Cognition, Thinking & Understanding

It is afterschool time in the Creator Space. Four 10-year-old students are using the iPads to explore a tangram challenge on the Osmo app. An 8-year-old boy is navigating a Wonder Workshop robot around the space, sending it dodging under tables and chairs. Three girls from P4 are using beads and hot glue guns to make bracelets, and there is a steady stream of 6- and 7-year-olds building houses and rockets inside of the enclosed LEGO bench. With so many tools and materials to choose from, it is surprising that there are no children from the Kindergarten classrooms. Two 5-year-old girls from K3A walk through the space with Marina Benavente Barbon, their K3A teacher, on the way to the nurse. They look around and pause to ask older children what they are working on, but quickly lose interest and leave. Later, when asked why the Kindergarten classes don’t use the space throughout the day, Marina replies “it feels like a big-kids room.”

 

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People from all around the world know about Washington, DC. They talk about it, write about it, draw it, and make movies and TV shows about it. But almost always, we hear only the opinions and ideas of adults.

 

For this book we invited some of our youngest citizens—preschoolers, kindergartners, and first graders from DC Bilingual Public Charter School, Sacred Heart School, Seaton Elementary School (DCPS), E.W. Stokes Community Freedom Public Charter School, Sunshine Early Learning Center, and J.O. Wilson Elementary School (DCPS)—to tell us what they think of our city. We asked them to share their ideas in order to help other children (and adults) learn about what is important about DC. We asked their teachers to help students research the city and discuss their ideas with classmates and children from the other schools. Each teacher guided the children in different ways. The result is Washington, DC: "What People Like Most is in This Book!,” a title suggested by the children that conveys their connection to their city. In this book you will find a set of descriptions, theories, and stories—shared in pictures, words, and photographs—that are thoughtful, informative, and sometimes surprising. As Sergio Spaggiari, a veteran educator from Reggio Emilia, Italy, notes, "It seems that for cities to be understood and appreciated, they should be talked about in stories." You can learn a lot about our city from the stories in this book.

 

Jim Reese

Director, The Professional Development Collaborative at

Washington International School

 

On behalf of the Children Are Citizens coordinating team: Mara Krechevsky, Ben Mardell, Nathalie Ryan, Joanne Seelig, Stacy Steyaert, and Tim Wright

 

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Making room for playful learning in school can be difficult. Formidable tensions exist between playful learning and the way pedagogy is currently structured in most schools. Educators often differ in how they value playful learning practices and their understandings of the nature of play. For, what is playful to one learner may not be experienced as playful by another. To those who view play as a central pathway for learning, resources such as time, space, and materials can seem in short supply. To those who see play as silly and off-task, encouraging playful learning can run counter to educational policies that emphasize efficient coverage of the curriculum. 

 

We believe that a pedagogy of play—a systematic approach to the practice of playful learning and teaching—is needed to bridge these tensions. Creating and operationalizing such a pedagogy requires a school culture where playfulness is celebrated, examined, made visible, and better understood as a powerful pathway of learning. Indeed, bringing play into a central role in a school entails creating a culture that values the core tenets of play: taking risks, making mistakes, exploring new ideas, and experiencing joy.

 

The purpose of this paper is to share ideas that are emerging from a recent research initiative called a Pedagogy of Play that explores how playful learning can assume a central role in school. 

 

The Pedagogy of Play project aspires to change the way that educators, family members, and policy makers think about play and learning through play, and to offer tools and resources for those wishing to systemically bring more playful learning to schools. This endeavor requires both a solid understanding of what is meant by play, playful, and playful learning, and an exploration of the structures, strategies, and systems that encourage (and sustain) the integration of ideas around play into the school experience. To these ends, the Pedagogy of Play research initiative is centered around four core research questions:
 

 

We address these questions through a new research model called playful participatory research, a collaboration among Project Zero (PZ), the International School of Billund (ISB), and the LEGO Foundation. This paper serves to describe this methodology and share some of the ideas that have emerged from the first year of the ISB-PZ research partnership.