week 7

Reflect on your favorite play activities (this could be from your childhood or adulthood). With the concepts presented in the readings, discuss possible opportunities that play provided for learning.

15 thoughts on “week 7

  1. For both Piaget and Vygotsky, learning is a phenomenon with a strong social component. In the case of Vygotsky, social interaction is central: it is through apprenticeship (interacting with someone just a bit older and wiser) that one enters the zone of proximal development. This is one form of “intersubjectivity.” Piaget’s intersubjectivity, on the other hand, presumes equal individuals who compare understandings and find that they do not match (“cognitive conflict”). This conflict spurs or motivates breakthroughs in understanding.
    I like both theories, yet something about them does not accurately describe my experience. Learning, in either case, is considered to be collaborative, even generous. Vygotskian learning requires that the more expert figure engage the “apprentice,” and one of the preconditions for Piagettian learning is “reciprocity.” Thinking back on my childhood, however, I remember the forms of play that were more competitive.
    Flashlight tag, for instance, could hardly be called reciprocal. Certainly there were shared rules that made playing the game possible, yet it was still a game about tricking the opponent. What made this game interesting, however, is that whoever was the seeker had just the night before, and many times before that, been on the side of the pursued, hiding out. That meant that he or she knew all the usual spots–behind that bush, on top of the shed, in the drainage pipe, etc. Because of this shared knowledge, the challenge was always to look ever more deeply at a familiar setting, to miraculously produce just one more hiding spot from a space that seemed totally familiar.
    I do not want to over-valorize competition or competitiveness, yet it seems as though we must theorize competition, since it plays such a large role in so many forms of play. Part of the pleasure of games like flashlight tag is social (trying to be the best at a task), but perhaps another large pleasure comes from collectively raising the bar, collectively producing and learning in a zone of proximal development. Still, play in this context is not totally “free” but bound by a set of rules that stay the same, day after day, almost like a ritual. For us, this meant that our energies were focused in highly specific, perhaps limited ways. Educators who want to make school more like a game need to reckon with the complicated dimensions of competitive play.

  2. My favorite ‘play’ activity is to organize and design ‘moments’ for people. This may seem vague, but it’s a thread of ‘fun’ in my life that combines the environment, visualizing a problem and solution, and creating an end product. I remember as a child I would convince my sister it was fun to move all our stuffed animals from our bedroom to the kitchen by way of living room. For hours we created a train of stuffed animals and pushed each animal at 4 inch intervals, one followed by the next. We would work together to talk about what to do next. As Zigler described part of cognitive development was emotional development, working with my sister as kids was a chance to learn. My sister would not help me create my animal trains if I spoke meanly to her, so I had to learn to social development and self-regulate by learning to modulate my voice and tone and empathize. I’m glad my parents guided us through ‘free-play’. When we were 15 years old, this practice of slowly moving things, eventually led into us pouring out boxes of cereal and with my dad’s video camera. We started to make our own stop-and-go animations and share them with our family. We seemed to have these elaborate visions, and it was a matter of experimenting with tools to make them work. I resonate with quote by Piaget “the nature of cooperation lead me I don’t know where.” When my sister and I ran into filming problems, we would have to rethink what all the tools we had created and defined either new problems or tweek our goal. We hardly focused on tasks that could be measured. Rather our childhood play as Hirsh-Pasek, K., & Golinkoff, R. described was divergent problems, where there are multiple solutions and no right answer.

  3. Yesterday, my husband mentioned very kindly to me that I have the tendency, when absorbed in a book (just recently, a fantasy book in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series) to utterly disregard all “real world” summons, like my name being called or even shouted. I believe I’ve carried this practice of retreating into imagined worlds from my elaborate childhood fantasies, involving a cadre of imaginary friends. As a child, I built up “inner worlds” (Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff 2003, p. 233) as a form of sociodramatic play; later, these inner worlds would extend to the space between the words in books.

    My favorite imaginary friend at age 4 was GoGo. GoGo did not have a physical avatar – GoGo literally appeared in whatever form I of desired him (or her, an ambiguity I will explain soon), usually as a small blue figure about the size of my hand. GoGo was spunky and capricious. His best friend (besides me) was Deelee BoBo, who was always female. Both GoGo and Deelee BoBo sometimes consorted with Floppy the bunny, who resided in a gray polyester rabbit, who was, as his name might suggest, rather flexible. Floppy, unlike GoGo and Deelee BoBo, who came and went quite as they pleased, was my constant companion. As such, I suppose Floppy would be considered my “transitional object” (Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff 2003, p. 217).

    After reading the Hirsh-Pasek (2003) and Zigler et al. (2004) articles touting play’s positive impact on learning and the Rogoff (1980) article comparing Vygotskian and Piagetan perspectives on social interaction and cognitive development, I’m trying to parse out how my play with GoGo, DeeLee BoBo, and Floppy benefited my overall development. My memory is that my imaginary friend play was fairly solitary, though I remember my mom asking me questions which might have fit into Piaget’s notion of intersubjectivity, even though she was an adult and not my peer (Rogoff 1980). For example, I recall sitting outside on our back porch, conversing happily with GoGo, when my mom asked, “Is GoGo a girl, or a boy, Amy?” To which I replied, “Well, right NOW he’s a boy, silly, but he was just a GIRL!” My mom never corrected these notions, just nodded as if to acknowledge my reasoning. But I’m not sure that my answer quite fits Piaget’s notion of either assimilation and accommodation – I refused to categorize GoGo in terms of the gender categories I saw in my world, so I created a new category in which gender was fluid. In this sense, a lot of my play seemed to diverge from the “cultural scripts” that Vygotsky suggests play helps children internalize (Hirsh-Pasek 2003). While I certainly played kitchen, house, and built mad cool blanket forts like most other kids, I also liked to imagine scenarios that “broke the rules” – in which horses could fly, moon-bounce shoes would actually take you to the moon, and I could turn a flowered quilt into a garden with flower-friends. This script-breaking play has given me better tools for divergent problem-solving. There was no right answer when playing with my imaginary friends. We capered where whimsy led us, and learned to manipulate aspects of the society in which we were embedded in order to craft even better, to our minds, inner worlds.

  4. I can’t remember if it’s the Jacques of Duke or Jacques of Rowland who speaks the lines, “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players” (I could of course look this up, though I find slight ignorance when it comes to Shakespeare avoids the pomposity of quoting him), but when I think back to my favorite play memories from childhood, they often involve one of many theater-related activities. From our Kindergarten curtain-raiser of “Chicken Little”, to ye ole tragedy of “The Pied Piper” in Year 2, my recollection of play often involved many of these literal, plays.

    Yet the fondness of my memory is not for the actual finished productions or opening nights, but the many, many rehearsal sessions leading up to them. Under the guidance of our Sondheim- devotee, Purcell Kelly, my fellow thespians and I took on a variety of roles: honed our sword- fighting skills, cavorted with the choreographed routines, and polished those lines dolled out to us. This rehearsal space became Narnia-like terrain- where reality was exaggerated and heightened. In this space, we discovered the nuances of language, the reality-role play, and the many personas we could chose to become.

    Hence when I read Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff’s chapter, and consider this against those who wish to end “playtime” at school, I wonder what I may have missed had our school eliminated its theatrical program. What it would life have been like had I not been allowed to discover my ability to transform myself into a judge, princess, soda jerk or pirate? As noted by Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff, “When children enter the world of pretend play, they are like the kings and queens of a new world-a world that they can build and control. Instead of relying on actual objects as they are, they now have the power to transform them and to serve their own purposes” (p. 227). Under the guidance of our director (aka substitute parent), our language, social and, more often than not, physical skills (believe it or not, those aluminum-foil swords were heavy) were exercised.

    This play-within-a-play also gave us literal and abstract working scripts. The constant imagining of what it would be like to “play” a sister, wife, mother or disgruntled shop employee gave us working prototypes as to how these persons operate in the real world. As Vygotsky stressed, we were “internalizing scripts for how to act in our society, we were learning how our culture does things” (p. 231). These rehearsed and guided interactions (setting an “agenda”) opened other avenues for learning to navigate the literal terrain of the grownups world. So although I haven’t (yet) had the opportunity to banish an assembly of snakes from my hometown, this play experience certainly contributed to my ability to be confident and articulate in social interactions: both with my peers and those adults around me.

  5. When I was in elementary school, I played a lot of handball. I know there are many variations of what people consider to be handball, but this version was hitting a ball against a wall and alternating between a certain amount of people or pairs. Even thought it seems to be a simple physical sport there were many concepts that I learned in a passive manner. I learned some of the things listed in the Zigler article regarding the cognitive, social and physical development. It contributed to my cognitive development in training my problem solving and memory. I strategized what my progression of action and responses should be based upon the opponent I was engaged against. In analyzing how they normally played, I gained a greater understanding of what I ought to do and how to play the game. At the same time, this was a precious time of interaction with my peers in which we took turns, and agreed upon a certain set of rules, and had to exercise sportsmanship.

  6. One of my favorite play activities are video games. I have been a big gamer since I was in kindergarden. When I first got my Sega Genesis, I would try to wake up early to beat my brothers to the console first so I could play (most of the good games were single player). I could play good games for hours at a time. Sadly, I don’t have as much time to play video games as of recent – but I love a game with an enthralling story and world. Similar to the concepts of Piaget and Vygotsky, playing video games most certainly served as a catalyst in my cognitive development. I believe video games allowed me to view different perspectives, conceptualize the function of different products and objects, increase my reaction time, inspire curiosity and motivate me to create my own visual world in my head.

    I recognize the shortcomings of video games, and I have suffered in some areas because of my addiction to them and not books. I played sports and with other kids – so I was getting physical activity and social stimulation, but I lacked spelling and grammatical concepts (it’s still my weakest area). My friends who found excitement in reading a good novel, often are excelled in those areas. However, I am not necessarily unhappy with the way I was raised in the sense that my area of interest was shaped by the games I played, and so were my friends to a certain degree. I like being analytical and practicing design. One of my best friends is the exact opposite of me – he enjoyed reading novels as a play activity. He always excelled verbally and now he wants to become a history professor. I believe depending on the child’s temperance, and what opportunity of game surrounds the child – the games that the child plays correlates with the topics that the child is interested in and ultimately learns, which shapes us into understanding what professions are desirable.

  7. It’s hard to think of activities in terms of “play” as an adult because I have such a fixed idea in my head of childhood play (i.e. running around with neighborhood kids at the park across the street from my house). But I suppose one way in which I participate in play as an adult is the word games my baby’s father and I tend to get into. He was raised in a family that was addicted to Scrabble, crosswords and verbal word play; I was not. For a long time, I gave him a hard time for his inability to control himself when it comes to puns (he’s a hipster and I consider his creative spellings and “punny” sense of humor to be indicative of this) but I have recently started to engage with him more. We started playing Words With Friends, where he regularly trounces me into embarrassment (our current score: Treboheme 242, Jorgantic! 412). However, I’m finding that the more we play, the more I am learning the techniques to actually earn points instead of my usual goal of just putting the most unusual word on the board. He models expert placement of letters, creative ways to use the space and has introduced me to a number of key “Scrabble” words that I had never heard of. This social interaction done via our iPhones provides me with the opportunity to develop what Vygotsky considered “culturally developed tools for learning” and to collaborate with a far more skilled “expert” (please never tell him I called him that, I’ll never live it down). In collaboration, I can refine my own skills and mirror some of his play. The technology and cultural context also provide a unique learning environment I which I can carefully study his choices (there is no time limit for play turnaround) and develop my own skills in relation to his.

  8. As I read Einstein Never Used Flashcards and Play Under Siege, it’s hard for me to imagine a childhood without play. As a child, I grew up with my sister and two cousins who lived next door. We were all about the same age give or take a few years. I can hardly remember a time when we weren’t all playing together as kids. We rode Big Wheels down hillsides, wrote and performed plays and constructed make believe stories around our dolls. I hardly remember a time where our parents were involved.

    The four of us would write and perform plays. The production of these plays taught us to be resourceful and creative. For instance, to write the plays we had to learn how to use the computer. Our parents helped us get some materials for sets (mostly old cardboard voting booths) and we used any other materials we could find to dress the scenes. We’d look at books for references on how to paint the sets and thus, learned about the setting we were trying to recreate. Throughout the process, we were in control of limitless options, helping us and motivating us to learn more. In creating these plays, I think we all learned a bit about negotiating and collaborating. Everyone in the play needed to like their part, have some control over their role so we’d have to adjust the script to make everyone happy. My older sister and cousin were generally the directors and, every once and a while, their competing desires for power over the productions would collide and cause a fight, derailing production of the play. From seeing those episodes, I learned how to a nice leader and make sure that everyone gets to do the things they want to. I hated the arguments and, I still do, so I usually try to develop strategies that make everyone happy in collaborations.

    These experiences support Vygotsky’s theory that social guidance, especially from those close to our age, facilitates learning. The quote, “This guidance provides children with the opportunity to participate beyond their own abilities and to internalize activities practiced socially, thus advancing their capabilities for independently managing problem solving,” seems particularly accurate in my own childhood experiences.

    Hirsh-Pasek, K., & Golinkoff, R. talk about the necessity for play to be fun and enjoyable but I think we often learn from situations that turn from playful and enjoyable to frustrating. We learn how to change our actions to avoid those situations so that we can have more fun. If a toy becomes frustrating, I think we tend to blame the toy for being too difficult and discard it. When social situations become frustrating, we have no one to blame but ourselves and adjust our behaviors and actions in order to achieve the goal of fun.

  9. When it comes to play learning as a child, Monopoly was that one game that taught me a lot. I learned everything from counting money, to how to make strategic moves, what bankrupt meant and what a monopoly was! It was a fun game that I enjoyed, yet also taught me many life skills. In Rogoff’s article, he states that Piaget stressed the importance of the partners having a common scale of intellectual values and being able to understand the material in the same sense. As a child, I never understood this. Whenever my family would say that I wouldn’t understand the game or I couldn’t be banker because it was too hard for me, I never understood it. However, not looking back on the situation, I would have been on a completely different scale, and I wouldn’t have understood the terms of banker and how money worked as well as older players. So, to solve this little dilemma I would always have, my family would give me an easier task to do so I could feel like I was helping.
    By playing Monopoly from childhood until now, I have been able to continually develop different skills. Cognitive skills have helped me to decide what property I should buy and how it would benefit me. they have also shown me how to solve any problems I may run into in the game, like running out of money! Social development skills have also taught me how to interact better socially. I have learned the importance of turn taking, and working with others in trades. The readings also pointed out that playing leads to greater creativity and development, especially when an adult plays too. Like I previously stated, I would try to find adults to play Monopoly with me when I was younger. For me at the time, it made me feel important and like I was good enough to hang out with the parents. Therefore, it increased my level of awareness during the game because I constantly wanted to show them all that I deserved to play with them. Playing Monopoly as a child helped me learn a lot of skills. It helped me build social skills through teamwork and collaboration, yet it also gave me cognitive skills like thinking for myself.

  10. My favorite animal has been the elephant for as long as I can remember. As a result, much of my childhood toys were stuffed elephants of various shapes, colors, and sizes. As a kid, I named each of my elephants. It’s interesting because the names I gave to my stuffed elephants got more sophisticated and creative as I grew older, which reflects the various levels of play described in “Einstein Never Used Flashcards.” My stuffed elephants’ names evolved from names like “Elephant 1” and “Elephant 2,” to names that started with an “e” such as “Erika” and “Edward,” to descriptive names such as “Nosy” (because his nose was broken). And after names, my elephants developed personality traits, such as “Nosy is a bad singer” or “Erika is a bossy older sister.” I stubbornly held on to certain ideas about my elephants, such as “Nosy is cuter than Erika,” even when my parents insisted that they were exactly the same thing. Soon, as we got even older, my brother and I began to develop story lines about the lives of our stuffed animals (his were mostly pigs), and to this day we can still remember the names and various story lines and personality traits associated with our stuffed animals. Much later, when we were introduced to the world of computers, my stuffed animals (and I) even created a newsletter on Microsoft Word, where we reported the various happenings of the stuffed animal community. None of this was required for school or by my parents. I created dozens of newsletters every month for fun! And as a consequence of this newsletter, I learned how to navigate a computer, write creative stories, and type. Playing with stuffed animals was a huge part of my childhood play, and the increased sophistication of my play with these stuffed animals over the years reflected my cognitive and social growth.

  11. The readings this week are an interesting approach to thinking of my own play as a child. It’s easiest to approach the topic through the article on Vygotsky and Piaget, as my favorite play was social, and my best friend and I were so different that we naturally learned a lot from each other.

    One of my favorite play activities when I was a child (say, until I was 12 years-old) was playing make-believe adventures with my friends and sisters. Our make-believe included a couple of strong personalities who always argue about what to do next and scheme together to overcome perceived challenges (I’m sorry to say that some of our challenges included how to steal ice-creme from the refrigerator, how to get a soft-drink from a forbidden country store, and how to drive a truck to get to a secret-hideaway, as well as other adventure I’m not at liberty to divulge). In our play, I often was assigned the task of taking the rash risks or solving the problems. In contrast, it was my friend Teri who often thought up the games we would play and assigned roles.

    My friend Teri was vivacious and social, and I was bookish and shy. Our pretend play often cast me as the plain intellectual with her as the cute (think Farrah Fawcett) blonde bimbo. But I learned from Teri, in these play situations, how to talk in public, how to be charming, and how to be cute. She learned from me a lot of new vocabulary words (she called me a walking dictionary) and how to listen to people carefully. I think in our play we learned more about how to navigate social settings than from any deliberate instruction our parents tried to teach us.

    This learning how to be social and interact reflects Vygotsky’s social interaction paradigm. In classrooms, I see this same paradigm in the instructional routine of pair-sharing, when partners turn and talk to each other about what they are learning from the reading or the lesson. There is an underlying theory that by sharing what they think with each other, they will teach each other a little bit of what the other may have missed, or correct some basic misconceptions, and that this work is more easily facilitated between peers. There is an element of relaxation and play as children talk about lessons or stories. Conversely, there was an element of serious learning in my play with my peer, Teri, who seemed so much more socially fluent than me. I felt that I was tutored though pretend and mimicry to be outgoing against my natural inclination. Teri learned to be more thoughtful through her play with me.

  12. As a child, I often went to the “train park” with my sisters and parents. I always loved going there because the park had a stationary row of concrete trains that I could climb into and pretend I was either the train captain or a passenger. I was able to “create my own activity” and imagine the possibilities of transporting across the world in my very own train cart (212). Through make-believe I was able to give roles to my family, imagine the places we could travel, and carry a conversation in this new world.
    My parents were also helpful in guiding how to throw a baseball, swim, and shoot a basketball into a hoop. My dad would help guide me in how to move my arms in order to the throw the basketball. First I would throw an under shot and after I got to that step, my dad taught me how to throw a normal shot. Vygotsky explains that “this guidance provides children with the opportunity to participate beyond their own abilities and to internalize activities beyond their own capabilities managing problem solving” (146) My dad was not “not intruding” on my play, and I not only enjoyed playing with him but he also helped me better my natural abilities. Because my parents noticed my strong passion for sports they helped me foster my skills including my competitive drive, my communication skills, and my ability to work with others.

  13. I was really intrigued by the idea of adults participating in pretend play with children and how that might actually help children develop more sophisticated imaginary worlds, when adult participation is done without an attempt to control or direct the child’s play. I couldn’t think of many examples of this from my own childhood, perhaps because when it happened it was a seamless experience. I do remember at the age of ten that a lot of my imaginary play revolved around owning a plane company and designing its routes, seat patterns and logos, a plane swimming pool that dealt with the water splattering everywhere issue with some sort of water gravity mechanism and other games for people to play inside the plane. My dad who was a banker in real life would pretend to be a loan officer in the future and I would pretend that I was asking for a loan to buy my planes and we would go back and forth about why I deserved to be given millions of dollars and what my business plan was. I think although he probably directed that conversation a bit with focus on different loan criteria, it still helped me expand my imaginary business in ways that I could not have done if I was playing or day dreaming alone. Although, thinking about it now with my current philosophical affiliations, I am a little alarmed at my early capitalist training. However, It did lead to a much more sophisticated model that was set within a larger economic model in the early 90s. It is interesting to think about what I had absorbed and knew as the implicit rules and how I might have also reinterpreted what was possible within that cultural and economic system given that I was a 9 year old minority girl living as a foreigner in England and what that might say about the stories I wanted to hear but was not.

  14. In elementary school, we did a lot of storytelling on the long and otherwise boring bus rides home. Storytelling was imbued in a lot of our games. After we got home there was a tree that we would camp under and pretend to be bunnies or kittens or whatever animal was popular at the time, and built homes with rocks and pebbles serving as kitchen items.

    We played this one game called “Assembly Line”, where we acted through the steps of assembling some object in a relay after deciding on the end product. For example, if our object was a piano, the first person would go into the forest to chop down the wood, the next person would saw planks, and so on.

    I suppose this game would be an example of an exercise in social development – we learned to take turns, and divide up the process so that no one person took over the entire game and that everyone had something to do. It lacked the adult guidance that Vygotsky advised – indeed, we probably skipped several vital steps in the production of our imaginary piano and invented a couple extra ones. I’m not sure how much cognitive skills were developed as a result, but we definitely learned how to work with our peers socially.

  15. While reading in the article by Hirsh-Pasek et al. how children would want to go over the same story indefinitely, I could not help but to laugh at myself. It remind of one of my favorite games from childhood, the one that I would never wanted to stop playing while the rest of the kids would: Treasure Hunt. How could someone not want to play Treasure Hunt anymore? For me, it had it all, every time was a whole new scenario for me, nothing (I thought) was repeating, it was a whole new experience.
    Even though treasure hunt probably had an impact in my cognitive development, what I can remember the most were the many ways in which I improved my social skills with each game. While playing the “hiding” group, we had to think strategically. The process for choosing and hiding the treasure and clues, resonated with a very basic notion of game theory’s thinking process, i.e. we had to go through what the other team would do given a certain action. It was an empowering process, thinking that you were able to anticipate what the others were going to do felt like pushing my thoughts to the limit. They key learning from this role though, was about the power of incentives; kids would want to play as long as the treasure was exciting, the moment we ran out of cool treasures and ended with a can of tuna, the game was clearly over.
    Now, the “seeking” group was my favorite role. It was an amazing opportunity to do pretend play with improvisation; the game would be new unforeseen contexts where the game would develop. Whenever we where in garden I would think of our group as one of very extreme explorers that would quickly changed to a very refined detective organization when moving to the house. It was a great way to develop observation skills, observing the spaces, the details, the objects, etc. was key.
    There is one more aspect associated with how much I liked treasure hunt; it was the sense of ownership that being able to define and redefine the rules gave me. It was a little world I could manipulate and experiment free of risks.

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