Playing as Encounter: Co-Authorial Space in Play between Children and Adults

Abstract

Play is a special way in which children and adults open up to the world and their own flexibility. When playing together, they build co-authorial spaces of meaning as a space in which their separate subcultures overlap. The construction and regulation of the co-authorial space in play between children and adults depend on relations between everyday living space and the playing space, wherein the basic principles of regulation are the safeguarding of the illusionary plan of play and the development of the dialogue of imaginations. Adults who play along with children, can not only influence the “script” of the game, but can also create a possibility to realize their own potentials for imaginative and original interactions with the environment they inhabit. The reflexive and transformative function of co-authorial space as well as the function of co-constructing culture contributes to adults and children combining and changing old cultural patterns through playing, transform relations of power over to relations of power with others, and construct meanings which can transit from play and get integrated into real social relations as processes of creative change.