The Call to Play

Abstract

This article explores the nature of play and its presence and potential in teaching and learning encounters. Play is portrayed as a movement that can characterize the process of learning and teachers’ reflections on their practice. The exercise of techne and phronesis are found to be key but problematic elements in this movement. The paper is in the form of a conversation, a medium calling the authors themselves to play with the play that might occur in classrooms. Thus, the authors’ play is itself a subject for inquiry. Their interplay warrants considering play to be an elemental activity for reconceptualizing teaching/learning practices. As new academic colleagues in a teachers college we discover a mutual educational concern regarding the lack of genuine conversation in teaching/learning situations. Attracted further by the call of possibility and desire for community, we enter into playful conversation. On the one hand, we have some personal aims—to understand each other better and to learn from each other. On the other hand, though, we have a broader professional interest. Through our conversation below, we hope to show conversation and play as legitimate, indeed essential, activities of inquiry and pedagogical relationship in teaching and learning. Much of current educational reform is potentially hostile to these activities (for example, high-stakes achievement testing and standards such as the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium’s [INTASC] with their emphasis on “strategies” and “techniques” [Hostetler, 2002]). There is critical need to retrieve these activities, which are at the center of good teaching and learning. Some Preliminary Thoughts on Conversation and Play So what do we mean by “conversation” and “play?” These are ideas that elude easy MACINTYRE LATTA & HOSTETLER, THE CALL TO PLAY definition, hence as we argue below, the need to play with them. Nevertheless, we do offer some preliminary orientation to these ideas before we launch into our conversation. Like German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer we understand language, the medium of conversation, to be the medium of all understanding. Gadamer (1989) takes up conversation as a mode of play. He insists that to understand conversation as play it is critical not to imply any frivolousness or lack of seriousness on the part of the conversational participants, but rather, to suggest that only through suspension of participants’ subjectivities can the matter at issue come to be revealed and understood. Gadamer describes this as “the primacy of play over the consciousness of the players” (p. 104). To give a trivial example, to really understand baseball, one really has to be a player. And while players surely bring individual talent and style to the game, at least if they want to play well, they cannot play the game any old way they want; their “subjectivities” have to be suspended. Good base stealers do not try to steal a base whenever they want. They take their cues from the game—the score, the inning, the number of outs in the inning—and the common concern of winning the game. Similarly, Gadamer (1989) asserts that the movement of a genuine conversation transcends distinct viewpoints (pp. 378-379). Part of this movement involves a focus upon some subject matter. This conversational play has an aim—understanding the subject matter at hand. And because the aim is understanding, participants must “transcend” their current opinions: “To reach an understanding in dialogue is not merely a matter of putting oneself forward and successfully asserting one’s own point of view, but being transformed into a communion in which we do not remain what we were” (p. 379). This “communion” does not imply agreement; people still will speak from their own experiences and other “prejudices.” Still, the aim is to speak as the conversation demands rather than merely as one’s own current beliefs demand. We hope to gain insights into this sort of conversational play. For example, to what extent can one really “transcend” one’s viewpoint? Do we really accomplish anything through our conversation? When we begin we are not sure what will happen. One of us has been a serious student of play; the other has only toyed with the idea. One of us has spent a great deal of time observing and analyzing teachers at play in their classrooms; the other spends very little time in classrooms. One of us takes an interpretive approach; the other was schooled in the analytic tradition in philosophy. What sort of play can we have? What sort of conversation? The Subject Matter of Our Conversation The object of our conversational play is the aesthetic play that might occur in classrooms. By aesthetic play we are referring to an attunement to the creating process in sense making; a sensitivity (on the parts of teachers and students) to the many nuances and possibilities present in learning situations and a willingness to take up the call to play (see also Barone, 1983; Dewey, 1934; Eisner, 1992; Gadamer, 1989; Grumet, 1993; May, 1993). We use data from a two-year inquiry (Note 1) into the nature of play in a middle school attempting to value the creating process, primary to the arts, across the entire school curricula. This provides opportunities to converse about