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125: The Transformative Power of Play w/ The Center for Playful Inquiry
6 Plays2 years ago
Today we’re joined by Susan Harris MacKay and Matt Karlson, the people behind the Center for Playful Inquiry. Susan is a former teacher and pedagogical director at Opal School and Portland Children’s Museum. Her recent book, Story Workshop: New Possibilities for Young Writers showcases the relationship between play, art, and writing. Matt is a former teacher, professional development facilitator, and Director of Opal School’s Center for Learning.
Together they formed the Center for Playful Inquiry, which prioritizes play, the arts, and meaning-making to inspire justice, democracy, and beauty. They work with schools, educators, and community members to build these systems. In this podcast, we discuss why imaginative play is deeply connected to learning, and why we must be skeptical of educational products & strategies aimed at controlling the narrative of learning.
Guests
Susan Harris MacKay is a former teacher and pedagogical director at Opal School and Portland Children's Museum. She is the author of Story Workshop: New Possibilities for Young Writers
Matt Karlson is a former teacher, professional development facilitator, and Director of Opal School's Center for Learning.
Resources
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Transcript
Introduction to Episode 124
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Hello and welcome to episode 124 of our podcast.
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My name is Chris McNutt and I'm part of the progressive education nonprofit Human Restoration Project.
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Before we get started, I want to let you know that this is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Leslie Lindsay, Michelle Edwards, and Joshua Kazemi.
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Thank you for your ongoing support.
00:00:29
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You can learn more about the Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org.
00:00:34
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or find us on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.
Meet the Guests: Susan and Matt
00:00:37
Speaker
Today, we're joined by Susan Harris-McKay and Matt Carlson, the people behind the Center for Playful Inquiry.
00:00:43
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Susan is a former teacher and pedagogical director at Opal School and Portland Children's Museum.
00:00:48
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Her recent book, Story Workshop, New Possibilities for Young Writers, showcases the relationship between play, art, and writing.
00:00:56
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Matt is a former teacher, professional development facilitator, and director of Opal School's Center for Learning.
00:01:01
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Together, they form the Central for Playful Inquiry, which prioritizes play, the arts, and meaning-making to inspire justice, democracy, and beauty.
00:01:10
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They work with schools, educators, and community members to build these systems.
00:01:14
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Thank you all for joining me today.
What is 'Play' in Education?
00:01:16
Speaker
Thanks for having us.
00:01:17
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Thanks very much.
00:01:18
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Yeah, I was just talking like kind of off air, if you will, checking out your TED Talks and your blog and all that kind of awesome stuff, which I'll link in the show notes.
00:01:27
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And I figure it makes sense really to just define our terms to start things off and talk about what it is that we mean when we talk about play.
00:01:38
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What literally is the play in the Center for Playful Inquiry?
00:01:44
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I think about play as a strategy for learning.
00:01:50
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I think about play in the sense of sort of the evolutionary sense that human beings have more play behaviors than other species, most of which have play behaviors, but also have way more instinctive behaviors as the species with the fewest instinctive behaviors.
00:02:11
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We have the most play behaviors, right?
00:02:12
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And that's
00:02:13
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gives us the opportunity to be responsive to our environment and to tinker with things and to ask good questions and to construct and reconstruct and deconstruct things that we don't understand.
00:02:25
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It's not so much, in my mind, an activity, you know, something that we do for fun, even though it is obviously still that, but really a thinking strategy.
00:02:35
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It seems like it's connected to fundamentally how we live our lives through any form of emotion, right?
Emotional Dynamics of Play
00:02:42
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It's the things that we not only obsess over, it's just who we are as a person is very much how we navigate through life is by playing and messing with things and reimagining things and doing stuff that we find cool.
00:02:55
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I know in your TED Talks, Susan, you talk about how even though we wouldn't necessarily design for sadness, sadness and being upset is a part of the human experience.
00:03:06
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And it's part of play, which is self-evident.
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If you've ever been around any young children, you know that they'll get around and be sad during play.
00:03:14
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But it's also part of adult play as well.
00:03:16
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To define a little bit more about play and emotion, is there a difference?
00:03:20
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in play when it comes to working with young children versus older children versus adults?
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Or is it kind of the same concept throughout?
00:03:28
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Because children and adults really see the world differently, right?
00:03:34
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Like they have a very different kind of consciousness.
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Alison Gopnik writes about a child's lantern consciousness.
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They don't see all the boundaries and dividing lines between things that adults have gotten really good
00:03:51
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at spotlighting, right?
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So we can turn our attention to something really specific and one's not better or worse.
00:03:58
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You know, in the best case scenario, the best kinds of learning environments, we honor both.
00:04:04
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Play as an attitude of kind of confidence in meeting up with things that we don't understand and valuing things that we don't yet have the answer to and asking questions
00:04:19
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and being open and being able to consider multiple perspectives and play the game of, well, what else could it be?
00:04:27
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What else could be going on here?
00:04:28
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It's pretty universal, right?
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It's whether you're three or 43 or whatever.
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So there's something that is best case scenario worth preserving there.
00:04:42
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But of course, what we're playing with and the kind of stakes to whether
00:04:48
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we play or don't play change, you know, over time.
Designing Emotional Learning Environments
00:04:52
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Everything that you're asking about already is like, well, we could spend six days just talking about that, which is great and fun and playful.
00:05:00
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There was something in the way that you framed your question, which was talking about the emotions of play.
00:05:07
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And I think that there is something about play and playfulness that
00:05:12
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that embraces the full range of emotions, that welcomes all of that into the space.
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And I think in schools, you know, when we think about barriers or approaches to play or obstacles there, we just haven't been very good in schools about welcoming all of that in.
00:05:34
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And so,
00:05:35
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I think that that can be a little scary for adults.
00:05:40
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Adults, I think, have more fear associated with play than young people do.
00:05:45
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It reminds me of, so recently we've been doing a lot of research into video game design.
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Not gamification, which I think in a second here, I want to ask like, what isn't play?
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Because there's like some like ways that we could twist this to make it into this concept.
00:06:00
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But one thing that's fascinating about video game design is designers will look at emotion as a map where in theory, you want folks to move from sadness to happiness, to joy, to relaxation.
00:06:15
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You want them to be constantly moving between and pinging between all these subtle, small scale emotions.
00:06:21
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If you program a learning environment so that people are, for example, always relaxed or always happy, that is incredibly boring.
00:06:30
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And I think that a lot of times when we think about classroom environments, the goal, sadly, is just to make them very one note.
00:06:39
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Like this is a calm space for someone who's 10 or 30, you know, whoever old they might be.
00:06:46
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After a while, that gets kind of dull, right?
00:06:48
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Right.
00:06:49
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So what is the relationship between then building spaces that foster play and building spaces that foster emotion?
00:06:58
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Is that the same thing?
00:06:59
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Well, I'm not sure that you could design a space that doesn't foster emotion, right?
00:07:06
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Because whatever, like we have, that's something that we don't ever walk away from.
00:07:12
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We can't leave at the door.
00:07:14
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We try to design spaces that try to do that, that try to encourage
00:07:19
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children especially to leave their students, learners of any kind, to leave their emotions at the door so we can just focus on their heads.
00:07:27
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You know, it's cleaner that way.
00:07:29
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It's less messy if people aren't in conflict or arguing with you about
00:07:34
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what the right answer to something is or that they have a different perspective or a different experience or, you know, like we can kind of clean that out and just focus on the, you know, which is sort of the intent, I think, of a lot of the book banning and curriculum decisions that are being legislated in certain places in the United States right now.
00:07:54
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Try to really buckle down and control that and imagine that motion just doesn't ever come in.
00:07:59
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But of course, that's absurd.
00:08:03
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Completely.
00:08:04
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And there's a neuroscience theory that articulates the importance of emotion to learning.
00:08:12
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We are in our most optimal state for learning when we have really high cognitive challenge and low emotional risk, but not a lack of emotion, right?
00:08:27
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If there's a lack of emotion, then we
Play vs. Gamification
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just call that boredom.
00:08:30
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And that's a terrible place to try and learn from.
00:08:33
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And we learn other things about ourselves and about what learning is.
00:08:37
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And, you know, if we are bored in school and then there's just the idea that learning to care about something implies that you have discovered that you have emotion about it, right?
00:08:49
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That you found out that you don't like the way something is and you want it to be different.
00:08:56
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You care.
00:08:57
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It is a question of engagement and learning just isn't,
00:09:02
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very useful without all that.
00:09:05
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I think that question of engagement, of agency, of participation is part of what I was thinking about when you framed that question that way.
00:09:16
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When you describe it as a video game designer or a teacher for that matter,
00:09:22
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If they're trying to create something that manipulates to a single note emotion, that was the image that I had when you asked that question.
00:09:34
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That doesn't give the person who's participating in that much space to participate.
00:09:40
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They're just being manipulated.
00:09:42
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They're just being soothed and dumbed into a space that
00:09:47
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They're being manipulated.
00:09:50
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And so there's not that kind of agency and participation.
00:09:52
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And I would say that that's very unplayful.
00:09:56
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They might be playing a game, but I do think that that's part of the answer to your question of when is it not play?
Transforming Education with Play
00:10:03
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When you're not present, it's not play.
00:10:07
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One thing I wanted to make clear from the onset, because I think this is a misnomer and I see it across a lot of your work as well as you're talking about play,
00:10:15
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that when folks hear play and they hear school, the first thing that they think of is gamification, badges, attaching traditional content to what would be seen in like a video game or board game setting.
00:10:31
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But that's not really what you're getting at across all of your work.
00:10:35
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Your work is a lot more transformational and systems-based.
00:10:38
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Can we briefly describe that?
00:10:40
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And then we'll get into some massive implications for this work.
00:10:43
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Briefly.
00:10:47
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Let's see.
00:10:49
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I think the first situation that you describe retains the assumption that adults, society, the culture has a body of predetermined information that children need to receive or retains the assumption that the world is known.
00:11:10
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And that school is a place where you're to receive that information.
00:11:15
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You're supposed to take on that knowledge of the way the world is.
00:11:21
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I'm not sure that that is so necessary anymore or even possible.
00:11:27
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I mean, there's all kinds of data about the way information is accumulating in the world right now and that you can't keep up with it.
00:11:36
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And I think that the biggest problem we get into is not being able to imagine something different.
Envisioning New Educational Relationships
00:11:43
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If you're not sitting in school to receive and accumulate this knowledge and this information, then why are you there?
00:11:49
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And so I think what we're talking about is changing the relationship between adults and children by taking very seriously the relationship between adulthood and childhood and recognizing how the imagination
00:12:05
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of adulthood really gates the experiences of childhood and the long-term implications.
00:12:12
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We see those outcomes all around.
00:12:16
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And so what else could it be?
00:12:18
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What kind of relationship?
00:12:20
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What kind of attention to interdependencies?
00:12:25
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What kind of ecosystem can you build inside a classroom?
00:12:30
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Which is such a great space, right?
00:12:33
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I mean, where else in the world do you get
00:12:36
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30 people to come together every day who don't know each other otherwise, who may not have met each other otherwise, and who get to spend six hours together for a long period of time and also get to go home and have a break from each other at the end of the day, right?
00:12:50
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And come back together and negotiate.
00:12:53
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Learn how to be with people that you might not have chosen to be with, that you can't understand or wouldn't understand otherwise, and practice.
00:13:02
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So what are we trying to practice?
00:13:04
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It really gets to all those questions about what's school for, what's the healthiest way to develop a stronger citizenry, right?
00:13:13
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A more productive and sustainable democracy.
00:13:17
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I think these are environments that are embracing the fact that the world as we know it is kind of broken.
00:13:24
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And so how do we practice not knowing in school
00:13:31
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building a different kind of relationship with our neighbors, with our fellow citizens than we can imagine right now.
00:13:37
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The classroom is just such a great potential laboratory for that kind of expression.
00:13:42
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We don't know what kind of world we could make if we focus there.
00:13:46
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What's interesting about talking about this topic, I don't know if this comes up in when you're working with schools, I'm sure it does, is that play is the most complex, simple idea.
00:13:55
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Like it's something that we all understand and we know what it is.
00:13:59
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Everyone does this.
00:14:00
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It's constant, right?
00:14:01
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It's part of our being.
00:14:02
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But yet so much of this feels over-engineered to fit into traditional schooling.
00:14:08
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It's like describing to an alien species what it means to play a game.
00:14:12
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It's a thing that we do.
00:14:13
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Everybody does it.
00:14:14
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It's awkward to describe.
00:14:15
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What I hear from you is I hear about the dichotomy between something being tapped on versus something being transformational.
00:14:23
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We're not just adding play onto the existing curriculum of school.
00:14:28
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We are transforming the curriculum of school to be more focused or in and of itself play.
00:14:35
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And you're all work at the Center for Playful Inquiry.
00:14:37
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You work with adults, schools, community members, et cetera, to transition into more of a play-based model.
00:14:46
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Does that mean that we're
Rethinking Educational Goals
00:14:47
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giving up old things?
00:14:49
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Like where does that start?
00:14:51
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What does that look like to start to embrace playful inquiry?
00:14:55
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There's a lot of work around, as I think Susan was just suggesting, and as I know your work really focuses on questions about what do we want schools to be?
00:15:07
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What are schools for?
00:15:09
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And if...
00:15:11
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The goal of school is to generate a body of people who know how to respond to a person in power's direction and
00:15:28
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serve them and figure out how to get the star sticker.
00:15:33
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If that's the goal, then maybe there is a role of highly gamified play to get there.
00:15:41
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There's a guy named Jamie Holmes who wrote this book called Nonsense, The Power of Not Knowing.
00:15:47
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And his line is, the central challenge today is to try and figure out what to do when you have no idea what to do.
00:15:55
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And so if that's it, there's this whole role for playful inquiry that's very different than trying to figure out how to put together a jigsaw puzzle that right away tells you, yes, right spot, no wrong spot, playing operation where you get the buzzer the second that you step out of line.
00:16:16
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I think that it really is a question of thinking about, especially right now in this moment of collapse, what do we want from our schools?
00:16:27
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What do we want the experience of children to be?
00:16:30
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What do we want the experience of how children and adults come together?
Embracing Uncertainty in Learning
00:16:35
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A lot of our work is thinking about what do adults want from that experience?
00:16:41
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Where do adults' values sit in that process?
00:16:46
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It's a practice of, I think, for teachers to figure out how the work that they're doing, the interactions that they're having with children, the extent to which those interactions and those decisions that they're making support those values and the distance that there might be, right?
00:17:04
Speaker
So that that itself is kind of looked at as a form of playfulness, right?
00:17:10
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That
00:17:10
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I'm never gonna get this absolutely right.
00:17:13
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I'm not gonna ever get to a place where I'm certain that the decisions that I make today are absolutely the right ones or that are gonna lead to a certain very predictable outcome.
00:17:26
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But that my work is about finding my way in making sense of my experience and my relationship with these children in this place and time right now, knowing that I'm gonna continue to learn also
00:17:39
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and bring me parts of myself to the work.
00:17:41
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So there's this just ongoing process of observation, reflection, and documentation, right?
00:17:48
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So what happened?
00:17:50
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What do I think about what happened?
00:17:51
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What am I going to do differently next time?
00:17:54
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Which is a playfulness, right?
00:17:56
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It's a way of making sense of your experience instead of being told or promised that
00:18:03
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that there's a way to induce experience that will guarantee that all your problems get solved because there's no such thing.
00:18:13
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We want to recognize that in the same way as Susan said, there's this remarkable gift of the classroom, of all these people coming together who would otherwise never meet each other and to
00:18:26
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try and figure something else out, something new out together, try and create new ideas together.
00:18:32
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It's also profoundly challenging, complicated, confounding, confusing, right?
00:18:39
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Like all of that, anybody who has ever taught knows that to be true.
00:18:45
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And if that's the case, then how can we
00:18:50
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stick with it?
00:18:51
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How can we find that to be interesting and provocative and life-giving?
00:18:57
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And playful inquiry is part of that, right?
00:19:00
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Like that requires a sense of playfulness and also a sense of social playfulness, both with the children that you're with and with your colleagues and with families.
00:19:11
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Yeah, to take this down to like ground level, when you're describing this to me, what I think of is, and I guess this is true both for very young children, but I come from teaching high school kids.
00:19:24
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For example, stopping class and discussing what we want to do next.
00:19:29
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What is it that kids want to do?
00:19:31
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We talk about that together.
00:19:32
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We have a conversation.
00:19:33
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It's wholesome.
00:19:34
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It's
Integrating Play with Curriculum
00:19:35
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joyous.
00:19:35
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We are just excited about learning stuff.
00:19:38
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And we go and do that thing, whether it be watch a video together, maybe it's a role playing activity, maybe it's dressing up or it's playing a literal game.
00:19:47
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I was always a big fan of this is not appropriate for younger kids, but we always played Jackbox games.
00:19:50
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And the kids love those games, party games.
00:19:53
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And sometimes that was standards driven.
00:19:56
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And sometimes it was not.
00:19:58
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Sometimes it was just we're just going to have fun.
00:20:00
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There's not any purpose to this outside of just community bonding because that is in and of itself important.
00:20:06
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How does a teacher who is listening into this and they're like, yeah, I agree with you and totally from a pedagogical angle, this all makes complete sense.
00:20:15
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How do they then wrap in what would be like their traditional content where they're thinking about seat time?
00:20:22
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They're thinking about, I need to cover these objective content standards.
00:20:24
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I need to do all these things.
00:20:26
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How do I make that play-based or where would I even start in thinking about that?
00:20:31
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Yeah, it's a question of, um,
00:20:34
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continuing to go upstream, do you find the source of the problem, a new set of questions to ask about not only what schools are for, but what kind of schools we need?
00:20:48
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Like, what do we need from school?
00:20:51
Speaker
I recognize what you're asking is that the reality of a lot of teachers currently is that they've got this list of stuff that they have to teach and they
00:21:01
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oftentimes have to teach it on a particular day at a particular time.
00:21:05
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And I'm not sure that I want to, I don't know, entertain too much the idea that that kind of curriculum that is printed by corporations who stand to profit off its sale, who profit off the sale of the test that goes along with it, that then gets to decide whether or not, you know, like,
00:21:30
Speaker
that system that is a choice is in any way supportive of where we need to go as a society that is in the midst of collapse, right?
00:21:44
Speaker
Like we can't pretend that all of the things that have taken us to where we are now are gonna get us back out of this mess, even if we have an extra hour for playtime, right?
00:21:53
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Like that's just, I don't think that that's true.
00:21:56
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That said, I think just
00:22:00
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Beginning to ask the question of like, what's wrong with this picture?
00:22:04
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What do I do with this tension of standardization and identity and an inquiry and democracy?
00:22:14
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Right.
00:22:14
Speaker
Like, how do those things even go together?
00:22:16
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And I'm not going to pretend that I have the answer to that.
00:22:20
Speaker
But I would like us to ask that question a little more often so that we're tangling with exactly this face, right?
00:22:26
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Like, what are we supposed to do about that?
00:22:28
Speaker
That doesn't make any sense, actually.
00:22:30
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Right.
00:22:31
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And so I don't think that there's a way to easily fix it.
00:22:35
Speaker
But I do hope that teachers will engage courageously in asking these kinds of questions because they're the right people to be to be asking them.
00:22:44
Speaker
I think your question could reflect and probably does reflect this really wide field of actual contexts that people are working in.
00:22:55
Speaker
I think that
Child-Led Learning Examples
00:22:56
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people might hear the question that you're asking and say, yeah, that's me.
00:23:02
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But each one of the people who are saying, yeah, that's me, are working in wildly different settings with wildly different demands.
00:23:09
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And so first it's thinking about like what actually is going on in your space and why that and why not something else.
00:23:17
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If you're in a setting where you've been handed a timed scripted curriculum,
00:23:23
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that says, here's what you need to do minute by minute, day by day, all the way through.
00:23:30
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There's just no space for play in that.
00:23:31
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I think you're right.
00:23:32
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If what you are trying to do is follow that, then I don't think that this has much to offer you other than to ask yourself, why are you saying yes to that?
00:23:44
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And
00:23:45
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Who is that helping?
00:23:47
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That's kind of one extreme.
00:23:48
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And then there's other spots in that spectrum that are around.
00:23:52
Speaker
I know that there's this element of mathematical thinking that I've been told all eight year olds should be getting to over the course of the year.
00:24:06
Speaker
And I'm not quite sure how to make that happen.
00:24:11
Speaker
And I'm trying to figure that out.
00:24:13
Speaker
and I'm trying to figure out what might be the role of play or playfulness in getting there, then I think that there's all sorts of space to get there.
00:24:22
Speaker
And it may be that even just observing children at play allows you to see connections between what children are actually doing and feeling and experiencing and bringing to the table and this outcome that you have been told those children have a right to consider, have a right to explore.
00:24:43
Speaker
Let's just maybe think of this moment.
00:24:45
Speaker
When I was in college, I used to tutor kindergarteners, first graders that struggled in school at the library.
00:24:52
Speaker
And I remember these are all kids who struggled with basic arithmetic and reading, at least on worksheets.
00:25:00
Speaker
So they were there to achieve help.
00:25:02
Speaker
It was like assigned by the school to go there.
00:25:04
Speaker
But there were all of these computers in the library that all had Minecraft.
00:25:09
Speaker
I think it was Minecraft.
00:25:10
Speaker
These kids were hooked on some of the most complex gaming systems and playing on those games with their friends constantly.
00:25:19
Speaker
And they were doing math and they were typing to each other in English.
00:25:24
Speaker
And it seems like they had all of those exact skills that they were learning.
00:25:29
Speaker
for lack of a better way of saying it, like not demonstrating, right?
00:25:32
Speaker
They weren't showing it on paper.
00:25:35
Speaker
There's a wild disconnect there between like, I'm doing it here and I'm not doing it here.
00:25:40
Speaker
And how do we connect those things together?
00:25:43
Speaker
We create this self-fulfilling prophecy, right?
00:25:45
Speaker
By creating this curriculum that is so meaningless, so scripted, so unnatural in the sense of like, it doesn't move us towards the kinds of things that we know human beings are
00:25:58
Speaker
want to be connected to like relationship, right?
00:26:01
Speaker
It just, it isolates us.
00:26:03
Speaker
And then children don't do very well with that oftentimes, especially when they're five or six years old.
00:26:10
Speaker
And then we say, oh, they can't do it or they don't want to, or they're not motivated or that, you know, like all of a sudden we have set up the situation in which just proves to us or reinforces the idea that children aren't very capable
00:26:27
Speaker
creative, interested, right, to begin with.
00:26:30
Speaker
And we take that as fact and forget that we could create entirely different environments in which we would see entirely different behaviors, entirely different responses to the world because there's no child that isn't interested in the world that they're a part of.
00:26:48
Speaker
And no child who doesn't wanna be in relationship with other people and no child that isn't curious
00:26:54
Speaker
It just doesn't happen.
00:26:55
Speaker
So when we don't see it in school, we don't spend enough time asking why not?
00:27:01
Speaker
What can we do differently?
Play as a Transformative Force
00:27:02
Speaker
In terms of pedagogical approaches, there's a huge number of different possibilities there just in what you've set up.
00:27:11
Speaker
One is to say, well, I know the answer.
00:27:14
Speaker
I'm going to create the Minecraft curriculum for these children.
00:27:18
Speaker
That would be one possibility.
00:27:21
Speaker
Another possibility is, I'm just going to let kids do whatever they want to do, and I'm just going to sit back and I'm going to do whatever I want to do.
00:27:28
Speaker
I'm just going to be aloof to that.
00:27:31
Speaker
But I think that there's another space of being able to say, oh, I think maybe what these children care about and are driven by is related to something that they haven't had access to yet or don't have language for yet or haven't had common experiences around yet.
00:27:53
Speaker
And I want to try and figure out how to play with that, how to put some of that forward and pay attention to what happens and see what grows there.
00:28:01
Speaker
Create a space where all of the children are also paying attention to that, trying to make sense of that, reflecting on that and growing some new ideas together.
00:28:11
Speaker
It sounds like what you all are very much getting at is the systemic language surrounding relationship building where
00:28:19
Speaker
It's not a day goes by where a professional development person says, you need to focus on relationships.
00:28:24
Speaker
But we often don't talk about what that really means at a systemic angle.
00:28:30
Speaker
And to build relationships is very much seeing play as a different way of looking at the world.
00:28:36
Speaker
Susan, earlier you kind of alluded to that Frarian notion of moving away from the empty vessels of worms, where they're bringing something to the table.
00:28:45
Speaker
Having relationships with young people means that
00:28:48
Speaker
you let them teach you and let them into their world, which doesn't mean that you need to invade their world with curriculum on top of what they're already doing.
00:28:58
Speaker
It's finding what they're already doing and bringing that just to the table as what it is.
00:29:03
Speaker
I think about kindergarten classrooms, first grade classrooms, where kids are just pumped at school.
00:29:09
Speaker
They are ready to learn about space and dinosaurs and reading stuff.
00:29:13
Speaker
And it's cool.
00:29:14
Speaker
Every hand goes up.
00:29:15
Speaker
And over time, the more and more that school experience becomes disconnected from that daily lived experience and who they are and what they want to do, which is have fun and play games and everything that goes along with that, they lose that joy and wonder of learning, at least in a traditional school sense.
00:29:33
Speaker
They're learning stuff.
00:29:34
Speaker
It's just not defined by school as quote unquote learning.
00:29:38
Speaker
What are your thoughts about play in a period of hope?
00:29:42
Speaker
play as a way to escape so many of the struggles that we see today in the education system and the world at large.
00:29:49
Speaker
How can play foster a better outcome for what we're seeing amongst young people?
00:29:54
Speaker
We're so trained to believe that this has to be hard, unpleasant, practically like children need to be inoculated with the alphabet or something like, really, this is going to hurt you, me, more than it hurts you, whatever that's saying.
00:30:07
Speaker
Right?
00:30:09
Speaker
Instead of recognizing that there's a lot of learning and connection and imagination and possibility and hope and trust and creativity that happens when you feel really good.
00:30:24
Speaker
Like we don't have to be afraid of having those feelings of belonging, right?
00:30:30
Speaker
Those feelings of curiosity, those feelings of like really caring about something and making space for that.
00:30:38
Speaker
And,
00:30:39
Speaker
As long as we're doing that, as long as we're caring deeply about things in the company of other people, you can be guaranteed that you're going to get into conflict with them, right?
00:30:50
Speaker
And as long as the classroom is a place where it really matters what I care about, what you care about, because we couldn't have this experience together if you weren't here and I wasn't here.
00:31:03
Speaker
This would be a completely different curriculum if you and I didn't show up.
00:31:08
Speaker
one day.
00:31:08
Speaker
We matter that much to what's happening here.
00:31:11
Speaker
That's what participation really is, right?
00:31:14
Speaker
And of course, people want to learn how to write.
00:31:15
Speaker
And of course, people want to learn how to read.
00:31:17
Speaker
They have to.
00:31:18
Speaker
because they can't continue to grow and expand and find out new things and continue to be curious and argue with their friends,
Overcoming Complacency in Education
00:31:26
Speaker
right?
00:31:26
Speaker
If they don't have that information and can't be increasingly skillful in taking all the chaos that's inside every single one of us and turning it out into some
00:31:41
Speaker
organized way that we can share ourselves with other people and they can share themselves with us, right?
00:31:47
Speaker
Like that's what learning is when it's at its best, this process and this ongoing process of taking things in and turning them back out again in the company of other people that are doing the same thing.
00:31:57
Speaker
That's how we build the world together.
00:31:59
Speaker
So why can't the world be a place where that feels good, even when it's hard?
00:32:04
Speaker
Susan earlier was talking about play as an improvisational act, as an act of imagination.
00:32:11
Speaker
What else could this be?
00:32:13
Speaker
And there's something right there in terms of the definition of hope, right?
00:32:18
Speaker
That you're looking at something and imagining some kind of possibility that exists right at the edge of there, some kind of transformation that
00:32:27
Speaker
that you might be a part of.
00:32:29
Speaker
And I think that stands right against, like, Dewey has that line about the real enemy in education is the humdrum, right?
00:32:37
Speaker
Like this kind of bureaucratic deadness that might exist.
00:32:41
Speaker
And that's where hope dies.
00:32:44
Speaker
That's the absence of hope right there.
00:32:46
Speaker
And instead, we are trying to create a space of possibility
00:32:53
Speaker
that is not absent current perception, right?
00:32:58
Speaker
Includes current perception, includes current interpretation, but also sees that it doesn't have to be this way.
00:33:06
Speaker
You know, a 10 year old told us once in the midst of a much bigger conversation that was incredibly interesting, but she told us that, you know, play is the antidote to complacency.
Embracing Joyful Educational Change
00:33:19
Speaker
And I think that she pretty much nailed it right there.
00:33:22
Speaker
Because it sits at the heart of making meaning.
00:33:26
Speaker
Those themes are so powerful, right?
00:33:28
Speaker
Themes of joyful struggle or imagining a better world or recognizing that the reason why it's difficult to go into the definitions of these things is that technically tomorrow we could all wake up and decide, hey, we're just going to do school this way now.
00:33:44
Speaker
And we just do it.
00:33:45
Speaker
That is possible.
00:33:46
Speaker
I think about the Graeber quote, or I'm paraphrasing, but it's something like the utmost hidden truth of the world is that it can be changed.
00:33:55
Speaker
The idea that all of these things are constructed by people.
00:33:58
Speaker
So if we want to create playful, joyful classrooms, just go start making playful, joyful classrooms.
00:34:04
Speaker
It doesn't require a doctorate degree in education.
00:34:07
Speaker
Just go have fun with kids and talk to them about what's going on.
00:34:10
Speaker
And it will feel a whole lot better than if you're not doing that, right?
00:34:14
Speaker
Like there's a specific immediate benefit there.
00:34:20
Speaker
Other really important aspects to this work, I think beauty being one of them.
00:34:25
Speaker
Not because it's about making some kind of subjective judgment on what's beautiful or not, but because beauty is...
00:34:32
Speaker
is something that draws us towards each other, draws us in, right?
00:34:36
Speaker
It heightens our perceptions and our interest in the world.
00:34:40
Speaker
And beauty is something that makes us feel like we can make stuff, right?
00:34:45
Speaker
It makes us want to make things.
00:34:48
Speaker
And it gives us an opportunity to really sit in an understanding that we can make enough to go around.
00:34:56
Speaker
Beauty and justice go hand in hand.
00:35:00
Speaker
just like play and democracy go hand in hand, right?
00:35:05
Speaker
These are wholly different ways of approaching the experience of education and redesigning relationships in school that attend to complexity and to the complexity of joy, that it's not like a party.
00:35:23
Speaker
It's complicated and it's full of emotion and possibility, good news, bad news.
00:35:29
Speaker
And in between, it's all there.
00:35:32
Speaker
And we need it all.
00:35:33
Speaker
That's what we want as human beings.
00:35:35
Speaker
It's definitely a feel-good conversation.
00:35:38
Speaker
And I appreciate you all sharing this today because oftentimes folks that obsess about like educational theory and research and changing schools, it naturally lends itself to a very cynical space, a very nihilistic space, because it's difficult to do this work.
00:35:53
Speaker
It's not easy.
00:35:54
Speaker
And there's a lot of forces that are kind of working against you.
00:35:57
Speaker
But when you can offer this joyous, hopeful message, you're making other people actually want to do it as opposed to just like joining you in misery.
00:36:07
Speaker
Right.
00:36:07
Speaker
So, yeah, it's powerful.
00:36:09
Speaker
There's a tremendous amount of theory, you know, and, and behind this and that this is where it's led us to is to this set of beliefs.
00:36:21
Speaker
Right.
00:36:21
Speaker
And it's fueled by,
00:36:24
Speaker
more than 20 years of experiences right alongside children, right?
00:36:28
Speaker
Who really have taught us that working together in this way is the way to go.
00:36:35
Speaker
It's better.
00:36:36
Speaker
It feels good.
00:36:36
Speaker
It's fun.
00:36:37
Speaker
It's meaningful.
00:36:38
Speaker
It's hard, but it's a kind of hard that makes you want to come back again and try again the next day.
00:36:45
Speaker
Which maybe is another definition of play.
00:36:46
Speaker
Yeah.
00:36:47
Speaker
The kind of hard that makes you want to keep coming back for more.
00:36:53
Speaker
Thank you again for listening to our podcast at Human Restoration Project.
00:36:57
Speaker
I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to start making change.
00:37:00
Speaker
If you enjoyed listening, please consider leaving us a review on your favorite podcast player.
00:37:05
Speaker
Plus, find a whole host of free resources, writings, and other podcasts all for free on our website, humanrestorationproject.org.
00:37:11
Speaker
Thank you.