How imaginary worlds help kids learn | Anna Rainio

0:02You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Classroom learning looks different for every kid. Some are hyper-focused. Others struggle to pay attention. Some are withdrawn. Others can't wait to make noise. According to educator and play expert Anna Rainio, it's strange that we ever expect sameness from children in school. If everyone's handed an identical curriculum, some are bound to struggle.

0:32Anna Rainio: In most other phases of our lives, it would be odd to think that everybody was able to do the same activity, enjoy similar things, or develop at the same pace. In this talk, Ana makes the case that radical inclusion in schools is possible. It just takes more creativity than we've been bringing to it. She studies an emerging idea called play worlds, adults and children coming together to build an imaginative world around an existing story and finding new ways to step inside it. Say a teacher starts reading The Wizard of Oz but stops halfway and asks kids to figure out how to get Dorothy home. Inside a play world, behavior that might normally be called difficult or disruptive can instead become part of the story.

1:18Before you rush to respond, try asking yourself, why not?

1:24Anna Rainio: And sometimes there's a clear reason to say no, but often there isn't. And when there isn't, you can go along with your children in that unpredictable direction and doors will open. And stick around after the talk. Head curator Chloe Shasha Brooks joins me for our Curator's Corner on the single image from Anna's research that moved her more than she expected and how it's changed the way she parrots. It's coming up right after a short break.

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4:29And now, our TED Talk of the day.

4:31Anna Rainio: I'd love for you to think about a classroom full of, let's say, 20 seven-year-old children. They are all different. There's a child who loves school and can easily concentrate through noise. Another child needs a lot of physical comfort and happily climbs to his teacher's lap if it's free. One student has to fidget to concentrate. The one at the back learned early on that adults and their promises cannot be trusted. She tried to keep her distance. Now imagine you're a teacher in this classroom, and it is your task to include all these different children in one activity. It's easy to see what happens.

5:19Anna Rainio: One or two children do not fit in and become excluded. it. Why is that? In most other phases of our lives, it would be odd to think that everybody was able to do the same activity, enjoy similar things, or develop at the same pace. Schools, however, are historically places where sameness is expected from all. This makes many children and adults alike suffer in these institutions. I am a researcher and teacher educator in Finland, and I believe that this does not need to be the case. Radical inclusion is possible in any early learning classroom through something called play worlds. Playworlds are adult child joint play often structured around a piece of literature or a work of art.

6:25Anna Rainio: Like Moomintroll's Playworld or Alice in Wonderland Playworld. They were originally developed by a Swedish scholar Gunilla Lindqvist and they are now studied worldwide by our research teams. The adults and children create the world of a chosen story in the classroom, and then the class plays, interacts and undertakes adventures together, with both adults and children in roles. The children take initiative, and the adults listen carefully. I've had the privilege of learning from more than dozens of play worlds, and together with my colleagues, and I want to mention here especially Beth Fairholt.

7:08Anna Rainio: We have seen how play worlds can change the way schools are. Let me give you an example of how a play world might look like in a kindergarten class. And just to note that these are fictional examples to protect the privacy of the participants, kind of composite stories of all the things we've seen in the many play worlds we've studied. So the teacher Johanna started by reading aloud the first half of a famous Slavic folktale, Baba Yaka, to the children. But instead of reading aloud the second half of the story, the class collectively wrote and directed their own resolution to the story's central conflicts.

7:54Anna Rainio: These are the set pieces and props that the class created over the course of a year. Anna shows a series of photographs featuring colorful handmade and hand-painted props that her students designed together from the world of Baba Yaga. This is Baba Yaga's tower. And these are magical creatures' caves that the children created. And that is Baba Yaga's trap in which he loved to captivate everybody he could. And these are the trees and a lamppost in the forest of the story. And this is a drawing by a child of a hut on chicken legs. It's very important in the story of Baba Yaga. And it was created in the classroom.

8:35Anna Rainio: And this is the wardrobe inside the hut that became a portal from the everyday life of the classroom to the magical reality of the play world. Even the adults used it to keep the magic alive. But in this classroom, like in many others, there were some children who had a hard time participating in classroom activities. Viola was often inattentive and disruptive. And when the class was discussing how to bring everyone's safety from the evil Baba Yaga, Viola suggested blowing up the whole school to save the magical creatures from Baba Yaga's trap. It's easy to see how Viola and her plan would be excluded from a normal classroom.

9:16Anna Rainio: But this is a play world. And in Playworld, the children, not the adults, are the experts. So the children negotiated with Viola and asked whether she could consider blowing up some props instead of an entire school. And Viola agreed and said, this is a good plan because everybody gets to do their own plan. But the following week, Viola was again inattentive, disruptive. so the teacher had to speak directly to her. And the teacher said, Viola cannot be part of the plan unless she commits to go through with it because everybody is dependent on her to save the magical creatures from the Baba Yaga and her disruptive behavior might alert Baba Yaga.

10:05Anna Rainio: So something extraordinary happened. Viola agreed to participate and when it was her time to carry out her part of the plan, She first carefully checked that everyone is protected, then threw the bomb to Papaya Gagas trap and engaged everyone in a dramatic countdown due to the explosion. Now, here's why I find this example so powerful. In most other classroom settings, realist behavior would be considered problematic or something that we should be preventing from happening. But inside a play world, it made sense and it even solved some problems. Viola's story is also a great example of a phrase I believe teachers, mentors, parents should be saying as much as possible.

10:55Anna Rainio: Why not? If a child turns to you to ask for something or suggest something, is often cognitively difficult for us adults because it means changing our plans, right? Or going into different directions. Or, as we perceive it, wasting our precious time. So our first intuition is to say no. Or maybe later. But before you rush to respond, try asking yourself, why not? And sometimes there's a clear reason to say no. But often there isn't. And when there isn't, you can go along with your children in that unpredictable direction and doors will open. Here is another example I love, and this time, let's say, from a first grade classroom.

11:49The teacher Tom wanted to develop a play world based

11:53Anna Rainio: on a children's book of Ruben, a bird who accidentally flies in through a child's bedroom window and needs the child's help to get back home. So the children read the story and imagine how Ruben might look, but then COVID hits. But the children continue thinking and talking about Ruben. And then after several months of distance learning, the children return to class that one morning to find Ruben, an actual puppet on a windowsill of the classroom. Tom, the teacher, plays Ruben, and the children just love it. They want to include it in all activities. They sing their favorite songs to it, they feed it, they build a nest for it during their art classes, and they even teach some math to it.

12:46Anna Rainio: But at this semester, also in this classroom, some children were seriously on the edge of disengagement. There was Alma, for whom it was difficult to sit still, follow orders or do school tasks. And there was Luca, who was so disruptive that the teachers had made special arrangements for him to leave school early. You can imagine how this made him feel even more excluded. Until these children started to develop a special bond with Ruben. For example, the puppet sent private email to Alma, saying that it felt really lonely in the class during the night. And Alma responded, asking whether Ruben needed a friend, her own soft toy, Sunny, from home.

13:33Anna Rainio: And Ruben said, yes, please. Slowly, these children became really close to Ruben. It often sat in Alma's lap in activities that were difficult for her and that made her calmer and more attentive. On a school field trip, Tom, the teacher, put Luka in charge of Ruben, and that was a huge win. Luka often couldn't join these trips because of his behavior, but Ruben made it possible for him to go. Perhaps you can see best how Ruben helped these children through this drawing. It's an illustration of Luka on a classroom whiteboard. It's Ruben and Luka together. It looks kind of like Ruben is lifting Luka up, perhaps making him feel happier, lighter.

14:22Anna Rainio: And for me, as a researcher, I really love this picture because I think it is this seven-year-old who was able through this drawing to best crystallize for us what development is and what imagination can do if adults take it seriously. Now, it would have been easy to write off children like Luka, Viola or Alma and say that the classroom just isn't a place for them. But these stories show us how adult child joined play can start changing these systems from the inside. But, and this is my strongest message for you today, the value of adult child joined play needs to be better recognized in early learning and teachers who play need to be supported and trusted by their school systems.

15:13Anna Rainio: If this happens, then Playworlds can help us imagine and build better futures with our children, futures where everyone could have an important role to play. It is through these roles and those relationships that our most excluded students can find their rightful place and we all benefit. And this can happen again and again and again if imaginative play is given the place it deserves. Thank you.

15:48That was Anna Reinho at Play at TED in 2026. And now here's TED curator Chloe Shasha Brooks. Hi, thanks for listening to Anna Reinho's talk. I'm Chloe Shasha Brooks, speaking to you from New York City. I find it very cool when sociological or psychological research is designed to find ways for people's differences to coexist, and maybe even thrive. When I first found Anna's work, it was that element of her research that stood out to me. She came to our exploratory video call with a deck of images that moved me way more than I was prepared for. She was talking about neurodivergent children's struggles to participate in the classroom, and showed me photos of play worlds that the teachers had created to include these kids.

16:34Young children wearing paper hats and costumes, hugging stuffed animals, sitting in small groups while building things, and then my favorite one, a photo of a coat closet taken from a child's perspective, just the lower half of it. This closet was located inside of a classroom, and the kids all treated it as a portal to another world. The coattails and cuff sleeves draping at varying heights in this surprisingly intimate photo took me back to my childhood, to the smell of wool and dust, to an age when we were all small enough for the bottom seams of jackets and hangers to graze the tops of our heads, an age when it felt frictionless to treat closets as time machines or as a door to another dimension.

17:15And that memory made everything that Anna was saying about these play worlds come together for me. It makes so much sense that children who are struggling to fit in or follow directions would feel more at ease in a classroom if they had the space and were maybe even encouraged to step into a fantasy world. Maybe then it would feel like they already fit in, or like the directions within that world were fun rather than a bore. Anna herself didn't directly teach these kids in a classroom, but she partnered with the teachers to study the effectiveness of play worlds. And even though she didn't spend much time with these kids, her passion and care for these children came through in our conversations, her desire to find a way for them to thrive.

17:54This particularly came through when she talked about this idea of why not, as you heard in her talk. Some kids just don't want to do what everyone else is doing. Why make them be like everyone else when it doesn't always have to disrupt the other kids? You may have noticed that in her talk, she mentioned that the stories were fictional examples, that they were composite stories to protect the privacy of students and teachers. Anna is very ethical with her research and explained that obscuring the details was necessary for her to be able to present on the TED stage. But I must admit, I was sad about it, because the original images, the stories of students, and specific details from Playworlds that she shared with me on that first call were so compelling and charming that I was worried the magic wouldn't come through anymore.

18:35For example, she had to change the names of the books that the students based their Playworlds around, and therefore the details from those books that students focused on, as well as the images of the actual objects that students made or grew attached to. Fortunately, she did such a good job of preserving the levels and types of details in her altered stories and images that I think she succeeded at sharing her authentic insights and passion in this talk. Working with Ana and diving into her research has actually impacted me as a parent, albeit in a less serious but nevertheless delightful way.

19:06When one of my kids is unwilling to do something that we need them to do, I sometimes bring them into an invented story that they already love, like Moana or The Lion King. You can be Moana's little sister and I'll be Moana and you can run into my arms and I'll catch you. And then, you know, I put her shoes on.

19:24If you're curious about Ted's curation, visit ted.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. Ted Talks Daily is a podcast from Ted. This episode was fact-checked by the Ted Research Team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Lucy Little, Emma Taubner, and Tansika Sungmarnivong. Additional support from Daniela Ballarezzo, Christopher Fazey Bogan, Valentina Bohanini, Banban Chang, Brian Green, and Lainey Lott. Learn more at podcasts.ted.com. I am Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feet. Thanks for listening.

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