Child-initiated play and professional creativity: Enabling four-year-olds’ possibility thinking

Given enormous global challenges, alongside nurturing children's creativity, professional creativity has perhaps never been more vital (Craft, 2011a and Moss, 2010). This paper considers how a small, qualitative, co-participative study in an inner city children's centre, explored practitioner perspectives and practice related to creativity understood as possibility thinking. This research builds on previous studies that have documented possibility thinking and analyses the nature of possibility thinking manifest in child-initiated immersive play triggered by practitioner-placed provocations, and pedagogical strategies which foster this.

► PT occurred in immersive play in emotionally enabling contexts, encompassing individual, collaborative and communal play.
► ‘Meddling in the middle’ involved adult and child co-imagining through provocation, evidencing sustained shared thinking.
► Leading questions and narratives drove PT, previous features of PT re-confirmed, children's risktaking emerged (new).