Exploring "Living Well" Through Children's Play

Abstract

This chapter considers how “living well in a world worth living in” is imagined, replicated and lived in children’s free play. Drawing primarily on video data collected by 21 young migrant and refugee background primary school students in Finland and Australia, we consider what children’s play can reveal about a just, equitable and fair world in the present and in future, and how schools can support its development by providing the needed cultural-discursive, material-economic, and social-political arrangements for play. Our chapter shows that as children play, they not only create, simulate, and negotiate between themselves an imagined, future-oriented world worth living in for all, but also, through the real collaboration, empathy and care they develop and practise together, they bring that world into being.