As a child, I enjoyed playing on my own, being immersed in creating fantastic fantasy worlds while inventing unique problems for my imaginary characters and finding creative solutions for them. However, playâs full potential truly manifested itself for me only when I was outside with friends. During my early years, growing up in a suburb in Slovenia, my friends and I were awarded with extensive freedom to explore our neighbourhood and its community. My parents trusted me to keep myself safe and to learn from my mistakes alongside my friends.
I remember these friendships as deep and meaningful. We knew each other well and appreciated each otherâs individuality. Using our creative thinking, we invented and reinvented play scenarios and games daily, constructed huts, and went for adventure walks in the forest or bicycle trips to other adjacent neighbourhoods. The excitement when faced with a yet unexplored place or unexperienced engagement flared up exhilaration and joy with a determination to explore and solve the presented mysteries. Play made life an adventure. It felt as though our options were limitless, and this filled me with a sense of freedom that I have brought with me into adulthood. Engaging in collaborative play also made me part of something I treasured and loved, bringing a sense of purpose to my world. I knew that I could find refuge from childhoodâs troubles and occasional harsh realities in the embrace of free play, sharing burdens with my friends.
When I migrated to New Zealand in 2007, I was delighted to encounter an early education context that valued play. This prompted me to extend my teaching qualification to the ECE sector. Being an active, life-long player, I appreciated the status granted to play in the curriculum and found it amazing to work alongside people who did the same. However, I also quickly noticed that play was often utilised as a tool for structured learning, whereas children would lose their prerogative for free will and choices in play. I observed how adults imposed their views and attempted to mould play in line with their designs without realising how their intervention caused a drop in motivation for children to continue playing and the negative impact on their creativity. For example, educators may feel they need to assert themselves as âteachersâ and take the play of children over to mediate academic learning, such as teaching the children colours, letters and mathematical concepts in their care. I felt a tension in this space as I observed well-intended, adult-guided academic
I became concerned that the current tendency to frame play as a didactic tool for academic teaching and learning was detrimental to childrenâs development and their right to play freely. Many of the values I identified above as important to me as a child were being eroded by those who objectify and intellectualise play and impose their views of play on others. I could see how innovative thinking and creative freedom were stifled alongside play, and I observed teachersâ frustration when they tried to articulate the importance of free play to others whose ears were wide shut. With increasing pressures for outcomes, I could see adult eyes glancing away from children at play, convinced they were not missing anything important. At the same time, their gazes were instead pulled towards standardised academic learning dictated by a prescribed curriculum. I wondered how the deprivation of play activities affected childrenâs development, well-being and belonging. Time to play is decreasing at home, in schools, early years centres and in the curriculum. While many adults believe that what they are doing is for their childrenâs futures, no one takes the time to listen to the ones those changes affect the most â the children.
My observations made me think deeply about play, its meaning, essential properties and inner workings. As a result, specific thoughts and attitudes have crystallised. However, these conceptions of play were overwhelmingly influenced by the feelings that accompanied them, and these conjured up memories, many from childhood but not all. When I brainstormed words that I associated with play and observed its many-layered connotations, I wondered about the subjective nature of these concepts. The words that manifested when thinking about play mostly describe states of being. I associated play with joy, fun, laughter, happiness, love, friendship, freedom, exploring the worldâs unlimited possibilities, creativity, refuge, ownership, excitement, purpose, being me and expressing myself, sharing, being active, and belonging.
As I formulated my personal meaning of play, I could not detach my affective self from the concept. Most of these words carry an aesthetic, spiritual, and perhaps even an esoteric connotation due to the deep connection to emotions and my inner being, which receives its impulses from life itself. They also represented my connectedness with the world and others that inhabit it. Through the ages, philosophers have meditated on these notions of freedom, happiness, purpose, individuality, love, and creativity and have not arrived at a common definition. How, then, can I expect to define what play is if, for me, it encompasses notions that themselves elude conceptualisation?
If we do not objectify play at all, can we still think about it, muse about it, and have conversations about it, since arguably, as soon as we do any of these, we render play an object of our thoughts, musings and discussions? In other words, if I am claiming that play is not an object and that it â in its unobjectifiable way â eludes all conceptualisation, I am paradoxically saying it is not an object while simultaneously making it one. This would then mean that any discussion about play would be a lie. This book would be a lie. While, in essence, I believe this to be true, if I did adhere to this thinking completely, this would make for a very short book: âPlay is not an object, so do not write about itâ. There is a difference between talking about play as a fluid, elusive, subjective matter that manifests itself differently for different people in different circumstances and intellectualising it by attaching certain absolute qualities to it while cataloguing objectifiable truths about the phenomenon.
I have decided not to take the latter approach in my attempt to explain play but rather to metacognitively moderate objectifying tendencies to instead focus on subjective experiences with play while keeping in mind that this is all they are â impressions, subjective perceptions, realisations and insights. I consider that taking the approach of learning about how play is conceptualised subjectively does not make it any less interesting from a researcherâs point of view, especially as subjective interpretations of play may carry a certain kind of intrinsic âknowingâ that could be attained by experiencing play through the act of playing that surges in oneself as innately purposeful as life itself.
If the purpose of play is to play, what is then the purpose of playing? Play carries an important role in the development of life skills of any mammal, such as skills that will enable us to survive, provide for ourselves and establish a successful existence that will allow for the procreation of life. This sentence may illustrate the critical link between play and life: play enables life, and life enables play. Play is also important for developing social skills; for example,
Now, I am asking myself about the connection between play and learning. I struggled to clarify this relationship at the start of my journey with this book. Play and learning are almost synonyms in early childhood education. However, while I did understand the developmental functions of play, I was still hesitant to imply the same level of importance of play for learning. Play can have some advantageous effects on certain types of learning that are closely connected with the development of social or motor skills. However, I was not sure if play was as strongly linked to the cognitive acquisition of abstract knowledge (academic learning) as many people believed. My engagement with this book answered this and many other questions for me and the teachers involved in the study.