More reviews, pieces and interviews from the most recent round of Play Ethic book promotion. Delighted to write a piece straight for teachers in the Times Educational Supplement (see continued post below for full article), calling on them to 'become players in the toughest sense of the world'. I also did an interview with the Sunday Business Post in Ireland, which was notable for one of my best/worst ever flyers - 'instead of the Celtic Tiger, why not the Celtic Dolphin?' - and the interviewer's description of my 'compassionate brown eyes'. And finally, just to demonstrate some range, here's an interview I did with Canadian online 'journal of fringe culture' New World Disorder. I even learned things about myself here... and I do like Phil Leggiere's sum-up line:
The book powerfully lays out a scenario in which the dominant science of the 20th century, economics, the science of the miserable, is retired in favour of a new science of pleasure, play and creativity-ludology.Now there's a small ambition...
Times Educational Supplement - Opinion
Another Voice : Play’s the thing to catch new teachers
Pat Kane
17/09/2004
I’m sure it must seem funny to teachers when they hear their profession being dragged through the ‘work/life balance’ debate. Wasn’t it always the homework/no-life imbalance for them?
Yet like any other occupation in the information age, education has to deal with the growing dissatisfaction of ever smarter, ever more worldly employees, increasingly chafing under employment regimes that don’t express their full selves. And in the public sector, as evidenced by its endemic staffing crises, everyone knows that vocationalism isn’t enough anymore to maintain the commitment to care (let alone educare).
There is a particular problem around bringing in the next wave of teachers from the career-sceptical, media-savvy Generations X and Y. Indeed, the coming advertising blitz from the Teacher Training Agency has had to pitch the teaching of children as being about humour, innovation and unpredictability - and way better than ‘working in an office with boring people’, says the TTA. David Brent, it seems, is the goateed spectre haunting all recruitment campaigns these days.
Yet it strikes me, as an outsider from the world of creative consultancy, that there is an amazingly underused resource in education culture. A tradition and expertise, with a centuries-old legitimacy, which could both attract people to the profession, and help existing professionals to re-imagine the nature of their labours and commitments. In short: do teachers truly realise the power and potential of play?
Of course we do, might come the reply - more vociferously from primary teachers, and accompanied by a riffling of old lecture notes from secondary teachers. From Rousseau to Montessori to Reggio Emilia, there is a wonderful tradition of valuing child’s play, its explorations and immersions, as a learning method.
But play often gets downgraded as the educational residue of those ‘progressive sixties values’ that exercise the PM at the moment. How does play get kids ready for the ‘labour markets of the future’?
Rather well, actually. In my experience, the most hard-nosed commercial organisations are literally obsessed with play. Most enterprises these days aim to become ‘learning’ organisations - responsive, self-aware and brimming over with ideas. Much of this learning comes through staff development exercises that are forms of play: theatre, visualisation, music, mind games, adventure trips, scenario planning.
If Unilever and Microsoft believe that their very profits and market share depend on the quality of their internal ‘players’, isn’t that enough credibility to allow teachers to develop those playful instincts in their children? Perhaps a ‘teacher of players’ might also attract those who would otherwise deploy their innovative urges in a more commercial setting.
This partly depends on whether teaching itself can de-romanticise play. For play is more than merely freedom and anarchic self-expression. The Indo-European root of play, -dlegh, means ‘to engage, to exercise oneself’ - almost the polar opposite of the idle triviality imputed to it by over 200 years of the Puritan work ethic.
The other definition I love comes from Friedrich von Schiller - pal of Goethe, author of the ‘Ode to Joy’ - who said play was about ‘taking reality lightly’. This doesn’t mean living in fantasy, but seeing the world as open to change and chance - and being inspired by that mentality.
Engaged, energetic children, who see a world teeming with possibilities and opportunities: if these are players, what teacher wouldn’t want to unfold their talents? From enterprise to citizenship to creativity, it seems to me that play - properly and profoundly understood - can provide some degree of underlying coherence to these often scattered and piecemeal initiatives.
As complex mammals, we begin our lives as players, in order to survive and develop. Our current generation, in its embrace of Playstation and Google, thumb-texting and CGI movies, thrill sports and karaoke pop, job-hopping and cheap travelling, seems to have made a collective decision to just keep on playing - and at the very least, be sceptical about the automatic virtues of the work ethic. Teachers can either dragoon these ‘soulitarians’ (as I call them in my book) into line. Or they can try to make the most of their evident capacities.
Again, from the outside, it seems as if the current tumult about the workload agreement in England and Wales might be as much a self-development opportunity for teachers, as it is a crisis of resources and structures. Released from the traditional chores of teaching, teachers could begin to unleash their pedagogical imaginations, as well as get a life beyond the classroom.
Might I suggest that one challenge could be a vision of an education for players rather than workers? For the moment, going by reports on creativity in primary teaching with titles like Expecting the Unexpected and Excellence and Enjoyment, there would seem to be fair wind for experiment.
What teachers might need to realise is that their long-standing commitment to play - using the child’s own creative energies and instincts to bring out their potential - isn’t some sixties-hippy embarrassment to hide from the Ofsted inspectors. Instead, it might be the tissue that connects them to the most vital social, cultural and technological dynamics of our times. It’s time for teachers to think of themselves as players, in the toughest sense of the word.
Pat Kane’s The Play Ethic: A Manifesto for a Different Way of Living, is out now on Macmillan, price £12.99. For more information, please visit http://www.theplayethic.com
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