News
The difference between work and play
10 Aug 2010
In an article in Nursery World (September 2010), Justine Howard and Karen McInnes discuss their work on children's perceptions of play and work, and suggest the difference between the two might be an important one. The article is an edited extract of their chapter from a book titled Thinking about play: Developing a reflective approach.
Howard and McInnes argue that while most definitions of play are based on the adult view of observational acts of children, they fail to get at the “heart” of playfulness, those things which separate it from other actions. In the book the pair explore what it means to "approach a task as play" and how that can contribute to the development of play-based curricula.
The idea that children do distinguish between play and work and how they do this is important to how a play-based curriculum is set up. According to the few studies that have been conducted around children’s views of play they distinguish work from play based on cues; emotional and environmental. Emotional cues “include the amount of choice a child has in an activity, whether the activity is voluntary or not and how easy it is.” Environmental cues “include where the activity takes place, whether or not an adult is involved or evaluates what the child has done and the physical nature of the activity.” Children use all these cues to determine how play-like an activity is, meaning things can be more or less like play or work.
Howard and McInnes suggest that the “affective quality of play, namely playfulness” supports learning. This suggestion is supported by a few studies and some ongoing research. The studies and research show that when children view the activity at hand as play they perform better than when they view the activity as work. And even when the task that the child has to perform remains the same, when practised playfully they do better. This would suggest that understanding how children view and understand play is beneficial and can help practitioners construct a curriculum which blurs the work-play boundaries and aids children’s learning.
For the full chapter see “Thinking through the challenge of a play-based curriculum” by Justine Howard and Karen McInnes in Thinking about play: Developing a reflective approach, Open University Press.
