Rethinking Play as Pedagogy

Sophie Alcock, Nicola Stobbs, Sophie Alcock, Nicola Stobbs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138319219
• eBook ISBN: 9780429844522
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The conceptualisation and practice of play is considered core to early childhood pedagogy. In this essential text, contributors from a range of countries and cultures explore how play might be defined, encouraged and interpreted in early childhood settings and practice.

Rethinking Play as Pedagogy provides a fresh perspective of play as a purposeful pedagogy offering multi-layered opportunities for learning and development. Written to provoke group discussion and extend thinking, opportunities for international comparison, points for reflection and editorial provocations, this volume will help students engage critically with a variety of understandings of play, and diverse approaches to harnessing children's natural propensity to play. Considering the role of the learning environment, the practitioner, the wider community, and policy, chapters are divided into four key sections which reflect major influences on practice and pedagogy:

• Being alongside children
• Those who educate
• Embedding families and communities
• Working with systems

Offering in-depth discussion of diverse perceptions, potentials and practicalities of early childhood play, this text will enhance understanding, support self-directed learning, and provoke and transform thinking at both graduate and postgraduate levels, particularly in the field of early childhood education and care, for students, educators, integrated service providers and policy makers.

Section 1

BEING ALONGSIDE CHILDREN

1

PLAYING WITH DIGITAL DRAWING

Janet Robertson

This chapter considers that ‘other’ sheet of paper, an interactive screen, as a drawing surface, and the possibilities of meaning-making with and for young children. Digital drawing is another vehicle for children to become familiar with and utilise those techniques to tell us what meaning(s) they are making of the world. This ‘interactive agency’ (Lenz Taguchi, 2009), with teachers being alongside children, broadens children’s abilities to connect with others. Unfortunately, this common-sense approach has become entangled with concerns about too much ‘screen time’ depriving children of other forms of explorative play and experiences with nature.

Exploring digital drawing is exciting. As David Hockney says, ‘Picasso would have gone mad with this, so would Van Gogh. I don’t know an artist who wouldn’t, actually’ (cited by Gayford, 2011, p.191). The reticence of early childhood teachers and the panic about ‘screen time’ have perhaps clouded what digital drawing is. The screen is simply another surface to make marks on, an alternative piece of paper.

The thinking and stories retold in this chapter occurred with children under five years of age at Mia Mia Child and Family Study Centre, Department of Educational Studies, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, a long day programme from 7.30am to 6.00pm, five days a week, 49 weeks of the year, where the author has been the outdoor teacher for 17 years.

Stepping back from the ruckus of ‘screen time’ and realising the importance of children using digital drawing becomes simple when viewed from this question: Would you limit children’s use of traditional drawing materials in an early childhood school? If the tools offered are simple (gimmick-free, no novelty pens or rainbow nibs), the early childhood profession would be aghast at the suggestion that students could only draw for ten minutes a day. The profession knows that mark-making is the essence of externalising thinking (Bruner, 1996, p.23) and is shrouded in early literacy memes. Digital drawing affords children a landscape upon which and with which to think. As Kress notes, ‘makers of representations are shapers of knowledge’ (2010, p.27). The essential point is that children must be able to use the app, not the app use them.

An exploration of the techniques and affordances of this media will be examined in this chapter, noting the differences between paper and screen. The surface upon which we make marks is as important as the implement we make the marks with (Vecchi & Ruozzi, 2015). Manipulation of digital colour is immediate and captivating; the possibilities for colour overlay, clarity of colour, immediate erasure and recording of marks in the making support the value of a ‘child as creator’. The digital platform used influences the child’s agency; some software is cluttered, with multiple options, so the child engages with the functions, creating ‘a child as consumer’ rather than ‘child being in charge’.

Play-based learning is a context for learning through which children organise and make sense of their social worlds, as they engage actively with people, objects and representations.

(Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR), 2009, p.3)

In my childhood, the invention of the ‘texta’ or marker pen astonished me. The solid vibrant coloured line was so surprising to someone used to the pale markings of colour pencils and wax crayons. Perhaps digital lines might astonish contemporary drawers? They certainly astonished David Hockney, who says:

Using this medium means you miss some things – you miss texture – but you gain a lot … the freedom to alter things. With this you can move things about, change, make them bigger and smaller. The black is like nothing else you can print. It’s fantastically dense.

(cited by Gayford, 2011, p.97)

Let me be clear: digital drawing should not supplant pen and paper. It is simply another way to make marks and thinking visible. The ability to draw one colour over the other without colour compromise, the ease of erasure, the simplicity of changing line width, the opportunity to draw on solid colour backgrounds and that the hue stays true are all affordances offered by the media.

Drawing movies

Finding simple cheap digital drawing software is possible. In 2013, I began using the software Explain Everything (https://explaineverything.com/), and in Ursula Kolbe’s book Children’s Imagination: Creativity Under Our Noses (2014) I described our first encounters. It is software more usually used with older school students; however, I worked with a group of four-year-olds.

To avoid children being dazzled by the array of effects, I showed them a basic screen only. I wondered at the time if this was ethical, but reasoned that I would not have allowed children all the art shop supplies, a photography studio, cameras, lenses and filters plus GarageBand in one go. It seemed to me the opportunity to draw with white on a black background was innovative enough. The restricted colour palette meant children paid attention to details in representations rather than playing with colours. I’d often given children black markers and white paper to explain some idea they were thinking about, so this seemed the logical extension. Once past initial exploration and now using the black and white drawing affordances (a matter of days), I explained the other functions. This included the ability to create a simple rotation, an expansion and contraction of each drawn character … creating a moving illustration. It was not real animation, only giving movement to marks, as was soon understood by savvy four-year-olds, as was the understanding that the software was cumbersome, fraught with operator sequence failures, and needed an adult alongside coaching and commiserating when drawings were ‘lost’. (It took weeks to remember the order of icons to tap). I showed children the final effect, which was the opportunity to record a voiceover and capture the movement of their marks, then replay the result … and short ‘movies’ were possible.

Aidan and his brother discovered the app’s ability to expand. I had been intrigued by a game of astronauts they had created in a complex block structure on the veranda with the large wooden outdoor blocks, playing there for 90 minutes with that deep inward look of children engaged in rich imaginary play. I took a photo of the building and the next day I offered Aidan the photo, inserted in the app, asking him, ‘Can you draw the game for me?’ He drew, building the known components of the game, or at least the ones that had been obvious to an observer, of a pilot and passenger. To my surprise he included another plot, underneath the photograph, drawing and narrating an underwater world, with ocean, octopus and scuba diver. Aidan was able to do this as he could expand the size of the page, adding room for the rest of the narrative and its imagined landscape, moving beyond my offering of the photo as ‘task-scape’ (Ingold, 1993, pp.152–174). This drawing gave me insight into the depth of the imaginary play the day before (Kolbe, 2014, p.83).

The first movie was Kevin’s. As a marine enthusiast, he’d covered the ‘page’ with fish, then inserted an underwater photograph as a background. We projected it onto the wall and his drawn and verbal narrative of fish scuttling away from a fearsome shark was embellished by contributions from the audience.

In recent years, the background photograph has become less important, with the animation and immediacy of the narrative influencing the work more. Oscar created a movie of his father burning sausages on the barbeque, the smoke occluding everything at its conclusion. Cate’s movie of the internal life of bubbles, peopled with fairies whose hazardous existence required rescue whenever a bubble burst – eventually coexisting inside one giant bubble – clearly illustrated her competence and imagination. A series of simple shark movies, with appropriate dangers to other sea dwellers or users, captivated a group of shark enthusiasts. The pressing desire to depict the thrilling adventures pushed these children’s representational skills beyond their usual comfort zones, hybridising and appropriating each other’s accomplishments to create detailed sharks and prey, outdoing each other’s narration.

The additional ability to record the narration highlighted for us the skills required to compose a story, to sequence and vocalise it with expression, using theatrical effects such as pauses and sounds and working to end with an appropriate dénouement. I knew that a story often accompanied paper drawings, but listening to these renditions made me realise the further potential of narration and animation to increase the complexity of children’s thinking (Bruner, 1996). The limited movement easily given to characters (back and forth, up and down, rotation, expansion and contraction) I could see, on reflection, had also existed in previous paper drawings. When children lifted a page off the table, flapping it or running about with it, this too was movement, an embodied animation of the marks. Now digital movement was added to the movement repertoire.

A user-friendly app

In 2016, I introduced a simple drawing app for children aged birth to five, Seesaw (https://web.seesaw.me/). This app was much easier to use and did not require the adult support Explain Everything had needed, so children’s agency was foremost.

A note here: this app allows for the digital transmission of images to other users. We did not and would not enable this function as we are aware children’s digital footprints and histories are valuable and vulnerable. We also realised this new frontier for communication and thinking was relatively manner-less, that societal codes for politeness, privacy and respect which adults might understand had not been articulated to young children, so we taught the children ‘digital manners’. The children were used to opening parents’ phones and rummaging through the apps, looking for the familiar and interesting. The school iPads were different; if the children were given an app to use, the teacher’s expectation was that children would not leave that site. The children soon understood that pressing the ‘home button’ was not acceptable on our iPads. We also found that children had assumed it was okay to take a photo of another person without permission, so we taught them to ask, as we always did, before taking photos of people. Another rule, respecting refusals, as the teachers did, and not sneaking photo shots, was well policed by children.

The early photos were of things, covered with lines mimicking the object. It took only days before children began to cease this photo as colouring book genre and moved on to adding imaginary elements. The first element was the addition of blue and white lines representing rain on a photo of the lawn, which had been taken and drawn on a dry cloudless morning. This imaginary invention was greeted with hoots of laughter prompting a rash of other imagined events, such as ‘rabbits hopping about in the puddles’ being also drawn over the lawn image.

Photo-drawings with three- to five-year-old children

Typically, however, children chose to take snapshots of each other and transform (with permission) those images. Their work reflected immersion in ‘life’, revealing intrigue with superheroes, popular culture, hetero-normative gendered families, and fantastical creatures. We teachers disrupted and engaged in critical reflections about these important tropes. In discussing creation of images, Eisner (2001, p.130) refers to ‘the limits of the material with which they work and their technical repertoires’. The surface the children used was both the screen and the photo; creating a platform for their lines to make yet another surface of meaning. We are yet to understand the role these photo-drawings have in the graphic traces children use to make meaning of the world and relationships. We remember that, ‘Of course, how an image is handled is not only a function of purpose; it is also related to children’s technical repertoire for making such representations possible’ (Eisner, 2001, p.113).

First marks

Grace at 13 months had already frequently explored mark-making materials: chewing on the ends of pens, dropping them to the floor, stuffing them in another container, crumpling and patting paper, rolling crayons on the table, tumbling them about, relishing the sound … but making few marks. Her inability to hold the crayon/pen and press down limited her capacity to make a visible mark. Certainly, she created phantom marks when she held the crayon and made a movement across the paper, or unexpectedly while tracing her finger through rain puddles on the veranda, but no intentionally visible marks were made. On the iPad, sitting in an adult’s lap, we captured Grace’s exploration of digital line-making. We watch as her finger explores the screen surface, as if getting to know it. We see her surprise, her cessation of finger to screen when she realises she is making the lines appear. She stills herself and tries again, dabbing with her finger. It would seem to us that she is testing her theory of: ‘I did that, did I? Yes, I did.’ She makes delicate taps, lifting her finger slowly, then adds long swirling lines, testing her theory again. She turns, wordlessly asking her adult companion, who smiles and nods. She returns to her marks, adding longer lines, creating loops. These marks have an element of gesture about them and as Ingold says: ‘The line to which [this flourish] gives rise is, therefore, intrinsically dynamic and temporal’ (2007, p.72).

Satisfied, Grace moves away. A week later she again works in this digital mode, now armed with the knowledge that her finger makes the mark. She covers a quarter of the page with swift moves, the marks betraying her haste and her knowledge.

Adian, at two years old, is used to the screen, knowing his finger is the agent for the marks. When he encounters the colour bar and the opportunity to change colours, he understands its role immediately. While selecting yellow, his finger accidently taps orange and he experiments with it, framing the rest of his work with an orange line. This ‘accidental analogy’ (Machón, 2013) will become one of his future techniques as he accom...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Series editors, volume editors and contributors
• Preface: entering contested waters
• Volume editors’ acknowledgements
• Series editors’ acknowledgements
• SECTION 1: Being alongside children
• Editorial provocations: engaging readers and extending thinking
• SECTION 2: Those who educate
• Editorial provocations: engaging readers and extending thinking
• SECTION 3: Embedding families and communities
• Editorial provocations: engaging readers and extending thinking
• SECTION 4: Working With Systems
• Editorial provocations: engaging readers and extending thinking
• Coda: thinking forward
• Index