Why Play Must Walk Hand-in-Hand with Schooling: Responding to NAEP and The Atlantic

from collage journal

Well, we may first tell what the map is not. The map is not a substitute for a personal experience. The map does not take the place of an actual journey. The logically formulated material of a science or branch of learning, of a study, is no substitute for the having of individual experiences. The mathematical formula for a falling body does not take the place of personal contact and immediate individual experience with the falling thing. But the map, a summary, an arranged and orderly view of previous experiences, serves as a guide to future experience; it gives direction; it facilitates control; it economizes effort, preventing useless wandering, and pointing out the paths which lead most quickly and most certainly to a desired result. [Dewey, John. The Child and the Curriculum (Kindle Locations 188-193). Kindle Edition.)

I. 

I love this brief video of Christy Hale accepting the 2013 Boston Globe Honor Book award for her book,  Dreaming Up: A Celebration of Building (published by Lee & Low Book Publishers). Hope you'll listen as she's so observant and wise. 




Hale says.

 "...there is little distinction between the building play of children and the innovative work of architects.When a child drapes a blanket between two chairs to make a fort and Japanese architect Kenzo Tange engineers the world’s longest suspension roof for Yoyogi National Gymnasium, both use the same design thinking. When a child stacks cup on cup, up and up, and Argentinean architect Cesar Pelli builds the world’s tallest twin buildings (the Petronas Towers), both reach for the sky. “Play is the answer to how anything new comes about,” developmental psychologist Jean Piaget said.

I have been knee deep this last month designing K-3 ELA units that focus on engineering, design, architecture.  None of it will matter much if play doesn't accompany the reading. I'm halfway through designing a kindergarten unit that features Dreaming Up: A Celebration of Building and Robert Louis Stevenson's lovely poem, "Block City." I want to recommend that play with blocks, water, and sand accompany the more common ELA learning, but I wonder just how many kindergartens still have these in light of our national obsession with school reading and school math. 

My friend, Jane Gangi sent me a link recently to an article about the NAEP results and how flat reading scores remain. In "Why American Students Haven't Gotten Better at Reading in 20 Years,"  experts, like Daniel Willingham, shine a light on the common sense notion that prior knowledge matters when reading be you 5 or 50. 

The author of the article, Natalie Wexler, writes:

Willingham explained that whether or not readers understand a text depends far more on how much background knowledge and vocabulary they have relating to the topic than on how much they’ve practiced comprehension skills. That’s because writers leave out a lot of information that they assume readers will know. If they put all the information in, their writing would be tedious. 

But if readers can’t supply the missing information, they have a hard time making sense of the text. If students arrive at high school without knowing who won the Civil War they’ll have a hard time understanding a textbook passage about Reconstruction.

Reading the article brought me back 7 years ago when I was working for a client. The curriculum director was quite upset because I was teaching faculty that prior knowledge plays a role in how we make sense of the world--be it a written text or a lived experience. At the time, ELA Common Core Standards author, David Coleman had been busy discussing pre-reading strategies. To me, his language was reckless and many administrators took his words to heart and banned providing students with any background knowledge at all.  

None.
Zip.
Zero.

We know this is a disservice and in fairness to Coleman I suspect his rhetoric was not intending to harm learners. But the interpretations of what he said, surely did do that. One only has to look at NAEP scores to understand that outcome. Yet, that reckless language and what followed never seem to get mentioned.

Knowledge matters.  It mattered in 2011 and it matters today. Be it general, content-specific, procedural, or schematic--knowing is important when we want to learn more. I think of it like that lovely line in Frost's poem about the woods: Way leads on to way. 

Knowledge though isn't simply a matter of assigning a topic and studying it.  Our understanding of the same 'topic' shifts and often deepens and perhaps becomes even more complicated as we age and/or as we learn. This is why Wexler's curricular advice in the article should have been pulled. (Are there education editors at Atlantic?) Wexler concludes:

The implication is clear. The best way to boost students’ reading comprehension is to expand their knowledge and vocabulary by teaching them history, science, literature, and the arts, using curricula that that guide kids through a logical sequence from one year to the next: for example, Native Americans and Columbus in kindergarten; the colonial era and the American Revolution in first grade; the War of 1812 and the Civil War in second grade, and so on. That approach enables children to make sense of what they’re learning, and the repetition of concepts and vocabulary in different contexts makes it more likely they’ll retain information. Not to mention that learning content like this can be a lot more engaging for both students and teachers than the endless practice of illusory skills.

The best way? Image "engaging" 5-year-olds in the study of the genocide of indigenous people. Or treating 6, 7 and 8-year-olds to a steady diet of war, war, and war.  This 'advice' fails to understand the more iterative nature of learning and assumes learning can be encapsulated and digested like an antacid. Meanwhile, developmental appropriateness is sorely missing.

II. 

Dewey told us a hundred years ago that the child and the curriculum are co-specifying. He wrote:

Classification is not a matter of child experience; things do not come to the individual pigeonholed. The vital ties of affection, the connecting bonds of activity, hold together the variety of his personal experiences. (Dewey, John. The Child and the Curriculum (Kindle Locations 39-40). Kindle Edition.)

Experience and content need to walk together. The child's recalled experience that makes sense of this new 'content' is the 'vital ties of affection' that we, who work with children so often forget and educational publishing companies and pundits never really knew. 

Christy Hale gets this. She concludes her speech by saying, "Children, architects, artists, and writers all know that play and work are one." 

In our desire to create STEM-proficient learners and better NAEP performers, let's not forget play. It seems ironic to me that play could ever be left outside like some poor relation. In the engineering and design processes, play is the foundation--the trial and error, the reimagining, the rebuilding from earlier attempts, the false starts, the lines of flight.  

Play is the embodiment of the vital tie of affection that gives rise to meaning.  It's as essential as breathing. 

A Brief Introduction to Rhizomatics Via Sheri Leafgren’s Reuben’s Fall

prepared by Jane M. Gangi, Ph. D.

Last semester Driscoll (2005), in Psychology of Learning and Instruction, discussed rhizomes in connection with constructivism:

The rhizome is a tangle of tubers with no apparent beginning or end. It constantly changes shape, and every point in it appears to be connected with every other point. Break the rhizome anywhere and the only effect is that new connections will be grown. The rhizome models the unlimited potential for knowledge construction, because it has no fixed points…and no particular organization. (p. 389)

Driscoll thinks of “spaghetti”; Eco thinks of “marbles”; I think of daffodils.

Sheri Leafgren (2009) thinks of Reuben’s fall:

Reuben fell. My professional life defined itself eighteen years ago when Reuben fell on the hard school-linoleum floor outside my classroom door. I was a young(er) person and a more naïve teacher at the time, blithely enjoying my lively class of kindergartners, covertly noticing some of the more interesting children in the kindergarten class down the hall, and on that morning, fully engaged in minding the interactions of the children in my own classroom when I heard the hard smack and muffled grunt signaling Reuben’s fall. When I went to the door to see had happened to disturb the commonplace silent, gender-based, double-lined trek connecting Mrs. Buttercup’s kindergarten class to the restrooms at the end of the hall, I witnessed a significant event.

            In the aftermath of Reuben’s fall, Julian—one of those spirited, full-of-verve, curious, “bad” children whom I had coveted for my own classroom—had left his place in the back of the line to reach Reuben where he had fallen near the front of the boys’ line and, as I  arrived at the door, was helping him off the floor, asking, ‘Reuben, are you okay?’

            As the other children steadfastly maintained their places in their straight, silent, boy and girl lines, Mrs. Buttercup shook her head, held up two fingers, and said to Julian: “That’s two, Julian. You are out of line and you are talking. You’re on the wall at recess.” (p. 15)

As a result of Reuben’s fall and Julian being made to stand on the wall, Leafgren conducted research on disobedience and wrote a dissertation. Her dissertation resulted in the book, Reuben’s Fall.

James Baldwin

“The greatest achievement of art is the ‘laying bare of questions which have been hidden by answers’” (as cited in Leafgren, 2009, p. 110). So, asserts Leafgren, is great research.

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical framework for Leafgren’s dissertation (and book) comes largely from Gilles Deleuze and Feliz Guattari (1987): “In developing a comparison between a rhizome and a tree as a metaphor of the contrast between two forms of logic, they name the tree’s linear structure—from roots through the trunk, to the branches—as a metaphor of the fixed, determining and linear logic that explains things in terms of cause-and-effect relationships…” (p. 36). In contrast with this vertical structure is the rhizomes lateral structure.

Leafgren’s 5 lines of inquiry on classroom disobedience:

1.     Disobedience (and childhood itself) as a form of deficiency (developmental, moral/religious, social, and behavioral) and/or as problems to be solved.

2.     The need for a particular order and control in schools and the means of achieving child compliance—and, as a result, “a positive, productive classroom atmosphere conducive to student learning…

3.     The teacher’s perspective and role in children’s moral and social behaviors, and the complexity of child compliance. Often discussed from a constructivist perspective in comparison to the more behaviorist approaches in the two prior categories, the goal here, however, is the same—to assert the authority of the teacher, but as a moral authority instead of a coercive one.

4.     The political, philosophical, and spiritual constraints of school morality. Within this category are researchers who study the state of school itself and authors who, with a more philosophical bent, write about the ideals of school(ing) in contrast to what they perceive as the state of school.

5.     The value of dissent and noncompliance toward an authentic democratic good life, reflecting Ralph Waldo Emerson’s caution: “your goodness must have some edge to it—else it is none” … (p. 19)

Leafgren’s rationale for using rhizoanalysis as methodology:

…identities grow and shift rhizomatically. And so, ways of researching with children also need to be rhizomatic—overlapping, multi-focal and shifting with time. Rhizoanalysis challenges the idea that one moment in a child’s life may be “caused” by his/her stage of child development, his/her gender, his/her teacher or by what another child said or did. Scientific findings of research using the representational “tree logic” of cause and effect are difficult to implement in education because humans in schools are embedded in complex and changing networks of being and social interaction. As each participant in every interaction has variable power to affect one another from day to day, and in the ordinary events of life, the generalizability of these educational research findings is greatly limited (Berliner 2002, McNaughton 2003). The non-representational lateral logic of rhizoanalysis serves to create tensions related to “changeability, diversity, ‘noisiness’ (complexity)” and so highlights the complex and shifting links between…gender, cognition, class, race, culture, obedience, and compliance as the links shoot in unpredictable ways into a particular moment in a child’s life…. (p. 22)

Leafgren’s Research Questions:

1.     In what ways do the kindergarten children disobey in the context of the kindergarten classroom?

2.     In what ways are the kindergartners’ moments of disobedience representations and enactments of something more than merely disobedience?

3.     In what ways are the kindergartners’ moments of disobedience opportunities for responding to others in caring, ethical ways and for acting out the possibilities that a spiritual childhood provides, such as reverence, awe, wonder, reflection, vision, commitment and purpose; and the sensitivities in awareness sensing, mystery sensing, and value sensing…? (p. 83)

Connections between rhizoanalysis and “Dissent and the Democratic Good Life” (Leagren, 2009, p. 77)

Butchart (1995)

Since the fifties, disciplinary literature has fallen silent on the long-term social objectives of school discipline, stressing the immediate control of students. The emphasis has shifted from ends to means and strategies. Rather than developing philosophies of discipline linked to visions of a preferred social order, writers have developed systems and models whose only criterion for success is their short-term goal of classroom order.

Dewey (1985):

[Democracy is]

Simultaneously a way of life, an ethical ideal, and personal commitment. Specifically, it is a way of life in which individuals are presumed to be self-directing and able to pursue their own goals and projects. No society that maintains order through constant supervision and/or coercion can be rightly called democratic. Further, individual benefit and the common good are mutually enhancing in a democracy. (as cited in Leafgren, 2009, p. 119).

More from Deleuze and Guattari:

Rhizomatic thought is multiplicitous, moving in many directions and connected to many other lines of thinking, acting, and being. Rhizomatic thinking deterrorializes arbolic striated spaces and ways of being. Rhizomes are networks…build[ing] links between pre-existing gaps between nodes that are separated by categories and order of segmented thinking. (as cited in Leafgren, 2009, p. 90).

Rhizomes are about mapping new or unknown lines and entry points, not tracing which records old lines or patterns. (as cited in Leafgren, 2009, p. 23)

In conclusion, Leafgren (2009):

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I worry about small things being lost. Children are not just small things themselves—they are great appreciators of small things: a silly joke, a fly crawling on the window, a ray of sunlight, a tickle fight, a secret” (p. 248).

“The memory of Reuben’s fall forever serves as a symbol of my resistance to order for the sake of order, valuing control over concern and sacrificing kindness to a keeping of the rules” (p. 253).

References

Driscoll, M. P. (2005). Psychology of learning and instruction (3^rd ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Leafgren, S. L. (2009). Reuben’s fall: A rhizomatic analysis of disobedience in kindergarten. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.

For Further Reading

Deleuze, G.

Guattari, .

More Thoughts

George Betts (creator of the Autonomous Learner Model) at the University of Northern Colorado was invited to study high school drop-outs. By hanging out on street corners, he gradually coaxed them back to school. Once there, he gave them IQ tests, which showed them to be off-the-charts (NOTE: I am not a huge IQ fan [see S. J. Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man, 2^nd ed., for the whole sorry history of IQ testing]; they are easy to undertest and hard to overtest, so that is where Betts’s information is helpful).  Betts called them “disenchanted” and tried, in the Autonomous Learner Model, to formulate ways that would make school more engaging to bright, although often disobedient, students.