The Serious Joy and the Joyful Work of Play: Children Becoming

The Serious Joy and the Joyful Work of Play:
Children Becoming Agentive Actors in CoAuthoring 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 perspective,
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 challenge
of becoming unique, self-determined, and free persons within the communal
world shared and co-created with others. Examples from video recordings of children’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 education
allocates ample time for this activity.
Keywords Bakhtin _ Vygotsky _ Play _ Early childhood _ Agency _
Transformative stance
Theory for and as Social Practice
of Realizing the Future
Implications from a Transformative Activist Stance
Anna Stetsenko
There is a pressing need today for alternative models of science – at the intersection
of theory, methods, and practice – that abandon claims to “objectivist” scientism
with its notion of knowledge as a mirror‐reflection of reality and its belief in
“raw” facts disconnected from human practices. The challenge, at the same time,
is to move beyond postmodernist approaches marked by relativist indecision, selfdefeating
skepticism, and lack of activist positioning. This chapter offers steps in
elaborating such an alternative in building and critically expanding on insights
from Vygotsky’s project. What is suggested is a model of science as a nonneutral,
transformative activist endeavor that transcends the separation between theory
and practice while embracing human agency grounded in political imagination
and commitment to social transformation.
Central to this position is the shift away from the notion that people are merely
situated in the world, and in need of adapting to it, as recipients of external
stimuli, or passive hosts of brain chemistry and information processing, or products
of culture shaped by social structures and processes. The alternative broad
premise is that people are agentive co-creators not only of their own lives and
development, but also of the very world which they collaboratively create just as
they are themselves interactively created, in a dynamically recursive and bidirectional
process, by their own creative and agentive acts of collaboratively realizing the
world. The deliberate, goal‐directed, and purposeful transformation of the world
based in a commitment to social change, therefore, is taken as the foundation for
human development, encompassing processes of being, doing, and knowing.
What lies beneath this conceptual shift is a strong refutation of the ethos of adaptation
(so far not sufficiently challenged within sociocultural scholarship) that takes the “givenness”
of the world for granted and assumes that individuals have to fit in, each on one’s own,
with its status quo while competing with others for its resources.
The alternative model, termed “transformative activist stance”
(TAS) (see Stetsenko 2012, 2010, 2008 and for application, Vianna and Stetsenko
2011) is premised on the sociopolitical ethos of solidarity and equality that
counters principles of adaptation as the core grounding for human development.
In place of adaptation, the TAS predicates ontology and epistemology on the
notion of moving beyond the status quo and enacting the future through agentive
contributions to collaborative practices carried out across the dimensions of the
past, the present, and the future at the intersection of individual and collective
agency. In capitalizing on social transformation and activist agency, the TAS
revives the abiding urgency of the struggle for a better future and, moreover,
theorizes such a struggle as ontologically and epistemologically central to all
forms of human being, doing, and knowing. This approach follows with the
critical tradition that connects theorizing with politically engaged activism (e.g.,
Freire 1970; for details, see Stetsenko and Arievitch, 2004) and joins in with the
efforts to provide an antidote to the cynical relativism and political quietism.
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