I don’t like play because it’s better than worksheets.
I don’t like play because it lets me see (and assess) the key competencies.
I don’t like play because …
I like play because of what it does for the player’s inner life.
Here are some words from books I’ve been inspired by. They help us think about play in deeper ways.
Roman Krznaric, The Good Ancestor.
There are at least two core skills they should be learning that will stand the test of time. Firstly, relationship skills like empathy, where humans have a big advantage over the AI machines that threaten to take their jobs. Secondly, the skill of long-term thinking itself. This is something we will always need in a world undergoing rapid transformation and facing long-term threats. We need education systems that forge a bond with the future generations who will inherit the consequences of our actions. Education for everyone from pre-schoolers to lifelong learners should help create a new imagined community across the expanses of time, just like nineteenth-century education systems forged a nationalist community across space.
Don’t you love that phrase, ‘imagined community across the expanses of time’. :)
Stuart Brown, Play
Living a life of play doesn’t mean always choosing the most pleasurable or fun path, however. Joseph Campbell, the brilliant scholar who documented how people across all cultures and times are essentially living by common mythologies, is probably most famous for his advice to “follow your bliss,” but he had to add a clarification because some people took this to mean that they should forgo anything that was unpleasurable or distasteful … What he belived was that people should find the path in life that fuels their spirit, that speaks to them on the deepest level. But Campbell also showed that this path is sometimes hard. “If your bliss is just fun and excitement, then you are on the wrong path,” he would say. “Sometimes pain is bliss.”
I wrote about this idea in a post about passion. It’s an idea that helps us think about play and older learners too.
Margaret Carr & Wendy Lee, Learning Stories
Continuity over time can refer to the past in the longest sense, and it can refer to the future in the longest sense too: as a possible self, an aspirational identity. Jay Lemke (200: 73) begins a paper on ‘Across the scales of time’ with two questions: How do moments add up to lives? and How do our shared moments together add up to a social life as such? He develops a table of the scales of time: from an exchange of seconds to minutes, to an episode of a few minutes to an hour, to a ‘lesson’, to a lifespan of educational development. He notes that longer-term processes and shorter-term events can be linked by ‘boundary objects’ (p. 281), which are typically records that link times, places and events …
Learning Stories can act as ‘material objects that carry significant information across time and space’
Assessment and play is a popular topic. We need to shift our idea about assessment’s purpose to answer that question though.
Bruce Mau, The Third Teacher
Kids don’t need much to engage their imaginations. Allowing grass and leafy plants to flourish in play spaces will provide endless opportunities for play and discovery. When you pave the playground, you take the complexity and richness of living organisims, a huge bandwidth that is fun, and scary, and dynamic, and hugely interesting, and compact it down to nothing. When I visited a school outside Chigaco, classes were letting out, and we watched kids as they were going home. Next to the school was a frozen pond. Three or four kids had crawled out onto it and were poking at the ice with a stick. That freedom is one of the sources of an entrepeneurial approach to the world. You learn that you can make things happen. So I think anything that we can do to give children free time and free space in a rich environment that is not determined, not programmed, is a huge asset for them.
Freedom is never ‘unbound’ is it - it’s always a response to a context.
What ideas about play do these quotes spark for you?