How Imaginary Worlds Help Kids Learn | Anna Rainio | TED

I'd love for you to think about a classroom full of, let's say, 20 seven-year-old children. They are all different. There's a child who loves school and can easily concentrate through noise. Another child needs a lot of physical comfort and happily climbs onto his teacher’s lap if it’s free. One student has to fidget to concentrate. The one at the back learned early on that adults and their promises cannot be trusted. She tries to keep her distance. Next to her is a boy who loves drawing dragons, and he drew this when the task was to craft holiday decorations. (Laughter) Now imagine you're a teacher in this classroom, and it is your task to include all these different children in one activity. It's easy to see what happens. One or two children do not fit in and become excluded.

Why is that? In most other phases of our lives, it would be odd to think that everybody was able to do the same activity, enjoy similar things, or develop at the same pace. Schools, however, are historically places where sameness is expected from all. This makes many children and adults alike suffer in these institutions. I am a researcher and teacher educator in Finland, and I believe that this does not need to be the case. Radical inclusion is possible in any early-learning classroom through something called “playworlds.” Playworlds are adult-child joint play, often structured around a piece of literature or a work of art, like [a] “Moomin Trolls” playworld or an “Alice in Wonderland” playworld.

They were originally developed by a Swedish scholar, Gunilla Lindqvist, and they are now studied worldwide by our research teams. The adults and children create the world of a chosen story in the classroom, and then the class plays, interacts and undertakes adventures together with both adults and children in roles, like you see here, in this illustration of a playworld, the teacher as some witch. The children take initiative and the adults listen carefully. I've had the privilege of learning from more than dozens of playworlds and together with my colleagues -- and I want to mention here, especially Beth Ferholt. We have seen how playworlds can change the way schools are. Let me give you an example of how a playworld might look like in a kindergarten class. And just to note that these are fictional examples to protect the privacy of the participants -- kind of composite stories of all the things we’ve seen in the many worlds we've studied.

So the teacher, Johanna, started by reading aloud the first half of a famous Slavic folktale, “Baba Yaga,” to the children. But instead of reading aloud the second half of the story, the class collectively wrote and directed their own resolution to the story's central conflicts. These are the set pieces and props that the class created over the course of a year. This is Baba Yaga's tower, and these are magical creatures' caves that the children created. And that over there is Baba Yaga's trap, in which he loved to captivate everybody she could. And these are the trees and a lamppost in the forest of the story. And this is a drawing by a child of a hut on chicken legs. It's very important in the story of Baba Yaga. And it was created in the classroom. And this is the wardrobe inside the hut that became a portal from the everyday life of the classroom to the magical reality of the playworld.

Even the adults used it to keep the magic alive. You know, one night, the teacher, Johanna, even returned to the class after the children had gone home just to exit the playworld via this wardrobe in case she had forgotten to do it earlier during the day. But in this classroom, like in many others, there were some children who had [a] hard time participating in classroom activities. Viola was often inattentive and disruptive. And when the class was discussing how to [keep everyone] safe from the evil Baba Yaga, Viola suggested blowing up the whole school to save the magical creatures from Baba Yaga's trap. It's easy to see how Viola and her plan would be excluded from a normal classroom, but this is a playworld. And in [a] playworld, the children, not the adults, are the experts. So the children negotiated with Viola and asked whether she could consider blowing up some props instead of an entire school.

(Laughter) And Viola agreed and said, “This is a good plan because everybody gets to do their own plan.” But the following week, Viola was again inattentive, disruptive. So the teacher had to speak directly to her and the teacher said, "Viola cannot be part of the plan unless she commits to go through with it, because everybody is dependent on her to save the magical creatures from Baba Yaga and her disruptive behavior might alert Baba Yaga." So something extraordinary happened. Viola agreed to participate, and when it was her time to carry out her part of the plan, she first carefully checked that everyone is protected, then drew the bomb [on] Baba Yaga’s trap and engaged everyone in a dramatic countdown to the explosion. Now here’s why I find this example so powerful. In most other classroom settings, Viola's behavior would be considered problematic or something that we should be preventing from happening.

But inside a playworld, it made sense and it even solved some problems. Viola's story is also a great example of a phrase I believe teachers, mentors, parents should be saying as much as possible: “Why not?” If a child turns to you to ask for something or suggest something, it's often cognitively difficult for us adults because it means changing our plans, right? Or going into different directions, or as we perceive it, wasting our precious time. So our first intuition is to say no. Or "maybe later." But before you rush to respond, try asking yourself, why not? And sometimes there's a clear reason to say no. But often there isn't. And when there isn't, you can go along with your children in that unpredictable direction, and doors will open.

Here is another example I love. And this time, let's say from a first-grade classroom. The teacher, Tom, wanted to develop a playworld based on a children’s book [about] Ruuben, a bird who accidentally flies in through a child's bedroom window and needs the child's help to get back home. So the children read the story and imagine how Ruuben might look. But then COVID hits. But the children continue thinking and talking about Ruuben. And then, after several months of distance learning, the children return to class that one morning to find Ruuben -- an actual puppet on a windowsill of the classroom. Tom, the teacher, plays Ruuben, and the children just love it. They want to include it in all activities. They sing their favorite songs to it, they feed it. They build a nest for it during their art classes, and they even teach some math to it.

(Laughter) But this semester, also in this classroom, some children were seriously on the edge of disengagement. There was Alma, for whom it was difficult to sit still, follow orders or do school tasks. And there was Luka, who was so disruptive that the teachers had made special arrangements for him to leave school early. You can imagine how this made him feel even more excluded, until these children started to develop a special bond with Ruuben. For example, the puppet sent a private email to Alma, saying that it felt really lonely in the class during the night, and Alma responded, asking whether Ruuben needed a friend, her own soft toy, Soni, from home, and Ruuben said, "Yes, please." Slowly, these children became really close to Ruuben. It often sat in Alma’s lap in activities that were difficult for her, and that made her calmer and more attentive.

On a school field trip, Tom, the teacher, put Luka in charge of Ruuben, and that was a huge win. Luka often couldn't join these trips because of his behavior, but Ruuben made it possible for him to go. Perhaps you can see best how Ruuben helped these children through this drawing. It’s an illustration [by] Luka on a classroom whiteboard. It's Ruuben and Luka together. It looks kind of like Ruuben is lifting Luka up, perhaps making him feel happier, lighter. And for me as a researcher, I really love this picture because I think it is the seven-year-old who was able, through this drawing, to best crystallize for us what development is and what imagination can do if adults take it seriously. Now it would have been easy to write off children like Luka, Viola or Alma, and say that the classroom just isn't the place for them.

But these stories show us how adult-child joint play can start changing these systems from the inside. But -- and this is my strongest message for you today -- the value of adult-child joint play needs to be better recognized in early learning, and teachers who play need to be supported and trusted by their school systems. If this happens, then playworlds can help us imagine and build better futures with our children, futures where everyone could have an important role to play. It is through these roles and these relationships that our most excluded students can find their rightful place, and we all benefit. And this can happen again and again and again if imaginative play is given the place it deserves. Thank you. (Applause)