Translator: Allie Russsll Reviewer: Maria Pericleous
What do you think would be the result
if we searched the word “play” online?
Look at what comes up for this search.
The majority are boys and girls,
younger than ten years old,
playing with footballs,
play dough, drawing,
doing various activities.
Now let’s do the same thing and search the word “study.”
Notice the change.
We see older people,
we see stressed people,
people buried in books,
people seen in groups,
but mostly they have their heads down.
All of this comes from the following.
I was working as a university professor,
I still am today,
but I recently started studying again.
And when I started studying again,
I started to feel strange.
I started to feel something wasn’t right.
I started feeling lost.
I didn’t know what was happening to me.
I felt disorientated, I didn’t engage.
All the time I said to myself:
“What is this? What is happening to me?”
Suddenly it all became clear to me:
“I am receiving a conventional education.
I am receiving a traditional education,
I am receiving a hierarchical education
and I am receiving an education that you would expect to receive.”
But nothing beyond this was happening.
The same thing applies to this example.
It’s an example I love, and I use it a lot in my classes
and today I want to do it with you.
The question is: what is half of eight?
Most of the time
the answer I receive is that half of eight is four.
But I want you to pause for a moment and think about it a little more.
What else could be half of eight?
Half of eight could be a zero.
It could be a three.
It could be a C. It could be an S.
It could be an E.
It could be an O and a C
or an H and an O.
It could be an eye.
It could be a number of things.
This example of eight
is what happens with education.
Education can be traditional,
it can be hierarchical,
but it can also be fun.
It can also be conceived and understood
through play.
Next, we are going to look at Homo Ludens.
This concept was created many years ago,
in the 1930s
and still to this day, I believe that it has a tremendous impact.
The idea that Homo Ludens puts forward
is that men and women, as a society,
see play as something of significance,
as something which enriches our culture,
as something which teaches us what is happening
in the society that we live in.
Let’s look at the next search.
I put the words “play and education” into Google Scholar.
Look at how many results come up.
We are talking about 5,800,000 results
in just this search.
There are millions of results.
The results date back to the 1970s
to 1920, 1910.
From that time, they were already talking
about the importance of play in education.
They were talking about the link between play and education.
But I want to ask you all a question,
think about after your primary education,
how many times did you learn through play?
How many times have you learnt by playing
in a maths class,
in a history class,
in a social studies class?
Apart from Physical Education,
how often in your undergraduate degree, did your professors get you to play?
In your specialisations, in your masters,
in your doctorates, in your jobs.
How many times did they get you to play?
Sometimes the answer is “many times.”
Sometimes the answer is “a few times.”
Sometimes the answer is “never.”
I have asked this question numerous times
and the most common answer I received
is “very little.”
“They got us to play very little.”
It is possible that the reason why we play so little
is because play is considered to be something that only children do.
But this is not just my experience.
We know that at Harvard
they are talking about the importance of play within education.
The LEGO Foundation is also talking about how play and education
can have a considerable positive impact on our social skills.
We can also see how Project Zero,
one of the main institutions on the topic,
demonstrates that play is not just for children
but for adults as well,
and how, by learning through play,
the learning outcomes are much better.
We can see how this progresses, develops and becomes much more comprehensive.
I think that’s what we are aiming towards,
towards a more comprehensive learning.
And this is only the theory.
But I think it is important that we move on to the practice.
And in practice we see the following.
This is me standing in my classroom
with a stormy background.
This background isn’t there for no reason.
The stormy background is there
because my students were doing an exercise
where some had very few resources,
some had a few more resources and some had even more than the others.
With these resources, they had to build a storm.
This storm had to be fierce and powerful,
it had to draw attention and be frightening
as real storms are.
But what was behind this?
What was behind this storm?
Why did I ask my final semester, management students
to build a storm?
It is to do with the concept of recursion.
I wanted them to learn about recursion,
to learn by doing and to learn by playing
what recursion meant.
Let’s look at another example.
These pirates that you can see running
were looking for treasure.
They are undergraduate management students
about to graduate, many already doing their placements.
Why are they running around the university
dressed as pirates?
It’s not Halloween, this is in February.
What they were doing was finding clues,
and for each clue the students found,
they had to solve different challenges, each related to the topic of the class.
In this case, creativity, innovation.
They were learning through clues
which led them to do Google searches,
to solve puzzles,
to follow instructions,
to look in places where they wouldn’t usually look.
What was the purpose?
That they learnt concepts that I could have easily taught them
in a lecture,
standing in front of them, telling them what it meant.
But what do they get out of it when they do something,
when they engage their body,
when they become involved in an activity
other than simply feeling that they are learning?
Here they didn’t have this feeling of being sat down in a class learning.
They had a different feeling,
which I think is much more valuable
and is a very powerful feeling,
“I am doing something different.
I am having fun, and that is not stopping me from learning.
In fact, it is helping me learn better.”
Here is the last example.
This was about maximising resources.
My students had pieces of pasta and a marshmallow.
And they had to make the tallest tower, with only these two things.
Everyone was competing against each other.
And what I saw in these exercises and through these dynamics was that, yes,
they were learning through play but they were also having fun
and at the end, the questions that arose
were far greater than before the exercise where I only said to them:
“Come on, sit down, let’s talk about maximising resources.”
The questions were different.
The dynamic was different.
Their willingness to learn was different.
This led me to believe there is a cycle.
When education is hierarchical and the professor is here
and we are here
and when our bosses are here,
our students, employees and everyone else are below,
the communication is difficult.
If I put myself in my students’ shoes for a second, and say
“this relationship is not hierarchical,
this relationship is horizontal,
it is a cycle where I learn from them,
they learn through play,
and in as much as I see how this process works,
I learn how to do it differently for the next time,”
we are building a system of learning which is much more accurate,
much more comprehensive,
much more appropriate for the type of people
we want to send out into the world in the future.
We are creating individuals
with a mentality which is not only based on the traditional expectations
of what it is to be a student or a professional.
We are creating people who can enjoy themselves
and can interpret life in a different way.
It sounds very easy to say.
It sounds very profound.
It sounds something like: “What are you talking about?”
But the results, from what I have seen,
and it wasn’t just me, it was also all of these institutions,
show us that playing is serious business.