educate young children.

Summary

My analysis illustrates that the children who are playing dragons are, at a personal level, exploring friendship, how to be part of a peer group, and danger and evil. At the institutional level, the analysis indicates that both the children and their teacher are exploring space, place and what good play ‘is’. At the societal level, the analysis indicates that the children are exploring how themes and experiences of importance to them can be part of the content of ECE institutions. By recording, presenting and reflecting on this imaginative role play as an example of interesting and important educational content, the teacher challenged and explored the didactical practices and expectations of ECE.

The teacher’s way of performing her teaching, being close to the children’s perspectives and play, paves the way for making room for a variety and complexity of activities. Children are viewed as creative, active agents at the core in learning and cultural formation. Both the children’s play and the teacher’s comments and reflections form a contrast with the uniform declared aims for ECE, built on the economic and political emphasis for more academic competences, early interventions to train social competences, and school readiness. The analysis and my interpretation, building on my theoretical frame, indicate that imaginative play, such as playing dragons, is a valuable activity in ECE. This play, can condition their access to exploring emotions, rooms, knowledge, friendship and content. Emphasizing the aims and content that are valuable from a political and economic perspective, and are far removed from children’s everyday life both in their families and in the ECE institution, can hardly compete with imaginative play in which the children are ‘a head taller’ themselves.

From my multidimensional analysis, I conclude that children’s imaginative play represents a valuable activity in ECE. Children manage more in play than in reality, even though children’s play will vary depending on their interests, abilities and social worlds. Children’s creativity and imagination are interrelated both with children’s experiences outside the ECE institution in accordance with class, gender and race and with the conditions and demands in their ECE institution. In their imaginative play, children are in control in a context that demands important knowledge from them and that they are able to meet in accordance with their experiences in ‘new’ and not previously defined activities. The challenge to solve contemporary and future issues calls for new and creative solutions. Uniformity and singular causality in how to resolve contemporary problems are not the answer. Therefore, more than mere reproduction of what we already know is to be welcomed.

The voices of the children and their teachers who are performing their activities in ECE institutions are intentional agents that act. If their voices are not taken into account when constituting aims and content in ECE, there is a missing resource for developing valuable activities for cultural formation. Children and teachers form the majority of the stakeholders in ECE, and their voices are of crucial importance when it comes to informing valuable activities in ECE institutions.