Comments by Stuart Lockton, PGCE Science student:

Vygotsky on Play – Relevance to Natural Play in Educational Settings

 Vygotsky makes many pertinent and surprisingly up-to-date-sounding observations on how play contributes to child development in young children up to early school age. What relevance do his findings have to the inclusion of play – particularly natural play – in nursery and school settings today?

 I find the observations that Vygotsky makes in his paper very interesting and relevant. At the moment the UK government through its agencies is encouraging a greater emphasis on play provision for all children aged 0-19. Included in this strategy is play provision in educational settings (see The Play Strategy, DCSF 2008). While recognising the importance of Vygotsky’s thinking, it is not immediately clear how relevant this is to older children and some aspects of “Natural Play” (see Children’s Play in Natural Environments, factsheet Children’s Play Information Service).

Vygotsky’s main points seem to me to be:

1)       Children’s play always involves rules and imagination

2)       Children’s play can be represented in a word formula relating object and meaning

3)       Creative play situations offer the possibility for the development of abstract thought.

 Through my own recent professional experience of designing play spaces in educational settings, the discussion of how play undergirds and supports child development is extremely important. Yet Vygotsky’s conclusions do not seem to apply in all cases.

 Let me take the sandpit as an example – one I have had much to do with in recent years.

 The sandpit acts as a major draw for all children from very young crawlers and toddlers through to teenagers. While much play involving rules and imagination can be observed when children play in sand, there seems to be much play which doesn’t obviously fit this model.

 Pre-schoolers and primary school children will play many construction (building sandcastles moats etc) and simulation games (loading sand into lorries, road tracks, sand play houses etc) in sand, which do involve rules and imagination. Even what may initially look like straightforward construction may involve imagination and rules (“I’m going to build a tower bigger than Blackpool Tower”). Nevertheless straightforward experimentation with construction materials need not involve imagination or rules at all. Equally children of this age may engage in other experimental play, such as finding a worm or a beetle and burying it in sand, or putting it in a sand hollow, and simply observing what happens. This situation seems to me to clearly be play, but not to involve imagination or rules – the key motivator here is experimentation.

 Equally, small children (under 18 months) will sit in sand and play with the grains, observing how it moves inbetween fingers and toes, or how it varies in consistency when wet or dry. Clearly children of this age will play, and indeed be deeply involved in play, in this situation, yet no rules or imagination are required.

 At the other end of the age spectrum, teenagers will happily sit on the edge of a sandpit, take their shoes and socks off and play with the sand with their toes. They may do this as an activity in itself, or as a parallel activity while chatting with friends. Again there seems little doubt that this activity is play, yet no obvious imagination or rules are required.

 In each of the examples I have cited above, experimentation is the key experience which seems to be going on for the children. In each case that experimentation could represent a significant developmental opportunity. It seems to me, that while Vygotsky’s conclusions on child development through play are a significant and relevant contribution to the debate, his conclusions do not explain all types of play or deal with all of the possibilities that play offers for child development.

 Recent papers have been published offering a taxonomy of play (A Playworker’s Taxonomy of Play Types, Hughes B, 1996), this paper offers a range of play types. My own thinking on this taxonomy has led me to think that experimentation and exploration are very important aspects of play. In particular, when one thinks about the design of natural play space, these elements of play are very important, and while a great deal of imagination may be employed through exploration and experimentation, the examples above show that this need not necessarily be the case.

From the perspective of a play designer working with educational settings I would like to know more about how exploratory and experimental play can support child development. (in terms of Hughes’ Taxonomy these would fit into Creative, Exploratory and Mastery play. I have devised my own Taxonomy which works more as a play designer’s taxonomy of play, in which I prefer the terms exploratory, experimental and construction play.)

 I am also particularly interested in how play supports the development of teenage children. While again imagination is very important in much teenage play (the football player, for example, imagines himself to be Steven Gerrard in front of the Kop), the opportunity for teenagers to engage in exploratory, experimental and construction play, particularly in a natural play space, would seem to afford many opportunities for development.

 What thinking has been done along these lines? I would be keen to engage in a debate on what I have written above and to explore more about these topics.

I introduced the piece; I enjoyed it, partly for the clear way that it is written. I liked the way that play for young children in his thesis is structured by rules, and his dismissal of pleasure as the main impetus for play. I thought that beginning with motivation, and exploring children’s interests, desires and fulfilment was a good idea, but I was rather disappointed that this wasn’t followed through in the way that I expected – there wasn’t much discussion of these in this text. I enjoyed the example of the sisters and sisterhood; how the child performed the latter in social role play with sophistication, of which she appeared oblivious in ‘real’ life; this resonated with my own experience of my grandchildren; I noted his point that imagination is fundamental – which he reinforced by asking of what could remain of play if imagination is removed? He developed this further by speculating on the concealed rules of imagination. I wasn’t too clear on his examples of the moral authority, but I understood his emphasis on the contextual moral framework – the ideological rules within which the child has to operate. His ideas about dominance of the visual field in young children also resonated with me (being interested in the visual world) and his theorising of perception as comprising generalised ideas was interesting, which he developed in his example of the stick standing in for a horse.

Not everyone was as accepting as me of Vygotsky’s rather formal view of play; we discussed the difficulty of tactile play (playing with mud), for instance, and tried to imagine how this would fit with his thesis. We considered the effect of the era (1930s) in which it was written, and decided that this had important effects on both its content and style; the concept of tactile play, especially in the art world, with the modernist emphasis on the importance of the material and haptic (touch) phenomenology (cf Hepworth’s  and Moore’s sculpture), brought to prominence tactility, with the popular adoption of this concept some years later. We shared anecdotes of our children playing with messy materials and our celebration of this practice.

Our discussion moved on to the dominance of language as a model and metaphor in structuralist and post structuralist theories, and thought that this might account for Vygotsky’s discussion being preoccupied with social role and communication. We discussed the relationship between Vygotsky and Piaget, and touched on the use of schemas.

Next we compared these to Bruner’s ideas on play, and noted Bruner’s remark that play is difficult to engineer for the purposes of education – which led to a discussion of the tricky business of teachers trying to implement the governments advocating of play techniques. We began to speculate on the characteristics of play, and considered if play is always identifiable, and how we go about recognising it. This led to ideas about the purpose of play.

Finally we discussed the structuring and refining of rules and wondered about the extent to which rules are inherent as opposed to learnt. In terms of games this concluded with the social acquisition and transmission of rules of play.

Thursday 19th November, 2009; 12.30-1.30pm, in Group room 2, ground floor of the LRC at Ormskirk. Lunch is provided. All welcome.

Jean-Luc Nancy: L’Intrus

Jean-Luc Nancy is a French philosopher who wrote a stunning piece about his own heart transplant L’Intrus. It’s a 14 page essay – part philosophical mediation, part literary testimonial – that Claire Denis ‘adopted’ as the basis for her feature film of the same name. (One of the finest European films of the last 20 years.)

Proposer: David Jackson

Look forward to seeing you there.

Jeff Adams

The academic reading group is for staff and research students who enjoy reading and who would like to share their thoughts with others. It is intended to encourage and support new thinking and writing for publication and research. People from all subjects and faculties are welcome, and nothing more will be expected than the pleasure of debating a text as a group. Last year saw our first series of meetings and it has proved to be especially helpful for becoming familiar with authors and theorists in a supportive group atmosphere.

One text is chosen for each meeting and it will usually be contemporary and relevant in some way; it will also be short, in the form of an excerpt, journal paper, chapter or short story. Hopefully people will be inspired to read further should they find the text useful or interesting. There is no requirement for all texts to be overtly ‘academic’, and some texts chosen for past sessions have been extracts from novels, web pages or graphic novels. Members of the group nominate the texts for future sessions.

Where the texts do not already exist in digital form through the electronic library collection, the LRC have helpfully agreed to digitise copies of the texts for you to download and read, and are usually available from the library catalogue by performing a module code search for REA101. Staff will have to log in with their library number and pin, whilst students log in with their student number and password.

If you cannot find a text please contact Jeff Adams, Education.

Thursday 12th November. We meet in group room 2 of the library at 12.30-1.30. All welcome. Lunch provided.

Lev Vygotsky: Play and its role in the mental development of the child

First Published: 1933; Source: Voprosy psikhologii, 1966, No. 6; Translated: Catherine Mulholland; Transcription/Markup: Nate Schmolze; Online Version: Psychology and Marxism Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2002. Available at:

http://www.mathcs.duq.edu/~packer/Courses/Psy225/Classic%203%20Vygotsky.pdf

I’m always keen to create an opportunity to read classics that still keep cropping up in contemporary research, and Vygotsky’s article is one of these, especially with the government’s renewed promotion of play for learning and creativity in education.

Proposer: Jeff Adams