Play and Social Justice

The Nature of Play

About a year ago, I was asked to give a talk on the importance of play to a group of families from South India. To ensure my audience understood what I meant by play, I started the presentation with my video clip of a man at a park playing ball with his dog. The dog had a slight limp, but when the ball was thrown, he ran, leaped for the ball, and carried it back to the man, tail wagging. However, the man’s affect was flat, and his movements were mechanical as he collected the ball from the dog and threw it again using a ball launcher. I asked my audience whether the dog was playing and received a “yes” from adults and children alike. Then, I asked whether the man was playing, and my audience gave a unanimous “no.” Like many play observers, they recognized play.

But defining play is harder. Just what is there about play that makes it easy to identify but hard to define? Various play theorists and researchers have attempted to define play. According to Klugman and Fasoli (1995), play includes some, but not necessarily all, of the following characteristics/elements: intrinsically motivated, freely chosen, enjoyable, actively engaging, mind-involving, and non-literal. Stuart Brown, psychiatrist and co-founder of the National Institute of Play, lists the following properties of play: (a) apparently purposeless, (b) voluntary, (c) inherently attractive, (d) free from constraints of time, (e) diminished consciousness of self, (f) improvisational potential, and (g) desire to continue (Brown, 2009). Research Professor Peter Gray, defines play as including some, but not necessarily all, of the following qualities: (a) “self-chosen and self-directed;” (b) “activity in which means are more valued than ends;” (c) “guided by mental rules;” (d) “non-literal, imaginative, marked off in some way from reality;” and (e) involving “an active, alert, but non-stressed frame of mind” (Gray, 2015a, pp. 139–153). Folklorist and play theorist Brian Sutton-Smith (1997, p. 229) concludes that “variability is the key to play, and that structurally play is characterized by quirkiness, redundancy, and flexibility.”

These various definitions and descriptions include a variety of self-motivated, enjoyable behaviors. Many creatures play. When dolphins blow bubble rings and then swim through them, gerbil pups engage in play fighting, rats run in a wheel without external motivation, and crows poke and prod objects to find out more about them, they are playing rather than engaging in survival behaviors. Yet survival may depend on the skills they learn through their play. Rats in enriched play environments develop more complex brain connections than play-deprived rats. Animal researcher, Jaak Panksepp concluded that for humans, as well as rats, play helps develop the social brain (2008). It is dangerous for the young of many species, including humans, NOT to play. The play of children involves such diverse activities as pretending, chasing, sliding and swinging, drawing, assembling puzzles, creating stories, and playing games. Like animal players, children choose to play. because they want to and generally because it is fun.

According to Bateson (1976), play takes place within a framework (referred to as a play frame) delineating it from other activities. The play frame is recognized by others, sometimes even across species. For example, dogs recognize one another’s play frame by tail wags and a play bow. And humans also can tell when a dog is playing. Pretending within a play frame, children may treat one another very unlike the way they normally treat their friends, pretending to shoot them, baby them, fight with them, or call them names, depending on their roles. If children within their play frames are treated as if their actions are real, the play, and what children might learn from it, is altered.

Children play throughout the world, but the style and content of their play differs by culture. Some contemporary play researchers, including David Lancy, Jaipaul Roopnarine, Robyn Holmes, Artin Göncü, and Suzanne Gaskins, have researched cultural influences on play including how types of play and the beliefs about play differ according to the needs of particular societies (Roopnarine, 2011) and the materials and activities that are available (Göncü, 1999). Research findings explain why some cultures allow toddlers to play with knives (Lancy, 2016), cooperative play is encouraged so strongly in Hawaii (Holmes, 2011), and Mayan children do not work through emotional events in their pretend play (Gaskins, 2009). Researchers and practitioners need to be aware that the study of play in the U.S. is often centered on a culturally or politically dominant, Eurocentric/Westernized view of play research and practice.

Is all play play? Because play is a word with many common meanings, issues concerning the use of play or the freedom to play during the school day are subject to semantic confusion. Is being in a play play? What about playing a musical instrument? Is playing baseball play? What about playing a board game? Whether these activities are play depend on the player and situation. My husband and I once spent the evening playing board games with two other couples. The host was extremely competitive, and soon I was not having fun. The evening was not play for me, and I found excuses not to participate again. However, the host was probably playing.

Although activities we tend to describe with the word play or game might not be considered play for everyone, they may have play potential, i.e., they are more likely to promote play than some other kinds of activities, such as drill that is part of test preparation. The terms playful and fun are sometimes used to describe aspects of play that don’t include all aspects of the definition. For example, an activity might be fun without allowing free choice. Teacher-led games might be fun for children. However, if required to play games, they might not think of them as play even though the teacher considers them “learning through play.” Playful has been described as a disposition in research with children (Barnett, 1998) and young adults (Barnett, 2007), but it can also describe situations where one feels light-hearted. Various characteristics, such as uninhibited, comic, and dynamic can be used to describe playful individuals (Barnett, 2007).

Work and Play

Whether one sees a situation as playful or would describe oneself as playful is very subjective. However, there might be more agreement on whether an activity is work or play. Interviews with kindergarten children (King, 1982;1986) indicate that they define school play according to whether they are given a choice. Whatever they are told to do is considered work. However, primary age children add the issue of enjoyment to the definition. Even if the teacher assigned an activity, the children considered it play if it was fun for them. These children distinguished three types of school play, labeled by the researcher as instrumental (instructional), real (recreational), and illicit play (King, 1982, 1986). Instructional games, recess, and passing notes surreptitiously are examples of the three types. Illicit play appears to have a strong social component, albeit negative (Power, 1992).

Older elementary school children think the only “real” play is recess (Block & King, 1987). According to King (1997), real play does more to establish a sense of classroom community than does instrumental play. Illicit play, in which children “assert their power to control activities in defiance of the teacher’s wishes … [is] in part, a product of the way in which the teacher organizes classroom instruction” (p. 70). Marshall (1994) asked children in five classrooms with varying curricula to rate classroom activities and assignments as work, play, or learning tasks. These children generally considered tedious, required tasks to be work, required tasks that were interesting to be learning, and computers, blocks, and LEGOs to be play. According to Kohn (Amster, 1994), there is an inverse relationship between activities children engage in simply because they want to and the rewards they are promised. In a study of children intrinsically motivated to draw, children who were told they would be rewarded for drawing drew less and the quality of their drawings became less creative. Perhaps they no longer thought drawing was play. This finding suggests that extrinsic rewards can have negative effects.

In 2002, Csikszentmihalyi was interviewed about a study he conducted on student motivation and learning (Scherer, 2002). In his study, one thousand randomly selected students in 6^th, 8^th, 10^th, 12^th grades from 12 school districts across the nation were signaled randomly with a programmable pager eight times a day from early morning to 11 P.M. for a week. Each time the pager went off the students were to identify what they were doing and whether they considered it work, play, work and play, or neither. Approximately 30% of the time they answered work, another 30% they considered play, approximately 30% was neither, and a final 10% was categorized as both work and play. Csikszentmihalyi concluded, after a nine-year follow-up, that “the best situation is when a person sees a life activity as both work and play” (Scherer, 2002, p. 13). Many companies now combine work and play in order to develop creativity (Butler et al., 2011).

Why Do All Children Need to Play?

A fundamental step in understanding the relationship between play and social justice, is considering why all children need to play. Child development theorists Jean Piaget, Erik Erikson, and Lev Vygotsky and educators Friedrich Froebel, John Dewey, and Maria Montessori all emphasized the critical importance of play in development and learning (a concise summary of their theories and methods can be found in Lyons, 2022, pp. 12–15). Sahlberg and Doyle (2019) list 35 benefits of play found by “research studies, experiments, and real-life school experiences around the world” (p. 52). These benefits can be categorized as academic, socio-emotional, physical and health, promotion of curiosity, creativity, and innovation, and classroom management.