Place, Pedagogy and Play

Participation, Design and Research with Children

Matluba Khan, Simon Bell, Jenny Wood, Matluba Khan, Simon Bell, Jenny Wood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429657443
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architektur
• Subtopic: Stadtplanung & Landschaftsgestaltung

Place, Pedagogy and Play connects landscape architecture with education, psychology, public health and planning. Over the course of thirteen chapters it examines how design and research of places can be approached through multiple lenses – of pedagogy and play and how children, as competent social agents, are engaged in the process of designing their own spaces – and brings a global perspective to the debate around child-friendly environments.

Despite growing evidence of the benefits of nature for health, wellbeing, play and learning, children are increasingly spending more time indoors. Indeed, new policy ideas and public campaigns suggest how children can become better connected with nature, yet linking outdoor space to pedagogy is largely overlooked in research. By focusing on three themes within these debates, place and play; place and pedagogy; and place and participation, this book explores a variety of angles to show that best practice requires dialogue between research disciplines, designers, educationists and psychologists, and a move beyond seeing the spaces children inhabit as the domain only of childhood professionals.

Through illustrated case studies this book presents a wider picture of the state of childhood today, and offers practical solutions and further research avenues that promote a more holistic and internationally focused perspective on place, pedagogy and play for built-environment professionals.

Chapter 12 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Part 1

Place and play

1

Manufactured play equipment or loose parts? Examining the relationship between play materials and young children’s creative play

Reyhaneh Mozaffar

Introduction

UNICEF (2001) states: “The early years from conception through birth to eight years of age are critical to the complete and healthy cognitive, emotional and physical growth of children” (p.2). In order to have a healthy future generation, we need to value these golden years and consider how to facilitate these developments in the best ways and how to equip children for a better future. One of the important aspects that can help reach these goals is encouraging creative thinking among children. It is the creative people’s innovations in history which have built today’s wealth (Runco 2004), and for an even better future, we need this empowering force to be concentrated even further. Creativity as a part of cognitive development is a vital feature for people’s performance, personal development and academic success (Kim and Zabelina 2011, Besançon et al. 2013, Kandler et al. 2016). It is an important aspect that needs to be encouraged among individuals, as new issues are raised in today’s society that need to be solved through original ideas (Lubart and Sternberg 1995, Amabile 1996a, 1996b). The golden age of childhood is highly influential on individuals’ creativity (Krippner 1999).

One of the major things that can promote creativity in children is play. Play not only supports children’s physical, emotional and social development, it is highly supportive of children’s cognitive development and particularly creativity (Piaget 1962, Vygotsky 1978, Moore 1986, Titman 1994, Lansdown 1996, Russ 1996, Moore and Wong 1997, Burdette and Whitaker 2005, Ginsburg 2007, Kopp 2010, Wilson 2012, Mayesky 2014, Oncu 2015). The Association for Childhood Education International (ACEI) has argued that children of all ages need to play (Isenberg and Quisenberry 2002), so in a dense contemporary environment where children are under pressure from adults to learn different skills and to gain knowledge in various fields, ensuring sufficient time to engage in free play becomes increasingly important for children’s development. The more opportunities they have to engage in free play, the more children can free their minds and develop creative thoughts.

Children’s time is increasingly devoted to structured and educational activities instead of free play (Lester and Russell 2008, Hofferth 2009), even when most people recognise that play is crucial to children’s development. Peter Gray (2011) argues that over the past half century, children’s engagement in free play has declined significantly. In her study, Sue Palmer (2008) found that the large number of technology-based entertainment games as well as manufactured play equipment and the ease of access to these are distancing children from free play, resulting in less creativity and imagination among them. Clements (2004), in a survey of mothers, found that 85% of them believed that modern technology is the main reason why children spend less time engaged in free play activities (and back in 2004 these were not so highly developed as in 2019). Between 1981 and 1997, children spent 25% less time in free play and instead engaged more in structured play over this time period, according to a study by Owens and Hofferth (2001).

Based on the importance of creativity and the fact that children’s engagement in free play can strongly encourage their creative thinking, there is a need to offer sufficient play spaces that provide children with more creative play activities and opportunities. In fact, the settings in which play takes place are very influential on children’s creative play, but knowledge in relation to children’s creativity is usually held by psychologists and educationists, and brings with it a lack of attention on how physical environments can actually affect children’s creative play behaviour from an architectural and environmental design point of view. Thus, many psychologists argue that physical environments can influence the development of creative abilities and have an important role in supporting individuals to express creativity in different ways (McKellar 1957, Amabile 1988, Sternberg and Lubart 1996, Stokols et al. 2002, Simonton 2003, Lubart et al. 2013, Berlin et al. 2016, Kandler et al. 2016). Accordingly, the study presented in this chapter aimed to understand how different play contexts can encourage creativity among children. This chapter will compare two different play contexts, one facilitated with manufactured play equipment and the other facilitated with loose parts play materials, to understand which of the two will encourage creative thinking among children more than the other. It then presents what features within the play elements of these contexts encourage creative play behaviours among children.

What is creativity?

While creativity has been a neglected subject in the past, with only 0.2% of psychological abstracts before 1950 and 0.5% between 1975 to 1994 focused on creativity (Guilford 1950, Sternberg and Lubart 1996, Coulter 2004), since 1990 the topic of creativity has risen up the research agenda (Feist and Runco 1993, Sternberg and Lubart 1996, Sternberg and Lubart 1999, Coulter 2004). Now there are over 100 different definitions of creativity (Treffinger et al. 2002).

For this study, a definition of creativity defined by Lubart and partners (Barbot et al. 2011, Lubart et al. 2012) is used. This definition was chosen not only because it is one of the most up-to-date definitions, but also, and most importantly, it covers several aspects of thinking processes, unlike many other definitions which only focus on divergent thinking as creativity. This model recognises two general thinking processes, namely divergent thinking and convergent thinking. Divergent thinking refers to the ability to produce lots of ideas and answers for solving a problem, so it has a quantitative nature. Convergent thinking refers to the capability to put different ideas together in new and original ways, so it is related to the quality of the concept or production (Sternberg and Lubart 1991, Sternberg and Lubart 1992, Barbot et al. 2011).

While many theorists in the past such as Guilford (1950), Torrance and Kim (Torrance 1966, Torrance 1968, Torrance 1998, Kim 2006a, Kim 2006b) believed that creativity is only related to divergent thinking and that convergent thinking is related to intelligence, Lubart and his colleagues (Barbot et al. 2011, Lubart et al. 2011, Lubart et al. 2012, Barbot et al. 2016), believe creativity includes both of these processes which occur in cycles. Based on this theory, they have also designed a creativity assessment test known as the Evaluation of Potential for Creativity.

Accordingly, creativity refers to the ability to grow an original and useful idea or product, meaning it is new or unexpected as well as appropriate to its context (Lubart 1994, Lubart and Mouchiroud 2003, Runco and Jaeger 2012). Hence, creativity is defined as:

the capability of an individual to produce work that is original (i.e. new, different from that which we can usually see) and adaptive to the context and the constraints of the situation

(Lubart et al. 2012, p.15)

The Creative Play Taxonomy: how children’s creativity is measured in play

Amabile (1996) believes that “Creativity is a concept that is difficult to define and even more difficult to measure.” As preschool children have limited verbal and drawing skills (Reisman et al. 1981, Zachopoulou et al. 2009), most of the tools that are developed to measure creativity are not designed for application to children (Mottweiler and Taylor 2014). Thus, there are limited studies on the creativity of preschool children (Ward 1968, Busse et al. 1972, Manosevttz et al. 1977, Mottweiler and Taylor 2014). Among those tests that are designed to assess children’s creativity, they either only measure aspects of divergent thinking (Reisman, Floyd et al. 1981) or only measure children’s verbal and graphical creativity, such as the Evaluation of Potential for Creativity (Barbot et al. 2011, Lubart et al. 2012, Besançon et al. 2013, Barbot et al. 2016). In fact, there is no currently available test that could measure children’s creativity when engaged in play.

Accordingly, as a part of my PhD I designed the “Creative Play Taxonomy” based on my observations of children’s play, the chosen theory of creativity and the existing assessment tools of creativity. The Evaluation of Potential for Creativity (Lubart et al. 2012) was chosen as the theoretical framework for developing the Creative Play Taxonomy. Studying this tool in detail resulted in the identification of three parameters associated with creative thinking, which cover both divergent–exploratory thinking and convergent–integrative thinking. These are integration, flexibility and originality.

•Integration refers to the number of different elements integrated together. Thus, integration is noted when a child integrates two or more elements together (Besançon et al. 2013).

•Flexibility is related to the element’s functionality and refers to the unexpected way in which items are used. Thus, flexibility takes place when a child uses an object differently from its intended design (Besançon et al. 2013).

•Originality is associated with the way the child acts compared to the other children. It is found when the child engages in an activity differently to other children (Lubart et al. 2012).

This taxonomy introduces eight different possibilities for a child’s play, based on how many of the above factors are included in it. These eight possibilities are built in four levels of creative play behaviour depending on how many and which of these three factors occur together:

a)the highest level of creativity; which includes all three factors;

b)a relatively high level of creativity where two of the three factors are included;

c)a low level of creativity where the child only engages in one of the three factors;

d)no level of creativity when none of the factors are seen in child’s play.

Table 1.1 shows the four different levels and eight stages of creativity in play with a description of each.

Table 1.1 The creative play taxonomy

This taxonomy was applied and tested in my research (see p. 14).

Which types of play are creative?

When talking about encouraging children’s creativity in play, it is important to know how play can be creative and which type of play includes creativity. Russ (2004) argues that one of the types of play highly associated with creativity is pretend play. Fein (1987) defines pretend play as the process where “one thing is playfully treat...