This past week, ideas of play have flooded my mind. Simply thinking about play made me significantly more imaginative and playful. For example, I ran around my front yard catching fireflies in a giant mason jar one night, and came up with narratives about their light show and why they no long lit up after being caught. I shared my creative hypotheses with some adult friends, and they were quick to tell me the facts. I admire children because they remind me what it is like to look at the world with wonder, to not always need to know the facts, but instead imagine their own stories. Kids always find ways to play, and often. But, what is play?
The process of play.
Play is an immersive and enjoyable experience which embraces exploration and the unknown. Some of my greatest experiences with play have been in artmaking. Play in artmaking means looking at a blank canvas and having no idea what the final outcome is, but you lay down colors anyway. Suddenly, you immerse yourself in a question that has never been asked before, and you answer it with colors, shapes, images, materials. You do not know the answer yet, and do not know when you will find it. The journey to find an answer is fun, satisfying, and non-linear. You problem-solve, and problem-find until you have a solution. Once a piece is done, you find many new questions sprout up. The process is much more important than the outcome when you play in art. There lies the freedom!
This gets lost somewhere in late elementary school/early middle school and some people never get it back. Why does this happen? My hypothesis is when people feel insecure (as you do starting in early middle school), you do not feel safe to play anymore. What is safe is what you know or what someone else tells you is right. What is safe is a measurable and repeatable outcome. In the art classroom this plays out with students drawing faces realistically, getting graded on correct perspective, memorizing color wheels, and drawing 500 thumbnail sketches before starting on a piece. Students are stunted by perfectionism and being a “good” artist. There is no room for play; only serious art.
This pains me because the art classroom is one of the only places to practice the important skill of play. Through artmaking, students can practice the skills of doing without knowing, asking questions with no right answers, and creative problem solving. Ultimately, they learn how to trust themselves.
This is a HUGE opportunity!
As an aspiring art educator, I hope to provide many experiences for my students to play. However, my deepest work lies in creating a space for students to feel safe. When I ask students to play with art materials, I am essentially asking them to intentionally get lost, to invite disorientation, and to let they guard down. That is not easy! But I have tasted the fruit of excitement from not knowing. I saw confidence emerge from answering the questions myself. I have known the freedom of throwing my hands up and saying, “what’s wrong if it did not turn out the way I expected?” Finally, I felt the joy in creating after a drought of perfectionism. Therefore, I will lead my students away from outcome-based learning when they are in my classroom. Eliza Pitri said in her article on artistic play, “The role of the adult in children’s play is not that of an instructor or entertainer, but rather of a friend whose presence will insure the quality and appropriateness of the experience. ”
All of these realizations take me back to the experience of catching fireflies in a mason jar. When a firefly’s main concern is safety (trying to get out of the mason jar), they can no longer shine their light and playfully dance through the air. Similarly, Art Educators have a unique opportunity to release their students from the jars of perfectionism and “right answers” in their life, and teach them to play again by cultivating safe spaces and opportunities to do so.
References:
Pitri, E. (2001). The role of artistic play in problem solving. Art Education, 54(3), 46-52.