Ditte Winther-Lindqvist

Introduction: Children’s Play and Development

Many excellent books have been written about play – so when you write yet another, you are certain to be in good company! At the same time, it must be made clear why one wants to add yet another book about the subject. Our wish is to contribute to play research by giving equal weight to play and cultural-historical theory and hopefully gain further insight by combining the two topics. Metaphorically speaking, our hope is to go further by walking on two legs. Certainly, most publications address both topics, but they are often treated in very unequal proportions. We will attempt to combine them as we go along and in the book seek to balance their relative importance. First step in this introduction will address the question “What is play?” At first the views of central theories of development are mentioned and thereupon we look at play through the cultural-historical lens. In the next part we discuss the application of theories, at first on a general level and afterwards with a focus on cultural-historical theory. Finally follows a brief presentation of all the chapters in the book.

Uncertainty as Organizing Principle of Action—Teenagers Living with Parental Somatic Illness

Uncertainty as condition for teenage life when confronted with parental serious illness is presented as the main challenge characterizing this situation. Based on the teenagers own accounts narrated in 26 semi-structured interviews, we are able to provide an analytical description of important ways in which parental illness affects every-day life of the teenager. Findings suggest various changes and challenges in family roles and caring patterns, emotional oscillation, changes in relation to peers, and conflicting motives and tasks. These changes are linked to the impact of the uncertainties of the illness situation. A model of uncertainty is proposed which illustrates how various events feed into the underlying uncertainty and fear of losing the parent. The model thus addresses the situation, where the teenagers are compelled to making firm divisions between a private-life world and a social-life world as well as between a family-life zone and a youth-life zone.

The Presence of Grief: Research-Based Art and Arts-Based Research on Grief:

The authors involved in the creation of this text collaborate on a research project called The Culture of Grief, which explores the current conditions and implications of grief. The authors mostly employ conventional forms of qualitative inquiry, but the present text represents an attempt to reach a level of understanding not easily obtained through conventional methods. The group of authors participated as members of the audience in an avant-garde theatrical performance about grief, created by a group called CoreAct. The artists of CoreAct create their art through systematic research, in this case on grief, and we as researchers decided to study both the development of the play and its performance, and to report our impressions in fragments in a way that hopefully represents the nature of grief as an experienced phenomenon. We use Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s concept of presence to look for understanding beyond meaning in grief and its theatrical enactment.

The Role of Play in Danish Child Care

Children’s play is an immensely central part of child care in Scandinavia. This chapter describes how children’s play with peers and friends is supported by the pedagogical environment of Danish child care. It is argued that play is an existential project for children and that opportunities to play freely teach children to become part of the social order, to become good friends, and to solve differences through negotiation. Throughout the chapter the environment facilitating children’s play is illustrated with reference to typical Danish child-care practices and research results on the quality of child care. To illustrate how play is a developmental activity for children, an example of a social fantasy play episode is analyzed in order to substantiate the claim: that children’s self-organized play activities propel social development, authenticity, and democratic values.

Playing with Social Identities: Play in the Everyday Life of a Peer Group in Day Care

In this chapter, it is argued that children when playing in day care are also playing with social identities. This holds true whenever they play together with peers, both when engaged in symbolic group play and when playing games with rules. Through Schousboe’s comprehensive model of spheres of realities in playing (see Schousboe, The structure of fantasy play and its implications for good and evil games ( Chapter 2). In Schousboe I, Winther-Lindqvist D (eds.) Children’s play and development: Cultural-historical perspectives. Springer, Dordrecht, 2013) and Lev Vygotsky’s insight that all playing involve rules as well as pretence, children’s playing is analysed as an activity involving the making, remaking and exploration of social identities among the children. The paper is informed by ethnographic observations in two different Danish day-care centres and draws on illustrative examples with symbolic group playing as well as game playing with rules (soccer) among 5-year-old boys. Findings suggest that day-care children’s playing and negotiation of roles, positions and rules are intrinsically concerned with processes of social identities, both those that are anchored in the social reality and those anticipated and imagined.