Introduction

Children’s play does not cease to attract the attention of researchers working across vast areas of inquiry, from developmental psychology and pedagogy to literary scholarship and art education. It has recently returned to the limelight, likely in response to the ongoing reforms in early education that threaten to curtail play by already focusing on standardized tests in early childhood. This continuing interest in play is hardly surprising given that most children are drawn incessantly to playing, as if by some magic force. This is evidenced in that most children spend countless hours at play, apparently never tiring of pretending, imagining, fantasizing, creating, and inventing. However, our ideas and concepts of play never quite seem to catch up with its remarkable qualities in ways that are commensurate with its rich texture, imaginative character, creative potential, and enigmatic appeal. These qualities are hardly reducible to objective metrics developed outside of an in-depth exploration into the meanings and significance of play—into what play is and why it is so important to children. There is a need to continue developing understandings of play by building on the rich theories of play and on related topics in psychology and other fields in order to grasp its creative, dynamic, and liberating dimensions that likely stretch beyond the obvious, the measurable, and the mundane. In our view, adequate explorations into play can benefit from broad inquiries into the deepest questions about the human condition and nature including questions as to what makes us human, how we are positioned in the world, and what our world is all about.

These are monumental questions. They are often supposed to be the province of a “big philosophy” rather than research into what many consider to be less significant, “minor” topics relating to early childhood, such as play. Yet these topics are no less deep or complex. To think otherwise would mean to erect barriers between play and other human strivings and endeavors, including their most dramatic expressions in adulthood. In arguing against such barriers, we draw attention not only to the need to understand play non-instrumentally on its own grounds (Marjanovic-Shane and White 2014). We also call for an acknowledgment that play belongs to a continuum of human life understood as one unified and uninterrupted process of striving, developing, and becoming. This idea is derived from the works of two remarkable scholars of the human condition—Vygotsky and Bakhtin. It is consistent with Vygotsky’s position that creativity is inherent at all stages of life in all of its expressions. It is also consonant with Bakhtin’s notion of becoming as “postuplenie” (discussed later in this paper). This notion refers to a ceaseless and open-ended quest for humanness that all people embark on and pursue throughout their lives. This process begins in childhood and draws on a vast repertoire of tools including play, with its hallmark features such as imagination and the ability to create novelty, transcend the given, and project into the future.

In emphasizing continuities between play and all human creative strivings, and by extension also between childhood and the totality of human life throughout its span, our suggestion is that not only children themselves learn much through play—in a non-instrumental sense of learning as a creative discovery about ourselves and the world. It is also that there is much we can learn through understanding play and what children do so passionately as they engage in it.

Based on these broad premises, we address what can be considered to be the great enigma of play through the lens of these and other ideas by Vygotsky and Bakhtin, who provided invaluable insights into this topic. No less importantly, they illuminated the broader dynamics of human existence in ways that are also applicable to studying play. The method employed in exploring these two theories in their applicability to play is not to sum up their respective ideas in an additive fashion, placing them alongside each other. Instead, we explore how their ideas can be creatively brought into dialogue by revealing their addressivity (to use Bakhtin’s term) toward the key paradox or predicament of human life—the tension between individual freedom and relationality. This paradox was thrown into sharp relief by the dramatic context that these scholars participated in and by the unique challenges they both faced as a result. To this end, we also draw on the “transformative activist stance” (TAS; see Stetsenko 2008, 2012, 2015) that provides a framework through which these two theories can be revealed as providing complementary answers regarding the key aspect of the human condition that is laid bare in children’s play.

Using this method, we suggest that while playing, children are sorting out what is arguably one of the most complex paradoxes of human existence. This paradox is about being one among many, that is, about being a unique individual in an essentially communal world shared with others. The paradox involved is that human beings are singular and unique individuals, yet they are also profoundly relational and deeply social, sharing with other people no less than the existential grounding of life in all of its expressions and forms. In other words, this is about human beings realizing their freedom and becoming individually unique while doing so within the inalienable bonds that tie them together with other people, all on the grounds of a profound, ever-increasing blending and meshing of one’s own ways of being, knowing, and doing with those of others. As can be argued from a Vygotskian–Bakhtinian perspective expanded in the TAS, what children (and in fact all human beings) are striving for in their various activities—and early in life especially through play—is to become free and authentic persons with self-determining individuality or identity, an unrepeatable voice, and an irreplaceable role within the social world and its collective history. However, at the same time, in a closely related quest, human beings also strive to participate and to belong by finding their place among others—all the while never completely breaking out nor distancing themselves from the profoundly social world shared with others.

This is about the paradox of particular versus universal, individual versus society, novelty and creativity versus tradition and historicity, and freedom versus necessity—the key dichotomies that play out in all the “grand” philosophies and theories of human development. The point is that they can also be discerned in the everyday life of both adults and children—including, with a particular sharpness, in children’s play. Our suggestion is that it is the quest to resolve this monumental paradox that is epitomized in children’s seemingly mundane yet also existentially significant and serious preoccupation with play. It is therefore no wonder that they so seriously commit themselves to this activity and tirelessly work at it, albeit in playful and joyful expressions and forms. Bakthin and Vygotsky each uniquely addressed this challenge and suggested valuable thoughts on resolving it.

The way to illuminate how children sort out this challenge in play, we suggest, has to do with play’s remarkable qualities and affordances. Play is a unique activity through which children can discover how to act as agentive actors in the social world shared with others, to which they contribute in unique ways and thus bring it into realization. What is special about such acting is that it affords an individually unique contribution to the world’s ever-emerging collaborative dynamics and to its ceaseless and open-ended transformations. Understood this way, play is a pathway for children to discover how to co-author themselves and the world in a bidirectional spiral of mutual becoming.

Merging Insights from Bakhtin and Vygotsky in the Transformative Activist Stance

Vygotsky devoted much attention to play, and many works in the sociocultural tradition have further elaborated his ideas in a varied and productive research direction (for a recent representative collection, see Connery et al. 2010; also, Nicolopoulou 1993). In contrast, Bakhtin’s works have been mostly applied in literary scholarship and in research on discourse and narrative, while finding less resonance with researchers studying play. This gap has recently begun to close in a shift that is apparently indicative of researchers discovering new dimensions and meanings of play. For example, Edmiston (2010) applied Bakhtin’s ideas about co-authoring to child–adult play to address how its cultural resources are tools for making meaning. Marjanovic-Shane and White (2014) have applied his notion of deed to analyze play dynamics. However, research on play has not yet focused on studying it at the intersection of Vygotsky’s and Bakhtin’s theories. Edmiston (2010) has mitigated this gap to some extent, and there have been few other studies that attempt such an approach (Duncan and Tarulli 2003). The paucity of these attempts is emblematic of the situation across many fields where two independent traditions associated with each of these scholars have developed. There is an ongoing debate among positions that either justify this split (e.g., Wegerif 2008; White 2014) or alternatively, suggest that ideas by Bakhtin and Vygotsky are compatible (e.g., Stetsenko 2007; Thompson 2012). Given that Vygotsky and Bakhtin developed philosophically complex, epistemologically rich, and conceptually dense theories, the question of how they contrast or overlap can be understood from very different angles. This is quite consistent with these scholars’ own orientations that defied simplicity and finality. In this paper, we offer one of the many possible ways to compare ideas by Vygotsky and Bakhtin so as to set the stage for a discussion of play that makes use of insights from both authors.

There are important commonalities between Bakhtin’s and Vygotsky’s theories that are especially apparent given the many parallels in their life paths that make a virtual dialogue between the two scholars possible and warranted. Born just 1 year apart in close geographic proximity, they were participants in the same cultural tradition that became disrupted by the turmoil that unfolded during their lifetime. Although they likely never met, their voices were part of the same social drama of history, each answering in a unique way to the challenges posed by their unique epoch. In particular, both Bakhtin and Vygotsky faced the highly contested dilemma between the notion of collective as one uniform “unity” in which individuals seamlessly blend and mesh together on the one hand (as promoted by the top–down ideology of the Russian revolution), and the quest for individual freedom and responsibility on the other. In other words, the core question raised with an acute sharpness by the historical context in which they worked was about the possibility of freedom within a profoundly communal world.

The answers that Bakhtin and Vygotsky provided were different, yet they shared a common conceptual backdrop. Most importantly, they both worked within and significantly advanced a deeply socio-relational understanding of human development, language, and consciousness. Indeed, Bakhtin’s thinking revolves around the notion that people are constituted through discourses and dialogues imbued with intentions and voices of others whereby experiencing the world is possible only because individuals are interconnected with others. In his words, “life by its very nature is dialogic. To live means to participate in dialogue…” (Bakhtin 1984, p. 293). Vygotsky too is unwaveringly relational in his thinking. This is particularly evident in his writings on the roots of psychological processes in infancy (Vygotsky 1998). In these works, he unequivocally posits that the true source of development is in the initial sharing situation—a symbiotic communion between adults and infants. Vygotsky held that infants are at first indistinguishable from caregiving adults and essentially belong with them together. The roots of consciousness and self are situated in the distributed field of co-being and co-acting in joint activities with adults and only gradually become differentiated from this initial social unity (for details, see Arievitch and Stetsenko 2014). For both scholars, social interconnectedness constitutes the deepest and most significant feature of human life. On this score, their positions are closely compatible and complementary, each strengthening the voice of the other, as if speaking in unison.

Furthermore, the deeper grounding of human existence for both Bakhtin and Vygotsky has to do with individuals acting in the world rather than passively experiencing or contemplating it. This theme comes across in Bakhtin’s statement that every thought is an individually answerable act that constitutes no less than the lived world itself. In his striking conclusion (Bakhtin 1990), the lifeworld does not exist before or outside of the actual deeds by individuals in communion with others as the center around which our existence revolves. The emphasis is on the phenomenological richness of deeds that form a seamless stream of one’s life in an active project of becoming or “postuplenie” (Russian). Note the richness of Bakhtin’s idiosyncratic term. Postuplenie conveys the sense of a process-like, continuous (uninterrupted) and dynamic (ever-changing and cumulative) unfolding of one’s life, as a becoming-through-doing. This term also conveys the value of one’s unique role and participation in the world, one’s “non-alibi in it”—a sense that each and every act changes not only one’s life (as it does) but also the world itself by leaving irreversible and unique traces in it. These views bear similarity to Vygotsky’s position. He too wrote about consciousness as emerging within and out of shared activities with others as can be imputed from Vygotsky’s notion of collaborative practice and his “general law” of development (for details, see Stetsenko 2007, 2013). The latter refers to “the transition from inter-psychological functions to intra-psychological ones, that is, from forms of social, collective activity of the child to his individual functions” (Vygotsky 1987, p. 259).

Building on Vygotsky’s ideas about collaborative practice as the key grounding for human development and Bakhtin’s notion of postuplenie, the TAS suggests the following expansions that help bring their contributions together. First, the world is understood to be a constantly shifting terrain of social practices continuously enacted and reenacted by people acting together in performing their answerable deeds. That is, the world is a process of ceaseless change as a collective forum for human becoming stretching across generations. Each person entering this collective forum and joining in with its dynamics, right from birth, is the core condition and foundation for individual becoming and development. Second, this collective and collaborative process of open-ended social practices is composed of contributions to them by each individual human being. Each person not only enters social practices but makes a difference in them, thus gradually coming to co-author these practices in becoming agentive actors in their enactments and transformations. That is, although social through and through, these collaborative social practices are realized through unique activist contributions by individual agents acting from their own irreplaceable positions and stances.

The resulting view suggests that it is directly through and in the process of people constantly transforming and co-creating their social world that people simultaneously create and constantly transform themselves. Human beings are agents of their own lives and society at large, who are responsive and responsible (or answerable, to use Bakhtin’s term) actors of social practices. They do not passively dwell in the world, but instead co-create and co-author it together with other people. Most critical is that in this creative process of co-authoring the world through contributing to its collective dynamics, people are simultaneously co-authoring themselves and becoming individually unique.

Based on these broad premises, the processes of knowing, being, and doing are acts of creative transformation contingent on how each individual contributes to social communal practices by changing their dynamics, creating novelty, and leaving one’s own indelible traces in them. This contrasts with explanations focused on human development as a passive process of people being simply situated in context while merely reacting to its influences coming from the outside. Focusing instead on creativity and novelty suggests that our acts and deeds do not just take place in the world; rather, they simultaneously bring forth the world and ourselves in one process of a mutual and bidirectional continuous becoming. On this premise, a person’s activist positioning and taking a stance within the dynamics of participation in community practices is the prime dimension of both collective and individual becoming. It is acting from one’s unrepeatable stance and unique place in the world that reality is experienced, understood, and made sense of.

Freedom and Self-Determination in the World Shared with Others: An Interplay of Individual Agency and Relationality

On the common foundation of Bakhtin’s and Vygotsky’s theories, there arises the difficult question of how to account for the possibility of individuals acting freely within such a profoundly social and communal world shared with others and composed of relational, collaborative acting. Vygotsky’s answer to this dilemma is directly related to his study of play. On the one hand, he suggested that play is profoundly social since it originates in the interactions with others and relies on cultural tools that they provide. Cultural mediation plays a crucial role in this process: psychological processes emerge via integration of signs that are first directed by others toward the self and then are taken over by the child in directing them toward others and ultimately, oneself. Importantly, all signs are products of social history of communities who collectively form systems of cultural mediation. These ideas can be interpreted as implying that individuals are directly shaped by society in a top–down process wherein individuals are relatively passive.

On the other hand, however, Vygotsky also engaged the topic of freedom in discussing play. He insisted that play is fundamentally creative, producing novelty and originality that stretch beyond what is “given” in the present. Moreover, Vygotsky (2004) dramatically stated that “The entire future of humanity will be attained through the creative imagination…” (pp. 87–88). The great value of play, according to Vygotsky, is exactly that it represents a context where freedom becomes possible. This is because play allows for the use of signs in ways that afford distance from the immediately given context through the power of imagination. This is achieved because the child creates imaginary situations in which objects can be used as substitutes for other objects in roles that one assigns to them, for example, using sticks as horses to ride on. This experiencing of things as they are (sticks as sticks) coupled with acting with them per one’s imagination (stick as a horse one can ride on) is of fundamental importance. As a result, objects lose their determining force and the child learns to be in charge of one’s acting. This is no small achievement. Instead of being driven and guided by the “dictate” of objects and situations as they are encountered in the outside world, children exercise through play in acting that is agentive and self-determined. In this sense, Vygotsky brings together the themes of sociality and freedom.

Bakhtin can be interpreted to provide an additional and crucially important layer to this understanding. Vygotsky’s theory explains how play affords freedom from situational constraints, but he does not engage with how children might gain freedom specifically from adult authority and broader society. As many critical comments on Vygotsky’s theory suggest, he seems to imply that human development is a smooth integration of individuals into a society understood as a monolithic unity devoid of conflicts and contradictions. In contrast, Bakthin insisted that society is inevitably marked by contradictions and disagreements. For him, dialogues and social interactions are always sites of struggles among divergent voices, values, and positions. Applying this idea to play highlights that it too can be seen as a site of struggles whereby children negotiate meanings, coordinate positions, and resolve conflicts (Duncan and Tarulli 2003). Danucan and Tarulli conclude that while sociodramatic play serves to prepare children for participation in adult life, it also enables children to achieve critical distance from social rules and norms.

On this account, Vygotsky’s ideas of play stand corrected in view of Bakhtin’s notions that put more emphasis on play as a site of conflict where children gain freedom from society rather than integrate with it. However, on a closer look, their views overlap more than first meets the eye.

It is important to note how fluid Bakhtin’s views are in combining seemingly contradictory ideas. On the one hand, his works are about dialogical and relational groundings of life. On the other hand, especially in his early works, he wrote that the world remains an empty possibility unless the person herself constructs meaningful relations with it, transforming its empty “givenness” into a coherent “world-for-me” distributed around me. It is only in his late works that Bakhtin displaced the authoring “I” from the center of the universe, instead focusing on dialogues with others (Morson and Emerson 1990). These nuanced views are paralleled by Bakhtin’s dynamic position on the role of rules and constraints. Although he has been cast as a philosophic anarchist who celebrates pure freedom and “rejoices in the undoing of rules” (Morson and Emerson 1990, p. 43), Bakhtin’s position is more nuanced. As Morson and Emerson (1990) describe, especially in his late writings, Bakhtin does not favor pure freedom. Instead, Bakhtin speaks in favor of “the given” serving as a resource for what is created. He acknowledges that social rules, norms, and even stable heritage as long as they are not total, are in fact necessary for creativity, openness, and freedom.

The possibility of individual freedom and agency within a communal world shared with others, addressed by both Vygotsky and Bakhtin, can be further expanded through the lens of the TAS. In addressing the challenge to integrate individual agency within the cultural-historical perspective, this perspective highlights how closely interlinked and complementary individual and collective planes of social practices are. This suggests that each individual is shaped by collective history and social practices, while at the same time shaping and realizing them through contributing to their open-ended dynamics. Importantly, this is possible because social practices are understood to be composed of human deeds that enact the world in ceaselessly moving beyond the status quo and transcending the “given” (Stetsenko 2013, 2015).

This approach implicates a shift away from seeing children as solitary individuals developing in a social vacuum, independently and separately from other people and community practices. Yet at the same time, the role of each individual person is ascertained as central to their own and their communities’ development. That is, each person is understood to be indelibly relational and dialogical, fully immersed in exchanges and interactions with others; yet at the same time, each person is also irreplaceably and unrepeatably individually unique as a social actor. This approach is about dialogues and relations serving as the source of individual uniqueness and, at the same time, about individual uniqueness serving as the source and the prime condition for dialogues and relations. Such a connection is possible because individuals are co-creating themselves and their world by contributing to collective pursuits in their own unique ways. In this view, each person simultaneously defines oneself and the world. Moreover, it is through the process of changing social practices and contributing to them in meaningful ways that the child ultimately comes to be oneself—a unique individual who has an irreplaceable role and a unique voice within their communities and their common history. That is, people create their uniqueness precisely through participating in, contributing to, and co-authoring social practices, while in so doing, gaining their unique voice and identity. The person is quintessentially and inimitably social—but only as a unique individual who has taken the responsibility and care from one’s own unique place and role in the world. The other side of this is that each person is ineluctably unique—but only as someone who has found her voice and place among other people in order to contribute to social and collective processes.

Play exemplifies a context where complementary interplay of individuality and social belonging, freedom, and obligation is possible. It is in a world that is open-ended, fluid, and infused with creativity, and thus recreated as a whole each time anew by each individual, that individuals can be agentive actors who simultaneously co-create and co-author social practices and themselves. In play, all the extant constraints can be changed and challenged, rather than faithfully reproduced, so that children gain experience and tools for becoming social actors capable of exercising agency in challenging and contesting “the given” and the taken-for-granted.

Especially in its dramatic and fantasy forms, play represents a quintessential expression of what is a uniquely human world of possibility and agency. In this world, various ideas and roles are entertained and coordinated, rules tried out and negotiated, stories and their episodes planned and enacted, and voices brought into conflict, dialogues, and interchanges. This world, rather than being a brute reality that acts on us as an external force, is a space where our agency is central and we create ourselves in creating the world. Play embodies a type of engagement with the world where rules are paramount yet boundaries are flexible, and negotiation and conflict are ubiquitous yet agreement is possible because the world is open-ended, unfinished and unfinalizable. Play is about acting in ways that do not copy the world as it has been in the past and how it exists in the present. Nor is it about simply coping with the world as in adapting to it in compliance with its status quo. Instead, play is about acting in novel and creative ways, like no one ever did before, each time bringing forth novelty, transcending the given, and realizing the impossible. In this process, nothing is repeated nor merely recreated but rather, invented and discovered each time anew in creative and unique ways.

The following extract from videotaped interactions of Sophie and Peter, both 4 years old, in a naturalistic setting of free play, illustrate how children initiate playworlds and negotiate positions in creating agentive outlook and authorial positioning.

Sophie: I have to go to ballet. Boys and girls can go to my ballet. Do you want to go to my ballet? (addressing Peter). Peter: well… Sophie: Its for boys and girls. Peter: well… Sophie: Yes… because you get to… Okay, here’s my ballet teacher… (gesturing into the space). Hi, ballet teacher, a child gets there. Come! (Turning to Peter) You can go, sweetie. Can you say hello? Peter: Yes, but… I’ve been not in ballet… well you know… Sophie: I could ask her. (Play theme shifts, Peter initiates the dialogue). Peter: I need to go somewhere to get more guitars. Sophie: Alright, I have one guitar that I gave to someone and then he gave me back (holding a long wooden block as a pretend guitar). So I could give it to you. Look! Peter: Is that the old fashioned one? Sophie: No! It is electric. Peter: I like electric better than old fashioned.

This extract illustrates how children “do” authoring while creating their own playworlds. In this episode, Sophie creates her own imaginary situation, “her” ballet class, which others can join in. This situation has rules and boundaries, with inhabitants speaking in different voices—Sophie herself and the imaginary teacher. Sophie is clearly in charge, exercising her agency by using voice, space, and body movements in actively asserting her position. Her strong voice, direct eye contact, and body movements are all involved in creating what is essentially “Sophie’s world.” This is especially clear as Peter hesitates to join it. As the play theme develops, the children are increasingly working out shared goals as they negotiate interactions. They take turns in initiating play scenarios, engage in shared meaning–making within the world they co-create together, explore different perspectives as well as establish their possible selves as agentive actors. There is much power dynamics, conflict, and negotiation even in this seemingly mundane episode. Even here one can see how children are actors and agents who co-create realities while discovering what is possible and how to co-author the world. The paradox is that this is achieved not in the form of a free-floating freedom from social constraints; rather it is about trying out and entertaining social rules and norms in the sense of a joyful and creative work rather than strict compliance. This is about co-authoring and co-creating rules and norms and thus, changing and expanding them in one’s own way and as befits one’s unique circumstances. In so doing, children are achieving freedom not by distancing from reality and the world of others, including rules and norms of social life, but by learning about reality and merging ever more closely with it. This is done by children figuring out their stake in the events, claiming their own stand on what is going on, and making their own decisions so that their actions and deeds count and matter for others. In discovering how to act in co-creating the world, children also discover how they themselves matter. It is through this process that children embark on the path of postuplenie—becoming individually unique and free in the world shared with others.

The acts of creating imaginary situations and of exercising positions and stances that play affords help to bring new potential worlds, and with them new identities, into the realm of the here-and-now. These acts undo the boundaries between reality and potentiality in a simultaneous construction of social spaces that are both “real-and-imagined” (Soja 1996) and of one’s identity that comes about through trying out various roles and stances while taking up responsibilities that accompany these roles.

This approach overlaps with yet also expands on previous works that have highlighted the role of play in spurring children’s agency (Edmiston 2010; Marjanovic-Shane and White 2014). Our approach puts an additional emphasis on the process of children creating and co-authoring their world itself while they create and co-author their identities—as facets of one and the same process of the continuous becoming of both individuals and their world. This process is impossible without cultural mediation accessible through shared activities with adults who supply models for collective acting according to social norms. Yet the child’s unique role in co-authoring imaginative spaces that crosscut into the real world needs to be emphasized too.

The ability to have one’s individual viewpoint, position, voice, and stance is often taken for granted, but it is hardly a natural “equipment” that children are born with. Rather, from a merged perspective of Bakhtin and Vygotsky, it is reasonable to assume that this ability develops in social interactions and dialogues. For young children, it is a challenge to have their own voices heard, yet it is even a bigger challenge to have their voices forged, while establishing one’s own stances from a relational yet authorial position. It is hard to imagine another context where this can be done by young children more efficiently than in play. Here, in play, the child is free to create “one’s own world” conceived from one’s own unique viewpoint where one’s stance and voice matter. This is why play is so essential and appealing. It helps children to discover how to position themselves and claim authorship in a world that they themselves co-create through the tools of play. When children can, as is the case in play, go beyond the status quo and the social forces that typically control them, they gain the tools of taking a stand and claiming an authorship and thus, becoming unique and free social actors in the world shared with others.

Conclusions

From a combined perspective of Bakhtin and Vygotsky merged in the transformative activist stance, children’s play with its faculty of imagination and creativity can be understood as an indispensible space in which children get to simultaneously co-author themselves and the world. In it, children are exploring and discovering dimensions of themselves as social actors who are able to take active positions and stances rather than just reflect on or passively adapt to the world. Such an active positioning implies that children participate in innovation, creation, and transformation of what exists in the present. That is, children are expansively creating no less than the world in their acts of co-authoring it—including its social structures and processes, its cultural rules and norms, discourses and narratives, and tools and traditions. In this process, each child is also coming to be a uniquely individual and irreplaceable actor in the social world, with authentic voice and unrepeatable identity.

The interplay between freedom with its self-determination, and social belonging (or relationality) with its obligation to others, is at the base of human becoming. In overcoming divisions between society and the individual as separated and polar opposites, there is a way to carve out a balance between continuity and change, tradition and transformation, and creation and transmission. Individuality comes from creativity—independence in shaping one’s own path in life, making one’s own decisions, and performing one’s own uniquely positioned and answerable deeds. Without being truly independent and in charge of one’s own acting, there is no way to participate in and especially to contribute to the social fabric of our shared lives. However, the reverse is also true—without being truly interdependent and grounded in realities of social life shared with others, it is impossible to create and be individually unique.

Play sheds light on this key predicament of human life—how to be oneself and author one’s life and one’s world yet also, at the same time and non-coincidentally, be part of one’s community and of our common humanity. We come into existence through entering the flow of social practices in order to carry them on while leaving our unique traces and indelible marks on them. Furthering one’s capacity for autonomous agency is only possible within a solidaristic community that sustains one’s identity yet such a community is impossible without free and self-determining individuals. Communities and individuals are coordinated and co-evolving whereby children are gradually getting to be more and more individually unique while at the same time becoming ever more enmeshed, or fused, with the social world—with the two processes representing interdependent facets of one and the same continuous and shared quest for human becoming. It is specifically play that makes this dynamics evident and possible.

As captured by many artists and writers, children are capable of great leaps of faith and imagination and can grasp greatness and potential in the world and in themselves. In play, children might be closer to reality than we may think: not to reality how it is, but to how it could be, as an open-ended possibility in which our quest for freedom in the world shared with others is supported and actualized. In the perspective of Vygotsky and Bakhtin merged in the TAS, the reality of play might be more real than the one we encounter through the lens of passivity and resignation that often applies in our adult lives. This reality is where by imagining, we power the possible into the real and freely co-create ourselves and the world. There is much that children learn in playing, especially in the sense of self- discovery, which is why the value of this truly existential endeavor cannot be overestimated. Therefore, it is important that early education allocates ample time for this activity. It is the work that children accomplish that is joyful and serious at the same time. In this claim, the emphasis is on the value of play against its subordination to formal instruction that narrowly targets cognitive skills. Yet it is also true that we all, as educators and scholars and simply as adults, have much to learn from children’s play—about the world as it can be and about how much needs to be improved in its status quo if we want to be free and relational at the same time.