Playwork, it could be argued, is driven by a children’s perspective on play, as described in the second Playwork Principle:

Play is a process that is freely chosen, personally directed and intrinsically motivated. That is, children and young people determine and control the content and intent of their play, by following their own instincts, ideas and interests, in their own way for their own reasons.

In an outcome driven school time and space for play can easily be forgotten on the list of priorities. Yet play is part of the practice traditions of Nordic school-age childcare (Højlund, 2002; Johansson & Ljusberg, 2004, Øksnes, Knutas, Ludvigsson, Falkner, & Kjær, 2014). It is therefore important to develop a language that makes conversations about, reflections on and analysis of play and playing in school-age childcare easier. Together with staff in school-age childcare in Sweden and England an action research project explored the facilitation of play. Data consists of transcribed conversations withstaff before and during the project. Kemmis et al.'s (2014) theory on practice architecture was the primary tool for analysis. Action research became a way to discover the taken-for-granted conceptions of play that governed their doings, their play practices. It also became a way to disturb the dominant play practices and open up for testing other play practices. Just as action research was used to disturb and change practice in order to understand it, concepts from Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy (1980/2004) were put to work to disturb taken-for-granted concepts of play in order to explore how playing works. A playing practice could be conceptualised as a practice that sensitises itself to the disturbances caused by playing but also puts itself 'in play' which opens up for a continuous playing with play. Such a transformative playing practice could mean that staff explore which is the dominant play practice in their setting and then continuously and consciously disturbs it. When staff sensitise themselves to playing it may be possible to avoid taken-for-granted and routine play practices.