Supporting Playful Learning Communities in Staffrooms and Classrooms

Rod Parker-Rees Rolle School of Education, University of Plymouth, Douglas Avenue, Exmouth EX8 2AT

Email: [email protected]

Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Conference, Cardiff University, 7- 10 September 2000.

Abstract

Groups of people, children or adults, who are able to engage in playful activity, even if this is nothing more than informal chat, can develop a feeling of community which arises from (and provides ideal conditions for) affective communication of a kind seldom found among groups who merely work together. Informal, face to face conversation enables members of a community to explore connections between the rich complexity of unmediated personal experience and the tidier but less colourful structures of shared communicable meanings. Teachers can make connections between their own practice, the experience of colleagues and ideas discussed in published research. Children can explore connections between their own ‘bottom-up’ understanding and the ‘top-down’ structures of the school curriculum.

This paper will present stories and reflections from a series of conversations with two groups of primary school teachers who have chosen to meet with me roughly once a month to talk informally about their own experiences, focusing loosely on possible ways of increasing opportunities for playful interaction among the children in their classes. These conversations are recorded and the teachers are later given a summary of the transcript. The teachers have responded positively to the opportunity to explore ideas without any pressure to write or to commit themselves to policy decisions.

Key Words: Conversation, Learning Communities, Playfulness Supporting Playful Learning Communities in Staffrooms and Classrooms

Introduction

The aim of this paper is to invite discussion of the role of playfulness in learning at all ages and levels. The ideas presented in this paper have emerged from, or at least been informed by, a series of meetings with groups of teachers in two schools, a first school and a primary school. The purpose of these meetings was to explore the potential of less formal, more playful kinds of interaction as a means of communicating and developing knowledge about teaching and learning.

Originally I had intended to work with these teachers on a more orthodox study of issues surrounding the provision of opportunities for children to be playful in classroom activities but I quickly realized that it might be more helpful to offer teachers an opportunity to talk about these issues in a more relaxed, playful environment where they might feel more free to explore and develop ideas in conversation, both with each other and with me. The decision to make the meetings explicitly informal and playful was also influenced by a long-standing awareness of imbalance in most communications about teaching and learning. My own work on playfulness (Parker-Rees 1997, 1999) had drawn my attention to the importance of a conversational reciprocity between top-down structures, organizations, rules and constraints and bottom-up associations with personal experience and real contexts. The management style described by some (Ball, 1997; Welch, 1998) as ‘new managerialism’ seemed to give much too much emphasis to compliance with top-down instruction at all levels, leading to frustration and disaffection.

We had a meeting to talk about play and reports with Anne and afterwards I felt, ‘That was such a good meeting’ because we were talking about what we wanted to do, and contrasting that with the meeting where we had to fathom out what we would do about the maths, and the difference! We’ve had so many of those kind of meetings where you get all the government curriculum stuff and you’re trying to make some sort of manageable sense of it, putting things in weeks and boxes. There’s so much of that and so little about talking about things you’ve started yourself and made up yourself and you’re enthusiastic about.

I thought it might be interesting to explore the educational potential of the unplanned, free-wheeling, light-hearted, playful kind of conversation which most of us really enjoy and to consider why work should be characterized by agendaed, planned, time-constrained, and purposeful kinds of communication which are so much less enjoyable.

Why do we separate out playfulness from our work, allocating different blocks of time to work and leisure? Is this a habit we have inherited from contexts where it might once have been useful but which are no longer relevant? Even conferences are normally organized so that presentation and discussion alternate both within sessions and over the course of each day. Delegates would not be happy with completely unprepared meetings to chat about whatever comes to mind, nor with a tight schedule of paper presentations with no time for discussion, but it might be possible to explore other ways of integrating the work of presentation with the play of ideas in conversation. I hope this paper will lead to further discussion about possible strategies for reversing the artificial distinction between play and work so that learning can be suffused with playfulness.

The paper will be structured around two overlapping topics:

What is playful learning and why might we want to make learning more playful? What are learning communities and what part might they play in making learning more playful?’ Playful Learning

I have devoted a considerable amount of time to trying to develop my own understanding of playfulness and I am conscious of the fact that I have little chance of communicating this understanding in the space available here. This problem illustrates what is, to me, a key feature of the relationship between playfulness and communication; we cannot communicate without reducing our own ideas to the relatively tidy, sequential and categorized form that most kinds of language require:

The world of experience must be greatly simplified and generalized before it can be translated into symbols. (Vygotsky 1962, p.6)

Communication always involves leaving out huge quantities of information, some of which may turn out to be more indispensable than we realized. The larger and less familiar the audience with which we wish to communicate the less we can assume we have in common with them and the more careful we have to be about how we put things (often we also have fewer opportunities to monitor and repair our communication with little or no feed-back before we have finished). One example from my own recent experience concerns interpretation of the phrase ‘cultural contexts’, which, to me, refers to the whole range of societal influences on a person’s sense-making but which others have interpreted almost exclusively in terms of ethnicity. Talking with adults about ‘play’ also provokes all sorts of associations, many of which may result in gut-feelings which can make people feel uncomfortable; ‘We’re not going to have to do role-plays are we?’ ‘Are we going to have to pretend to be children and make fools of ourselves?’.

Two things emerge from this: first, it may be easier to talk with adults about playfulness, playful thinking and playful learning than to try to talk about play and second, noone really enjoys playing with strangers. I will return to the second of these when I address the role of learning communities but first I want to say a bit more about playfulness and playful learning.

The phrase ‘playful learning’ will generate different associations for every reader because we have all had different experiences, read different books and talked with different people. For me, an essential feature of playful learning is that it must acknowledge the fact that the same words (or other symbols or icons or acts) cannot but mean different things to different people. Although conversation among a group of friends may lead to the emergence of a common story about shared events, each participant must recognize that some aspects may feel different to others – what is hilarious to most may remain acutely embarrassing to one or two, at least for some time. It is in this space between actions and words that playfulness can thrive; you cannot think playfully if you are convinced that people who do not understand things as you do must simply be wrong.

If I were pressed to define playful learning I might find it easiest to talk about what it is not. Playful learning is, almost certainly, not certain. Ellen Langer has conducted ingenious experiments to demonstrate that ‘conditional’ presentation of material can result in more successful recollection (Langer 1997, pp. 79-80) and Bruner has argued that the ‘subjunctive voice’ of narrative may have a special part to play in learning (Bruner 1986, 1990). Bruner offers two speculative hypotheses about the special functions of “‘subjunctive’ stories”. First, he suggests that such stories ‘can be tried on for psychological size, accepted if they fit, rejected if they pinch identity or compete with established commitments’ (1990, p.54). Like metaphors, stories can invite us to bring our own experience to bear on making sense of them so that we feel a more powerful sense of engagement with them. Secondly, Bruner observes that ‘a story is somebody’s story’ (ibid.); the way a story is told helps us to gain insight into the teller’s thinking, to understand more about how people work. When information is presented as impregnable fact there may be little point in attempting to relate it to one’s own experience and there is likely to be little opportunity to do so.

Another way of seeing the difference between playful and laborious (workful) learning is that whereas the laborious learner adopts new information, the playful learner adapts it and adapts to it (a distinction not unlike that between assimilating and accommodating).

If you can adapt you lessen the feeling of failure and I think that happens with the children too, if they realize they can adapt and they can learn from mistakes, and then that whole big problem of failing goes back into the distance - its not such a problem.

Where laborious learners put on a uniform and conform, playful learners find ways to express themselves by turning the wearing of the uniform into a performance. I have suggested elsewhere (Parker-Rees 1999) that this distinction resembles the difference between dressing, in its historical sense of making regular or orderly, and dressing up. Playful learners enjoy dressing up in new ideas and exploring connections with what they already know (‘what if ...?’) but they need space and time to do this. Many of the teachers recognized that over planning could stifle opportunities for playfulness, both their own and the children’s:

I didn’t really have time to plan and I deliberately went in more or less unplanned and I think for me it often goes better because instead of you having a sense of all this time all this stuff to get in to this hour, its the other way round and of course you’ve got to know what you’re going to do but there’s plenty of things to do somehow I’ve got kind of stacked up in my head. When I’ve got too much planned I can’t stop trying to do it.

David Blunkett would like us all to be new teachers all the time really wouldn’t he? And plan every single thing all the time. But how do you remember what you’ve planned? That would be my problem. Like when Ofsted are here, you keep having to refer to your file. I know, it’s awful. Don't you feel lost when you do that?

I came adrift with the numeracy this year because we had these set things and I found the only way I could remember to tell children everything was actually to write it down so for the first time in hundreds of years I was standing there with this lesson plan and it was dire it was awful, had I mentioned the right things? It was dreadful. If you think about it we spend our whole day in blocks of time it's a bit like being in prison, isn't it?

Like adopting a subjunctive voice or ‘dressing up’ in ideas, pretending seems to offer an effective way of bridging the gap between the rich complexity of direct, personal experience and the simplified, ordered symbol systems which enable us to communicate. This emerged quite clearly in conversations about the appropriateness of teaching children to use Standard English. On the one hand, it might seem unwise to teach children that their language, and the language spoken in their homes, is inferior in some way to the dialect used by the educated middle-classes but, on the other hand, children who do not learn to put on Standard English when necessary may find themselves at a disadvantage. Pretending to ‘talk posh’ may allow children to acquire a useful skill without making them feel they have to abandon or betray their own dialect and the self that belongs with it. Pretending can also reduce the ‘function pressure’ of real activity which can inhibit performance, so that playful adults, as well as children, may appear ‘a head taller’ (Vygotsky 1978, p.102). The need to learn the rules while still maintaining one’s sense of self became a recurring theme for discussion in this group. In one meeting a teacher talked about her children’s delight in acting out the witches’ scene from Macbeth. Because the children were able to ‘dress up’ as witches, putting themselves into their performance in their expressions, gestures and movements, they were able to bring the words to life, to interpret the symbols and turn them into the sort of rich, multi-level communication with which they were familiar. This form of communication is very different from writing and reading, as one of the teachers in the other group found when she asked her children to prepare a play:

When I was on one of my teaching practices I had to concentrate on literacy and language with a class for about six weeks and I decided to do plays with them. It was a year four class and we spent ages writing a play and we were going to perform it at the end and two children had been away on holiday and the ones who had written their plays laboriously down and acted them had acted them and acted them and so then these two girls came back and they just did them. Improvised. Yes and it was amazing! It was ten times better than with the other children and I thought ‘I did it the wrong way round, didn’t I?’ they didn’t need to write it, they interacted and it just worked. I could have just done that. Why didn’t I start with that - ‘Here’s the situation, lets go and do it’?

As we talked about the value of acting and pretending the teachers suddenly realized how important a part acting plays in their own work:

When you said that thing about teachers acting, that's what we do all the time. The thing is you do learn in the first year that unless you do put on that persona, if you’re really you, you just get run out ragged if you don't kind of put this you know being a bit annoyed when you're not really annoyed. You don't really mind but somehow you do have to do it otherwise if you wait. Its very exaggerated, isn't it? But its funny, with your own children I find with children in school I don't really get annoyed but my own children I do and you think, you know, you're really quite cross with the sort of things they do but with the children in class ... But it is an act. The other day I'd had an awful weekend and I've got a boy in my class who needs humouring all the time and I just hadn't got the energy, I couldn't bear to do it and because I wasn't humouring him - ‘Come on, up you come’ - all this, he was unbearable, he was awful because I wasn't, I just wanted to hide away all day and all the other children were very sympathetic and sweet but Sam couldn't cope because I wasn't this person which was ‘ Up you get Sam, quick as you can’ like this all the time and it was just like, it was awful, and its really weird because I noticed how I must be very very different with him normally and not really myself. I've just come into the field and heard this thing about teachers being positive and feeling this terrible guilt if you're not constantly positive with children. I think people from outside actually don't realize, like that accelerated learning, I do really agree with all that, I really do, but I don't think people realize he's talking about, you know, you had to make a decision ‘this is a no put down zone’ in terms of playing with children and I really agree with all that but the reality of coping with so many children some of whom have problems and may be disturbed, they’re just people and naughty, they try it on, and to keep that constant positive attitude. I don't think people realize what it’s like. There's probably no other scenario where you would be expected to be so accepting the whole time. You have to do it because the alternative is horrible. You feel like an air hostess.

These teachers were focusing on the defensive value of pretending, of maintaining a distance between one’s public face (Goffman, 1959) or persona and ‘the real me’, but you may not feel comfortable about describing their approach to classroom survival as playful, possibly because of the feeling of inevitability in their behaviour. We only really feel playful when we feel in control and able to make our own choices but thinking playfully can also enable us to cope with oppressive constraints:

To treat an order, or any kind of rule or instruction, as merely suggestive - to turn it into something a little more to one’s taste - is radically to revise the nature of authority (obedience would be merely fear of interpretation). (Phillips, 1998, p.87)

One of the teachers expressed this rather more defiantly (though with a laugh!) when she said, ‘We opt out of anything we’re really told to do’ but playful interpretation may be more effective than simple refusal or rebellion.

It is interesting to note the connotational differences between words built around the Old English root ‘play’ and those constructed around the Latin root, ‘ludere’. There is a common thread of distrust and unease in the shifts in usage of such latinate words as ludicrous, illusion, elude, collude and delude. Most speakers and, more particularly, writers of Norman or Latin would have been in positions of power and therefore predisposed to feel uncomfortable about attitudes and behaviours which might help their minions to maintain any sense of freedom or choice. Eluding systems of control, by playfully interpreting them in ways which make them less onerous, could be seen as a form of treachery. Collusion, getting together and playfully exploring ways around constraints, would, rightly, be seen as a particularly dangerous threat to the maintenance of an imposed order.

Perhaps things have not changed so much. I have been struck by the intensity with which these teachers have described their sense of being hemmed in and constrained by top-down policies and constraints:

But, it’s sort of worrying but the thing is you’re in a straitjacket and you don’t realize because you don’t sort of step back and look at it objectively, you just keep your head down and get through everything every day ...and you don’t actually look at the whole picture any longer.

Yes, it started with all this accountability, didn’t it? and lack of trust and seems the bad side of all that, the literacy and numeracy, the down side - because there is a good side to it too - but the bad side is that its logical conclusion is a lack of trust, you know, of teachers. I mean if it was there to use as a guide ... The strategy knows best, the strategy knows better than a teacher on the spot what’s appropriate ...

But teachers are also themselves in a position of power over the children they teach and they are very aware of the risks involved in taking the lid off the pressure-cooker of classroom control:

for someone doing something like drama, when they’re not very confident with it, it can be really scary, that you’re taking the lid off this thing and it’s all alive and bubbling and ‘where will it end!’. So you’ve got to take a deep breath and ... hope nobody comes in!

The risk is not just that, given an inch, children may find ways to collude in taking a mile (particularly the youngest children who ‘have no fear’) but also that ‘someone might come in’:

she did this you know that you turn round and you’re in role and then you turn round and you’re out of role and um I did a few times with one class of being in role as an alien and they love it they just love it they have to ask you questions but you’re sort of going (waving arms about as alien tentacles!) ... just hope nobody walks in This anxiety about being ‘caught’ in a situation which, to an outside observer, might look chaotic, again exposes the teachers’ sense of a gap between what they would like to do in their classrooms and what they feel they are expected to be doing. Opening up opportunities for children and teachers (and headteachers, and LEA advisers ..) to be playful in their interpretation of constraints can easily be seen as a recipe for chaos, the collapse of all order, so it feels safer to batten down the hatches and run a tight ship. But of course we are not faced with a choice between absolute chaos and absolute control, playfulness is only possible within constraints and although players may try to bend the rules in their favour they have nothing to gain from abandoning them altogether. On the other hand, it may be much easier to be playful in the company of trusted friends than when one has to face oppressive constraints on one’s own.

Learning Communities

Dewey was writing about communities of enquirers in 1938 (Johnson 1999, p.26) and the idea that learning is a social process has developed steadily since then but Senge’s (1990) application of the concept of the ‘learning organization’ to commercial enterprises has recently led to a renewal of interest in the importance of affective relationships in the development and maintenance of a learning culture (Retallick et al., 1999; Clark, 1996). I believe it is important to recognize that we now use the word ‘community’ to refer to very different kinds of social groupings and I am particularly concerned to focus on the smallest, most intimate levels of community which are supported by regular face to face conversations, chat and gossip. As communities grow, the common understandings which hold them together have to be rarefied and simplified from complex, subtle, largely tacit knowing into ideas which can be captured in a common language of symbols. While this level of common-ness may suffice for the maintenance of working relationships it may not be enough to establish the trust and familiarity which enable groups of friends to let down their guard and engage with each other more playfully:

Research on conversational groupings suggests that people can maintain full involvement with about four others before the group fragments into smaller clusters (Dunbar, 1992). This may be because conversation involves much more than just attention to words. In conversation we use information from people’s posture, gestures, pacing, intonation, hesitations, gaze direction and even smell (Motluk, 1999), not to make sense of what they say but to work out what they mean and to update our impressions of what they are like. Conversation within a group of known and trusted friends can serve both to maintain this community and to negotiate the interpretation of information, and particularly constraints, which come down to the group from ‘above’.

When we separate out work and play we run the risk of removing opportunities for this kind of social interaction from work activities, leaving working life dry and remote from the affective life of the workers:

I feel I know the children less now than I used to because you don’t hear about their families

I don't think you get to know many children as well because it’s so much delivering

One of the pleasures of reading through the transcripts of the meetings has been the frequency with which the teachers relate anecdotes about the ‘lovely’ parts of their work but the teachers recognized that much of what they particularly enjoyed in school took place on the fringes of the work of the school, on outings and visits, when ‘work’ was suspended for preparations for a performance or event. Occasionally, teachers did find time to combine work and social interaction and these were clearly marked as special occasions: It’s wonderful, we're all sat there at this table and they're really doing beautiful work and they're sitting there chatting and talking about it and it’s such a lovely atmosphere.

I was doing cooking with my children today, just a group at a time and, I don’t ever do that because my ESA does it and I just thought it was lovely because you had, well I had one group of 7 and three groups of 6 to get through with the bits and it was just so .. chummy

There is an inevitable tension between the top-down demands of a prescribed curriculum and the bottom- up interests of any group of learners and teachers require a high degree of confidence before they will risk loosening their control to accommodate the children’s interests and feelings. The value of acknowledging the affective component of children’s learning was well illustrated by one teacher’s account of a science lesson which began fairly straightforwardly as a discussion about an experiment to find out about how plants grow but which developed into a heated debate about the ethics of abusing plants for the sake of enquiry:

The QCA materials suggest an experiment involving taking leaves off one plant and comparing growth with another which has its leaves left on. This led to an extreme reaction from the children so I asked the children to say why they didn’t they think the experiment should be carried out. They got incredibly fired up and it wasn’t like (gestures children-to-adult interaction), it was just (gestures interaction between children, with sound effects to illustrate pace and energy of discussion!). It was things like, “How would you like it if there were lots of plants sitting in a circle and they ripped off your arms and legs?” but then other children were saying, “Yes, but they’re not alive; plants aren’t alive like we’re alive” so it really got quite ..in depth. I was trying to write down arguments for and against and in the end we took a vote about who thought we should and who thought we shouldn’t And what happened? Well, we’re not doing it. We decided on another experiment, though people were saying, “Well we eat cabbages” and it was quite balanced, with some who thought it was perfectly reasonable and some who were more anthropomorphisising. I thought the argument was much more valuable than actually doing the experiment.

Here the teacher was faced with a choice between pressing on with her planned lesson or responding to what she recognized as a powerful concern felt by some of the children and she was prepared to follow their lead and explore an aspect of science which drew on both the children’s knowledge and understanding of living things and their own developing understanding of ethics and morality (c.f. Gallas, 1994 on the value of ‘Science Talks’ with young children)

Our meetings have focused on the value of playful conversation so it is not surprising that we have spent a good deal of time talking about ways in which children can be given opportunities to chat with each other, and with adults, in the course of the school day. I have become particularly interested in the recurring observation that children enjoy opportunities to experiment and practice in situations which will not involve them in being held accountable for their exploratory efforts – writing on laminated wipe-off boards, for example, or talking about a recent outing without having to write about it or feed back to the whole class. In one of the schools, the playground includes an area with large bushes and we all recognized the children’s need, sometimes, to go off into the bushes to chat, away from the well meaning gaze of supervising adults. In this school the headteacher also recognises that teachers may benefit from sometimes having space to engage in their own playful conversations away from the supervision of ‘management’. For both children and adults, being able to chat with well known and trusted friends seems to provide a confidence boost which makes more formal talk with larger groups of less familiar people a bit less intimidating: Yesterday, in that maths thing after school, we had some training after school and, like, because we'd had time to talk about it together Sally was asking for some feedback and you had the confidence to say something about that because you knew that everyone else in your group had agreed with you and it was something worthwhile saying, whereas I would never have put my hand up if she'd just asked me.

As one of the teachers put it, ‘If you can play together you can do so much more working as a team, you pull through together’. It is not just that teachers who have time to chat become more confident participants in their own learning conversations; when there is space to accommodate teachers’ affective needs and interests in their work they seem to be less likely to succumb to the deadening impact of disaffection:

Teachers who work in collaborative communities which are cohesive and highly collegial are more innovative, show higher levels of energy and enthusiasm and are more supportive of personal growth and learning. (Retallick 1999, p.115)

One of the teachers spoke with real passion about her distress after attending a training session with teachers from other schools. She showed a mixture of compassion and disbelief as she recounted the general feeling of surrender expressed by many of these teachers, summed up in their desire to be told what to do:

Just tell me what to do and I’ll stick in the tramlines and do it.

She was astonished by the other teachers’ repeated observations that hers must be ‘an incredibly brave school’ to risk interpreting the requirements of the Literacy Hour and Daily Maths Lesson to suit the needs of the children and there was real concern in her heartfelt comment that ‘it must be hell working in a school where you’re not allowed to be you’. When there is no space left in our work for us to be playful, to explore connections with our own concerns or to engage with others in playful conversations, then it does become very difficult to be ourselves and work may come to feel like a kind of hell.

Playful conversation with colleagues is, of course, a form of collusion and it can help individuals to recognize that structures are more flexible than they might otherwise have believed:

You can find that you’ve been doing something you thought you had to do and then you hear someone say, ‘No, we don’t do it’ ...

But far from threatening the collapse of order, this culture of playful interpretation can strengthen a community as constraints are adapted and adjusted to accommodate the different requirements of different members. Within the classroom, children who are given time to make sense of what they are learning may actually be surprisingly willing to work within formal constraints and teachers who have opportunities to chat with each other and to play around with different ways of meeting their children’s needs may be less likely to rebel, resign or slide into disaffection, depression and burn-out.

The illusion of a conclusion

In his bold attempt to explain consciousness Daniel Dennett has suggested that each of us may be more like a community than we realize (Dennett, 1991). Dennett describes the workings of the brain as a ‘pan- demonium’, a process of interaction between ‘demons’ each of which specialises in making sense of one kind of information - finding edges or straight lines in the visual field, tracking movement, identifying phonemes in the flow of speech etc. Out of the ‘conversation’ between these demons a mental ‘grand narrative’ emerges into consciousness. Dennett suggests that consciousness acts like a circus ringmaster, announcing and interpreting the antics of the performers to the crowd and presenting the illusion of being in control of proceedings in which he actually plays very little part.

Guy Claxton (1997) has made a strong case for redressing the balance between the rationalisations of conscious, deliberative thought (the ringmaster) and the skillful but tacit performance of the ‘undermind’ (the performers or demons). Peter Tomlinson has drawn from research on the relationship between the ‘conscious serial mode’ of thinking and the ‘tacit connectionist mode’ to argue for a reappraisal of the balance between conscious reflection and implicit learning in teacher preparation (Tomlinson 1999a, p.415). Tomlinson argues that the emphasis on teacher reflection may actually have reinforced teachers’ perceptions of a dualism between thought and action; first you act, then you reflect. What is needed, Tomlinson argues, is a greater emphasis in teacher preparation on grappling with ‘the difficult issues of balance and interplay between implicit and explicit facets of processing’ (Tomlinson, 1999b, p.533). A similar argument for reappraising the role of intuitive skills, knowledge and understanding in the practice of teaching is made by Claxton (2000). He describes the ideal environment for the nurturing of intuitive learning as ‘one that is convivial, playful, co-operative and non-judgmental, as well as being purposeful and professional’ (p.48) and suggests that:

Rehabilitating intuition seems to be largely a matter of regaining balance: the balance between effort and playfulness ... and the balance between intuition itself and reason (Claxton, 2000, p. 44)

Restoring playfulness to the effortful, laborious work of learning may provide a valuable antidote to disaffection, both in teachers and children, but we may need to recognize that it is very difficult for individuals to develop as playful learners without the affective support of a community. A playful learning community enables its participants to participate in conversations which address and develop tacit, intuitive understandings as well as the business in hand. The continuing development, or learning, of the community is seen in terms of personal and social development as well as performance as measured against external standards.

The aim of this paper has not been to persuade or convince readers of the truth of my argument, it is offered instead as a contribution to a discussion. I hope it will stir some flickers of recognition in its readers and possibly even prompt some of you to consider the possibility of introducing a little more space for playfulness into your own work with researchers, teachers and children. One of the schools I have been visiting is now involved in the ‘Learning to Learn’ project and some of the teachers have agreed to alternate more formal research coordination meetings with more playful gatherings to chat about issues arising from the research. At the moment, for teachers at least, it is still probably easier to keep opportunities for playful interaction separate from ‘work’ meetings and I suspect that any moves to reintegrate play with work are more likely to come from experiments in the classroom where ‘incredibly brave’ teachers may be prepared to build opportunities for chat into their planning. Although it may be easier for teachers to convince themselves that it is possible to just stick in the tramlines and deliver the curriculum, I am confident that most would welcome the opportunity to collude with the brave individuals in schools which are prepared to support communities of playful learners among both children and staff. References

Ball, S. J. (1997) ‘Policy Sociology and Critical Social Research: a Personal View of Recent Education Policy and Policy Research’, British Educational Research Journal, 23, 2, 257-274. Bruner, J. S. (1986) Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Bruner, J. S. (1990) Acts of Meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Claxton, G. (1997) Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind: Why Intelligence Improves When You Think Less. Fourth Estate: London. Claxton, G (2000) ‘The anatomy of intuition’ in G. Claxton and T. Atkinson (Eds), The Intuitive Practitioner: on the Value of Not Always Knowing what One is Doing. Buckingham: Open University Press, pp.32-52. Dennett, D. C. (1991) Consciousness Explained. Harmondsworth: Penguin Dunbar, R. (1992) ‘Why Gossip is Good for You’, New Scientist, 21/11/1992, pp. 28-31. Gallas, K. (1994) The Languages of Learning: How Children Talk, Write, Dance, Draw and Sing their Understanding of the World, New York: Teachers’ College Press. Goffman, E. (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Johnson, N. (1999) ‘Meeting the challenge: becoming learning communities’ in J. Retallick, B. Cocklin & K. Coombe (Eds) Learning Communities in Education, London: Routledge, pp. 26-43. Langer, E. J. (1997) The Power of Mindful Learning. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Motluk, A. (1999) ‘The scent of fear’ New Scientist, 1/5/1999. Parker-Rees, R. (1997c) Playing the system: learning to think playfully, in: J. Burnett and J. Rodd (Eds) Realising Children’s Potential: the Value of Early Learning (conference proceedings), Exmouth: University of Plymouth, Rolle School of Education. Parker-Rees, R. (1999) ‘Protecting Playfulness’, in L. Abbott & H. Moylett (Eds) Early Education Transformed. Falmer: London. Parker-Rees, R. (2000) ‘Time to relax a little: makingtime for the interplay of minds in education’. Education 3-13, Vol. 28, No. 1, pp. 29-35. Phillips, A. (1998) The Beast in the Nursery. Faber and Faber: London. Retallick, J. (1999) ‘Transforming Schools into Learning Communities’ in J. Retallick, B. Cocklin & K. Coombe (Eds) Learning Communities in Education, London: Routledge, pp. 107-130. Retallick, J., Cocklin, B. & Coombe, K. (Eds) (1999) Learning Communities in Education, London: Routledge. Senge, P. (1990) The Fifth Discipline: the Art and Practice of the Learning Organsation, New York: Doubleday. Tomlinson, P. (1999a) ‘Conscious reflection and implicit learning in teacher preparation. Part I: recent light on an old issue.’ Oxford Review of Education, Vol. 25, No. 3, pp. 405-424. Tomlinson, P. (1999b) ‘Conscious reflection and implicit learning in teacher preparation. Part II:implications for a balanced approach.’ Oxford Review of Education, Vol. 25, No. 4, pp. 533-544. Vygotsky, L. S. (1962) Thought and Language trans. E. Hanfmann and G. Vakar, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978) Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Mental Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Welch, A. R. (1998) ‘The Cult of Efficiency in Education: Comparative Reflections on the Reality and the Rhetoric’, Comparative Education, 34, 1, 157-175.