Playing Transitions - Settling and Belonging in School together

This project aims to improve children’s transition from daycare to school through pedagogically framed play activities. Play activities enable and support children’s processes of actively settling and belonging in the school setting. By focusing on how professionals can support children’s participation in play, this aim is operationalized through an iterative process of co-designing play experiments. The project rethinks the role of play in children's transition to school as a matter of co-developing and negotiating communities, participation and belonging in school, rather than smoothing out institutional differences between daycare and school. The project hypothesis is that a combination of knowledge from transition studies, play theory, childhood studies and educational design research may serve to overcome inherent problems in current transition pedagogies .