2 In celebration, Michael takes the class outside for a run in the field. One child, Rachel, says as she runs, “I feel like I’m flying.” Pearl looks up at the sky as she runs and says, “I look up and I go faster.” Andrea, Pearl’s younger sister, runs backwards and asks, “Why am I walking backwards?” She answers herself, “I don’t have to look. I know where am I’m going.” Michael and I still look at each other in amazement when we watch the film of this event together: How did Andrea know then what it took us three years to understand about the power of Pearl’s words?i
Cognition and emotion are still, often, separated in the social scientific study of development and learning. Vygotsky called this separation “a major weakness of traditional psychology” and explained that this separation “makes the thought process appear as an autonomous flow of ‘thoughts thinking themselves,’ segregated from the fullness of life, from the personal needs and interests, the inclinations and impulses, of the thinker” (1986, p. 10). We accept this segregation in part because we do not have adequate means of observing, and then capturing for study, complex dynamic relations between such key psychological processes as cognition, emotion, imagination and creativity. In this thesis I propose and describe a means of making these relations visible in all their complexity and fluidity. I argue that a new form of play, playworlds, in which adults actively enter into the fantasy play of young children as a means of promoting the development and quality of life of both adults and children, holds special potential for making perezhivanie [pâr-uh-jhi-von-yuh], or “intensely emotional lived through experience,” visible, and hence available for empirical research.