Rethinking Play

I recently began reading the book Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul by Stuart Brown and felt instant nostalgia for the times in my life when I actually allowed myself to play. This of course is a scary prospect, as it seems too often in my life I have altogether forgotten the joys of play by cramming my schedule so full with tasks and appointments that there is little time left to engage in play. I have always attributed this rearranging of priorities to the fact that I love my job and truly enjoy the oft-perceived drudgery of reading articles, researching, and toying with complicated concepts. My true creative outlet comes forth in lesson planning and designing learning experiences for my students to explore, challenge, and build knowledge through active learning–even in a college setting– as opposed to give and get transmission models of learning.

But still–maybe that’s not enough. Maybe vested engagement in play for the pure joy of itself regardless of professional implications is just as necessary. Brown even suggests that taking breaks from work to engage in play may improve our ability to do our work, refreshed and reinvigorated and possibly in possession of insights we were too focused to make.
“Authentic play comes from deep down inside us. It’s not formed or motivated solely by others. Real play interacts with and involves the outside world, but it fundamentally expresses the needs and desires of the player. It emerges from the imaginative force within. That’s part of the adaptive power of play: with a pinch of pleasure, it integrates our deep physiological, emotional, and cognitive capacities. And quite without knowing it, we grow. We harmonize the influences within us” (p. 104).
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Interesting perspective that was only reinforced earlier this week when I came across this article on recess and play in a New Zealand School, where more freedom and access to play actually improved safety. So why not improve overall education too?