Distilling playful stances to learning: Looking across cultures, contexts, roles and generations

The potential of play for socio-cognitive development and learning has received scholarly attention for many decades. Nonetheless, the role of play in education and the nurturing of playful approaches is mostly restricted to studies of the early years, extra curricular learning spaces, and introductory or accessory phases in learning cycles and educational practices. This demarcation becomes more acute as the achievement-centred demands and globalised standards of competitive societies increasingly permeate educational systems and practices. In this scenario, play and playfulness appear as a neglected or encapsulated area, divorced from the contemporary global agenda of learning and instruction. Rather than advocating a return to the roots or calling for more space for play in academic schedules, this Special Issue seeks to advance the international agenda around playfulness and show that through re-envisioning the concept, new insights can be garnered in contemporary times. Eleven contributions from north to south and east to west deploy fine-grained methodologies to delve into how and why playfulness can enhance children's, teachers', youth's and adults' learning at school, university and in more open spaces. The collection of papers contributes a more precise understanding of the specific qualities that sustain the experience of playfulness and, on that basis, enable creative, agentic and pleasurable ways of learning in ecologically relevant fields.

The issue surfaces new directions for research, that include for example extending the focus of playfulness to secondary and higher education contexts as well as wider populations. Specifically such work could seek ways that alleviate the academic pressures and prioritisation of knowledge reproduction as well as flesh out how playfulness can sustain and enrich the learning horizons of those with neurodivergent trajectories and needs. In order to advance a more nuanced understanding of the affordances of playfulness in learning, we also need to disentangle how different senses and experiences of play contribute to different ways and rhythms of learning. And develop a deeper appreciation of the multiple ways in which imagination and reality feed each other in playful learning, both across and beyond educational curricula.