Karen Wohlwend, Indiana University
We live in an era of rapid change and uncertainty where it is often difficult to make sense of a world that is constantly morphing. Ironically, the people who may be best equipped to teach us about coping in these unpredictable times are young children at play. American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead once noted:
Children have to lead a life and move toward a conclusion that is unknown and if the adults are going to understand the world in which they live, they have to look at the children whose experience is different from their own. It doesn’t mean the children know more than adults; it simply means that children know more about living in the present-day world than adults because the adults grew up in such a different world.
Anthropologists like Mead who study play take a bottom-up fieldwork orientation. They seek to learn from children as experts whose pretending offers a glimpse of key practices of daily life. This resonates with something I encourage graduate students to do in their research, “Enter the classroom as a learner.” Or in anthropological terms, “Enter this site and learn from the people who are already living and working here. Assume they know a lot more about this place than you do and expect to be surprised.”
But researchers approach play differently than teachers. When I started out as a kindergarten teacher, I believed in play as a tool, which is largely how educators still think of play: as a vehicle for teaching children something else—a spoonful of sugar to help students memorize bits of information. This top-down perspective values a knowledge or skill that adults teach to children in order to reach a static pre-determined school achievement target. But my perspective on play changed when as a doctoral student, I spent a year studying first-grade recess play. I suddenly realized how little I knew about what children were really accomplishing on the playground: a popular toy is wielded to gain a place in a playgroup; a daily game of tag builds a history for being together.
If we stop undervaluing play and take a step back to reposition ourselves to learn from children, we can see that play has value in its own right. When children play together, they replay events in their lives to better understand how to belong in the world around them. The educational question then becomes: “How are children using play to make sense of their lives? What does play provide that could help children adapt to and live in this constantly changing world?”
Playing with Complexity
Play is full of tensions and competing interests that players actively need to resolve as they create a fragile work-in-progress that changes moment-to-moment. Play scenarios are built from a set of agreements that the pretense depends upon: “Pretend you have superpowers” or “Pretend this crayon is a lightsaber.” Like a Jenga game, pulling out one agreement—who’s playing which character—can shift the entire structure and the play can come crashing down.
To keep play going, players must also maintain a coherent storyline. Something needs to happen in a way that makes sense to all the players; if the pretense becomes too boring or too nonsensical, the scenario falls apart and players leave. Players also need to reconcile their individual ideas for the emerging story in order to keep a coherent play theme going. If players can’t agree on who plays which character or what should happen next, play breaks down and players leave.
Playing Together
Play is creative, collaborative…and contentious. Children play to make and keep friends, of course, but conflicts can also threaten players’ friendships. When players come together in a game, they bring various visions for how their scenario should move forward. These ideas may be based on individual lived experiences at home, personal interests, media passions, and so on. When children are very attached to favorite toys or media characters, they can have strong ideas about who can hold a treasured toy or what a beloved character should do, leading to conflicts that become intense and end in tears. Compromises are necessary to keep play intact, requiring players to negotiate to preserve their collaborative story and their friendships.
Playing Resourcefully
Players need to watch what the other players are doing, so that they can react to the actions of others in the unfolding scenario. They also react to things around them and make do with the available resources, balancing the need to stay responsive to other players but also to respond to the nonhuman things in the immediate environment. If children don’t have the toy that they need for a prop during play, they invent a substitute from the objects at hand. For example in a classroom, if players want to dig a pretend hole with shovels (to play MineCraft when the video game is not available), they might look around the kitchen playset and pick up spoons. At home, children improvise with pizza boxes to create the laptops that they see their parents using. In a video game, players make instant decisions in order to respond to changing conditions produced by an app or other players on the same network. But play is not just made from players’ actions with physical materials. It is also built with the cultural stuff of their lives—from their schools, home, and communities; from peer cultures, friendships, and playgroups; from popular culture, children’s media, and video games. The surrounding environment, material and cultural, become resources for children’s play scenarios.
Playing to Imagine Otherwise
Finally, children play to imagine otherwise. Children imagine otherwise by inventing play worlds where they can imagine together and try out alternate possibilities. Elsewhere, I have argued that play is a literacy that creates stories, not from print on paper, but built from children’s actions and pretense. Players story together but they also restory, which means players agree to pretend an imagined place where they can determine what happens next. I have studied the uncannily convincing performances young children enact when they take on more powerful roles that are beyond their reach to play a parent, a teacher, or a superhero.
When children play, they try on pretend identities to access wished-for abilities, but more importantly, to remake and reimagine the challenges they face. Real life constraints are reimagined on the spot and reframed to accommodate imagined possibilities, constructed in the moment, while players simultaneously think up their next move and anticipate what the other players will do next, as in the following preschool example:
Story time is about to begin and children gather in the corner of the classroom, filling the playroom furniture and spilling onto the rug in front of an empty adult-sized rocker. Arriving late, four-year-old Ella scans the group for an open spot, while five children, companionably scrunched together into a tiny sofa, grin and laugh, “No room!”
However, a few minutes later, Ella is perched in the teacher’s chair, clicking a toy smartphone at the group while directing them to “find your seats” and “say cheese”. Having secured the best seat in the room, Ella continues to play teacher as children smile and pose for their pretend photos.
In my research, I find this kind of playful improvisation noteworthy, not because it is unique but because it is so commonplace. It’s typical of the inventive remakings that children produce through play that expand what’s possible. Play provides daily learning opportunities to teach children, under the most ordinary conditions, to access alternatives by imagining past the immediate limitations of here-and-now realities.
Playing into Unknown Futures
As I said at the beginning, we’re living in a time of rapid change and uncertainty. It is an era in which we seem to have no idea about the future world that awaits young children. And as educators, it’s challenging to know how to help children prepare for whatever a post-AI world might require. The educational policy response to the new normal of continuous global change seems to double down on the familiar practices of the last century, rather than to face up to the need to better equip children for life in this century and beyond. Currently in US schools, teachers spend months preparing children for standardized tests that measure proficiency with print literacy skills and subject area knowledge. The current obsession with high-stakes testing might help children identify the correct answer on a state standards test, but it does little to prepare them for more complex tomorrows where a click on a device with artificial intelligence can instantly sift through an immense number of potential solutions to any problem.
Learning from the play expertise of children can show us what we might need to know to adapt and collaborate with intelligent machines in a more-than-human future. In the swirl of rapid cultural and technological change with increasingly voice-activated and embodied literacies, we should also be actively preparing children to respond to, to make sense of, and to imagine with the next literacies that are coming—the ones that we have no idea about. While we cannot predict and prepare children for the specific technologies and intelligences they’ll encounter, we can focus on change-oriented practices that can equip all of us for fast-changing lives. We should be encouraging children to negotiate and collaborate with one another across their differences; to compromise and improvise, to be resourceful, and make do with what they find around them. And to do all this, we should first provide children many more opportunities to play while repositioning ourselves to learn from these young play experts.