How imaginary worlds help kids learn | Anna Rainio

Elise Hugh (0:03)

You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh.

Classroom learning looks different for every kid. Some are hyper-focused, others struggle to pay attention. Some are withdrawn, others can't wait to make noise. According to educator and play expert Anna Rainio, it's strange that we ever expect sameness from children in school. If everyone's handed an identical curriculum, some are bound to struggle.

Anna Rainio (0:32)

In most other phases of our lives, it would be odd to think that everybody was able to do the same activity, enjoy similar things, or develop at the same pace.

Elise Hugh (0:44)

In this talk, Anna makes the case that radical inclusion in schools is possible. It just takes more creativity than we've been bringing to it. She studies an emerging idea called play worlds, adults and children coming together to build an imaginative world around an existing story, and finding new ways to step inside it. Say a teacher starts reading The Wizard of Oz, but stops halfway, and asks kids to figure out how to get Dorothy home.

Inside a play world, behavior that might normally be called difficult or disruptive can instead become part of the story.

Anna Rainio (1:18)

Before you rush to respond, try asking yourself, why not? And sometimes there's a clear reason to say no.

But often there isn't, and when there isn't, you can go along with your children in that unpredictable direction, and doors will open.

Elise Hugh (1:35)

And stick around after the talk. TED curator Chloe Shasha Brooks joins me for our Curator's Corner on the single image from Anna's research that moved her more than she expected, and how it's changed the way she parents. It's coming up right after a short break.

And now, our TED Talk of the Day.

Anna Rainio (2:00)

I'd love for you to think about a classroom full of, let's say, 20 seven-year-old children. They are all different. There's a child who loves school and can easily concentrate through noise. Another child needs a lot of physical comfort and happily climbs to his teacher's lap if it's free. One student has to fidget to concentrate.

The one at the back learned early on that adults and their promises cannot be trusted. She tried to keep her distance. Now imagine you're a teacher in this classroom, and it is your task to include all these different children in one activity. It's easy to see what happens. One or two children do not fit in and become excluded.

Why is that? In most other phases of our lives, it would be odd to think that everybody was able to do the same activity, enjoy similar things, or develop at the same pace. Schools, however, are historically places where sameness is expected from all. This makes many children and adults alike suffer in these institutions.

I am a researcher and teacher-educator in Finland, and I believe that this does not need to be the case. Radical inclusion is possible in any early learning classroom through something called playworlds.

Playworlds are adult-child joint play, often structured around a piece of literature or a work of art, like Moomin Troll's playworld or Alice in Wonderland playworld. They were originally developed by a Swedish scholar, Gunilla Lindqvist, and they are now studied worldwide by our research teams. The adults and children create the world of a chosen story in the classroom, and then the class plays, interacts and undertakes adventures together with both adults and children in roles. The children take initiative, and the adults listen carefully. I've had the privilege of learning from more than dozens of playworlds, and together with my colleagues, and I want to mention here especially Beth Fairhold, we have seen how playworlds can change the way schools are. Let me give you an example of how a playworld might look like in a kindergarten class.

And just to note that these are fictional examples to protect the privacy of the participants, kind of composite stories of all the things we've seen in the many playworlds we've studied. So the teacher, Johanna, started by reading aloud the first half of a famous Slavic folk tale, Baba Jako, to the children. But instead of reading aloud the second half of the story, the class collectively wrote and directed their own resolution to the story's central conflicts. These are the set pieces and props that the class created over the course of a year.

Elise Hugh (5:27)

Anna shows a series of photographs featuring colorful hand-made and hand-painted props that her students designed together from the world of Baba Jaka.

Anna Rainio (5:35)

This is Baba Jaka's tower, and these are magical creators' caves that the children created. And that is Baba Jaka's trap in which she loved to captivate everybody she could. And these are the trees and a lamp post in the forest of the story. And this is a drawing by a child of a hut on chicken legs. It's very important in the story of Baba Jaka. And it was created in the classroom, and this is the wardrobe inside the hut that became a portal from the everyday life of the classroom to the magical reality of the play world. Even the adults used it to keep the magic alive. But in this classroom, like in many others, there were some children who had hard time participating in the classroom activities. Viola was often inattentive and disruptive. And when the class was discussing how to bring everyone safety from the evil Baba Jaka, Viola suggested blowing up the whole school to save the magical creatures from Baba Jaka's trap. It's easy to see how Viola and her plan would be excluded from a normal classroom. But this is a play world. And in play world, the children, not the adults, are the experts. So the children negotiated with Viola and asked whether she could consider blowing up some props instead of an entire school.