July 9, 2010
Playfulness!: Full of Play and Learning
When I first “got connected” to playfulness as a way of living and teaching, it was 1971 and I took a course in Fort Wayne, Indiana called Education Through Music. Mary Helen Richards and Fleurette Sweeney were the main teachers of the course, and I had so much fun that I knew THIS would be my teaching self, although I hadn’t even taught yet. I had never experienced such playfulness and easy humor with children and with peers. At the time, the playfulness was most often situated in a “song-experience-game,” labeled that to emphasize the wealth of experiences (social, musical, movement, and linguistic) present in the play, experiences beyond the singing of the song and the process of the game.
I was so smitten by the philosophy, practices, and people of Education Through Music (ETM) that I could not imagine myself NOT attending every course, workshop, or gathering that I could. And, I hardly missed anything (first as an apprentice, then on the faculty)…for the next 20 years (except the Minnesota summer course of 1978 when I was in Texas beginning my doctorate). Education Through Music is the precursor to the developments that have become known as SongWorks®.
Our ETM courses in the 1970s and 80s were filled with playing games, every day, in every class. Game-playing was considered essential to understanding the philosophy of ETM and to applying the philosophy in a classroom.
The Outliers
Not everyone who took our courses was equally enamored with our sense of play. I remember that more than a few teachers would groan, “All we do is play games, I need to learn how to teach music!” These outliers got my attention, and I began trying to figure out the distinctions between play-infused teaching (playfulness) and playing games.
During our talks over the years, Anna Langness, elementary music teacher in Boulder, Colorado) would often confess that a relatively small proportion of her elementary music classes was devoted to “playing games.” Instead, Anna was intent upon developing skills and understandings that gave students a springboard to a lifetime of musical satisfaction and skillfulness. So her study activities were designed to be fun, engaging, stimulating, and game-like, but they did not necessarily warrant playing singing games for most of the class period.
Likewise, my university students (undergraduate and graduate) needed the intellectual stimulation that comes from being challenged with cognitive, analytical discourse about our music-making and methods-learning. Too much game playing without enough “learning about learning” led some of these adults to be skeptical about the academic rigor component of my college classes.
Thinking about these and similar contexts caused me several years ago to adopt the term “playfulness” to describe the style and intent for interacting with learners. When we present study activities and information, playfulness can be, but is not necessarily a game.
Playfulness Without a Game
Some of us have struggled with the notion that “Okay, the game (fun) is over, now it’s time to be serious and study.” Twenty years ago, I tried to address the concern “What do we do besides play games?” in an article in the ETM Newsletter called “We’ve Had a Good Time Playing the Game: Now What?”
Ideas about the content and implementation of the “Now What?” question, led Doug Bartholomew and me to write two books that have playfulness threaded throughout the pages and activities: SongWorks 1: Singing in the Education of Children (1997, Wadsworth) and SongWorks 2: Singing from Sound to Symbol (1999, Wadsworth).
Introducing children to sound study, musical terms, historical contexts, skill practice, compositional techniques, and notation of sound is part of a comprehensive music program, but these facets of the program are likely not taught while playing a singing game. These “now what?” activities, however, can be taught with the charm, playfulness, and imaginative interaction that are so characteristic of our folksong games.
Even when we teach in “lecture mode” or “presentation mode,” we can infuse our teaching presence with a playfulness that connects us to our learners, no matter how many there are, no matter what age they are. Here are five ideas for doing that:
- Look at learners as if you know and like them, with soft eyes, smiles, warm attention, and lingering eye contact
- Plan brief acknowledgments each of your learners by using their names (#1 behavior is important here), even if you do not ask them anything: Ex: “Now, in Stacy’s class she may never encounter this, but in Tammy’s class, she may have the opposite experience.” “Jess, you look a little unsure of this idea. Let me give an example.”
- Use light humor to show your own light, humorous side (see #1): “Stan, I wonder if, at any time in your long, wonderful life, you got to be the Cheese!” “Just in case, I went into babble-mode when I explained that, could you explain to me what I just tried to explain to you?”
- Teach as if you are having a conversation with your learners (see #1): “My gosh, Molly, your image is sure vivid for me!” “Josh, how does that explanation compare with your music study?” Rhetorical questions, those not needing a verbal response, can be good ways to accomplish #2, #3, and #4. Again, being conversational can lead us to pose our ideas as if we are asking, “I wonder if this has ever happened to you?” “When you do this, what happens?” In these ways, our teaching is playful by being highly interactive in a “low-threat” way with our learners, no matter their age or number.
- Be aware of the balance between your talking and their doing. Teaching never needs to be one or the other (I teach in universities, remember? We have all learned from good lectures!), and ideally, it is a balance between the two. Sprinkle your talking with #1, 2, 3, and 4 and sprinkle your interactions with light-hearted, yet meaningful playfulness
Original version published as “Playfulness: Full of Play, In and Out of the Classroom” in the February 2010 issue of the Music EdVentures Newsletter.
Recent Comments