Perspectives on Play

Learning for Life

Avril Brock, Pam Jarvis, Yinka Olusoga, Avril Brock, Pam Jarvis, Yinka Olusoga

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351258104
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This text offers innovative, multi-disciplinary perspectives on the subject of play in a range of environments: the classroom, playground, home, and local community. Chapters include observation notes, case studies and comprehensive illustrations of ideas in action, as well as encouragement for the reader to stop and reflect on their own practice with questions for consideration.

Extensively revised and with new contributions, this third edition explores the theory and clearly demonstrates how to take the theory from the academic classroom and apply it to practice in a child's setting. New features include:

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• an up-to-date exploration of the latest policy developments and research, including Ofsted's 2015 Early Years Report and the 2017 EYFS Statutory Framework
• an exploration of globalisation and technology, and critical analysis of children's leisure time, screen interaction and virtual experiences
• international perspectives on play and the connections between play and mental health
• brand new practical examples woven throughout, accompanied by additional full-colour photos

Perspectives on Play is an invaluable resource for any student studying within childhood studies, playwork programmes or training to teach at early years or primary level. It is also ideal for early years, primary and play practitioners.

SECTION 1
The value of play?

Psychological, educational and playwork perspectives

CHAPTER 1 Three perspectives on play

PAM JARVIS, AVRIL BROCK AND FRASER BROWN

Introduction

When we launched the first edition of Perspectives on Play, we were quite optimistic about the prospects for play-based learning in the United Kingdom, particularly for children aged birth to 5. For the first time since the mid-1960s, the government seemed to be recognising human developmental processes within their policies for children, schools and families, and the vital place of play within a healthy childhood. We celebrated the funding streams that had been created for this purpose, the creation of the five-year project 'Play England' and its counterparts in the other nations of the UK, the renaming of the Department for Education and Employment as the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF), and the support and funding promised for play spaces by the Children's Plan (2007). However, the damming of this funding stream was initiated by the international 'Credit Crunch' that began in the UK with an investors' run on the Northern Rock Bank in September 2007 (BBC, 2009, online), and this gathered speed following the indecisive result from the 2010 election that resulted in a Conservative-led Conservative/Liberal Coalition Government. This change of government brought further disappointments, which began with the re-naming of the DCSF as the Department for Education (DFE) on the day following the election. On 22 April 2013, the Conservative Minister for Children, Elizabeth Truss, announced: 'We want [nursery] children to learn to listen to a teacher, learn to respect an instruction, so that they are ready for school' [The Guardian, 2013, online). This took the quest for play-based learning back to a situation that we thought had been firmly consigned to the past; and when we were asked to produce a new and updated edition of this book, which had become a steady 'bestseller' within its genre, we realised that quite possibly, it had an even more important job to do than the first edition, which had been released under far more optimistic circumstances. Developments between the point at which the second edition was released in early 2014 and the events of the current day (Spring 2018) indicate that the idea of children as programmable machines has even further advanced, and that the need to make the case for the power of play in the development and learning of children and young people has become even more intense.

The modern concept of play-based learning emerged from the practice of pioneers such as Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi who, in the early nineteenth century attempted to model the philosophy of Jean Jacques Rousseau in practical pedagogy (Jarvis, 2017a), involving the learner in practical tasks to deepen his/her Jaiowledge of the to-be-learned material by engagement; that is, to play witli both artefacts and ideas.

As the socio-political philosophy of Neoliberalism (Jarvis, 2017b) has risen over the past 35 years to become the principal Anglo-American political philosophy the debate between those who see learning as the product of direct instruction, and those who think that children learn more deeply in play-based activity has become increasingly heated. The case made from the 'progressives' (which increasingly sees itself as 'the defence' to state-sanctioned policy) is that education practices have become too heavily skewed towards the narrowly traditional, driven by the neoliberal goal of producing compliant consumers and workers for the international marketplace; a situation dubbed The Zombie Doctrine (Monbiot, 2016). Programming is the key to neoliberal concepts of education, the impetus being towards quasi-privatised state education (Mansell, 2017) and the relentless statutory assessment of the competence of both pupils and teachers, utilising assessments not only to test learners against artificially created 'norms', but also to impose 'accountability' measures upon teachers and schools (George, 2017).

Where education practice is dominated by this neoliberal premise, the driving impetus inevitably becomes programming learners towards assessment performance via the most direct and economical route (Jarvis, 2017c). And, given that such a practice has its roots in a philosophy of 'dehumanisation' (Jarvis, 2017b), it should not be a surprise that the subtleties of child development begin to become invisible. I have argued in many publications that the ways in which human beings most effectively learn to make meaning in the early years of life have been increasingly ignored (Jarvis, Newman and Swiniarski, 2014) within contemporary education policy and practice, even in the face of psycho-biological research findings that clearly highlight physical evidence of the 'under construction' synaptic patterns present within the living brains of young children (Jarvis, 2017c, see below). Such findings support some aspects of earlier models of cognitive development created by researchers such as Jean Piaget (Arsalidou and Pascual Leone, 2016), in particular the incomplete nature of neural connection (Jarvis, 2017b) that makes it difficult for children under seven to deal with information that cannot be processed through existing concepts within memory. In my article 'Is Baseline Missing the Bigger Picture?' (Jarvis, 2017c), I used the analogy of an attempt to store clothes in a wardrobe with insufficient hangers: unfamiliar ideas, like excess clothes cannot be placed into memory in an organised fashion, and therefore tend to fall to the bottom and become jumbled together.

The fact that young children's brains are under development in this way during the first six years of life means that teaching and learning interactions during this developmental stage are far more successful if the child has a role in choosing an activity to act as a pedagogical anchor within existing cognition, and adults then engage in this agenda to teach towards 'next steps', a process known as 'Sustained Shared Thinking' or SST (Brodie, 2014); that is, playing alongside the child whilst engaging him/her in conversation to support learning through play. Where children entering early education settings come from homes where English is not the principal language, or they have been diagnosed as non-neurotypical, SST can also be flexibly utilised to effectively address such individual needs.

Non-neurotypical

Conditions such as Asperger's and dyslexia are being increasingly identified as differences in brain function rather than detriments, which have advantages as well as disadvantages to individuals who experience such conditions. Therefore, rather than being identified as a 'special need', which indicates a detriment, the reference is to a 'non-neurotypical' brain structure, which is instead a difference.

However, the recent OFSTED document Bold Beginnings (OFSTED, 2017) makes no reference to SST at ail and its content further indicates that the concept of SST has not been considered by the authors; for example the comment that 'most learning could not be discovered or left to chance through each child's own choices' (p. 17) fails to recognise the role of the adult in the learning through play process. The proposal that there should be 'the same learning... expectations at the start of school as ... at the end' (p. 13) also indicates a lack of consideration of the role of SST within early years pedagogy, and is moreover a worrying indication of a lack of consideration of the vast difference between the stage of construction of an average 4- and 11-year-old brain. There is additionally a reference in Bold Beginnings to 'start(ing) teaching quickly' (p. 16), which appears to indicate that 'teaching' is constructed as synonymous with 'direct instruction'. This point is introduced in a paragraph reflecting upon what 'body of knowledge to pursue . .. what ideas to link together, what resources to draw on, how to teach and how to make sure all pupils benefit' (p. 12) in which there is no mention of the fact that effective early years teachers routinely engage in SST to address these requirements, utilising young children's self-chosen activities to strengthen and extend pathways within their existing neural network, rather than simply providing them with specific answers to specific problems on a serial basis.

SST is especially essential for working with young children whose development has been negatively impacted by environmental circumstances. Across the UK, approximately one third of the child population has to cope with the considerable social, emotional and intellectual challenges of living within a financially unstable household. Such experience is likely to create a neuronal effect known as cognitive lag (Jensen, 2009), one of the results of which is that children from socio-economically deprived households most typically start school with a less well-developed vocabulary (Carey, 2013) than classmates from more privileged homes. As such the SST process is crucial in creating an environment in which language development takes place in context, mirroring the niche in which human beings evolved: building linguistic competence through spontaneous interactions (Jarvis el al, 2014).

Therefore, neoliberal societies' demands that children swiftly absorb nuggets of information to regurgitate to hit specific assessment targets ignore the natural human impetus to learn through play and genuine interaction. As such, regimes based upon thi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• List of abbreviations
• Author acknowledgements
• Publisher acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Section 1 The Value of Play? Psychological, educational and playwork perspectives
• Section 2 Children at play: A journey through the years (0-11)
• Section 3 Supporting children's play
• Section 4 Concluding perspectives
• Glossary
• Index