Play pockets in kindergartens: on framing blurred practices with art, pedagogy, and play

This chapter examines perspectives on framing art-making and aesthetic encounters with children in pedagogical settings through the metaphor play pocket. Framed play pockets are initiated by adults and eventually adult-guided, but with attention to art with children. Play pockets draw on a theoretical framework connected to philosophical and phenomenological perspectives on aesthetics as the sensitive cognition and -experience sampled with cultural orientations towards the notions of children’s play and aesthetics. Hence, aesthetics become more than superficial sensing or creating objects. It becomes a way of playing-and-being-in-the-world with attunement to aesthetic encounters of various kinds and exploring them in all possible directions through presentiments, imagination, and corporal-sensitive participation. It involves creating intermediate- and possible worlds and atmospheres and awakening ‘something more’. The chapter presents excerpts from a research process in Danish kindergartens where artists, pedagogues, and children (4½-6-years-old) participate in social- and aesthetic exploring of themselves and eachother through various pieces and artefacts made out of metal. This open-ended process involves children and adults as play-partners and aesthetic agents. The aim of the article is to develop a view on blurred practices with art, pedagogy, and play as a state of being and becoming – a multilayered sphere for aesthetic experiences and -Bildung and not as a vehicle for formal learning and schooling.