Peer-reviewed article
Playworlds and Narratives as a Tool of Developmental Early Childhood Education
Pentti Ensio Hakkarainen, Milda Brėdikytė ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This paper examines playworld pedagogy, an approach to early childhood education developed in Scandinavia that builds on Russian developmental theory from the 1990s. The method uses narrative role play and adult-guided activities that gradually transition to child-initiated play to support children's personality development. The authors argue that contemporary developmental early childhood education programs should retain core principles from this foundational theoretical work, particularly the integration of emotional and intellectual development through play.
Key points
- Playworld pedagogy was inspired by V.V. Davydov's developmental project on preschool education from the 1990s
- The approach proposes systematic transition from joint adult-children play to independent, child-initiated play
- Children's personality development requires aesthetic reaction and the contradictory unity of affect and intellect in narrative role play
- The method has been developed and adapted in Swedish and Finnish early childhood education contexts over 30 years
Limitations
This article is a theoretical overview rather than an empirical evaluation; it does not present quantitative data or systematic evidence of outcomes from implementing playworld pedagogy with children. The document lacks information about specific impacts on child well-being or developmental outcomes.
Abstract
We shortly introduce some main ideas of a project of scientific research collective “School” (Shkola) led by academic V.V. Davydov. The collective elaborated a new project — “Concept of preschool education” [9] that would better meet the developmental and educational needs of young children and create the basis for learning activity at school. The project has inspired development of playworld pedagogy in Sweden and Finland. Now 30 years later, attempts to design systems of developmental early childhood education try to concretize central concepts of Davydov’s project. This article presents interpretation and elaboration of the main ideas of the project in playworld pedagogy developed in Scandinavian early childhood education. We propose a systematic transition from joint adult — children play, to independent children initiated play. Children’s personality development presupposes esthetic reaction and contradictory unity of affect and intellect in narrative role play. We have concluded that present attempts to design new developmental early childhood education programs cannot forget the ideas of the collective from the 1990’s.