The Real Rigor of Play

The opposite of play is not work, it's rote. ~Dr. Edward Hallowell

Our outdoor classroom is one big slope and within that slope there are many ups and downs, reflecting our city which is built on hills. We're forever experimenting with gravity out there, rolling and flowing things downhill or dragging and pushing things up. There are parts of the space that are so steep one needs a running start to get to the top and there is very little flat upon which to rest one's legs.

We have a pair of wagons, which are regularly used on the hills. One day, one of those wagons became an airplane. 

From my photos, it's easy to see the physics and engineering learning, but those were minor aspects, almost side-effects, of the bigger, more important project, which was figuring out how to get along with the other people.

People sometimes question the "rigor" of a play-based curriculum when, in fact, we're engaged in the most rigorous curriculum known to mankind. There is simply no greater or more important challenge than the one of balancing our own individual desires and needs with those of the other humans with whom we find ourselves. 

A play-based curriculum is rigorous because of it's subject matter, which is the all-important one of getting along with the one another, something children are passionate about. Traditional schools, on the other hand, are rigorous simply because they attempt to teach less interesting things by rote, lecture, and text book, the most difficult way to learn new things because most children find them tedious and frustrating. It's an artificial rigor designed, I guess, to make the adults feel important.

Many people confuse hating school with rigor, saying things like, "It prepares them for life," but those of us who work in a play-based environment spend our days amongst children who love school, who arrive each day eager to tackle the challenges of community, and I would assert that there is no better preparation for life. Make no mistake, it's not pure joy, it's not all laughter. There are tears. There is conflict. There is negotiating and compromise. Children might complain, but they return each day eager to engage, to figure out the things they are most driven to figure out: the most important things of all.

There was so much to learn about flying our airplane together. Would it be safe? Where would everyone sit? How many of us can go at a time? Who gets to steer? Who rides and who "launches?" How do we get it back to the top of the hill? How do we make sure everyone gets a turn?

For the most part, we adults stood back, taking a few pictures, letting the kids work it out. Sure, the first few times they launched themselves down the hill, I jogged just ahead of them, prepared to intervene in the name of safety, but as it turned out on this day, I was unnecessary, even when the airplane crashed and burned.

I'll take the real rigor of play over the artificial rigor of rote any day. And so would the kids.

******

Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in ways that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

In Endless Dialog With An Interconnected World

Yoan Capote (detail from Isla, oil, nails, fish hooks, artist's blood)

I often talk about my blogging habit as the core of my reflective practice as an educator. I generally don't sit down and write because I have answers, but rather because something has happened that intrigues me, or challenges me, and I want to understand it better.

Maybe it's a child doing something. Maybe it's something I've read. Maybe it's something someone has said. Maybe it's the state of the world. It starts with an anecdote or quote or phenomenon and this part, the writing, is my best effort at making sense of it. I like writing for publication because knowing that someone might read it, gives me an imagined thinking partner or interlocutor. I write a sentence and wonder how someone might respond. Will they, with reason, scoff, will they doubt, will they be confused, will they be angry or depressed or inspired. They say we shouldn't worry what the other people think, and sometimes that's probably good advice, but I find that if I'm not considering how others will respond, then it's often difficult to think of anything at all.

One of the things I think I've learned from working with young children is that they seem to think best while engaged in play. As developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky put it, "In play a child is always above their average age, above his daily behavior; in play it is as though he were a head taller than themself."

In this way, my blogging, I think, is a form of play, a way to sustain a thread of thought, not with a specific goal in mind, but rather because I've learned if I'm not rushing toward a conclusion, I'm much more likely to discover connections I could not have otherwise anticipated.

In their book, The Dawn of Everything, David Greaber and David Wengrow, write:

“When we are capable of self-awareness, it’s usually for very brief periods of time: the ‘window of consciousness’, during which we can hold a thought or work out a problem, tends to be open on average for roughly seven seconds . . . the great exception to this is when we’re talking to someone else. In conversation, we can hold thoughts and reflect on problems sometimes for hours on tend. This is of course why so often, even if we’re trying to figure something out by ourselves, we imagine arguing with or explaining it to someone else. Human thought is inherently dialogic. Ancient philosophers tended to be keenly aware of all this: that’s why, whether they were in China, India or Greece, they tended to write their books in the form of dialogues. Humans were only fully self-conscious when arguing with one another, trying to sway each other’s views, or working out a common problem.”

Play is likewise a kind of sustaining dialog, a thread that keeps children engaged without forcing a predetermined destination. This is why it stands in such sharp contrast to normal schooling, which is all about predetermined destinations in the form of "correct answers." Play, like dialogue, is inherently about taking the time to explore questions without the pressure of being judged right or wrong.

In his book Sapiens, historian Yuval Noah Harari argues that Neanderthals, our species' chief hominoid rivals, were individually much more intelligent than individual Homo sapiens. If Neandrathals were like mainframe computers, we are much more like PCs, individually less powerful, but far better connected. This is what our species has evolved to do: to think through, with, and alongside people, places, and things. Our minds are not confined to our brains, but rather come into being through the connections we make.

In other words, thinking is at least as much a social activity as it is a cognitive process. Together we're a genius.

We've evolved in conversation, in argument, storytelling, joking, teaching, debating, writing, and playing. And it seems to me that play is the seed from which it all grows. Play is how we evolved to sustain inquiry. It's how we come to stand a head taller than ourselves. Children do it with blocks, mud, and pretending. Adults do it with ideas, stories, and conversations. In both cases, the activity provides enough structure to keep the thread from dissolving, to keep our minds from distraction, while remaining open enough to be surprised and delighted by what we find; not because it's the right answer, but rather, as Eleanor Duckworth puts it, because it's a "wonderful idea."

When we are free to play, this is what we're doing, moving from one wonderful idea to the next, in endless dialog with an interconnected world.

******

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I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Playing With Social Arrangements

When the two boys played alone, they tended toward the art table where they would chatter their way through works of art that involved action -- superheroes mostly. Or maybe they would claim a corner of the rug where they built a fort or parking garage together. When they played this way, it was as equals, almost in the spirit of improvisational comedy, building their play one "Yes, and . . ." at a time.

They were also part of a larger group of boys that often played together. You would find four of them forming a team of some sort, usually involving costumes or carrying "blasters" they had made from Legos. These games were full of "C'mon everybody!" and "Let's go over there." Although at times they had to pause things in order to negotiate the exact nature of what they were doing, usually culminating a Eureka! moment of democratic synthesis with someone saying, "I've got an idea!" 

And sometimes they played in even larger groups, with up to a dozen kids, boys and girls, engaged in, say, digging ditches and holes in the sand, then flooding the area from the uphill side with water to see where it would flow. These games could involve a great deal of bickering, sometimes breaking up into factions, but usually coalescing around one or two children who directed while the rest set their own agendas aside, at least temporarily, for the greater good.

You could find these boys engaged in each kind of social arrangement over the course of any given week -- sometimes even over the course of a day. In fact, most of the children ebbed and flowed in this way, sometimes playing alone, sometimes in small groups, sometimes massing together. 

Of course, it was rarely quite this clear-cut. At any given moment, someone was getting frustrated that their ideas aren't being considered. Or there was someone on the outside biding their time for their bestie to break away and join them in something more intimate. There might be someone trying to figure out how they could fit in with the glamorous team that was swooping about the classroom, or someone else who had broken away for solo play that was destined to become the next great fad.

In many ways, this sort of experimentation with social arrangements, the question of what is the "best" way for humans to live together, stands at the heart of what makes our species unlike any other. In their book The Dawn of Everything, the Davids Graeber and Wengrow, an anthropologist and archeologist respectively, point out that a fish or a hedgehog exist in a "state beyond good and evil" and therefore have no need to ask such questions. They organize themselves as their instincts guide them. But humans have evolved the capacity to be moral and social beings, which makes us unique in the animal kingdom. We can choose how we are going to organize ourselves.

Not everyone believes this, of course, there are many who insist that we are evolutionarily hierarchical and that civilizations always progress from the "primitive" to "civilized" in a predictable way. But Graeber and Wengrow beg to differ:

"(A)rcheological evidence is piling up to suggest that . . . our remote ancestors . . . shifted back and forth between alternative social arrangements, building monuments and then closing them down again, allowing the rise of authoritarian structures during certain times of the year then dismantling them -- all, it would seem, on the understanding that no particular social order was ever fixed or immutable. The same individual could experience life in what looks to us sometimes like a band, sometimes a tribe, and sometimes like something with at least some of the characteristics we now identify with states . . . our remote forager ancestors were much bolder experimenters in social form, breaking apart and reassembling their societies at different scales, often in radically different forms, with different value systems, from one time of year to the next."

Graeber and Wengrow have re-interpreted the anthropological and archeological record of our species, finding this phenomenon on every continent (with the obvious exception of Antarctica) across millennia. They show that many Indigenous societies deliberately shifted social forms, often on a seasonal basis. A community might be relatively egalitarian during one season and highly hierarchical during another, depending on what they were trying to accomplish. Hierarchy was never an inevitable or permanent state, but rather a tool, adopted for a time, to get certain things done. 

Our habit of considering our ancestors to be "primitive" in comparison to us tends to blind us to the fact that they were not just our cognitive equals, but our intellectual peers too. "Likely as not, they grappled with the paradoxes of social order and creativity just as much as we do; and understood them -- at least the most reflexive among them -- just as much, which also means just as little. They were perhaps more aware of some things and less aware of others . . . equally perceptive, equally confused."

In a similar way, I sometimes think, our habit of considering young children as less cognitively capable, likewise blinds us. When they engage in these kinds of social experiments, these ebbs and flows, they are following in these same footsteps, grappling with the paradoxes of social order, creativity, and what it means to be both free and connected. The Davids argue that our present social order where we see nation-states and hierarchy as inevitable, is unnatural, that we have become "stuck," and that this is the source of many of the world's most pressing challenges. There is no room for the natural ebb, flow, and experiment.

In her Canopus in Argos pentology (five book series), Doris Lessing explores a similar theme, but at the level of consciousness rather than political organization. She creates a mythology based on Sufi philosophy, in which there are six zones, each representing a specific level of consciousness. As moderns, our habit is to rank these zones, ranging from the most earthy to the most Devine, but she shows us that healthy development requires movement and exchange, like the circulation of blood, between the zones, or levels, or ways of being with regard to the other people. 

Otherwise we stagnate. Otherwise the blood clots.

As moderns, we've come to understand freedom as freedom from the control of others, but maybe, as our Indigenous ancestors seemed to understand, freedom is the ability to move between social arrangements, not the obligation to live perpetually under one "ideal" system or another. 

When children are moving like this, between self-created social arrangements, I see a healthy classroom. I see children moving fluidly between moments of complete autonomy, collaborative negotiation, and, hopefully rarely, situations in which an adult must temporarily take charge because the moment calls for it (like when safety is at stake). This may be one of the biggest challenges for us adults: remembering that our moments of authority must be temporary.

The health of any community lies not in its commitment to one governing principle or other, but rather in its flexibility. That is what the children are playing with as they circulate and move, enjoying the fruits of one way of being together, bumping up against the paradoxes, and then trying something else again and again and again. Perhaps it's only when we become stuck that we have a problem.

******

Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in ways that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Knowing How to Play This Game

"Wait a minute! I know how to play this game."

The children were standing around a table upon which were the tokens, dice and other parts and pieces from the board games Monopoly and The Game of Life. The night before, I had discovered, in my building's garbage room, that one of my neighbors had thrown out these brand new board games. I assume that it was the young couple from down the hall who had been talking for some time about hosting a game night for their friends. 

And as a preschool teacher, I'm not above a little dumpster diving.

If you're familiar with these particular classic games, you know they aren't designed for preschoolers, but I thought the kids would nevertheless get a kick out of the little houses and cars, the roulette wheel spinner, the stacks of phony money and whatnot. I had set the actual game boards aside, replacing them with a piece of white mat board that a previous group of children had used for an art project involving table and crayons.

"I know how to play this," the boy insisted, as if convincing himself. He was taking in the scene, his eyes and hands darting from piece-to-piece, "I know how to play this." 

Of course, he could not possibly know how to play this game because there was nothing to know; there was no game there. It wasn't a game at all, but rather a collection of game pieces. What he was reacting to was the idea of a board game, something he derived from previous experiences with these same, or similar, game pieces. He was making connections between his memories and the present. He was seeing patterns, interpreting them through the filter of experience, and, right there in front of everyone, constructing knowledge. "I know," he said.

Humans are born knowing no visual stories so the world they see is just a bunch of blobs. Likewise, smells and tastes begin as meaningless sensations. Newborns have, however, had the experience of listening to their world in utero, muffled by the womb, and so they are born knowing to attend, for instance, to their mother's voice: they turn their heads toward the familiar sound because a story about that voice has already started to form. 

The human brain is a pattern-recognizing machine, one that cannot abide a story vacuum. So, just as the boy constructed the story of a game from those mixed up pieces, a baby begins, from the moment of birth, even before, constructing the story of mommy, connection, and love.

As adult humans, it's obvious to us that the raven in the tree over our heads is not actually smaller than the raven in the grass near our feet. Indeed, we treat perspective as a scientific and artistic truth, but the ability to perceive that is a story we constructed for ourselves. It's a story we've learned. 

Not all the stories we tell ourselves throughout our lives turn out to be true. The patterns we think we've identified, the connections we've made between things, might turn out to be wrong, or at least not the same as the way other people do it, resulting in a different story. Our conflicts are always disagreements over stories.

By the same token, our greatest achievements emerge from working together to fill the vacuum with a common story. As the boy began to share with the other children about this game he "knew," they began to join in, asking questions, making their own assertions, and even negotiating exactly what this game was all about. The story of the game that emerged was not the one that we adults with our more detailed experience with board games in general, and these board games in particular, would have told. This was a fresh, new story.

So much of what passes for education is adults trying to tell their same, old, tired stories to the children. Stories that may or may not be true. A play-based curriculum is one in which the children are free to do what our brains are designed to do, which is to construct their own learning. This is how our species progresses.

******

Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in way that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Imaginative Play is Thinking Play

Imaginative play is the backbone of most of the play we see in our preschool classrooms. It might be making art or building with blocks or playing house or putting on costumes and creating entire worlds. It's the opposite of our cultural stereotypes of "school" because it's not about "just the facts." On the contrary, it's about counter-factual thinking, which is, as it sounds, using our imaginations to create something that isn't, in fact, real.

They use their imaginations to paint a "spooky ghost with spider legs" or build a Lego laser or bake a pan of play dough muffins. They play games in which they are mommies or baddies or baby snow leopards. Sometimes critics of play-based learning point this out as a nothing more than a silly waste of time, but nearly everything around us that isn't nature is a product of counter-factual thinking. Someone had to first imagine a vehicle that propelled itself with a motor before it could ever become a reality.

Imaginative play is more than invention, of course. It's also how children come to understand their world. When they pretend to cook they are exploring, from the inside, something that is obviously important to understand. Dress up play is a gateway to storytelling and ultimately literacy. It's also a part of how we develop empathy and understanding of others. 

The imaginative play of children often seems dreamlike as they cobble together their play from fragments of past experiences, loose parts, compromise, and agreement. In imaginative play there can be two queens, talking gorillas, and healthy cookies. An orange rind can become a rainbow. A stick can be . . . well, almost anything.

Yesterday, I wrote of our memories as something we construct, or as experimental psychologist Frederic Bartlett put it, an "imaginative reconstruction," born anew, altered, adapted, and improved, each time we evoke them. He also argued that imagination is a product of memory. Indeed, the process of assembling bits and pieces into a cohesive product of imagination is, in our brain, remarkably similar to the process we use to call up memories. 

As neuroscientists Charan Ranganath puts it, "the hippocampus and the DMN (default mode network) . . . function at the crossroads between memory and imagination by allowing us to extract the ingredients from past experiences and recombine them into new creations. In other words, our brains are not memorization organs, but rather thinking organs, and imagination, not being a silly waste of time at all, stands at the center of it.

When we attempt to make children stop playing in order to force-feed them academics we are, in a pathetic adult-centric way, attempting to control their memories, the raw material they have at their disposal for thinking. And what dull stuff it is. Foolishly, we declare that all children must be forced to know this or that, ignoring the fact that our brains have evolved to be singular, to take in meaningful information and transform it in unique and idiosyncratic ways (i.e., by thinking) into something else. That is the entire story of human evolution.

And that is exactly what children are doing as they engage in their imaginative play. They are making memories and meaning, meaning and memories, in a creative cognitive process, which is, at the end of the day, what our brains are meant to do.

******

Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in way that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Don Quixote

As if you didn't indulge me every day, today I ask for a little extra indulgence.

Our windmill is a former prop that was was regularly set afire in a performance based upon Don Quixote by the now defunct Cirque de Flambe. We've removed the heavy metal vanes and replaced them with swimming noodles.

The fire in the performance, I assume, represented the intensity of Alonso Quijano's imagination as he sallies forth into the world, believing himself to be the chivalric hero Don Quixote de la Mancha. I prefer to think that he is neither "a madman nor a fool," as the great critic Harold Bloom writes, "but someone who plays at being a knight-errant." Bloom, in his book The Western Canon cites Dutch historian Johan Huizinga who in his masterpiece Homo Ludens asserts that play is the source of all human culture.

Play is a voluntary activity, unlike madness and foolishness. Play, according to Huizinga, has four principal characteristics: freedom, disinterestedness, excludedness or limitednss, and order. You can test all of these qualities upon the Don's knight-errantry, but not always upon Sancho's faithful service as squire, for Sancho is slower to yield himself to play. The Don lifts himself into ideal place and time and is faithful to his own freedom, to its disinterestedness and seclusion, and to its limits . . .

There is no greater universal image than the Don's impossible dream quest, that thing that brings us all every day out into the world to unreasonably stand before windmills and fight them as if they be giants that "move more arms than the giant Briareus." If each of us is not standing from our beds each day, our minds afire with our dragons and Dulcineas, then we are the more sane Sancho Panza, the one who says, "the arms you fancy, are their sails, which, being whirled about by the wind, make the mill go." Throughout our lives all of us are sometimes the Don and sometimes Sancho, both of whom see the world with a clarity that makes the other seem mad or foolish. (Although I will point out that in the end, when the Don is at last defeated, he returns to "sanity," giving up his play, and dies, an indication, I think that Cervantes put the special star of life by his "insane" Don.)

And play is what this is all about, the first novel, and perhaps the greatest thing ever written. It's about play's sanity, it's insanity, and it's bulls-eye central-ness to what kind of thing we are in the universe. That's why we still read Don Quixote and why when we see a storybook windmill, those of us who haven't forgotten how to play, always take a tilt at it.

I did not want our windfall of large pieces of canvas to become one of those prizes that I wind up curating while it sits on the shelves for months, if not years, awaiting the "perfect" moment, so I'd promised myself they'd get used as soon as possible. The children arrived to find their windmill a canvas wrapped giant in the center of their classroom.

We sallied forth on our adventure, paint brushes in hand, together dreaming our impossible dream.

We marched right up to this giant and made our marks, shoulder to shoulder, still seeing a windmill I suppose.

Perhaps we were a troupe of Sanchos as we set out, still seeing vanes instead of arms.

Playing, yes, but practically with our brushes and our quiet little cups of paint. There's a goodness and rightness about that; an innocence, certainly. It's the kind of place from which the best adventures start.

Some of us, in the freedom of our play, chose to swing around to the back stage side of things, where we found something magical to do, that being the moment when we first suspected that there was more here than a mere windmill.

And perhaps is was then that we began to understand that we were dealing with a giant.

It had grown right here before us. We needed to reach higher so we began to call for ladders to allow us to scale its ramparts.

It continued to grow as we painted and its many arms to spin like the giant Biareus. This would not be enough. 

That's when we decided to manufacture lances for ourselves, long sticks onto the ends of which we duct taped brushes to allow us to do proper battle with those long arms, all the way up in the clouds where they waved about so fiercely.

Of course, these particular children may not have been battling at all.

In fact, I'm inclined to believe they were not, but rather playing an entirely different story, but one, I'm sure nonetheless was a quest worthy of knights.

They just were playing; you know, building a little human culture.

Tell me this is not the stuff of legend.

We reached into the clouds indeed, our knight-errantry taking us to heights beyond ourselves, and many simply beside ourselves, like the peculiar incident that involved someone planting a green dot on someone's cheek unawares.

But the invention of this new slice of human culture was far from complete as we then proceeded to the launching of paint besotted projectiles, such as sponges, and something (I don't exactly know what; they predate me) in the toes of nylons that we generally use for splat painting (dipping them in paint, then dropping them onto paper from a height).

Look how boldly we stand here before the giant.

We are the Don.

Adding an extra challenge was the group of peasants who sought to ride their donkey's in the neighboring pastures, so we were careful to avoid collateral damage.

After each toss, we approached the giant to survey what we had managed.

And oh, we had some technique.

Amazingly, this one hit it's target!

Lest you get the idea that we were playing a kind of war game here, I should point out that I'm the only one of us (meaning me and the kids) who has read Don Quixote, so this fantasy combat imagery was only in my head, as it was in the Don's. Up to this point, all the tools we'd used -- ladders, long paint brushes, paint soaked projectiles -- were all discussed as attempts to paint to the "very top" of the canvas. I mention this because this last thing we did is quite martial and I don't want you to think we'd been the whole time building ourselves up into a combat-ish frenzy.

That's right, we took our dangerous spear throwing to a whole new level, taping paint brushes to the ends of our bamboo stakes, dipping them in paint . . .

. . . taking aim . . .

. . . and letting them fly!

It was an idea one of the kids had suggested and we just had to give it a try, you know, because we're the Don, and Sancho, for the time being, is no where to be found.

******

Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in way that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!