by Emily Stanley

In my first year of teaching in a small independent elementary school in New Hampshire, my co-teacher and I, then in our early twenties, gained a reputation for antic behavior.  We would come to class and spend the day as characters from our social studies theme, speaking little or no English and inviting children to pretend along with us as we learned the customs of a new land. We invented games on the spot, sometimes using the stuffed animals or action figures that kids had brought from home.  Other times we would announce that we were spending the entire day under a magical tree, and that to be granted permission to do so by the local gnomes, the students had to help us think of gnomish ways to do math and read.  After a few weeks of this, one little girl said, in wonderment, “You two are just big kids – all you want to do is play!”  At the time I found this mildly amusing, but today, it is harder than ever to earn such an accolade.  Play has become a serious business.

In those early years, I migrated from one independent school to another, each with its own flavor of play and learning, before finding the place where I could do what I’ve come to consider my lifework.  This is a small school for dyslexic children founded on a philosophy of multisensory, experiential learning.  It began as a summer tutoring camp at a farm, and when it evolved into a school, it retained the playful flavor of camp life as well as the hands-on practicality of farm living.  For many years, chickens and goats roamed the campus freely, homemade go-carts sputtered around the playing field, and the surrounding woods became a land of recess adventure.  Forts were built and zip lines strung between tall oaks, while stream-walking led children away from the intensity of classroom learning, and brought them back refreshed. 

I know this not only from the school lore I’ve gleaned over the last twenty years of my own teaching, but also from the interviews with alumni that I’ve been conducting in my final year of doctoral research into the meaning of  play in school.  Times have changed, the “anything goes” 1970’s and 80’s are history, yet the flavor of freedom lingers in the atmosphere of this school.  Children have two recesses during the school day and are allowed to play freely around the campus, including in the nearby woods and stream.

As most independent school teachers would attest, recess duty is one of the required joys of a teacher’s daily schedule.  I used to say that with some cynicism, especially on those bitter February days when all I wanted during recess was to nurse a cup of hot chocolate in my quiet classroom.  But now there is a measure of real joy in pulling on my rubber boots and heading to the woods amid a swarm of excited children.  As part of my research, which includes interviewing parents, administrators, and teachers, I have been observing my students hard at play outdoors, talking with them about what they are doing, and reveling in the sense that what  scholars describe as “activity for its own sake” (Reed, 1996) is as creative as it is exuberant, and as restorative as it is inspiring.  A real children’s culture has sprung up here, as they collect and trade and build and explore this environment that most adults in their world have never seen and never will.  Friendships are solidified as children work out the protocols of their particular fort, games of hide and seek take on new significance among the trees and bushes and boulders on the steep hillside, and the material and symbolic value of plants, rocks, and wildlife is constantly examined.  All this occurs in a few precious moments that are never recorded in the official annals of gradebooks and reports home.

This play truly is serious business to its participants.  I have heard testimony from every quarter of the school – from every constituent group that I’ve spoken with – that such freedom and encouragement to play is what makes our school unique and wonderful.  It’s not just outdoors, either.  Walk into any classroom, of any age group, and you will find teachers demonstrating that learning through play removes barriers, opens doors, and encourages creative, divergent thinking.  We play with objects, numbers, concepts, words and, most importantly, with each other.  These are not the competitive (and, for any child with a learning difference, demoralizing) games that I recall from my own childhood school experience of spelling bees and rapid-fire math facts tournaments.  Instead, these playful activities are designed to place children in a position of eminence and agency, enabling them to “stand a head taller,” as Vygotsky put it, than they normally would.  

Playing demonstrates to children that we see the learning process as open to an “as if” perspective, which harnesses the power of imagination in engaging real life possibilities.  Introducing absurdity is an immediate signal to children that we are shifting into play mode.  In one of our first grade science classes studying animal classification, we rely on children’s delight and skill in pretending for a game that we call “Animal Court.”  With suitable gravity, the plaintiff, who may be a teacher or a student, presents an animal (a tortoise, for instance) to the court: “Your Honor, I have here before me a…bird.  See?  It has a beak.”  Students, suppressing giggles, are asked to offer logical arguments in response to this unlikely “case,” using empirical evidence, prior knowledge, and the concepts that they have learned in class.  Such playing with reality suspends a teacher’s authority of ultimate knowledge and places it in the hands of students, who can then proceed with the fun of pretend roles while using observation and critical thinking to demonstrate their understanding of the unique features of the animal before them. This offers confirmation for children that adulthood does not mean the abandonment of spontaneity, but that we who lay down the law in our classrooms are also capable of laying aside our own rigidity and rules.  By so doing, we invite our students to move from the “as if” of pretend play to the “what if” of imagining new possibilities.  What if I had presented an aquatic turtle to the court and called it a fish?  What if a bat was believed to be a butterfly?  This is play in the interest of true recreation, a quality of life that even dour John Locke acknowledged “as necessary as Labour or Food” (Locke, 1693/1968, p. 211)

Teachers are supposed to have an educational agenda before them at all times which focuses on instructing children in important knowledge and skills.  How that instruction is delivered can make the difference between an enthusiastic embrace of new and challenging ideas, and their relegation to the junk heap of the difficult and meaningless. Vivian Paley, whose insightful writings on young children’s fantasy play are based on her own classroom research, observed that children’s play should be regarded as a teacher’s work.  I would add that the reciprocal is also true: teachers’ play should provide a model for children’s work.  This includes flexibility of thinking, recognition of multiple possibilities, willingness to step into a variety of roles, and celebration of the inherent pleasure in learning. 

We teachers often offer play as a reward for work, blatantly signaling our own classification of what is “fun” and “not fun.”   This creates a distinction on the part of students between “good” and “good for you,” which, in the concrete world of children, is easily translated into the metaphor of dessert and vegetables.  It also means that if one of these must be given up, due to time or other constraints, it will be the one considered frivolous and lacking in nutritive value.  I believe that a false dichotomy exists in this pervasive characterization of work and play in school.  Instead of representing a momentary break between bouts of “real” learning, playful activity should be seen as nourishing both cognitive and social development, and should be as purposefully woven into the fabric of our pedagogy as the adept management of a classroom, the insightful analysis of test scores, or any other essential practice.

Playing in school is an increasingly endangered activity.  Frightening statistics demonstrate that recess and other activities perceived as non-academic have gradually evaporated in many public schools fighting to maintain achievement standards.  Independent schools are affected by similar selective pressures, both in and out of the classroom.   Do those of us who are veterans in our schools fully recognize how much we need to continue playing, and why we should model it for our younger colleagues?  Play is not the sole purview of twenty-somethings.  In my experience, it is often the senior members of a school faculty who are comfortable enough with both the subject and the reciprocity of the teaching-learning process to relax and have fun with it.  My daughter’s 7th grade social studies teacher, an otherwise staid older gentleman, declared every Thursday “Game Day” and challenged teams of students to develop fun, creative ways of reviewing the week’s material.  His spirited participation in their games was the highlight of the activity.

All of us, regardless of age, need to recognize the opportunity to continue learning more about those who are central to our mission as teachers.  Plato has been quoted as saying, “You can learn more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.”  Over and over, as I observe my students at play, and when I play along with them, I am amazed at what I never knew.   This child playing a rhyming game is a budding poet; that one constructing a cardboard roller coaster immediately intuits potential results. We teachers don’t need to be just big kids – we can’t go back there, nor should we try – but we need to take play in our schools seriously, and not assume that it will exist simply because we have children in our midst.  We need to grant our students, and ourselves, permission to play.

References:

Locke, John. Some Thoughts on Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968.

Paley, Vivian.  A Child’s Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Reed, Edward.  Encountering the World: Toward an Ecological Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Vygotsky, L. Thought and Language. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986.

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