Playing Under Pressure: Lived Meanings, Tensions, and Re-Significations in Teachers’ Ludic Mediation Through Play and Toys

Play and toys are central resources for learning; however, their integration into schooling is typically traversed by curricular, evaluative, disciplinary, and institutional tensions, particularly in resource-limited contexts. This study examined the meanings, tensions, and re-significations that shape the lived experience of in-service teachers, pre-service teacher education students, and university teacher educators when mediating instruction with play and toys. A phenomenological–hermeneutic study was conducted in Imbabura, Ecuador, with 61 participants: 27 undergraduate education students, 26 school teachers, and 8 university faculty members. In-depth phenomenological interviews were administered, and the corpus was organized and analyzed using Atlas.ti to support the interpretive traceability of the process. The phenomenological–hermeneutic interpretation yielded five nuclei of meaning: embodied ludic heritage, material scarcity narrated as a source of invention, playing under pressure as a structural condition of the classroom as lived by participants, transformation of the didactic gaze, and the teacher’s symbolic horizon. Within this corpus, pressure emerges not as external to play but as a condition participants describe as constitutive of its school-based practice. The study concludes that, in the situated experience analyzed here, ludic mediation appears as a practice that demands professional judgment, contextual sensitivity, and institutional recognition.