“It is through others that we become ourselves.” A study of Vygotskian play in Russian and Irish schools.

50 years after publishing his seminal work on play and its role in child development, Vygotskian theory is still highly influential in education, and particularly in early years. This paper presents two examples of full integration of Vygotskian principles into schools in two very different settings. Both report improvements in learning and in well-being, and exemplify the theory-practice-theory cycle, highlighting the development of new theoretical constructs arising out of putting theory firmly into practice. In both settings, the positive results have come from years of effort, in which school personnel who may have been skeptical at first, have been inspired by the impact of adopting Vygotskian play on the children they teach. The Northern Ireland study shows that at least some of the Golden Key principles (mixed-age play and enhanced home-school links) translate perfectly into very different cultural-historical contexts.

The Buksh Museum of Hobby-Craft

This article describes the last of three architecture projects carried out over two years’ PhD research in the Indian city of Agra, completed in 2014. The projects aimed to expose ways that residents in the city’s historical Tajganj neighbourhoods had, over four centuries, constructed an urban topography that was meaningful to them. The final project the Buksh Museum of Hobby-Craft explored ways in which re-establishing a civic role for one building could enable those involved to reimagine the potential of this neglected urban district. This was done through assembling temporary additions to a ruined building.

The project was carried out with a local non-governmental organisation (NGO) and ran parallel to an urban regeneration scheme for Tajganj with which this NGO was involved. Several groups with different urban specialisms were involved in this scheme and were committed to fielding their own set of objectives within it: often these goals conflicted. The research project, isolated from these objectives, allowed participants to engage with the conflicting value sets in play, and explore ways of mediating between them without compromising any groups’ role in the regeneration scheme itself.

Location decision-making of 'creative' industries: the media and computer games sectors in Dublin, Ireland

There has been significant research undertaken examining the “creative class” thesis within the context of the locational preferences of creative workers. However, relatively little attention has been given to the locational preferences of creative companies within the same context. This paper reports on research conducted to qualitatively analyse the location decision making of companies in two creative sectors: media and computer games. We address the role of the so-called “hard” and “soft” factors in company location decision making within the context of the creative class thesis, which suggests that company location is primarily determined by “soft” factors rather than “hard” factors. The study focuses upon “core” creative industries in the media and computer game sectors and utilises interview data with company managers and key elite actors in the sector to investigate the foregoing questions. The results show that “hard” factors are of primary importance for the location decision making in the sectors analysed, but that “soft” factors play quite an important role when “hard” factors are satisfactory in more than one competing city-region.