Let’s Play! Interweaving All-Day Education and Playfulness in the Italian Context

This paper explores the pedagogical value of play in all-day education contexts. Playfulness makes it possible to go beyond transmissive methods, encouraging student agency, creativity, experiential and collaborative learning, and the strengthening of relationships. In all-day education contexts, where school time is also an educational variable, play offers opportunities for interdisciplinarity and rethinking traditional lesson structures. After having structured a theoretical framework that interweaves play, playfulness and all-day education, a qualitative study conducted in northern Italy during the 2022/2023 school year is presented. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with seven primary school teachers working in all-day education classrooms. The thematic analysis of the collected data revealed three topics: (1) ideas on all-day education; (2) play as a marginal and “disorganised” experience; (3) play as a primarily pedagogical moment. There is a general loss of pedagogical meaning in all-day education, with play often seen as a filler between unstructured moments; only in a few cases is it recognised as pedagogically valuable.