Students in Dr. Nicole Pfannenstiel’s summer Games and Writing class crafted blog posts exploring play theory. Over the next several weeks, we will share their theory posts in this space to offer a variety of perspectives on play, games, and writing, written by current graduate students in the MA and M.Ed. English programs.

_______________________________

What Is Play? (For the Secondary English Classroom)

by: Courtney Harting

There has been much debate on the usefulness of play in the classroom and how it impacts a student’s experience with their academic endeavors. For some, the assumption of play for students, specifically high school students, is that it is a frivolous or foolish activity with little more to offer than mere entertainment or superficial pleasure. In the world of education, we might suggest that play for secondary students lacks rigor and fails to promote meaningful learning. This is especially true for secondary English classrooms in which skills such as reading and writing seem to be a far stretch from our commonly held preconceived notions of play.

However, while play can often induce feelings of joy or pleasure for secondary students, I would define play as something with greater implications for high schoolers. Play is a magical activity and the means by which we can engage students in their learning, but for this to happen authentically and meaningfully, the play must be carefully balanced between the notions of play choice and play context.

While it is important to discern that play transcends simple fun or joy, it is also important to acknowledge that play, and our students’ engagement with course content via play, can have a magical essence to it – an essence that cannot be explained by physiology or psychology. There is something more significant happening with the mind when engaged in play, making it a phenomenon of sorts. Through these magical experiences with play, students can make meaning of their reading, of their writing, in ways that are imaginative. For example, can students imagine themselves as characters within a story? Can they role play through character diary entries, thus playing within an imaginary world and playing with the nuances of language? These are experiences students are already engaging in within many secondary English classrooms, and yet we are reluctant to call this mode of learning play, and even more so, we are reluctant to see this as a form of magic.

On one hand, the fact that play is a magical experience may make it sound as though it is an experience happening to our students, but the reality is that this experience must be voluntary and subjective in a way that gives students significant choices as players in regards to how to magically engage with their reading and writing. Without these choices, play loses its volunteerism and organic qualities, thereby lessening the magical learning potential of the experience for each individual student. This is not to say, however, that there aren’t factors which influence or shape the way our students experience play. Play is still, though magical and voluntary, influenced by the context – in this case, the teacher facilitated context, which surrounds the play and learning. So, while students may already be engaging in play in secondary English classrooms, we must ask ourselves what level of choice and what level of contextual supports we are providing so that the play is true play and not merely a compliance task.

Thus, when we consider play as more than a fun experience for our students, as more than the opposite of non-seriousness, as a means by which we engage our students in meaningful learning, we must also consider both individual student choice and the context we create as teachers and how these aspects of play are interrelated in the rhetorical situation of the classroom. Play in the classroom is built upon imagination, choice, and context, and should be made accessible to our high school students in their English courses.