Things and children in play - improvisation with language and matter

Based on the authors' studies of material-discursively approached lives of children, this paper addresses the educational relevance of playing, through re-entangling and complicating divided, purpose-directed and individualistic conceptualisations of play. The unhelpful binary of conceiving playing as an end ('free play') as distinct from playing as means ('guided play') is argued to render children as subjects of education who do not yet know, rather than ones who are capable of also producing knowledge and challenging ways of knowing and being. The empirical anchoring of this paper is a study in which 12 Finnish children, aged four to seven, gathered once a week for a total of 11 times to assist an adult researcher in studying 'things, objects and beings'. Based on insights from this study, an approach to playing as intra-active and comprising improvisation with language and matter, is suggested to provide spaces for producing and contesting as well as acquiring knowledge.