Keywords

Introduction

The word school derives from the Greek word scholē (σχολή), meaning “free time” and a source of knowledge and experience available as a “common good” (Masschelein & Simons, 2013). “Common good” is at the heart of the double purpose of education discussed in this book, that is, to enable learners to live well in and help create a world worth living in for all. However, the role of free time as part of this purpose is often paid little attention. This chapter considers what a world worth living in for all might look like from the point of view of young migrant and refugee background school students, and how the practices of living well in that world may be seen to emerge and be shaped by their free play at school.

Our study draws from a larger Finnish-Australian research project exploring the broad questions of what educational “success” looks like from the point of view of children from refugee backgrounds, and how schools can best support these students. Our findings from that project have indicated that the feeling of success may arise from the resourcefulness of children in diverse conditions (Kaukko & Wilkinson, 2020); that play creates important affordances for learning to work together (Kaukko et al., 2022b), and that teachers showing care and love are crucial in assisting students to settle and feel safe especially in the early stages of their settlement (Kaukko et al. 2021). Our previous findings have also highlighted the equally crucial role that educational leaders play in ensuring that the school climate is based on principles of social justice and equity and that teachers have the opportunities and support to meet the needs of students from migrant and refugee backgrounds (Wilkinson & Kaukko, 2020). This is in line with other research, showing that the initial years of settlement after migration are decisive factors in refugee students’ wellbeing and long-term settlement (Dryden-Peterson, 2016; McIntyre & Abrams, 2020) and that, during this time, schools are crucial sites that can help students feel safe and settled (Kohli, 2011). The crucial importance of schools is not limited to refugee students’ inclusion and settlement but applies to other migrant students as well (Kaukko et al., 2022a, b). As our project grew and matured, we noticed that some parts of the study would benefit from extending the invitation to all migrant children, not only refugees. This was important especially when we focused on something that can be inclusive by nature, like play.

In this chapter, we explore how children engage in free play at school in Australia and Finland and consider the insights this play might give into the double purpose of education. In line with the future focus of this volume, we consider how analysing the imagined worlds children create in their play can help us understand how children may emerge into, and co-construct, a real-world worth living in. In addition, we consider how schools may better guide students towards living well in the present by providing children with opportunities to play. As children play, they not only create, simulate, and negotiate between themselves an imagined, future-oriented world worth living in for all, but also, through the real collaboration, empathy and care they develop and practise together, they play a part in actually bringing that world into being. This is not all that play can do, but it highlights the importance of broadening our analytical focus from formal practices of education to also encompass times when children are let be.

Two groups of school students, one in Australia (13 children between the ages 6–9) and one in Finland (eight children of 7–9 years of age), documented their school lives wearing chest-mounted action cameras and later co-analysed some of the video recordings with us. When the participating students were let be at school, that is, when they had fairly unstructured free time there, they spent much of it in nature areas in the school premises, or around the schools when accompanied by supervising teachers. The students’ activities in these outside spaces included smashing rocks, jumping around on boulders, hiding in bushes, climbing in trees, gathering natural materials for building, and playing hide and seek.

For this chapter, we analysed one episode of Finnish students’ free play and one episode of Australian students’ free play. In the Australian episode, a group of students was engaged in imaginary play involving the preparation of a communal meal, using leaves and other natural material. In the Finnish episode, a class of newly arrived migrant children were taken on an outing by their teacher to a lake near the school, accompanied by two of the authors of this chapter (Mervi and Nick). At the beach, the students built sand houses for plastic toy animals that the teacher had brought along, as well as for a ladybug encountered during their play. Focusing on such a small fraction of the data comes with limitations: we cannot make any generalisable arguments about how children’s play unfolds. Yet on the other hand it allows us to engage with play in all its complexity and capture the “happeningness” (Kemmis et al., 2014, 29) of practices in play. Our arguments, however, are supported by our interpretation of the extensive overall body of data. While engaged in seemingly simple play activities, the children across the whole body of data had rich discussions about themes such as how to be fair to others, how to include other children in play activities, and how to get things done together. In their actions, they both simulated and enacted situations which were inclusive and sensitive to the diversity of students. In many ways, they played, and lived, a world worth living in as they imagined it.

Although there was very little direct adult interference in the documented play, these play practices did not emerge coincidentally. Enabling them required purposefully planned cultural-discursive, material-economic, and social-political arrangements orchestrated by educators, which, crucially, left room for children to “just be kids”. In the following pages, we explore these various arrangements and how they served to enable and guide students’ free play practices towards the original purpose of education, a purpose that at times lies in stark contrast with some of the recent test-driven tendencies of education in both Australia and Finland.

The Purpose of Education

Contemporary schooling, with its varying levels of standardised testing, can be seen as having the narrow purpose of equipping students with skills and temperaments to function within prevailing socio-economic systems (Kemmis & Edwards-Groves, 2018). Education, on the other hand, can be seen as having a deeper moral purpose. Kemmis et al. (2014) define education as the

process by which children, young people, and adults are initiated into forms of understanding, modes of action, and ways of relating to one another and the world that foster (respectively) individual and collective self-expression, individual and collective self-development, and individual and collective self-determination and that are, in these senses, oriented towards the good for each person and the good for humankind”. (p. 26)

By this definition, education happens in practices, that is, in the present moment, but it also focuses on the future: the future good for each person, the future good for humankind and, we would like to add (see Kaukko et al., 2021), the future good for all the life on our shared planet. The moral task of education then, as described by Kemmis and Edwards-Groves (2018), consists of five facets: environmental, economic, social, cultural, and personal, each of which impart skills and knowledge with which to create conditions for, and to practise living well in, a world that continues to be worth living in for the next generations too.

Play can be a set of practices which invites children to imagine a better future. On the other hand, play can also sometimes be cruel, mean, racist, sexist, and reproduce the worst aspects of society. Our attempt is not to romanticise play as simply “good”, but in this chapter, our focus is on what play can say about living well together. Play can have varying importance in education, depending on the school system and the age of the students. At best, play can be “an inherently enjoyable activity and an important process through which children learn about themselves, others, and the world around them” (Austin et al., 2016, p. 119). It can appear anywhere and everywhere, yet play is also informed and influenced by the material arrangements surrounding it. Both episodes selected for this chapter take place outdoors in natural or semi-natural environments. In the Finnish example, it was because the children were taken to a lakeside beach surrounded by forest. In the Australian example, children chose to play in particularly leafy parts of their school’s large natural premises—an environment which had been especially crafted for the children by the school, given many of them lived in apartments with no outside space to play. Children’s play studies (Ernst & Burcak, 2019; Wake & Birdsall, 2016) suggest that particular qualities of natural spaces, including their mystery and complexity, make them preferred sites of play for children. Research has highlighted extremely positive effects of children’s nature-based play on whatever is measured, be it students’ physical activity outcomes, cognitive behaviours, learning, mental health, or wellbeing (Dankiw et al., 2020; Miller et al., 2022; Wake & Birdsall, 2016). Ernst and Burcak (2019) argue that free play in natural settings develops skills and attitudes relevant to sustainability, such as curiosity, creative thinking and resilience. Wake and Birdsall (2016) argue that well-planned and collaboratively designed school gardens offer students opportunities to experience nature while promoting social inclusivity and healthy lifestyles.

Research on play is diverse in its quality, contexts, methods, scope, and, importantly, the extent to which it can come to convincing conclusions. Play is hard to understand from the outsider’s perspective and when play can be researched, the act of exploring it may limit the extent to which the play continues unchanged and “free”. Nevertheless, childhood researchers continue to call for more research on play (Parker et al., 2022), and few educators would doubt its importance. Many also agree that schools, especially those in urban and/or low socio-economic areas, should invest more in creating opportunities for children’s free play in safe and stimulating environments.

Acknowledging the important benefits and purposes of children’s play as well as the challenges involved in researching it, we focus on children’s play as an aspect of the original purpose of schooling, to be both a source of free time and of knowledge and experience available as a “common good”. In studying episodes of children’s play, we therefore approach play as a window through which to investigate how children, on their own terms yet guided by the cultural-discursive, material-economic, and social-political arrangements of schooling, come to understand, negotiate and live well in a world worth living in for all. In the following section, we discuss the contexts, participants, and methodology of our study.

Context and Participants

The data used in this chapter were collected by students who studied in public primary schools located in the outskirts of the large city of Melbourne, Australia and a city in Finland. The Australian school is a middle-sized (< 400 students), public primary school where approximately 90% of the students speak English as an additional language and about 25% of the students are from different refugee backgrounds. The Finnish school is a large (> 1500 students) public comprehensive school, including classes from early childhood education to upper secondary school. The students we observed in both countries were 6–9 years of age. They all had migrant backgrounds and some came from refugee backgrounds.

The Australian school follows the Victorian Curriculum F–10 (Foundation year to Year 10), which sets out what Australian students should learn during their first eleven years of schooling. This curriculum, incorporating the Australian Curriculum and Victorian priorities and standards, claims to outline the common set of knowledge and skills required by students for life-long learning, social development, and active and informed citizenship (VCAA, 2022). The Finnish school follows the National Core Curriculum for Basic Education (EDUFI 2014), which, like the Australian curriculum, sets the standards for learning in grades 1–9, but does so in a very broad manner. The students we observed in the Finnish school were in a preparatory class for newly arrived migrant students, meaning that in addition to the Finnish National Core Curriculum, they followed a Preparatory Education Curriculum. The main focus of preparatory education in Finland is on learning Finnish language and becoming familiar with the Finnish school system, through individual education plans and more flexibility in the curriculum.

Neither the Victorian Curriculum F-10, the Finnish National Core Curriculum for Basic Education nor the Finnish Curriculum for Preparatory Education have a particular focus on play. They acknowledge play as a teaching practice (VCAA, 2022) and an inquiry method, especially for young learners (EDUFI, 2014; VCAA, 2022) but not as a priority or as a cross-curricular theme. However, there is an increasing awareness in both Australia and Finland that play promotes key skills and knowledge that school systems should provide in better ways. This awareness was reflected in the Australian case study school’s emphasis on play as a crucial form of pedagogy (Kaukko et al, 2022b).

Methods

The nature of children’s play, with its imaginative dimensions and its child-exclusivity, makes it difficult to research, yet some elements of play can be comprehensible from the outside (Kaukko et al., 2022b). For our broader study, we gathered audio-visual data consisting of videos filmed by students themselves as they participated in day-to-day school activities. In each country, the schoolteacher helped us select students to participate. All the Australian students were from different migrant backgrounds, with some from refugee backgrounds, but studying in the mainstream education system. The Finnish group consisted of eight students who were studying in a preparatory class before moving into mainstream primary school classesFootnote 1. After giving consent to participate and be filmed, and after being introduced to the aims of the study, the students wore chest-mounted action cameras for approximately 90 min per day, filming their ordinary school activities. The groups followed their normal schedules during the filming periods, meaning that students’ videos captured a mix of time spent inside, outside, in structured lessons and in unstructured free time such as lunch breaks or outings. When students returned their camera after each filming session, we asked them a series of questions about their activities and experiences. The questions varied slightly depending on the group. The first question, “Did you do something that made you feel successful?”, was simplified as needed, which sometimes led the students to mention any events that made them feel good at school. Follow-up questions elaborated on the role of other people, and things around them, in the chosen moments. School observations, as well as interviews with teachers and school leaders, complemented the data collected with children.

Our initial interest was in moments students identified as making them feel successful, where success was defined in the broadest sense of encompassing all kinds of academic, social, and emotional flourishing. However, as we became more familiar with the video data, we realised that much could also be found outside of the chosen moments. This led us to new lines of inquiry, including the current study described in this chapter. Analysing broader swathes of the video material, we identified the two particular play episodes described above and deconstructed the sequences of play practices within them. Both episodes were filmed simultaneously by two or more children who were involved in the same play projects. We analysed these sequences through the theory of practice architectures (Kemmis et al., 2014), paying attention to the sayings, doings and relatings evident in the videos, as well as the broader cultural-discursive, material-economic, and social-political arrangements of the site (for a more detailed description of our analysis methods, see (Kaukko et al., 2022b). This chapter draws mostly on the analysis of this video data. We use observational notes and interview data with children and teachers as background data, as needed.

Analysing Changing Practices of Imaginary Play

Play is simultaneously imagined and unpredictable. The same can be said about the future. The flow of play episodes, like the flow of the present world into the future, is shaped by the changing, adding or disappearing of elements within them. Play changes as new materials, activities, participants, or ideas are introduced or removed, or combined in new ways. A common way to try to understand the meaning of a practice is to focus on the practitioner’s words. In play, however, and especially in a multilingual group’s play, words offer only a partial understanding. The episodes we analysed were full of moments in which children applied different or contradictory meanings to their roles and actions when something was not understood in the same way by the players. We also saw the meaning of play practices affirmed and/or disputed by other children who joined the play. To analyse play, we therefore considered not only what the children did, but also how they adjusted their actions to shifting understandings of what the play required at any given moment.

For the current study, the multilinguality of the video data and our research group gave us an opportunity to be playful with our analysis method. The main language used by students and teachers in the Finnish episode was Finnish, while in the Australian video, the main language used by students was Burmese. In both episodes, some students occasionally mixed these languages with English phrases. While all three members of our research group speak English, two also speak Finnish (Mervi and Nick) and none speak Burmese. This variation in language gave us the opportunity, as a group, to analyse students’ play practices firstly by focusing on what was revealed without words, i.e. what the children seemed to be doing, how they related to one another, and what they seemed to be expressing based on the tone of the voice or body language. Jane, who could not understand Finnish or Burmese, commenced this non-verbal analysis on both the Finnish and Australian episodes, followed by Mervi and Nick, who made a similar non-verbal analysis of the Australian video. After this, we obtained an English-translated transcription of the Australian episode, allowing us all to reanalyse the episode in terms of the meanings that the students’ words provided. At the same time, Mervi and Nick analysed the Finnish episode with an understanding of the students’ speech and compared their comprehensive analyses to Jane’s non-verbal analysis.

In the next section, we give a more detailed overview of the episodes in both countries, then zoom in to the children’s doings, relatings, and sayings, as well as the arrangements that held them in place. We do this while acknowledging that the changing and unpredictable nature of play makes it vulnerable to misinterpretation.

Field Trip to a Finnish Lakeside Forest

The Finnish data present a school class trip to a nearby beach in late May, just before the summer holiday. The setting is a beautiful natural lakeside environment, and the filming takes place on a pleasant sunny day. The sky is clear, but we can tell that the weather is cool, as the children are wearing jackets and woollen gloves. We can see children being led by their teacher through native forests with pine trees, untended public land and finally arriving at a natural beach site. We can see a changeroom and a rubbish bin behind the beach and apartment blocks slightly further away, indicating the beach is public and urban. There are no other people on the beach when the group arrives. Children wander freely and without rush, and there seem to be no adults dictating their movements.

In this episode, the main activity the children are engaged in is building sand houses for toy animals that the teacher brought along to the beach. Hence, the play was partially initiated by adults as they brought the toy animals, but it was up to the children to decide to integrate the toy animals into the play. We view this episode from the chest-mounted camera of a girl who shapes the damp sand into walls with her gloved hands. Nearby, we can see and hear another girl and boy building their own sand house in similar ways. Occasionally, we see them run together to a nearby patch of forest, gathering natural materials such as flowers, grass, and seeds to be brought back to the sand house. A little later in the video, a fourth important participant is brought into their activity: A ladybug that was found by one of the girls in the forest while collecting materials.

Pretend-Cooking at an Australian School Yard

The Australian play episode occurs on a school playground. The weather here is also sunny and clear. Children are wearing a mix of summer and winter uniforms with some jackets. Girls have leggings underneath their dresses so they can play physically more easily. We can see low school buildings, trees of different sizes, bushes and a variety of different natural and artificial objects lying around. There are natural materials, such as logs, that look purposefully trimmed and placed as play equipment. Other artificial play equipment includes a green metal climbing frame, some swings, and smaller objects such as shovels, pots, and pans. There is a large wooden table situated in the corner of the playground, nestled within a ring of trees and leafy bushes. The ground is covered with wood chips.

In this episode, the main play activity is the simulated preparation and cooking of a meal. We see the episode from the chest-mounted camera of a girl who carries a metal cooking pot to a group of other girls sitting and standing at the wooden table. On the table, various objects have been neatly arranged; there is a tablecloth, a cushion, a metal muffin tray, and some stacked plastic pots. Throughout the episode, we see the girls going back and forth from the table, fetching natural materials from the surrounding ground, bushes, and trees, and placing them in the cooking pot and muffin tray. When one girl cannot reach the seedpods or nuts higher up in the bushes, the other girls lift her up.

Doings Consisting of Purposeful Activities Aiming for a Shared Play

In both the Finnish and Australian play episodes, the doings of the participants seem purposeful and collaborative and targeted towards a commonly agreed aim: building sand houses in Finland and preparing a pretend-dinner in Australia. In the Finnish episode, we see the children running to the forest, collecting building materials such as flowers, twigs, and grass. We see them adding these materials as decorative or functional features of their sand houses or storing them in some of the sand rooms, and we also see them sharing materials and helping each other build. Doings in both episodes show organisation, deliberation, and precision. In the Australian episode, the children are neatly sorting and storing seeds, leaves, and branches in the muffin tray cups, as well as carefully crushing them with a rock. Similarly, in the Finnish episode, we see the children handling their gathered forest materials with care and aesthetic consideration while building and decorating their sand houses. In both cases, the children seemingly strive to make their play environments both beautiful and functional, mimicking practices that would apply to real homes as well.

Play practices have the power to transform and acquire different meanings in the middle of an activity (see Kaukko et al., 2022b). These transformations need to be negotiated between participants, so that a shared understanding and agreement of the aims and “rules” of the play remain. What happens in collaborative play opens new possibilities for interpretation, imagination, and narration for the players, which, in turn, leads to new directions for unfolding. An example of negotiation between play participants is seen in the Finnish episode when, in the middle of the house-building activity, one of the girls finds a ladybug. The girl holds it aloft on her finger, calling the other children over to help make a house for it. She handles the creature delicately as she studies it and shows it to the others, who show interest in it. While we hear them negotiate verbally about the “rules” of the play, how to build the ladybug’s house and whether it likes eating certain leaves within the house, we also see them negotiate through their doings; adding and arranging their own elements to the house while accepting, adapting, or rejecting elements added by others. Through this multifaceted negotiation of practices, the collaborative play settles into a new direction of flow in which a certain room now represents the ladybug’s home, a certain leaf represents its bed, and so on.

This shift in the play’s direction seems to happen easily, as the ladybug is an interesting enough element to draw the practitioners’ focus away from the previous play practices. As the ladybug is a living object, the children handle it carefully and gently. The children seem to understand that the needs of the ladybug overrule the needs of the inanimate toy animals they had, up to that point, been playing with. We do not wish to make any far-fetched assumptions about why the ladybug receives such a central role in the play. It might be because of its bright colours, its small size, pleasing appearance, or the fact that it does not fly away; the video does not give us answers for that. What we do think is shown by the children’s doings in the video, however, is a curiosity and a thoughtful consideration to the safety and wellbeing of this non-human play participant. In another scenario, the ladybug could have been crushed or discarded, either through ignorance of how to handle it or deliberately. Significantly, this consideration of safety and wellbeing emerges both in the simulated play that the children have co-created, for example, with the provision of a home, a bed, and food, and also in the real-world manner in which the children physically handle it.

Built, Found, and Imagined Material-Economic Arrangements of Play

In both episodes, the material-economic arrangements that support the children’s play include the natural and built play equipment, as well as the time and space allowed for children to experiment, be creative, and work towards a shared aim. Some of these arrangements were deliberately constructed, enabled, or provided by adults at the schools. From our background research, we know that the adults in both schools had the power to give the children the time to play. Past decisions at the school, district, or national levels have ensured that these school children have resources such as equipment and space to accommodate different types of play. The playground in the Australian episode features a range of objects which might not be found in most school yards, such as baking trays, seat cushions, sheets, buckets, and other containers. These “cooking implements” were complemented by “ingredients” consisting of leaves, nuts, flowers, branches, and rocks available from trees and bushes growing in the playground. Such a set-up is not a coincidence. Rather, it concurs with a broader pedagogical philosophy of the school, centred on play and collaborative learning. The practice architectures that shape play in our videos are part of an ecology of practices that connect up to the teaching, leading, researching, and professional learning practices of the school and its classrooms, not only the outdoor environment. The children learn to be collaborative through how they are taught in the classroom and these practices are amplified and reinforced through the practice architectures of the outdoor environment and its naturalistic setting. In one of the interviews we later made with the school’s teaching staff, an educational leader noted that:

Our spaces outside are not just about biodiversity and curriculum, and they're not just about sport and fixed play equipment, and they're not just about safety, they are actually and truly child centred play opportunities, and open ended as much as possible. (Assistant principal, Australia)

Another of the school’s educational leaders agreed, stating that:

[The school’s play philosophy] is about the play and setting up environments that are diverse – giving children the opportunity to have space and choice in the yard and having the notion that we are not risk averse so kids can climb trees. We don’t have yard duty, because yard duty implies a sergeant major is walking around saying don’t do that, don’t do that. The idea with play support is you go around and you say ‘Oh that’s interesting what you’re doing. I might join in’, or ‘I don’t feel comfortable with that’. (Principal, Australia)

The play episode captured in the Finnish video, on the other hand, took place with almost no ready-brought arrangements apart from the toy animals the teacher had brought along to the beach. The material-economic arrangements were mainly created by the children and were rather modest. With no shovels or other play tools available, the children use their hands, feet and sticks from the forest to build and shape their sand houses. In this case, we see that, in fact, the only material-economic arrangements this Finnish school needed to provide in order to enable play was free time and a safe, natural, and rich environment where children were trusted to collaborate.

Respectful and Trusting Relatings Sustaining the Play

From our observations and interviews with teachers and students in both the Finnish and Australian schools, we know that the children were not instructed to work together. Nevertheless, they do, because playing is most often a social practice. The play practices seen in both episodes include individually performed tasks, such as constructing a wall or sorting materials, yet the mutually agreed project of the play, building houses or cooking a meal, also requires collaborative practices, such as sharing, helping, advising, or praising. These same individual and collaborative requirements of play apply to what these children need to do to realise a future world worth living in. They need to practise working together, finding agreement on shared goals and ways of going about tasks that benefit not only themselves but others as well. Working together requires that the children are competent and know what to expect from one another. This means that there is a certain level of predictability in play, even if play, as a whole, can be full of surprises. Some predictability and agreement of common aims ensure that the required tasks get done and the play is purposeful. Additionally, communality and fairness in play practices sustain the flow of the play and keep the participating group committed.

The collaborative nature of play, and the children’s attempts to be fair and just, are clearly illustrated in both episodes. In the Finnish video, one of the male participants comes to a girl’s building site, pretending to visit her sand house. He explains that he is bringing materials and offers to help her build. The girl accepts the offer and, looking over at his own house, compliments him on how nice it looks. These kinds of polite exchanges occur throughout the video between the participants themselves, yet also between participants, their toy animals and the ladybug, whose roles the children take in the dialogues.

In the Australian video, we can see three girls collecting “cooking ingredients” from the bushes behind the playground table. One of the girls, who is shorter than the others, indicates that she wants to reach higher up the bush. One of the other girls lifts her up by the legs and keeps her balanced while the shorter girl picks seeds or nuts from the bush. The third girl helps to hoist the small girl up onto the second girl’s shoulders. As they work together, they laugh and converse in Burmese. Through the girls’ actions alone, we can interpret their intention as to assist the smallest child, and the later translation of their conversation confirmed this. From the translation, we also gain a sense of both the difficulty of the task as well as the care and co-ordination the girls brought to it: “Hold it carefully…. Could you please hold her legs?” Overall, the task seems pleasant, and all seem pleased at the outcome.

Social-Political Arrangements Nurturing Collaboration and Respect

The relatings we see in the play episodes illustrate the children’s orientation towards fair play and being just. It is not easy to conclusively pinpoint the origins of the social-political arrangements enabling this orientation. Based on the observations and interviews at both the Finnish and Australian schools, we can assume that such relatings are made possible by a respectful and fair school climate, as well as committed teachers, leaders and other school staff. The Australian school was committed to a whole-school approach and personalised learning (Otero et al., 2011), championing respect and dialogue among students, staff, and families. One of the educational leaders we interviewed explained that respectful relationships within and beyond the school community were a non-negotiable requirement for all staff. They noted that, “We expect you to be part of that making those connections with community and families and the broader community”, and that good relationships between staff, students, families, and communities fed into good relationships between the student and learning, and the school and the real world. This is what they call “personalised learning”:

[In] personalised learning you use your actual world instead of using a core curriculum which tends to be in so many cases it’s all about numeracy and literacy. Well, learning isn’t all about numeracy and literacy. They are absolutely crucial parts of the piece but they are not the whole piece. (Principal, Australia)

From our observations, it was clear that this was not merely rhetoric. The entire school staff knew the students’ names, family situations, interests, and concerns, and they used every opportunity to link learning to the real worlds of the students. Providing opportunities for different kinds of play was part of this pedagogy.

Building arrangements that enable free, yet collaborative play is an outcome of persistent work. The teacher of the students in the Finnish episode explained that, at the beginning of the year, she could not take her student group outside of the fenced school area, as the children would run away or do something else unexpected. To reach the stage of making a successful and rewarding field trip such as the one we witnessed in the Finnish episode, it took the teacher a full year of building trust, learning to communicate with the multilingual group, and building a safe and welcoming community. These qualities were apparent to us both from the Finnish video material and in our more general observations of the class. Similar qualities were likewise seen in the Australian school, where one of the Australian teachers noted:

You don’t play if you're not feeling safe and you have to worry about your belongings, and you have to worry about where people are and you're too traumatised and sad, your play can look very, very different. So, with the evolution of play in our yard, we can actually now say that our children are feeling very safe and happy in our yard, and they trust those things will be there tomorrow. (Leading teacher, Australia)

Children’s relatings indicate respect for the teacher, each other, and others’ play sites; students are not breaking or stealing materials from others. We note here that this might be a limitation (or a benefit) of our methodology, given that the children’s behaviour may have been influenced by their awareness of the cameras and the knowledge that their actions were recorded. However, the video filming period for each student was quite long (one week in Finland, three weeks in Australia) and both examples are from the final days of the filming. It is therefore fair to assume that the children grew used to the cameras and did not constantly think about them.

Sayings with and Without Language

Sayings consist not only of words, but also of elements such as silences, pauses, tones, and gesticulations. Some of the sayings in the Finnish and Australian play episodes can therefore be understood without understanding the children’s language. In the videos, we see non-linguistic elements of sayings such as speaking with loud or soft tones, speaking rapidly or slowly, or pointing with their finger to an object. In short, the children in the play episodes are using, in addition to words, a whole range of verbal, tonal, and gestural elements from which an understanding of the children’s expressions can be surmised.

In the Finnish video, the children are mostly talking about the sand house activity, narrating their actions, and offering guidance to the others. There are also many small, polite exchanges that are not directed at the play practice per se, but aimed at connecting, supporting, and encouraging each other. In analysing the Australian episode, none of us understood the children’s Burmese language, yet its translation did not reveal any great surprises; as in the Finnish episode, the children are narrating their actions, as well as giving short instructions, compliments, or requests to one another: “Put rice, pork, and water in this pot…”, “Put vegetables here [in the pot] and then cook”, “It’s dirty”.

When analysing a section of the Finnish video in which one of the girls is poking twigs and grass through a small pile of sand, Jane is not sure what they are for. She does not understand the girl’s words, so her guess is that the girl is arranging sticks to light pretend fires in the home. However, with an understanding of the girl’s words, Nick’s and Mervi’s analysis reveals that the pile is going to be a bathroom wall and that the sticks stuck through it are showers. This shows that material-economic arrangements of play, in this case the sticks and grasses, require suitable cultural-discursive arrangements to give them meaning. Only then can their purpose be agreed among the players. We saw this as well in the Australian video analysis, where none of us initially understood what was being talked about or what the exact meaning and purpose of the children’s activities were. In the video, it seemed clear that the girls were busy pretend-cooking with nuts, seeds, and other nature elements in a pot. The English translation of the Burmese dialogue, however, revealed that the berries represented rice, and the discussion touched upon the use of rice in their “village”. “In our village, there is no rice. We eat only vegetables”, said one of the girls, as she added pretend rice in her food. The others continued: “We need to cook rice”. It is difficult to say how significant this food selection is to the children's play-cooking. Maybe it refers to the scarcity of a basic food group that the children may have experienced in the past, but we have no information about this. We also cannot say how important the addition of showers is to the children building sand houses. Perhaps knowing these things would not reveal much more about children’s ideas of a good life or a world worth living in. Maybe showers and rice were simply parts of their play, enabled by the suitable material-economic arrangements that happened to be available, and the cultural-discursive arrangements that made them acceptable and intelligible in the minds of other players. We do argue, however, that these kinds of nuances are difficult to grasp by observation alone. Trying to analyse these types of episodes in the way we have attempted here helps us as adults, researchers, and educators to step into the shoes of the child who does not speak the language of the other players. Combining non-verbal and verbal analytical approaches illuminated how it might have felt for many of the participants to participate in the play episodes; that is, being an observer or a participant in a social situation without fully or at all understanding the language of communication. Also, these episodes show that through play, children are not just engaged in imaginary situations, but they actively consider what it would be like to live in, and act well in, in scenarios that they might face in future.

Cultural-Discursive Arrangements Enabling Understanding of a Multilingual Group

Sayings are enabled or constrained by the cultural-discursive arrangements existing in the medium of language and in the dimension of semantic space of the play site. These arrangements are the resources that make possible—and comprehensible—the language used in and about play, that is, its sayings. On the other hand, what is being said in these play practices becomes arrangements for other children’s sayings. For example, the type of tone a child adopts, the direction of their attention or the body language they use can either invite other children into a conversation or repel them. The Finnish and Australian play episodes consist of language and communication that acknowledges and appreciates the children, their imaginations, and their human and non-human companions.

In the episodes, we analysed for this chapter, teachers and other adults are almost entirely in the background, yet the value and room they give to their students’ play is revealed in our broader observations of their classes and in our interviews with them. These types of cultural-discursive arrangements become highlighted especially in multilingual and multicultural play. In communicating with each other, the children in the play episodes used not only body language and gestures, but also languages other than their first language. Nevertheless, throughout the episodes, we see the students using the common languages of Finnish, Burmese, and English confidently and flexibly, combining them on occasion (for example, “I don’t have any hakaneula” [Finnish for safety pins]). The fact that the students feel confident and free to blend languages in this way suggests that the cultural-discursive arrangements surrounding the play allow them to be accepted and understood. The combining of languages also changed according to whom the speaking was directed (teacher, students who were fluent in Finnish/English, less-fluent students, or non-human participants), suggesting that the students themselves understood how their language became a cultural-discursive arrangement for others.

Discussion

We cannot say anything definitive about what the children in our research had in mind while they played, but we can say that the world they mimicked in their play showed inclusiveness and equity. Participatory analysis would have helped, and that is what we used when analysing moments which the children had selected as connected with a feeling of success. The data used for this article goes beyond those moments. However, two of the students in the Australian example chose the cooking activity as their moment of success for that day. When Mervi interviewed them, one of them noted that the group conversed in their first language because one of the girls was new to the country and could not yet speak English well. The videos confirm the efforts for inclusivity in, for example, the way the children changed their language to Burmese and when speaking English, they did so in slow, clearer tones, using far more gestures to match the language skills of the receiver. In other words, the welcoming and inclusive nature of the children’s practices could be seen in the video data, and the interviews confirmed that this indeed was their intent. The children included the newcoming child in their sayings, doings, and relatings, not by coincidence, but on purpose.

The world imagined by the students and replicated in their play was also equitable, seemingly because that was the only way to keep the play going. Some of the plays in the videos were individual, yet most were based on cooperation. Very rarely was it based on competition. Children strove for shared goals with friends, helping each other by sharing skills, materials, or strength, and also being responsible for, and taking care of others. Considering these inclusive and just elements of play, we argue that increasing the emphasis on play as part of a broader pedagogical philosophy based on building trust, collaboration, and equity in schools can foster children’s collaborations in building a world worth living in in their present, partially imagined world and also allow them to develop skills to bring about, and act within, a world worth living in for the future.

We acknowledge that play cannot alone fulfil the educational needs of children or, by itself, teach them to build a world worth living in. We also understand that the purpose of schooling is more than offering children time to “be” and to engage in free play. Schools and education have, fortunately, evolved greatly since the Greek word scholē (σχολή) was originally used. Schooling as “free time” is no longer exclusively for privileged boys to be freed from physical labour; it is now the right of all children and youth. We are therefore not arguing for a reversal of schooling back to some “good old days”, or for schools filled with nothing but free play time. Rather, we argue for our current schools to pay closer attention to the importance of play. Play can give experiences of succeeding for children of different abilities, languages, and backgrounds. It can make children feel safe and included. Teachers can build conditions for play, and it does not need grand transformations of our current educational practices. Children play when they are left to be, and their play can at the same time be educative, purposeful, and rewarding. The benefits of play are hard to measure and may therefore be overlooked in crowded curricula and standardised testing. Yet, as we can see in our data and in other play research, play can support a range of knowledge, skills and attitudes needed for a better future.

The process of analysing data without understanding the words was particularly illustrative in terms of how play might appear in the eyes of an observer who would like to enter it without the possibility of understanding the language of its practitioners. Tuning our senses to the non-linguistic dimensions of play practices reminds us that people’s realities are lived and shared in ways beyond words and languages. Exploring some of these dimensions through play gives us one more window to investigate living well in a world worth living in for all, as seen by children.

We can go even further and play with the idea of what “play” means. Considered broadly as an element of a good life, playing should not be limited to children. Furthermore, it should encompass more than its most common definitions: playing board games, sports, instruments, etc. Playing as part of living well can consist of having fun with friends, engaging in social interactions, having enjoyable conversation with others, or just any practices that are conducted for the sake of being a human and enjoying life with others. Understood this way, playing is more or less the same as living well and if this playing is inclusive and welcoming to all, the world can be made a little more livable for all.