Childhood learning and playful ethos

Abstract

Watching the construction and permanent reorganization of games created and imagined by children, is an interesting experience that generates profound thoughts about our own teaching practice and particularly on the early stages of formal education. The vastness of space and time that shape the game context, the different uses, dreams, ideas and effort that each child places in this flow of ideas, gives deeper meaning to these personal experiences and great intersubjective value, whose collective rooting is an existential act with which children commit. In an attempt to characterize in the most genuine way these experiences, arises the name "playful ethos", whose linguistic connotation opens windows to look more closely at the elements or axiological dimensions of conviviality and cultural construction with which children access and contribute to the generation of their own knowledge. Among the aspects that define this concept, and relevant at the moment of thinking in how to favor their learning processes at school, we can mention that playful time and space are undetermined and complex; this is, their actions are determined by constitutive and dynamic emerging rules that obey to an actional sequence, and thus have a contextual sense and meaning.