Playing to Learn

The role of play in the early years

Sandra Smidt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136973383
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Sandra Smidt sets out to explain what play is and why it is so important as one of the key ways of learning, particularly - but not solely - for young children. She argues that all play is purposeful, and can only truly considered to be play when the child has chosen what to do, where and how to do it.

Using case studies drawn from all over the world, Smidt challenges some of the prevailing myths relating to play and pays close attention to what it is that early years professionals need to do to interpet the play, understand its purpose for the child and sometimes extend it.

Attention is paid to the close links that play has with creativity, and the author also highlights the importance of being able to explain to colleagues, parents and even those in government, why play matters so much in terms of learning and development.

This book will be of interest to anyone involved in early years' education.

Chapter 1
What is this thing called play?

The book starts by defining play and then moves on to introducing the ideas of some of the people whose thinking and writing have been influential on educators, researchers and writers. Here you encounter some of the professional language or ‘jargon’ associated with the subject. Each such term or phrase is given in italic script and explained in the text that follows. This means that by the end of this chapter you should have a framework on which to build a more complex and nuanced understanding of what is meant by play and of why play matters.

‘We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.’

(George Bernard Shaw)

‘You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.’

(Plato)

NOTES:

Since this book has been written with teachers, nursery nurses, teaching assistants, those working in Children’s Centres and other educators and practitioners in mind, the implications of what is said for these professionals is key. In order to make such implications evident, this logo is used. You might find it at the head of a whole section or dotted in the midst of the text.

The voices of practitioners are highlighted in the text where they comment directly on their own views and practice. This logo makes this clear to readers.

Starting with a definition

Play is what children and young people do when they follow their own ideas and their own interests in their own way for their own reasons.

(Getting Serious About Play – DCMS, 2004)

It seems odd, in 2009, to be writing yet another book about play. So much has been thought and said and argued and written about it that it seems impossible to believe that there is more to say. You can read countless definitions of play and find it referred to in government documents and text books on early learning. And yet play still seems to be a misunderstand concept and the term is used so loosely that perhaps another book is truly needed.

Play can be defined as the way in which children within a context, a culture, a family and a community, set about doing any or all of the following:

• trying to solve a problem they have set themselves;

• exploring and experiencing something that interests or concerns or scares or excites them;

• expressing and communicating their feelings related to their experiences.

Play is thus always purposeful for the child.

You can quickly see in this definition the sense of agency: it is the child who needs to solve a problem or experience or express or explore something. No one needs to tell the child to do these things. From this it follows that all play is purposeful because the child is using it for a reason. The child owns the reason and therefore the play. The child is in control of what to do and how to do it. The play itself may well be pleasurable or fun, but it may also be deeply disturbing and traumatic. So play is what the learner chooses to do in order to address a need, answer a question, express a feeling or follow up an interest.

This definition might raise some questions – for example, what is meant by talking of play as ‘traumatic’ or what is meant by adult-directed play or where is the role of the practitioner in play where the child is in control of the agenda. These are important and valid questions which will be addressed throughout the book. By the end of the book you may have been persuaded that we should only describe behaviour as play where it is purposeful: purposeful does not necessarily mean consciously purposeful.

Key thinkers in the field

Note: Many important ideas and issues will be raised in this introductory chapters. All the ideas raised here will be dealt with in more detail in the chapters that follow. Remember that this is a scene-setting chapter, designed as an introduction to some complex ideas and language. The key thinkers are not introduced in chronological order; rather they are introduced in a sequence reflecting their particular views on play and how they relate to the arguments of this book.

Many writers, thinkers and researchers have discussed play and its importance in learning. We start with the ideas of Jerome Bruner who was very interested in play as a way or a mode of learning which implies that he saw it not as an activity in itself but as a way of doing something. We can do things because we have been asked or told to do them, or because we feel the need to do them. For example, the child can fill containers in the water tray because she has been told to or because she has chosen to. In the first example the child may be learning through following an instruction; in the second, she is learning through play because she is seeking an answer to a question she has raised.

The child engaged in play is finding out about the world and the objects and people and relationships in it. Bruner saw play is a process. We know that there are many modes or ways of learning – for example, reading or watching an ‘expert’ or exploring or asking questions. Bruner’s position was to see play as another way of learning. Famously he talked of play as ‘memory in action’ and this is something worth spending some time considering. What Bruner meant by this was that children play in order to remember and think about events and experiences in their lives that are no longer present and in order to make sense of them. The example of a child dropping things one after another out of the pram is not an example of random behaviour but rather suggests that the child is implicitly asking a question – perhaps ‘Why do these things land on the ground? Do all things do this? What would happen if I threw it up in the air first?’ and so on. Describing play as memory in action is a powerful way of allowing practitioners and others to think differently about play and about its significance. Bruner’s focus on the links between play and memory allows us to see play as always purposeful for the child.

Play is a way of being able to use hands-on or real or life-like situations to answer questions that arise in children’s heads as they constantly seek to make sense of their lives, experiences and feelings. Very young children, when encountering something new, appear to ask themselves ‘What is this?’ and then to attempt to answer the question by using what is available to them. Their asking of a question is not, of course, using words, but their behaviour is indicative of a search for meaning. And in the earliest years the ways in which they can seek to make sense of anything are all very concrete. They can touch and mouth and look at and listen to and shake or drop or feel or smell whatever it is. As they do this, it seems likely that they then compare whatever it is they are exploring with other things they have explored. This is where memory comes in. So in the earliest months of life, children use movement and their senses to explore new objects or experiences or people and to compare them with other things they have encountered. At this stage children do not yet have access to words to describe these comparisons. Access to spoken language comes through their interactions with others in their lives and is one of the most important cultural tools to help learning. (The term ‘cultural tools’ was first used by Vygotsky to describe things that have been made by human beings in order to assist their thinking and communication. Examples of cultural tools include complex systems like language, books, signs, symbols and artefacts. You will find more about cultural tools and their significance throughout the book.)

As children get older, their store of experiences becomes greater so they have more memory to rely on. Let’s look at some examples to illustrate this:

• Three-month-old Nuur, given a shiny rattle, puts it in her mouth, takes it out, looks at it, shakes it accidentally and hears the sound it makes, puts it back in her mouth, takes it out again, looks at it and shakes it again more purposefully. Two days later, given the same rattle, she immediately shakes it, listens, smiles, shakes it again.

• Fifteen-month-old Dov is given a doll when his new brother is born. He holds the doll, rocks it in his arms, looks into its face and smiles, rocks it again and then puts it in a pram. Six weeks later he only ever takes the doll out of its pram in order to throw in on the floor and stamp on it.

• Lerato is a child being raised by his grandmother since his mother died a year ago. He finds it difficult to separate from her in the mornings when he goes to school and at school is involved in a lot of fighting. But when he comes home his grandmother says that he will listen to her tell stories about his mother and will listen for a long time and with intense concentration.

• Five-year-old Emilia has just started school. She comes home after a few days and sets her dolls out on the floor in a circle and then sings with them the songs she is learning at school.

These are simple observations, relatively easy to analyse in terms of memory in action. Let us do this.

• Nuur has very little memory to draw on when she first encounters the rattle and her initial explorations use her senses and her actions. But it is clear that she is cognitively active, which means that she is thinking about and noticing what happens. So that when she is next presented with the rattle, she can draw on her memory that it made a noise when she shook it. We can assume that the noise surprised or pleased or interested her which is why she tried to elicit it again.

• Dov has seen his mother rocking the new baby in her arms. Dov, being older than Nuur, has more experiences to draw on and initially he calls up the image of his mother rocking the baby and does this to the doll. A little later his play changes and he now draws on the memory he has of his feelings about the new baby and enacts these out using the doll. Feelings are really important to all learning and evident in much play. He solves the problem of his feelings safely through the doll rather than through his baby sister!

• Lerato’s memory in action is reflected in his ability to pay attention to stories being told about his mother who tragically died when he was 4 years old. In his time at school his play is characterised by aggression, possibly showing more about his feelings than he is able to show in other ways.

• Emilia plays the role of teacher at circle time, arranging her dolls as her peers and singing the songs she has learned. This is clearly memory in action.

We now turn to the work of Tina Bruce, an educationalist whose work you may have read. She has written much about play and clearly regards it as one of the most significant ways in which young children learn. You can see the influence of the work of Bruner on her. She talks of play being ‘an integrating mechanism’ and it is worth taking a little time to understand what she means by this. She says that when children are involved in what she calls ‘free-flow play’ (play which is self-chosen and where they are in control of what they are doing), they appear to bring together many aspects of their learning and coordinate them in order to bring about or reinforce new learning. Here again it is the process which is important. The end-product, if there is one, may not be relevant to the learning that takes place. Here is an example, taken directly from Bruce (1991):

… Anne (five years) is playing ‘schools’ in the garden. There is a clump of snapdragons. She pretends these are the children in the class and that she is the teacher. She pretends that it is lunchtime and tips water into each one, pulling the flowerhead apart to do so. She chats in teacher tones, ‘Good boy – what a nice clean plate’, etc.

(p. 79)

In Bruce’s analysis of this as an example of play as an integrating mechanism, she says that Anne brings together the memory of two real experiences – one of starting school and the other of having lunch with a friend whose mother is very keen on clean plates at the end of the meal. Again, the link to Bruner’s work, here to play as memory in action, is evident. We need to think about the implications of this for us. Remember that Bruner can only know this by finding out as much as possible about each child and by observing the children as they play.

This is the first explicit reference to what practitioners need to know or do in order to understand play and use it to good effect. Practitioners need to know as much as possible about their children so that they can then watch children, listen to them and think about what their actions might indicate about their interests and their concerns.

In order to try to analyse the next example in terms of play as an integrating mechanism you need to know some things about the child involved, Diya. Bruce tells us that Diya has heard of orphanages in Romania through the children’s news programmes on television and she has seen the film ‘Oliver’.

Diya (five years) plays ‘orphanages’ with her dolls and soft toys. She dresses them all, and sits them round a pretend table. She rings a bell – ‘Don’t ask for more, ‘cos you won’t get it’ she says sternly to the teddy. She ‘walks’ some of the dolls round, clearing and wiping the table. She makes them all line up, blows a whistle and sends them to school.

(p. 79)

No one would be able to attempt an explanation of Diya’s behaviour without some knowledge about her and her experience. But equipped with some knowledge about her prior experience, it is possible for her to draw on the things she remembers and perhaps doesn’t quite understand and uses them in her play to try and e...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 What is this thing called play?
• Chapter 2 Taking inventory of the world
• Chapter 3 Agency and ownership
• Chapter 4 Memory and its role in play
• Chapter 5 A sense of self
• Chapter 6 Sharing feelings and thoughts
• Chapter 7 Sharing feelings and thoughts
• Chapter 8 War play, cruel play, tragic play
• Chapter 9 Why play matters
• Bibliography
• Index