In most conversations about play, we focus on its developmental benefits: creativity, problem-solving, motor skills, emotional regulation. These outcomes matter, but they tell only part of the story. As I explored in my Master’s thesis, Playing with Play: Considerations for Embedding Outdoor Play-Based Learning into the Early Years (Power, 2024), the most transformative elements of children’s play—agency, autonomy, co-creation, and power-sharing—are also the least understood and least supported within institutional early learning systems.

This is not accidental. It is structural.

Current play ideology within formal systems tends to support what I call play-light: playful experiences that look like play but remain largely adult-controlled and time-bound, with limited space for children to shape meaning, direction, or environment. Throughout my career playing alongside children, educators and families, I found that the qualities of play that help children become confident decision-makers, negotiators, creators, and agents in their own lives are the very qualities that challenge institutional norms (Pyle & Danniels, 2017; Sutton-Smith, 1997).

This blog explores what these forms of power and agency look like, how educators cultivate them, why institutions struggle to hold them, and why they matter—not just for children’s learning but for the future of a just and equitable society.

Why Power and Agency Matter in Play

Power, in the context of children’s play, is relational. It emerges through decision-making, experimentation, negotiation, risk-taking, resistance, and co-creation (Sutton-Smith, 1997). When children play, they are not simply developing skills; they are enacting a microcosm of citizenship—practicing what it means to influence, contribute, adapt, question, and belong.

Play theorists from Vygotsky to contemporary play scholars argue that agency-rich play supports children in forming internalized understandings of self-efficacy, autonomy, and social responsibility (Vygotsky, 1978; Pyle & Danniels, 2017). These are not small outcomes. They sit at the heart of democratic life.

In my thesis, I extend this argument by showing that deep, land-based play invites children into relationship with each other and with the Land in ways that cultivate reciprocity, care, and responsibility (Power, 2024). Children learn not just what they can do, but how their actions matter—to peers, to community, to place.

This situates play not merely as pedagogy, but as a foundation for a more equitable, relational future.

How Children Claim Power in Play

In observing outdoor, land-based, and emergent play environments, I found five recurring patterns through which children claim and enact power. These patterns showed up across contexts, ages, and settings—and across the broader play literature.

1. Choosing what to play
Agency begins with the moment a child says “I want to…” The freedom to choose one’s play anchors autonomy and ownership.

2. Deciding how long to stay
Sustained engagement—returning day after day to the same structure, imaginative storyline, or challenge—builds persistence and self-determination.

3. Taking risks that matter
Risk-taking in play is about possibilities: testing abilities, assessing danger, navigating uncertainty. It signals trust in one’s judgment.

4. Negotiating social worlds
Children enact leadership, collaboration, disagreement, and repair within play. They try on roles and negotiate identities.

5. Shaping the environment
Through loose parts, natural materials, and Land-based affordances, children literally transform their play world—exercising influence and co-creation.

These forms of agency form the core of the Outdoor Play-Based Learning Continuum I developed in my thesis (Power, 2024). On one end: play-light. On the other: deep, emergent, relational, land-responsive play.

How Educators Cultivate Agency Through Play

Children’s agency thrives not automatically but through conditions adults intentionally create. I'd like to repeat that again. Children’s agency thrives not automatically but through conditions adults intentionally create. Throughout my research, I observed five practices that consistently support deep, powerful play.

Educators cultivate agency first by stepping back to allow emergence—adopting a posture of “not knowing,” remaining open to surprise, and trusting children’s ideas as legitimate. This willingness to follow rather than direct creates space for children to step into leadership (Power, 2024).

Agency also grows when educators honour children’s decisions, signalling through their responses that children’s choices carry weight. Small moments—pausing before redirecting, offering alternatives, validating preferences—send a powerful message about autonomy.

At the heart of this work is making space for negotiation and conflict, recognizing these interactions as meaningful opportunities for children to navigate power, relationships, and difference. Conflict is not a disruption to play; it is part of the curriculum of being in community.

Here, educators play a crucial relational role: they build curriculum from children’s play rather than imposing curriculum onto it. Instead of positioning content or pre-determined learning outcomes as the starting point, educators attune to the stories, inquiries, questions, and emerging theories already present in children’s play. In this approach—supported across emergent, inquiry, and land-based pedagogies—curriculum becomes something co-constructed. Children’s lived experiences, identities, interests, and relationships with each other and with the Land are not “add-ons” to learning; they are the learning (Power, 2024; Vygotsky, 1978). When educators document children’s play narratives, revisit children’s ideas, and design experiences that extend their inquiries, they reaffirm that children’s voices matter and that knowledge grows from lived connection, not abstraction.

This pedagogical stance stands in contrast to approaches where curriculum is predefined and play is used to “deliver” content. Instead, the educator’s role becomes interpretive and relational—listening deeply, observing closely, and building outward from the meanings children create.

Another key element of cultivating agency involves offering empowering materials. Loose parts, natural elements, and open-ended environments invite invention and allow children to manipulate, transform, and reconfigure their world (Nicholson, 1971). These materials support children in doing the cognitive and social work of building meaning.

Finally, educators cultivate agency by inviting the Land into the teaching relationship. When the Land sets the conditions—when weather shifts the rhythm of the day, when water, wind, moss, slope, or light shape what is possible—children learn to attune, adapt, and co-create. This is a form of agency that exists outside adult control, and one that institutions often struggle to understand because it requires a pedagogical stance grounded in reciprocity, humility, and place.

In these environments, power flows between child, educator, peers, and place. This is where agency deepens.

Closing Reflections

Supporting children’s agency in play is not a technique or a simple shift in practice; it is an ongoing negotiation of relationships, roles, and expectations. It asks us to reconsider how power moves in early learning environments and to recognize that children’s ideas, decisions, and ways of knowing can and should shape what learning becomes. This work is neither quick nor straightforward, but it is deeply worthwhile. When we make space for children to lead, to inquire, to shape their environments, and to be in relationship with the Land, we honour not only their capacities in the present, but their place in a more relational and equitable future.

References 

Nicholson, S. (1971). How not to cheat children: The theory of loose parts. Landscape Architecture Quarterly, 62(1), 30–34.

Power, M. (2024). Playing with Play: Considerations for Embedding Outdoor Play-Based Learning into the Early Years (Master’s thesis, Trent University). https://batadora.trentu.ca/islandora/playing-play-considerations-embedding-outdoor-play-based-learning-early-years

Pyle, A., & Danniels, E. (2017). A continuum of play-based learning: The role of the teacher in play-based pedagogy and the fear of hijacking play. Early Education and Development, 28(3), 274–289.

Sutton-Smith, B. (1997). The ambiguity of play. Harvard University Press.

Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press.