Classified "A" by ANVUR in the fields 11/D1, 11/D2 Scientific in the field 14.
Abstract
Open-ended play emerges as a profoundly democratic educational practice: it fosters active participation, stimulates critical and divergent thinking, and enables children and adults to construct meanings of the world in a free, subjective, and shared way. In a cultural context marked by the neoliberal logic of consumption—which exalts efficiency, measurability, and performance—playing with open-ended materials represents an act of resistance, precisely because it cannot be reduced to immediate outcomes or functional results. This contribution offers a theoretical and practical reflection on open-ended play as a space of possibility and presents a concrete experimentation, where the constructive dimension is not merely manual activity, but an opportunity for encounter, imagination, and creativity. In this perspective, play becomes a generative ground for democracy and subjectivation, where educating does not mean transmitting knowledge, but creating conditions to open up to desire, questioning, and the discovery of possible worlds.
