IJEC (2015) 47:221–234

DOI 10.1007/s13158-015-0141-1

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

The Serious Joy and the Joyful Work of Play: Children

Becoming Agentive Actors in Co-Authoring Themselves
and Their World Through Play

Anna Stetsenko1 • Pi-Chun Grace Ho1

Published online: 13 June 2015

 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Abstract In most cultures, play seems to matter a great deal to young children.
This is evidenced by the vast amount of time children spent playing and the
combination of often unsurpassed passion, imagination, and energy which they
invest in this activity. This paper explores why play matters through the lens of
Bakhtin’s dialogic approach combined with Vygotsky’s developmental theory. In
expanding upon their insights into a framework termed ‘‘the transformative activist
stance,’’ we suggest that play offers unique opportunities for children to develop and
exercise their agency, identity, and voice. While playing, according to this per-
spective, children discover how to be agentive actors—that is, unique persons who
have an irreplaceable role in co-authoring social interactions, communal practices,
and the world itself. In this complex endeavor, children sort out the difficult chal-
lenge of becoming unique, self-determined, and free persons within the communal
world shared and co-created with others. Examples from video recordings of chil-
dren’s interactive play in a naturalistic setting illustrate how play paves the way for
children to collaboratively create and transform the world from their unique stances
and positions. This approach suggests that play is serious work for children as they
develop capacities for agency. Therefore, it is critically important that early edu-
cation allocates ample time for this activity.

Keywords Bakhtin
Vygotsky
Play
Early childhood
Agency

Transformative stance

& Anna Stetsenko

AStetsenko@gc.cuny.edu
Pi-Chun Grace Ho
Pho@gradcenter.cuny.edu
1
The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York,
NY 10016, USA

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Résumé Dans la plupart des cultures, le jeu semble avoir une grande importance
pour les jeunes enfants. Le temps que les enfants passent à jouer et la combinaison,
souvent inégalée, de passion, d’imagination et d’énergie qu’ils investissent dans
cette activité, en sont la démonstration. Cet article explore pourquoi le jeu est si
important, à travers la lentille de l’approche dialogique de Bakhtine combinée à la
théorie du développement de Vygotsky. En élargissant leurs idées à un cadre appelé
‘‘position d’activité transformatrice,’’ nous suggérons que le jeu offre aux enfants
des opportunités uniques de développer et exercer leur capacité d’agir, leur identité,
et leur voix. Tout en jouant, selon cette perspective, les enfants découvrent comment
être acteurs– c’est-à-dire être des personnes uniques qui ont un rôle irremplaçable
comme co-auteurs d’interactions sociales, de pratiques communes et du monde lui-
même. Dans cette entreprise complexe, les enfants trient le difficile défi de devenir
uniques, auto déterminés et libres, dans le monde commun, partagé et co-créé avec
les autres. Des exemples d’enregistrements vidéo de jeu interactif d’enfants dans un
cadre naturel illustrent comment le jeu pave la voie pour que les enfants créent et
transforment le monde, de façon collaborative, à partir de leurs postures et positions
uniques. Cette approche suggère que le jeu est un travail sérieux pour les enfants qui
développent leurs capacités d’acteurs. Par conséquent, il est extrêmement important
que l’éducation des jeunes enfants alloue suffisamment de temps à cette activité.

Resumen En la mayorı́a de las culturas, parece que el juego es muy importante

para los niños y niñas. Esto se demuestra por la gran cantidad de tiempo que ellos
pasan jugando y la combinación de pasión, imaginación, y energı́a sin igual que
dedican a esta actividad. Este artı́culo examina por qué jugar es importante para los
niños, a través de la perspectiva del enfoque dialógico de Bakhtin y de la teorı́a del
desarrollo de Vygotsky. Nosotros ampliamos sus erudiciones en un marco com-
puesto llamado ‘‘postura activista transformadora.’’ Nosotros sugerimos que el
juego ofrece oportunidades únicas en que los niños desarrollen y practiquen su
agencia, su identidad y su voz. De acuerdo con esta perspectiva, mientras que los
niños juegan, ellos descubren cómo ser un actor agenciador—es decir, una persona
que tiene importancia y que desempeña un papel indispensable en la co-autorı́a
agenciadora de las interacciones sociales, en las prácticas comunales, y en el mundo
en general. Ejemplos en grabaciones de videos en cuáles los niños juegan en una
forma interactiva en un entorno natural, ilustran cómo los juegos permiten que ellos,
colectivamente, transformen el mundo a través de sus posturas y posiciones indi-
viduales. Este enfoque sugiere que el juego es un trabajo serio para los niños cuando
ellos desarrollen las capacidades para el agenciamiento. Por lo tanto, es fundamental
que la educación primaria asigne suficiente tiempo para esta actividad.

Introduction

Children’s play does not cease to attract the attention of researchers working across
vast areas of inquiry, from developmental psychology and pedagogy to literary
scholarship and art education. It has recently returned to the limelight, likely in

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response to the ongoing reforms in early education that threaten to curtail play by
already focusing on standardized tests in early childhood. This continuing interest in
play is hardly surprising given that most children are drawn incessantly to playing,
as if by some magic force. This is evidenced in that most children spend countless
hours at play, apparently never tiring of pretending, imagining, fantasizing, creating,
and inventing. However, our ideas and concepts of play never quite seem to catch up
with its remarkable qualities in ways that are commensurate with its rich texture,
imaginative character, creative potential, and enigmatic appeal. These qualities are
hardly reducible to objective metrics developed outside of an in-depth exploration
into the meanings and significance of play—into what play is and why it is so
important to children. There is a need to continue developing understandings of play
by building on the rich theories of play and on related topics in psychology and
other fields in order to grasp its creative, dynamic, and liberating dimensions that
likely stretch beyond the obvious, the measurable, and the mundane. In our view,
adequate explorations into play can benefit from broad inquiries into the deepest
questions about the human condition and nature including questions as to what
makes us human, how we are positioned in the world, and what our world is all
about.
These are monumental questions. They are often supposed to be the province of a
‘‘big philosophy’’ rather than research into what many consider to be less
significant, ‘‘minor’’ topics relating to early childhood, such as play. Yet these
topics are no less deep or complex. To think otherwise would mean to erect barriers
between play and other human strivings and endeavors, including their most
dramatic expressions in adulthood. In arguing against such barriers, we draw
attention not only to the need to understand play non-instrumentally on its own
grounds (Marjanovic-Shane and White 2014). We also call for an acknowledgment
that play belongs to a continuum of human life understood as one unified and
uninterrupted process of striving, developing, and becoming. This idea is derived
from the works of two remarkable scholars of the human condition—Vygotsky and
Bakhtin. It is consistent with Vygotsky’s position that creativity is inherent at all
stages of life in all of its expressions. It is also consonant with Bakhtin’s notion of
becoming as ‘‘postuplenie’’ (discussed later in this paper). This notion refers to a
ceaseless and open-ended quest for humanness that all people embark on and pursue
throughout their lives. This process begins in childhood and draws on a vast
repertoire of tools including play, with its hallmark features such as imagination and
the ability to create novelty, transcend the given, and project into the future.
In emphasizing continuities between play and all human creative strivings, and
by extension also between childhood and the totality of human life throughout its
span, our suggestion is that not only children themselves learn much through play—
in a non-instrumental sense of learning as a creative discovery about ourselves and
the world. It is also that there is much we can learn through understanding play and
what children do so passionately as they engage in it.
Based on these broad premises, we address what can be considered to be the great
enigma of play through the lens of these and other ideas by Vygotsky and Bakhtin,
who provided invaluable insights into this topic. No less importantly, they
illuminated the broader dynamics of human existence in ways that are also

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applicable to studying play. The method employed in exploring these two theories
in their applicability to play is not to sum up their respective ideas in an additive
fashion, placing them alongside each other. Instead, we explore how their ideas can
be creatively brought into dialogue by revealing their addressivity (to use Bakhtin’s
term) toward the key paradox or predicament of human life—the tension between
individual freedom and relationality. This paradox was thrown into sharp relief by
the dramatic context that these scholars participated in and by the unique challenges
they both faced as a result. To this end, we also draw on the ‘‘transformative activist
stance’’ (TAS; see Stetsenko 2008, 2012, 2015) that provides a framework through
which these two theories can be revealed as providing complementary answers
regarding the key aspect of the human condition that is laid bare in children’s play.
Using this method, we suggest that while playing, children are sorting out what is
arguably one of the most complex paradoxes of human existence. This paradox is
about being one among many, that is, about being a unique individual in an
essentially communal world shared with others. The paradox involved is that human
beings are singular and unique individuals, yet they are also profoundly relational
and deeply social, sharing with other people no less than the existential grounding of
life in all of its expressions and forms. In other words, this is about human beings
realizing their freedom and becoming individually unique while doing so within the
inalienable bonds that tie them together with other people, all on the grounds of a
profound, ever-increasing blending and meshing of one’s own ways of being,
knowing, and doing with those of others. As can be argued from a Vygotskian–
Bakhtinian perspective expanded in the TAS, what children (and in fact all human
beings) are striving for in their various activities—and early in life especially
through play—is to become free and authentic persons with self-determining
individuality or identity, an unrepeatable voice, and an irreplaceable role within the
social world and its collective history. However, at the same time, in a closely
related quest, human beings also strive to participate and to belong by finding their
place among others—all the while never completely breaking out nor distancing
themselves from the profoundly social world shared with others.
This is about the paradox of particular versus universal, individual versus society,
novelty and creativity versus tradition and historicity, and freedom versus
necessity—the key dichotomies that play out in all the ‘‘grand’’ philosophies and
theories of human development. The point is that they can also be discerned in the
everyday life of both adults and children—including, with a particular sharpness, in
children’s play. Our suggestion is that it is the quest to resolve this monumental
paradox that is epitomized in children’s seemingly mundane yet also existentially
significant and serious preoccupation with play. It is therefore no wonder that they
so seriously commit themselves to this activity and tirelessly work at it, albeit in
playful and joyful expressions and forms. Bakthin and Vygotsky each uniquely
addressed this challenge and suggested valuable thoughts on resolving it.
The way to illuminate how children sort out this challenge in play, we suggest,
has to do with play’s remarkable qualities and affordances. Play is a unique activity
through which children can discover how to act as agentive actors in the social
world shared with others, to which they contribute in unique ways and thus bring it
into realization. What is special about such acting is that it affords an individually

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unique contribution to the world’s ever-emerging collaborative dynamics and to its

ceaseless and open-ended transformations. Understood this way, play is a pathway
for children to discover how to co-author themselves and the world in a bidirectional
spiral of mutual becoming.

Merging Insights from Bakhtin and Vygotsky in the Transformative

Activist Stance

Vygotsky devoted much attention to play, and many works in the sociocultural
tradition have further elaborated his ideas in a varied and productive research
direction (for a recent representative collection, see Connery et al. 2010; also,
Nicolopoulou 1993). In contrast, Bakhtin’s works have been mostly applied in
literary scholarship and in research on discourse and narrative, while finding less
resonance with researchers studying play. This gap has recently begun to close in a
shift that is apparently indicative of researchers discovering new dimensions and
meanings of play. For example, Edmiston (2010) applied Bakhtin’s ideas about co-
authoring to child–adult play to address how its cultural resources are tools for
making meaning. Marjanovic-Shane and White (2014) have applied his notion of
deed to analyze play dynamics. However, research on play has not yet focused on
studying it at the intersection of Vygotsky’s and Bakhtin’s theories. Edmiston
(2010) has mitigated this gap to some extent, and there have been few other studies
that attempt such an approach (Duncan and Tarulli 2003). The paucity of these
attempts is emblematic of the situation across many fields where two independent
traditions associated with each of these scholars have developed. There is an
ongoing debate among positions that either justify this split (e.g., Wegerif 2008;
White 2014) or alternatively, suggest that ideas by Bakhtin and Vygotsky are
compatible (e.g., Stetsenko 2007; Thompson 2012). Given that Vygotsky and
Bakhtin developed philosophically complex, epistemologically rich, and concep-
tually dense theories, the question of how they contrast or overlap can be understood
from very different angles. This is quite consistent with these scholars’ own
orientations that defied simplicity and finality. In this paper, we offer one of the
many possible ways to compare ideas by Vygotsky and Bakhtin so as to set the stage
for a discussion of play that makes use of insights from both authors.
There are important commonalities between Bakhtin’s and Vygotsky’s theories
that are especially apparent given the many parallels in their life paths that make a
virtual dialogue between the two scholars possible and warranted. Born just 1 year
apart in close geographic proximity, they were participants in the same cultural
tradition that became disrupted by the turmoil that unfolded during their lifetime.
Although they likely never met, their voices were part of the same social drama of
history, each answering in a unique way to the challenges posed by their unique
epoch. In particular, both Bakhtin and Vygotsky faced the highly contested dilemma
between the notion of collective as one uniform ‘‘unity’’ in which individuals
seamlessly blend and mesh together on the one hand (as promoted by the top–down
ideology of the Russian revolution), and the quest for individual freedom and
responsibility on the other. In other words, the core question raised with an acute

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sharpness by the historical context in which they worked was about the possibility
of freedom within a profoundly communal world.
The answers that Bakhtin and Vygotsky provided were different, yet they shared
a common conceptual backdrop. Most importantly, they both worked within and
significantly advanced a deeply socio-relational understanding of human develop-
ment, language, and consciousness. Indeed, Bakhtin’s thinking revolves around the
notion that people are constituted through discourses and dialogues imbued with
intentions and voices of others whereby experiencing the world is possible only
because individuals are interconnected with others. In his words, ‘‘life by its very
nature is dialogic. To live means to participate in dialogue…’’ (Bakhtin 1984,
p. 293). Vygotsky too is unwaveringly relational in his thinking. This is particularly
evident in his writings on the roots of psychological processes in infancy (Vygotsky
1998). In these works, he unequivocally posits that the true source of development is
in the initial sharing situation—a symbiotic communion between adults and infants.
Vygotsky held that infants are at first indistinguishable from caregiving adults and
essentially belong with them together. The roots of consciousness and self are
situated in the distributed field of co-being and co-acting in joint activities with
adults and only gradually become differentiated from this initial social unity (for
details, see Arievitch and Stetsenko 2014). For both scholars, social interconnect-
edness constitutes the deepest and most significant feature of human life. On this
score, their positions are closely compatible and complementary, each strengthening
the voice of the other, as if speaking in unison.
Furthermore, the deeper grounding of human existence for both Bakhtin and
Vygotsky has to do with individuals acting in the world rather than passively
experiencing or contemplating it. This theme comes across in Bakhtin’s statement
that every thought is an individually answerable act that constitutes no less than the
lived world itself. In his striking conclusion (Bakhtin 1990), the lifeworld does not
exist before or outside of the actual deeds by individuals in communion with others
as the center around which our existence revolves. The emphasis is on the
phenomenological richness of deeds that form a seamless stream of one’s life in an
active project of becoming or ‘‘postuplenie’’ (Russian). Note the richness of
Bakhtin’s idiosyncratic term. Postuplenie conveys the sense of a process-like,
continuous (uninterrupted) and dynamic (ever-changing and cumulative) unfolding
of one’s life, as a becoming-through-doing. This term also conveys the value of
one’s unique role and participation in the world, one’s ‘‘non-alibi in it’’—a sense
that each and every act changes not only one’s life (as it does) but also the world
itself by leaving irreversible and unique traces in it. These views bear similarity to
Vygotsky’s position. He too wrote about consciousness as emerging within and out
of shared activities with others as can be imputed from Vygotsky’s notion of
collaborative practice and his ‘‘general law’’ of development (for details, see
Stetsenko 2007, 2013). The latter refers to ‘‘the transition from inter-psychological
functions to intra-psychological ones, that is, from forms of social, collective
activity of the child to his individual functions’’ (Vygotsky 1987, p. 259).
Building on Vygotsky’s ideas about collaborative practice as the key grounding
for human development and Bakhtin’s notion of postuplenie, the TAS suggests the
following expansions that help bring their contributions together. First, the world is

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understood to be a constantly shifting terrain of social practices continuously

enacted and reenacted by people acting together in performing their answerable
deeds. That is, the world is a process of ceaseless change as a collective forum for
human becoming stretching across generations. Each person entering this collective
forum and joining in with its dynamics, right from birth, is the core condition and
foundation for individual becoming and development. Second, this collective and
collaborative process of open-ended social practices is composed of contributions to
them by each individual human being. Each person not only enters social practices
but makes a difference in them, thus gradually coming to co-author these practices
in becoming agentive actors in their enactments and transformations. That is,
although social through and through, these collaborative social practices are realized
through unique activist contributions by individual agents acting from their own
irreplaceable positions and stances.
The resulting view suggests that it is directly through and in the process of people
constantly transforming and co-creating their social world that people simultane-
ously create and constantly transform themselves. Human beings are agents of their
own lives and society at large, who are responsive and responsible (or answerable,
to use Bakhtin’s term) actors of social practices. They do not passively dwell in the
world, but instead co-create and co-author it together with other people. Most
critical is that in this creative process of co-authoring the world through contributing
to its collective dynamics, people are simultaneously co-authoring themselves and
becoming individually unique.
Based on these broad premises, the processes of knowing, being, and doing are
acts of creative transformation contingent on how each individual contributes to
social communal practices by changing their dynamics, creating novelty, and
leaving one’s own indelible traces in them. This contrasts with explanations focused
on human development as a passive process of people being simply situated in
context while merely reacting to its influences coming from the outside. Focusing
instead on creativity and novelty suggests that our acts and deeds do not just take
place in the world; rather, they simultaneously bring forth the world and ourselves
in one process of a mutual and bidirectional continuous becoming. On this premise,
a person’s activist positioning and taking a stance within the dynamics of
participation in community practices is the prime dimension of both collective and
individual becoming. It is acting from one’s unrepeatable stance and unique place in
the world that reality is experienced, understood, and made sense of.

Freedom and Self-Determination in the World Shared with Others:

An Interplay of Individual Agency and Relationality

On the common foundation of Bakhtin’s and Vygotsky’s theories, there arises the
difficult question of how to account for the possibility of individuals acting freely
within such a profoundly social and communal world shared with others and
composed of relational, collaborative acting. Vygotsky’s answer to this dilemma is
directly related to his study of play. On the one hand, he suggested that play is
profoundly social since it originates in the interactions with others and relies on

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cultural tools that they provide. Cultural mediation plays a crucial role in this
process: psychological processes emerge via integration of signs that are first
directed by others toward the self and then are taken over by the child in directing
them toward others and ultimately, oneself. Importantly, all signs are products of
social history of communities who collectively form systems of cultural mediation.
These ideas can be interpreted as implying that individuals are directly shaped by
society in a top–down process wherein individuals are relatively passive.
On the other hand, however, Vygotsky also engaged the topic of freedom in
discussing play. He insisted that play is fundamentally creative, producing novelty
and originality that stretch beyond what is ‘‘given’’ in the present. Moreover,
Vygotsky (2004) dramatically stated that ‘‘The entire future of humanity will be
attained through the creative imagination…’’ (pp. 87–88). The great value of play,
according to Vygotsky, is exactly that it represents a context where freedom
becomes possible. This is because play allows for the use of signs in ways that
afford distance from the immediately given context through the power of
imagination. This is achieved because the child creates imaginary situations in
which objects can be used as substitutes for other objects in roles that one assigns to
them, for example, using sticks as horses to ride on. This experiencing of things as
they are (sticks as sticks) coupled with acting with them per one’s imagination (stick
as a horse one can ride on) is of fundamental importance. As a result, objects lose
their determining force and the child learns to be in charge of one’s acting. This is
no small achievement. Instead of being driven and guided by the ‘‘dictate’’ of
objects and situations as they are encountered in the outside world, children exercise
through play in acting that is agentive and self-determined. In this sense, Vygotsky
brings together the themes of sociality and freedom.
Bakhtin can be interpreted to provide an additional and crucially important layer
to this understanding. Vygotsky’s theory explains how play affords freedom from
situational constraints, but he does not engage with how children might gain
freedom specifically from adult authority and broader society. As many critical
comments on Vygotsky’s theory suggest, he seems to imply that human
development is a smooth integration of individuals into a society understood as a
monolithic unity devoid of conflicts and contradictions. In contrast, Bakthin insisted
that society is inevitably marked by contradictions and disagreements. For him,
dialogues and social interactions are always sites of struggles among divergent
voices, values, and positions. Applying this idea to play highlights that it too can be
seen as a site of struggles whereby children negotiate meanings, coordinate
positions, and resolve conflicts (Duncan and Tarulli 2003). Danucan and Tarulli
conclude that while sociodramatic play serves to prepare children for participation
in adult life, it also enables children to achieve critical distance from social rules and
norms.
On this account, Vygotsky’s ideas of play stand corrected in view of Bakhtin’s
notions that put more emphasis on play as a site of conflict where children gain
freedom from society rather than integrate with it. However, on a closer look, their
views overlap more than first meets the eye.
It is important to note how fluid Bakhtin’s views are in combining seemingly
contradictory ideas. On the one hand, his works are about dialogical and relational

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groundings of life. On the other hand, especially in his early works, he wrote that the
world remains an empty possibility unless the person herself constructs meaningful
relations with it, transforming its empty ‘‘givenness’’ into a coherent ‘‘world-for-
me’’ distributed around me. It is only in his late works that Bakhtin displaced the
authoring ‘‘I’’ from the center of the universe, instead focusing on dialogues with
others (Morson and Emerson 1990). These nuanced views are paralleled by
Bakhtin’s dynamic position on the role of rules and constraints. Although he has
been cast as a philosophic anarchist who celebrates pure freedom and ‘‘rejoices in
the undoing of rules’’ (Morson and Emerson 1990, p. 43), Bakhtin’s position is more
nuanced. As Morson and Emerson (1990) describe, especially in his late writings,
Bakhtin does not favor pure freedom. Instead, Bakhtin speaks in favor of ‘‘the
given’’ serving as a resource for what is created. He acknowledges that social rules,
norms, and even stable heritage as long as they are not total, are in fact necessary for
creativity, openness, and freedom.
The possibility of individual freedom and agency within a communal world
shared with others, addressed by both Vygotsky and Bakhtin, can be further
expanded through the lens of the TAS. In addressing the challenge to integrate
individual agency within the cultural-historical perspective, this perspective
highlights how closely interlinked and complementary individual and collective
planes of social practices are. This suggests that each individual is shaped by
collective history and social practices, while at the same time shaping and realizing
them through contributing to their open-ended dynamics. Importantly, this is
possible because social practices are understood to be composed of human deeds
that enact the world in ceaselessly moving beyond the status quo and transcending
the ‘‘given’’ (Stetsenko 2013, 2015).
This approach implicates a shift away from seeing children as solitary individuals
developing in a social vacuum, independently and separately from other people and
community practices. Yet at the same time, the role of each individual person is
ascertained as central to their own and their communities’ development. That is,
each person is understood to be indelibly relational and dialogical, fully immersed
in exchanges and interactions with others; yet at the same time, each person is also
irreplaceably and unrepeatably individually unique as a social actor. This approach
is about dialogues and relations serving as the source of individual uniqueness and,
at the same time, about individual uniqueness serving as the source and the prime
condition for dialogues and relations. Such a connection is possible because
individuals are co-creating themselves and their world by contributing to collective
pursuits in their own unique ways. In this view, each person simultaneously defines
oneself and the world. Moreover, it is through the process of changing social
practices and contributing to them in meaningful ways that the child ultimately
comes to be oneself—a unique individual who has an irreplaceable role and a unique
voice within their communities and their common history. That is, people create
their uniqueness precisely through participating in, contributing to, and co-authoring
social practices, while in so doing, gaining their unique voice and identity. The
person is quintessentially and inimitably social—but only as a unique individual
who has taken the responsibility and care from one’s own unique place and role in
the world. The other side of this is that each person is ineluctably unique—but only

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as someone who has found her voice and place among other people in order to
contribute to social and collective processes.
Play exemplifies a context where complementary interplay of individuality and
social belonging, freedom, and obligation is possible. It is in a world that is open-
ended, fluid, and infused with creativity, and thus recreated as a whole each time
anew by each individual, that individuals can be agentive actors who simultaneously
co-create and co-author social practices and themselves. In play, all the extant
constraints can be changed and challenged, rather than faithfully reproduced, so that
children gain experience and tools for becoming social actors capable of exercising
agency in challenging and contesting ‘‘the given’’ and the taken-for-granted.
Especially in its dramatic and fantasy forms, play represents a quintessential
expression of what is a uniquely human world of possibility and agency. In this
world, various ideas and roles are entertained and coordinated, rules tried out and
negotiated, stories and their episodes planned and enacted, and voices brought into
conflict, dialogues, and interchanges. This world, rather than being a brute reality
that acts on us as an external force, is a space where our agency is central and we
create ourselves in creating the world. Play embodies a type of engagement with the
world where rules are paramount yet boundaries are flexible, and negotiation and
conflict are ubiquitous yet agreement is possible because the world is open-ended,
unfinished and unfinalizable. Play is about acting in ways that do not copy the world
as it has been in the past and how it exists in the present. Nor is it about simply
coping with the world as in adapting to it in compliance with its status quo. Instead,
play is about acting in novel and creative ways, like no one ever did before, each
time bringing forth novelty, transcending the given, and realizing the impossible. In
this process, nothing is repeated nor merely recreated but rather, invented and
discovered each time anew in creative and unique ways.
The following extract from videotaped interactions of Sophie and Peter, both
4 years old, in a naturalistic setting of free play, illustrate how children initiate
playworlds and negotiate positions in creating agentive outlook and authorial
positioning.
Sophie: I have to go to ballet. Boys and girls can go to my ballet. Do you want
to go to my ballet? (addressing Peter). Peter: well… Sophie: Its for boys and
girls. Peter: well… Sophie: Yes… because you get to… Okay, here’s my
ballet teacher… (gesturing into the space). Hi, ballet teacher, a child gets
there. Come! (Turning to Peter) You can go, sweetie. Can you say hello?
Peter: Yes, but… I’ve been not in ballet… well you know… Sophie: I could
ask her. (Play theme shifts, Peter initiates the dialogue). Peter: I need to go
somewhere to get more guitars. Sophie: Alright, I have one guitar that I gave
to someone and then he gave me back (holding a long wooden block as a
pretend guitar). So I could give it to you. Look! Peter: Is that the old fashioned
one? Sophie: No! It is electric. Peter: I like electric better than old fashioned.
This extract illustrates how children ‘‘do’’ authoring while creating their own
playworlds. In this episode, Sophie creates her own imaginary situation, ‘‘her’’
ballet class, which others can join in. This situation has rules and boundaries, with
inhabitants speaking in different voices—Sophie herself and the imaginary teacher.

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Sophie is clearly in charge, exercising her agency by using voice, space, and body
movements in actively asserting her position. Her strong voice, direct eye contact,
and body movements are all involved in creating what is essentially ‘‘Sophie’s
world.’’ This is especially clear as Peter hesitates to join it. As the play theme
develops, the children are increasingly working out shared goals as they negotiate
interactions. They take turns in initiating play scenarios, engage in shared meaning–
making within the world they co-create together, explore different perspectives as
well as establish their possible selves as agentive actors. There is much power
dynamics, conflict, and negotiation even in this seemingly mundane episode. Even
here one can see how children are actors and agents who co-create realities while
discovering what is possible and how to co-author the world. The paradox is that
this is achieved not in the form of a free-floating freedom from social constraints;
rather it is about trying out and entertaining social rules and norms in the sense of a
joyful and creative work rather than strict compliance. This is about co-authoring
and co-creating rules and norms and thus, changing and expanding them in one’s
own way and as befits one’s unique circumstances. In so doing, children are
achieving freedom not by distancing from reality and the world of others, including
rules and norms of social life, but by learning about reality and merging ever more
closely with it. This is done by children figuring out their stake in the events,
claiming their own stand on what is going on, and making their own decisions so
that their actions and deeds count and matter for others. In discovering how to act in
co-creating the world, children also discover how they themselves matter. It is
through this process that children embark on the path of postuplenie—becoming
individually unique and free in the world shared with others.
The acts of creating imaginary situations and of exercising positions and stances
that play affords help to bring new potential worlds, and with them new identities,
into the realm of the here-and-now. These acts undo the boundaries between reality
and potentiality in a simultaneous construction of social spaces that are both ‘‘real-
and-imagined’’ (Soja 1996) and of one’s identity that comes about through trying
out various roles and stances while taking up responsibilities that accompany these
roles.
This approach overlaps with yet also expands on previous works that have
highlighted the role of play in spurring children’s agency (Edmiston 2010;
Marjanovic-Shane and White 2014). Our approach puts an additional emphasis on
the process of children creating and co-authoring their world itself while they create
and co-author their identities—as facets of one and the same process of the
continuous becoming of both individuals and their world. This process is impossible
without cultural mediation accessible through shared activities with adults who
supply models for collective acting according to social norms. Yet the child’s
unique role in co-authoring imaginative spaces that crosscut into the real world
needs to be emphasized too.
The ability to have one’s individual viewpoint, position, voice, and stance is
often taken for granted, but it is hardly a natural ‘‘equipment’’ that children are born
with. Rather, from a merged perspective of Bakhtin and Vygotsky, it is reasonable
to assume that this ability develops in social interactions and dialogues. For young
children, it is a challenge to have their own voices heard, yet it is even a bigger

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challenge to have their voices forged, while establishing one’s own stances from a
relational yet authorial position. It is hard to imagine another context where this can
be done by young children more efficiently than in play. Here, in play, the child is
free to create ‘‘one’s own world’’ conceived from one’s own unique viewpoint
where one’s stance and voice matter. This is why play is so essential and appealing.
It helps children to discover how to position themselves and claim authorship in a
world that they themselves co-create through the tools of play. When children can,
as is the case in play, go beyond the status quo and the social forces that typically
control them, they gain the tools of taking a stand and claiming an authorship and
thus, becoming unique and free social actors in the world shared with others.

Conclusions

From a combined perspective of Bakhtin and Vygotsky merged in the transforma-

tive activist stance, children’s play with its faculty of imagination and creativity can
be understood as an indispensible space in which children get to simultaneously co-
author themselves and the world. In it, children are exploring and discovering
dimensions of themselves as social actors who are able to take active positions and
stances rather than just reflect on or passively adapt to the world. Such an active
positioning implies that children participate in innovation, creation, and transfor-
mation of what exists in the present. That is, children are expansively creating no
less than the world in their acts of co-authoring it—including its social structures
and processes, its cultural rules and norms, discourses and narratives, and tools and
traditions. In this process, each child is also coming to be a uniquely individual and
irreplaceable actor in the social world, with authentic voice and unrepeatable
identity.
The interplay between freedom with its self-determination, and social belonging
(or relationality) with its obligation to others, is at the base of human becoming. In
overcoming divisions between society and the individual as separated and polar
opposites, there is a way to carve out a balance between continuity and change,
tradition and transformation, and creation and transmission. Individuality comes
from creativity—independence in shaping one’s own path in life, making one’s own
decisions, and performing one’s own uniquely positioned and answerable deeds.
Without being truly independent and in charge of one’s own acting, there is no way
to participate in and especially to contribute to the social fabric of our shared lives.
However, the reverse is also true—without being truly interdependent and grounded
in realities of social life shared with others, it is impossible to create and be
individually unique.
Play sheds light on this key predicament of human life—how to be oneself and
author one’s life and one’s world yet also, at the same time and non-coincidentally,
be part of one’s community and of our common humanity. We come into existence
through entering the flow of social practices in order to carry them on while leaving
our unique traces and indelible marks on them. Furthering one’s capacity for
autonomous agency is only possible within a solidaristic community that sustains
one’s identity yet such a community is impossible without free and self-determining

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individuals. Communities and individuals are coordinated and co-evolving whereby

children are gradually getting to be more and more individually unique while at the
same time becoming ever more enmeshed, or fused, with the social world—with the
two processes representing interdependent facets of one and the same continuous
and shared quest for human becoming. It is specifically play that makes this
dynamics evident and possible.
As captured by many artists and writers, children are capable of great leaps of
faith and imagination and can grasp greatness and potential in the world and in
themselves. In play, children might be closer to reality than we may think: not to
reality how it is, but to how it could be, as an open-ended possibility in which our
quest for freedom in the world shared with others is supported and actualized. In the
perspective of Vygotsky and Bakhtin merged in the TAS, the reality of play might
be more real than the one we encounter through the lens of passivity and resignation
that often applies in our adult lives. This reality is where by imagining, we power
the possible into the real and freely co-create ourselves and the world. There is
much that children learn in playing, especially in the sense of self- discovery, which
is why the value of this truly existential endeavor cannot be overestimated.
Therefore, it is important that early education allocates ample time for this activity.
It is the work that children accomplish that is joyful and serious at the same time. In
this claim, the emphasis is on the value of play against its subordination to formal
instruction that narrowly targets cognitive skills. Yet it is also true that we all, as
educators and scholars and simply as adults, have much to learn from children’s
play—about the world as it can be and about how much needs to be improved in its
status quo if we want to be free and relational at the same time.

Acknowledgments The authors would like to thank Maria Arievitch for Spanish translation and
editorial work, as well as Enitza Carril and Elena Samoylenko for translation edits.

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