I have been struck for some time by the assumptions of practitioners relating to ‘work’ and ‘play’. I remember a Teaching Support Assistant (TSA) who was supporting a Year 8 pupil who was on a red card report during the artefacts workshop I have written about before [see https://teacherlearning.org/interacting-with-objects-and-history/]. This particular pupil, let’s call him Tom, had had a history of persistent disruption, open defiance and insolence over the course of the first few years of high school and had been excluded a number of times. This was why he had been placed on a red card report. The lesson that had taken place immediately prior to the artefacts workshop had gone wrong for Tom and there had been an altercation of some sort between him and the teacher of that lesson. As the artefacts workshop was beginning, the TSA placed the red card on the desk and, looking like a harbinger of ill tidings, warned me that Tom was not in a good mood today. I looked at the red card and saw the words ‘Rude and Defiant- would not leave despite warnings and argued back’ angrily handwritten. The TSA had moved to where Tom was sitting and stared back at me meaningfully. Tom was sulking and staring away deliberately from where he was meant to be looking.
There was perhaps no better way of setting up a self-fulfilling prophecy but thankfully, on this occasion, it was not fulfilled. The workshop was extremely successful for all pupils, including for Tom. Gradually he lost his sulk and began to sit up and pay attention. He became fixated by the artefacts and held them in great respect, listening to what the others were saying and engaging in mutual speculations and imaginings of the people who may have owned them and used them so many years ago. Once the workshop was over and the class was in the process of being dismissed, I noticed that the TSA had returned to the desk to pick up the red card. As I was a guest at the school and not ‘the teacher’ as such, she assumed responsibility for writing a comment on the card for that lesson. I noticed what she had written: ‘much better in this lesson but didn’t have to do any work’. At the time I did not say anything, but as I reflect back on it, the unfairness of this comment became clearer. It revealed assumptions and expectations about the nature of ‘work’ and what it had to consist of for it to somehow ‘count’. Activities that involved touching and feeling things, talking and dialogue did not count and were deemed ‘merely’ play or recreation. For there to be real learning there had to be silence, hard disciplined writing, and struggle.
I have seen this attitude voiced and demonstrated many times in schools and universities among teachers, educators and administrators. There is no doubt that these attitudes have manifested themselves in multiple ways over the years: in the monastic orders of old, in the Puritanism of the Civil War era, the abstinence and thrift of the Victorian era and austerity of the 1940s and 50s. Clearly too they incubate in schools and certainly in this case bring about a meanness and lack of generosity which is arguably as anti-social as the insolence that caused the pupil to be on report in the first place.
I would like now to turn to examining these notions of ‘work’ and ‘play’ in relation to the following piece of classroom dialogue. When I have presented this dialogue to others in the past, it seems to have split opinions quite sharply. This was a year 8 class and pupils were trying to evaluate competing reasons for why the Great Fire of London in 1666 spread so quickly. This was a dialogue emerging out of the fact that it took too long for the Lord Mayor to order that housing should be demolished to create fire-breaks. This was a factor that pupils initially passed over because it was not immediately intelligible to them but the teacher encouraged the pupils to look into it more and this was the dialogue that emerged. As the dialogue went on, pupils became more and more engaged and animated in the discussion. Are the pupils and teacher ‘just playing’ in relation to this or are they ‘working’?
Teacher: Why does the Lord Mayor have to give an order for these houses to be demolished? Why can’t people just demolish them there and then?
Ciaran: Because you might need the materials to do it to fight the fire?
Teacher: Because you might need the materials? Is there another reason?
Holly: Cos he would have to pay for them all to be rebuilt?
Teacher: Right we’re getting closer…
Ryan: Because it’s against the law!
Teacher: Right, you can’t just demolish anybody’s house can you. It is vandalism isn’t it? So you can’t just go around blowing up people’s houses unless someone in authority says it’s ok. What do you think Adam?
Adam: Why can’t you just demolish your own house?
Teacher: Would you like to do that?
Adam: Well, if it is going to be set on fire anyway…
Others: I wouldn’t…
Teacher: Well… That’s an interesting point Adam. Maybe if you were thinking of other people and you were prepared to make that sacrifice then that would be very brave of you.
Holly: But what’s the point of knocking it down if it is going to get burned?>
Teacher: Well that would be what other people would think isn’t it
[heated discussion here]
TSA: What do you think the neighbours would think if they knocked their house down and yours was going to be safe now
Ryan: That would be funny
Teacher: Exactly, why don’t you suggest to your neighbours that they knock theirs down in order to keep yours safe?
Adam: Why don’t they just knock down anybody’s house?
[more heated discussion]
Teacher: Why didn’t they just knock down anybody’s house
Other: Yeah cos if it is going to get set on fire anyway…
Teacher: The problem is that if you did that – without the Lord Mayor saying it is ok to do that – you could get clapped up in jail…
[heated discussion and inaudible objections]
The teacher although he had wanted to probe the legal ramifications of a decision to demolish housing, he had not anticipated that the pupils would bring this into their own world and consider neighbourly quarrels about whose house should go and whose should stay. The considerations and questions voiced by pupils (and a TSA) here are ones that the teacher himself had not anticipated at all. Inside this conversation you can hear the pupils bringing this into their every-day experience in order to go beyond it and they anticipate informally, playfully and sometimes irreverently the complexities behind a decision like this – why the Lord Mayor took so long and what the implications might be for the decision-making process about where the fire-breaks should be created and therefore whose houses were to be sacrificed and whose were to be saved – a profound ethical dilemma – again some excellent opportunities for links to be made from this in relation to the concepts of insurance – and into the second order realm of evaluating competing causes.
Or maybe they were just playing around?