Category: Play

Sense of Purpose

Liz Truss has made some comments which, if accurately reported in this morning’s Guardian, suggest that she and I sit at opposite ends of a spectrum of views of how children learn best.  “Free-flow play is not compulsory,” she states in the Mail. I will be addressing this as a key theme in my class tomorrow morning  – a gift ( as is Toby Young’s rather sideways defence in the Telegraph) for my summative class on Play and Pedagogy of the semester!

But we do need to look behind the rhetoric and the snarling with which the Guardian message boards are filling up. The bile is extraordinary, a tap turned on to release a slurry pit of anger. Maybe that was her intention; it certainly doesn’t help a reasoned voice to be heard in response. Giving children a sense of purpose is important, and I worry that this sort of statement is liable to drown out a lot of good work that thoughtful people do with their own children and as paid professionals or volunteers.  Few parents (or grandparents) want a bear pit at home, any more than a nursery worker wants a block play corner wrecked or Lord of The Flies in the garden – but that’s not what actually happens; by building on children’s interests that grow from adult stimuli (a book, a song, some colour in the water tray) children are encouraged to develop a sense of purpose. This is autonomous learning: satnav politeness isn’t the aim, and in any case politeness is best modelled rather than instructed, which requires, for one thing, warm, genuine interest from the adults around the child.

And here is part of my chapter from our book Themes and Debates, blogged last summer. I note an increase recently in people finding my longer extract on Academia.edu by searching for “Formal and informal curricula,” too.

Thinking again about play

To start with a quotation:

“Psychologists and educators have found it difficult to come to a definition of what play is – partly, perhaps, because the phenomenon is more easily recognised than it is pinned down to a rigid classification. However, understanding some of the complexities of play needs some unpicking. We can identify play when we see it, but going beyond a mere description is a more complex business.”

So much from the Reflective Reader we wrote back in 2007.

Has the new framework for Early Years changed any of this?  It has to be admitted that there are a number of other documents  and web sites which augment the framework, not least Early Education’s key Development Matters material, which must not be overlooked. But a quick look through the framework makes for depressing reading in many ways.

If we look at para 1.9:

Each area of learning and development must be implemented through planned, purposeful play and through a mix of adult-led and child-initiated activity. Play is essential for children’s development, building their confidence as they learn to explore, to think about problems, and relate to others.

Children learn by leading their own play, and by taking part in play which is guided by adults. There is an ongoing judgement to be made by practitioners about the balance between activities led by children, and activities led or guided by adults. Practitioners must respond to each child’s emerging needs and interests, guiding their development through warm, positive interaction. As children grow older, and as their development allows, it is expected that the balance will gradually shift towards more activities led by adults, to help children prepare for more formal learning, ready for Year 1.

We are clearly here in the realm of an instrumental view of play, one in which practitioners view play not as having intrinsic value but as a means to an end.

The gloom that hangs over this for me is the increasing interference of adults in children’s activities “to help children prepare for more formal learning, ready for Year 1.” Not only school readiness, but ready for a top-down curriculum done to children… So the official/enacted curriculum is already strong on what we need children to be like and we are no further on than the Desirable Outcomes in the 90s.

Or am I being too gloomy?

At the heart of my disquiet, I think, is the lack of clarity I started this post with.  Part of me sees this difficulty in coming to a shared understanding  about what play is as liberating – an ambiguity that allows for creativity, for risk-taking, for making time to read a book or whittle a stick; part of me would like a definition, and if I’m honest I’d like it so that we could have a bulwark against the intrusion of issues such as “school readiness” and top-down pressure. But there is a third element here, and I’ll end with a question:

As tides turn and fashions change, to what extent can EY practitioners steel themselves to live with this ambiguity, since the lack of definition actually makes us easy prey to the notion that Early Years practice is in effect just preparation for real learning?

Playing Outdoors

Some very interesting links here for the New Year, for example this one on play in the Early Years or the more general link to a map (which perhaps could do with a bit of elaboration – I note some gaps round Oxford for example!!).

The Play In Schools position paper is also well worth a read, despite being 6 years from its publication.  Despite? Perhaps because. How much movement has there been? Are we now seeing a return to formalisation in schooling which will cost play dear? Or will it simply mean a clearer line between the two – “Work hard, play hard” as my head teacher used to say – except he was thinking of rugby, which I found more of a trial than Greek.

Physical Activity Report

The ever-thoughtful Julian Grenier brings to our attention – well, to mine anyway – the new physical activity guidelines in his blog and in the factsheet 2 It deserves some consideration, although I feel uneasy as I read it. . Part of me has to recognise where my opposition comes from: the tone, which is less factsheet than Diktat, and (deeper in my history) from the dire footie sessions in Junior and Secondary schooling where I was taught nothing and stood around, bored and cold and sidelined (and I now shamefacedly wonder about all those other classes where I lapped up attention at the cost of bored and sidelined classmates). However, three hours a day seems an awful lot to get in – until we turn from the terse and instructional language of the factsheet to the longer report itself, Start Active, Stay Active and in particular Ch 3 on Early Years.
Full marks to the repeated admissions of the paucity of research evidence on EY activity. But I find the argument interesting, and  I worry about this reported connection:

Importantly, patterns of sedentary behaviour, particularly TV viewing, are relatively stable over time.

The brief, sketchy but important section p24 tells us soething about what the report sees as important about play, abd while I could argue about this rather instrumental view of such a core way of interacting, it is nonetheless worth quoting in extenso:

Active play opportunities should encourage young
children to:
•use their large muscle groups
• practise a wide range of different movements
• experience a variety of play spaces and
equipment
• set up their own play areas
• make up their own active play
• have fun and feel good about themselves and what they can do.

But does it have to seem as if we are required to do it? Oppositional me feels like catching the bus instead of cycling to work in the morning….

Play and playfulness

Perhaps I have been too allusive in recent posts on EYFS, and perhaps this is a symptom of being away from the classroom  too long – too far away from the stories shared with chidlren, the time we found a mouse’s nest, the cafe where the food was made of sand from the sand pit.  When I included here a quotation from Evangelou et al to the effect that “the art of early years practice is getting the balance right between guided and self initiated learning, either in homes or in settings” I ought to have gone further, and maybe nailed my colours to the mast.  Here, then are some more quotations to think about.
In Sue Rogers’ chapter on “Powerful Pedagogies” (in Liz Brooker and Sue Edwards’ Engaging Play) she suggests, for example that

The coupling of play with pedagogy is in many ways a deeply problematic enterprise for at least three reasons [I’m quoting just the first two here]: first, because traditionally, the concept of play has been positioned in marked opposition to its apparently more worthwhile counterpart, work. This divuision is marked not simply by the ways in which play is often relegated to specific times and places but also in the ways inn which it is regarded in practice as a marginal and recreational activity removed from the real business of the early childhood classroom. Second the pedagogization of play (pedagogy of play) has meant that play has increasingly become an instrument for learning adult competencies.

And Deborah Albon’s chapter on Playing for Real (in Janet Moyles’ Thinking about Play) starts to draw to a conclusion with these remarks:

…I do not believe there are easy answers; indeed I am suspicious of ‘easy answers’ to complex areas of practice. But I do believe the questions are important to reflect on and constantly revisit as team. This points to a need for reflective classroom discussions about play in early childhood settings that go way beyond planning meetings merely listing the resources that might be added to an area in order to organize and encourage children’s play or that discuss observations of children’s play without reflecting on the role practitioners could play in extending or, indeed, inhibiting that play.

So here’s me not being allusive:
The richest times I have seen children have in school have rarely been in the gift of the adult, except indirectly. That’s not to say that there wasn’t learning there – my observations at the time suggested the opposite – or that learning didn’t take place in opportunities I created, but simply that those times which I remember best from working with young children are those in which children seem motivated and involved in a project that has only incidentally been about their learning something I have chosen. They have been afternoons with time machines, days with dens, improvised pulleys and rope swings, funerals for dolls, and the time that mouse came out from under a paving slab.

“Education from the neck up?”

I want to try and unpick the question of formal and informal curricula a bit more.
McCann’s account of Samuel Wilderspin’s desperate attempts at gaining his distressed pupils’ attention by instituting learning through play show how far we have come – and not come? – since the day in 1826:

When their mothers had left, nearly all the children started crying ‘Mammy! mammy!’ Wilderspin’s wife tried to calm the tumult but had to leave the room and Wilderspin also ‘exhausted by effort, anxiety and noise’ was compelled to follow her, ‘leaving my unfortunate pupils in one dense mass, crying, yelling and kicking against the door’. In despair Wilderspin picked up his wife’s cap adorned with coloured ribbons, put it on to a clothes prop and dashed back into the schoolroom. ‘All the children’, he found to his amazement, ‘ . . . were instantly silent.’ The silence was only momentary, however, but before general disorder could break out again Wilderspin had cried, ‘Now we will all play “Duck”, and I will be the great Duck.’ The children immediately began a chorus of ‘quack, quack, quack’. Then he said, ‘Now we will play at “Hen and Chickens”, and I will be the old hen, and when I cry “cup-biddy”, “cup-biddy”, you must all come.’ Wilderspin was surprised to find that it all succeeded admirably and twelve o’clock came before they knew where they were.
(cited in McCann, P (1966))

It is an isolated incident in the early career of an educator – at one level. It can also be seen as a turning point (as McCann (1966) and Singer (2005) might argue) in the application of enlightenment educational theory to practice, the incident that exemplifies a growing understanding of “child-centredness.”
We have come to the key phrase. What does it mean to be “child-centered”? I suspect that, at its bluntest, it means (as Singer seems to imply) a power-shift towards listening to children, reflecting on those needs and how they are expressed. The questions I raised in the Reflective Reader (Wild and Mitchell 2007) remain pertinent:

  • How does the practitioner know when to intervene?
  • Is it about policing behaviour, or about instruction?
  • Is play a private world for children?
  • Can this level of interaction be sustained where the curriculum is led in such a way that the adults’ time is taken up with direct teaching?

But of course the bigger questions remain: how do policy makers and implementers understand children’s learning? At what level is child-centredness a genuine political, practical and moral choice?

Or is this the wrong question? Ken Robinson’s light but engaging speech (“Education professors…They live in their heads… disembodied; they look upon their bodies as a form of transport for their heads…”) raises questions about how learning and intelligence are conceived, and whether the needs education addresses are employment based (“Don’t do music, you’ll never be a musician”) which he describes as “benign advice, profoundly mistaken.”

It is fascinating to read in Margaret McMillan’s Education through the Imagination (1923 edition in front of me, but the first edition is pre WWI) that

“The learning of facts and of formal arts, the training of the verbal memory, the discipline of the classroom and the school are very good things in their way, but they are only means to an end. The energy that wins them and uses them is needed everywhere…” (p11)

McMillan is vociferous about how parrot-learning is a destructive thing – but in looking at her attack on formal learning we need to remember not only the context of much Edwardian/Georgian schooling (pace Wilderspin above, and others) but also the psychological construct she is using, in which memory is seen as unsubtle, a monolith that “has to be broken up…to be of real use.” (p21).

A front page

This is a picture of me in Port Meadow, Oxford, perhaps an ambiguous choice of picture for a web-based resource, since (as technology stands at present) for most people reading this is an inside activity

.Nick at port meadow

And as a web-based activity, I ought to point out the links to the side here; they will lead to things as diverse as the Play Council and the Rule of St Benedict. Is this the only site that has them both? Until I write the book, it may be… Some of them are there as a way of “bookmarking” them – but really, I suppose, to show the kinds of things I look at on the computer when I’m not working and when I am.

winter 04 eldertrunk.jpg