Daniel makes stuff, and, in his spare time, writes about things like movies, kid culture, and geek stuff.
Places of Education

The early childhood schools of Reggio Emilia, Italy – widely acclaimed to be among the best in the world – have a saying about their classrooms: “The environment is the third teacher,” alongside parents and teachers themselves. This very visceral connection that children have to physical spaces and places (PDF) is too important to neglect, and yet so many of our classrooms are poorly kept, uninspired, and ill-maintained.

“A school needs to be a place for all children, not based on the idea that they are all the same, but that they are all different.”

-Loris Malaguzzi, Founder of the Reggio Emilia schools

With this in mind, GOOD Magazine has a selection from Lissa Rivera’s photo collection, “Places of Education.” It’s interesting to consider classrooms in such a detached way, that perhaps only a photograph can provide: when we step back and really see how these classrooms and places of education are, I think we begin to question what implicit assumptions and expectations they communicate about education the process of learning.

Among my favourite of Rivera’s photos:

I feel like I could spend all day in this art studio at The Windsor School.

Nov 23, 2009 :: Tagged under: , , :: #

A Look At Asia's First "Cyber Playground"

Another one of them thar high-falutin’, techno-woozical electronic playgrounds, I say.

Very novel and certainly entertaining, I suppose, but I’m wondering when we’re going to learn that the best playgrounds for kids will never be the ones that are designed by adults. If kids are an environment’s intended users, then why are we not simply yielding control of that environment directly over to them? Why must we introduce yet another layer of adult-derived complexity to get in their way?

(Via JC Boushh.)

Nov 07, 2009 :: Tagged under: , , :: #

Banning Adults, Take Two

The BBC expands on the “banning parents from playgrounds” story with a bit more depth and (well, let’s face it) level-headed reporting:

Ms Thornhill (the elected mayor of Watford) said of the two adventure playgrounds where the parents had been asked to leave: “This is not a playground we’re talking about but a unique gated and fenced facility where quite risky and challenging activities take place.”

She said the Harebreaks playground had never allowed adults to stay and the Harwood site had had a core of half a dozen parents who insisted on staying with their children.

It had distracted staff from adequately supervising the children leading to a series of incidents, Ms Thornhill said.

I think we really have to be quite hesitant to make values-based judgments about anything before putting ourselves in the shoes of those making the decisions. It seems like the senior playworker involved really, truly felt the culture of the Adventure Playground, and the opportunities there for children to play freely, would be better served if parents were asked not to stick around.

Anybody who’s worked with groups of children, I suspect – either in child care or education, at an Adventure Playground, or in special groups or clubs – can at least sympathise with the feeling. I’m sure the playwork staff and the Council feel it would be lovely to have a welcoming place for all – kids and their parents, and hell, anybody else who is a part of the community – but especially in these financially constraining times, it takes far too much time and energy from an already over-taxed staff to concentrate both on kids and parents. When push comes to shove, it’s the kids who win out – and rightfully so, I should think.

UPDATE: Dorothy Thornhill has posted several responses to the widely misconstrued incident on her blog, and it seems this really is a bad case of the misunderstandings:

What has happened is that at Harwoods a handful of parents have been staying on, not just dropping their kids off. After a number of incidents, staff that run the facility felt that the presence of these parents was hampering their ability to supervise the kids properly – who remember are engaging in risky play and do need to be given full attention. They’ve now brought the site in line with Harebreaks, where parents don’t stay on and they have no problems.

Oct 30, 2009 :: Tagged under: , , :: #

Banning Adults from Playgrounds?

By Daniel Bigler :: Friday October 30, 2009

Lenore Skenazy at Free Range Kids caught hold of recent piece in the Telegraph describing how a local London borough is taking steps to “ban” parents and adults from public playgrounds in their area.

Councillors in Watford claim they are only following Government guidelines and cannot allow adults to walk around playgrounds “unchecked” … Council Mayor Dorothy Thornhill argued they are merely enforcing government policy at the play areas, in Vicarage Road and Leggatts Way.

She said: “Sadly, in today’s climate, you can’t have adults walking around unchecked in a children’s playground and the adventure playground is not a meeting place for adults.

It sounds pretty outrageous at first glance – but there have been a few things that have thankfully been cleared up along the way.

First, there’s this fact: Watford’s two “public playgrounds,” in question – Harwoods and Harebreaks Adventure Playground – aren’t in fact public to begin with. They’re Local Authority-run and technically fall under the bill of “offered youth services” – not that dissimilar from public schools, after-school programs, clubs, and so forth. Most or all of those places, mind, typically don’t encourage adults to stick around for very long either – since many parents do actually tend to get in the way of the program itself, generally.

Second, I’m not sure what to say about the Telegraph’s reporting: it’s all over the map in how it’s portraying these places. A few things: Adventure Playgrounds aren’t your normal playgrounds. They are set aside, time-honoured spaces for kids to build and be in charge of their own play – “a child’s world in the city,” if you will. Some of their hallmarks are:

  • They’re dynamic, fluid spaces – often filled with children’s fort- and den-building, mud and sand pits, ponds or other natural places, and built wooden structures like gangways, towers, and so forth (historically solely built by the children, but anymore primarily built by the adults who are guided by the kids) – and their ultimate control lies in the hands of the kids themselves;
  • Children are given ample permission and encouragement within Adventure Playgrounds to take measured risks, build competence, and test their own abilities within a safe environment that they have ownership of;
  • A staff of trained, experienced “Playworkers” is always close at hand – understanding, reflexive adults there for the children if needed, who provide for and maintain children’s play in different ways, but otherwise are very hands-off in their approach. Unlike how the article describes playworkers, they’re not “Play Rangers” and they don’t “patrol”; the title of “Play Ranger” does exist, but typically in more commercialised play spaces that may be “adventurous,” but really shouldn’t be considered “Adventure Playgrounds.” (And yes, play workers do know their title is oxymoronic – and often they’d prefer there was no need for their job; that said, there’s sometimes no way around providing at least minimal adult supervision in places like these.)

Adventure Playgrounds can really only be understood by spending time in one (a real one) and reading up on the history and philosophy of Adventure Playgrounds. They have quite a legacy in many European countries, and are seen to fulfil a vital need in densely populated urban centres, where children don’t often have the space – or the social allowances – to play freely. Again, to really understand how they operate and what they provide to kids you just have to experience one; if you don’t have one near you, though, Morgan Leichter-Saxby’s playwork blog is a good place to start to get a better idea.

Like a few of the commenters from Skenazy’s post, I have to admit: the kid in me rejoiced a little at first hearing the Watford story. The adults have been banned! The adults have been banned!

Even though some parents are crying foul and accusing the borough of being a nanny state – well, logically there’s not that much difference to kids between nanny states and nanny parents. Both are a bit of a nuisance when you’re trying to play.

I think more pressingly, this is not about whether parents are allowed to visit their playground – but about an underlying issue of Openness in children’s play environments.

Adventure Playgrounds generally try to run based on a philosophy of openness: Children should be free to choose what they like to do. They should be allowed to play however they like, and with whomever they like. And, perhaps most crucially to the concept: Children should also feel an openness to come and go as they please, to use the space as much or as little as they want. Open-access was a founding principle of the Adventure Playground. The idea was to turn the space into a neighbourhood-based resource for children in the broader context of their lives, functioning at their full disposal and not as a mere attraction for their parents to drop them off at on special occasions. No, they were to be places children can come to with friends, say, after school, hang out at however long they like, and leave from whenever they wish. They were to be children’s places, fully theirs and no one else’s.

This belief in openness may often mean pragmatic difficulties for Adventure Playground staff, depending on where their financing is coming from. Many Adventure Playgrounds are run independently as separate charities, but others are run by Local Authorities and governments, typically with their own agendas in place. The person who foots the bill is the one who gets to decide what kinds of information the playwork staff collect about children: For instance, do children need to be registered, with parental contact information? Do they need to be signed in every time they visit, or just once? Are they allowed to sign in themselves, or do their parents need to do it for them each time? There’s a lot of questions involved, and unfortunately this is where the ideals behind Adventure Playgrounds come into conflict with the realities of arranging for their funding and the actual practice of running them.

Still, I think it might be too easy for us to get caught up in our adult worries in considering play provision: We get trapped in a paranoia about pedophiles, or a constant questioning of safety, or the feeling that we need to have more accountability. Sure, it was a misstep on the part of the Council to cite these concerns as reason for the “ban” – but I hardly think that’s the full picture, or even really the most important issue at stake here. Unfortunately for the Harwoods and Harebreak Adventure Playgrounds, the Local Authority officials in charge of them don’t seem to really understood this philosophy of Open-access: They’ve required that children are first registered to visit, for instance, and the general feeling I get is that parents are either required or encouraged to drop off and pick up their kids – but children aren’t free to come and go as they wish. There doesn’t seem to be much of a feeling of true Open-access for kids.

That they equally don’t extend access to parents is only a periphery concern to me; I think what we should really be worried about is the children’s level of Open-access to Adventure Playgrounds. It’s them, not the parents, who most importantly should feel the freedom to come and go as they wish, unhindered by both policy and their parents’ free range allowances. If we were truly focused on them and providing for their play, then maybe the topic of “banning” parents from playgrounds wouldn’t raise such a big stink.

UPDATE: Some quite needed follow-up, courtesy of the BBC’s far more level-headed reporting and some blog posts from the Council’s elected mayor, Dorothy Thornhill.

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Venturing Into the Land of the Wild Things

NPR spends some time talking with author Dave Eggers, who co-wrote the film adaptation of “Where the Wild Things Are.” I think I’ve covered the film and its history pretty well, but saw this bit and had to include it.

Eggers tells Melissa Block that his attraction to the Wild Things project sprung from his love of the Maurice Sendak children’s book upon which the movie is based. He was particularly drawn to Sendak’s vision of free-form childhood:

“I spent most of my time growing up … in the woods making forts, breaking stuff and playing in the mud,” he says. “I think most kids, but boys especially, need to sometimes pick up a stick and hit other trees with it.”

Eggers contrasts that aspect of his youth with the depictions of childhood commonly seen in modern Hollywood movies: “You see a much more indoor version of childhood,” he says. “It’s safe and sanitary.”

There’s so much truth in that.

Oct 18, 2009 :: Tagged under: , , , , :: #

Stupid Playground Rules

You can’t make this stuff up:

“Always sit in the swing; don’t stand or kneel. Hold on tightly with both hands. Stop the swing completely before getting off.”

This is why adults should never, ever be in charge of playgrounds.

Sep 20, 2009 :: Tagged under: , , , :: #

Re-imagining Children's Play Spaces

The Cool Hunter considers what a splash of colour and innovation might do to the places we provide children to play in:

Kids have boundless imaginations. No matter how poor, colorless and toyless their environment, they’ll find a way to play. They will play with stones, twigs, grass and water, and they will play with each other … In this light, what our urban kids have available to them, is excessively abundant. They have daycare and play spaces, parks, playgrounds, even yards. Yet, when we look at the basic play environments in our communities, there’s no denying that they are sadly short of what they could be. With some color, imagination, labor and resources, they could all be so much better.

A good many of the photographed places aren’t exactly new, but The Cool Hunter’s photo essay is worth a look if you’re interested.

Unfortunately these places are almost universally adult-designed and constructed, and that’s the downfall. No matter how tantalizingly engaging they look for play, they don’t hold a candle to the play spaces children can construct on their own. That doesn’t mean there can’t be a place for playful architecture and design woven into the broader culture, but we must remember to let kids’ play still ultimately remain their own.

Jul 29, 2009 :: Tagged under: , , , :: #

Children's Risk and Play in Gambia

Morgan Leichter-Saxby has conducted extensive anthropological research with children in London’s Adventure Playgrounds, and she writes eloquently about their experiences in the playgrounds and the play culture that emerges. She also shares of her own experiences in the playwork profession – supporting and providing for children’s play, as an adult, in a managed setting. (It’s a tricky business, you can be sure of that.)

Recently, though, she visited Gambia and it’s her recollections of this different global perspective of children’s play that really fascinated me. The boys in Gambia were fully accustomed to “dangerous” play – play with knives and in locales that would easily scare most parents in Western countries – and also interestingly, their play was often indistinguishable from more practical-minded “work”: involving going on hunts into the bush, tracking wild game, and climbing high into trees to collect mangoes. It’s this blurring between work and play, and this open incorporation of “risky” play behavior, that is interesting.

It reinforced for me how particular our ideas of risk are, and how paranoid.  These children take their freedom to roam for granted, as well as their ownership of a knife and ability to use both in whatever way they see fit.  Our fears over paving stones that get slippery or climbing walls with too high a drop demonstrate how we still take carry the false belief that we can control all elements of our children’s environments.  Even when we argue for more risk in play provision, we think of it as something we can “manage”, when we know that the real dangers are always unexpected.

Clearly, conceptions of risk will always be culturally bound: despite a European or American’s unease with the “riskiness” of, say, a child with a knife, it is an established and expected – and clearly not as risky as we surmise – part of Gambia’s play culture. I think we certainly should be asking ourselves what the perceived risk versus actual risk is in much of children’s activities, especially in terms of the rewards afforded. (I suspect we’d be surprised at how little actual risk is involved, and how much stands to be gained, in children’s “dangerous” play.)

But I think what I’m struck by most is how purposeful these Gambian children’s play was, as Leichter-Saxby describes it. Despite the absence of adult direction and provision for play, despite the fact that you might never find a formalized “playground” (as we know it) or a material subculture of “playthings” in their midst, these children’s play certainly is incredibly alive and well – but more to the point, it seems engaged and connected to their broader culture. Play seems a given, indispensable part of their Gambian community; the children’s bow-and-arrow play early on prepares them for the day they role later of hunting and providing for their wider community.

Children’s play can seem “dangerous” and “risky” at times, but Leichter-Saxby’s experience in Gambia reminded me that we must always recognize that risk is a relative thing. If we act in a way that is not fearful of children’s “risky” play, but instead open to its context and acknowledging of its potential benefits – and if we realize ways to provide purpose to that play for the broader society – I think we’d be much better off.

Jul 29, 2009 :: Tagged under: , , , , :: #

New Electronic Park Hopes to Lure Kids Outside to Play

There’s just so much going wrong here I don’t know where to start.

A city near Salt Lake City, Utah, thinks they just might have an answer to the “epidemic” of children not playing outside anymore, due to those darn good-for-nothing video games that they play.

“We’re losing a lot of kids to the basement,” said Diana Ross, co-owner of Playspace Designs. “How do we get them back to the park?”

Oh, please say you have The Answer, Ms. Ross, please? Oh, you do? Why, it’s… it’s… a new-fangled electronic version of the all-time great American hallmark, the park! (Wha?)

“We can almost sucker them into thinking this is like a video game,” Ross said, “but this is very, very active play.” Three new pieces of electronic equipment, each supporting multiple games, are designed to keep children moving more than video games, slides or jungle gyms usually allow, Egget said.

Among the games going digital: capture the flag and tug of war. To play capture the flag, as many as seven teams gather around a network of pipes and lights that looks like a 21st century swing set.

The outdoor “electronic” park, which Ms. Ross helped design, is supposed to open within a couple of months – surely to the delight and joy of children everywhere.

Meanwhile, I spent the day playing with kids in a decidely lower-tech way: by building with cardboard boxes and other found objects outside at the local farmer’s market.

And frankly, even though this new-fangled, high-falutin’ “electronic” playground does actually sound kinda cool, I still think kids will take play environments that they have control and power over any day of the week. Just spending more and more money to find new ways to entertain and dazzle children won’t make them want to play outside any more — because we’re still only offering them what is ultimately an adult’s conception of play, limited to within an adult-designed structure and environment.

If we want kids to go outside and play, then maybe we should just a) let them (it’s actually, after all, mainly sociological conditions, like our fear-driven culture, that are keeping kids indoors — so let’s all stop picking on video games now); and b) allow them to play however they wish, with them being the ones having control over their play. It is theirs, after all — or did we forget that?

Jul 17, 2009 :: Tagged under: , , :: #

Should Adults Help Kids Play?

By Daniel Bigler :: Tuesday July 14, 2009

Mike Lanza, of Playborhood.com, recently raised a particularly good question: Should adults help children play?

It’s only been relatively recently in history that adults have become infatuated with children’s play – recognizing its inherent values and, well, the inevitability of it. Of course toy companies have known this for the better part of a century, and the early childhood education field has also recognized it for many decades. The mainstream culture has been a bit behind the curve – only really becoming fully comfortable with the idea of play as not only natural but useful in the past 10 or 15 years, I’d say – but now you could say it has become a de facto standard in America: Children deserve to play, and crucially, it’s adults’ responsibility to support and guide them in their play.

While history somewhat obviously bears out that children have always played, it was still only until the late 1800s and early 1900s – marked most distinctly by a 1930 White House conference, where it was declared that “Play is a Child’s Work” – that adults began attempting to capitalize and control children’s play. As Howard Chudacoff writes in his stellar book, “Children at Play: An American History” (you can read a condensed version of Chudacoff’s central premise in Greater Good Magazine), “The intention was clear: Play was integral to childhood, but because play, like work, needed to be productive, its content was an adult responsibility.”

Thus, we’ve noticed a paradox emerge in this past century: while adults now recognize that children’s unstructured, free play is a valuable pursuit, we’re also now more keen than ever to control it – to extract every ounce of worth from it. As with so many good things before, we’ve made play into an economic good – a commodity that should be utilized well to extract its greatest value.

Lanza points out how this has manifested itself now into an actual adult profession: The Playworker. (I will note that, at least generally, within their European Adventure Playground roots, playworkers have always been rather respectful of this paradox.) We also see this capitalizing streak being spread through the efforts of nonprofits like Playworks and KaBOOM!, into our schools’ play yards and recesses and into our communities’ playgrounds – efforts that, intentionally or not, place the power to play in the hands of adults, not kids.

So what can we do, to truly honor play by letting it be – but also making sure there’s room for it? By putting respectively it in the control of kids themselves, but unconditionally encouraged by adults?

This, I think, is the greater question.

Thankfully, I am rather pleased that children might have already kind of answered that question. As Chudacoff attests – and this was my favorite part of his book – children have an incredibly powerful ability to subvert the most well-conceived ideas and efforts by adults, at anything that ultimately belongs in their domain. We tell children to play on this nice, wonderful playground that we’ve provided; they naturally play in the streets – or (rather brilliantly) come up with new uses for said playground. We give them the utopian, docile world of Barney to sing along to; children naturally come up with the “I Hate You, You Hate Me” version of it. (That, and Soulja Boy. ‘Nuf said.) And so on – never underestimate children’s power to creatively undermine adult’s best efforts.

But, as Lanza recognizes – and I agree – America is not a typically play-friendly place for children. Despite all our best efforts at controlling and guiding play, we’ve engendered a culture that simply doesn’t allow for the real stuff.

I like how Lanza describes the cultural situation, and what role adults may have in changing it:

Most neighborhoods today have no culture of children’s play. They are wastelands. There are virtually no kids playing at all. When kids do play in neighborhoods, they play in small numbers, usually two (i.e. one-on-one play). While play in America’s neighborhoods is scarce, large group play is scarcer. Thus, there is no built-in mechanism for passing down play culture from older kids to younger kids.

We adults who are actively guiding young kids’ play activities are taking on that older kid role. Like older kids, we decide what to play, where to play, and with whom, and we adjudicate disputes.

However, our power over young kids is naturally more absolute than that of older kids, so we need to consciously “back off” when we’re guiding their play. Our goal should be to grow our little kids into big kids, the leaders of play in their neighborhoods. We should let them go beyond their comfort zone at times to prepare them for leadership, and we should be prepared to get totally out of the picture when the older kids are ready to be leaders.

I think he’s right: this is a cultural battle – and like it or not, no program or initiative is going to effectively change culture. We can’t buy our way out of this play deficit.

Rather simply, we just have to hand the keys over to kids themselves – helping provide spaces and places, materials and other things when we can, but ultimately simply recognizing that we can’t and won’t ever be in control of children’s play. When we tell ourselves that, it frees the culture up to be led and forged by the children themselves.

I heard a story once where a man who grew up in the 1960s asked his mother what they did that was so successful in parenting him and his siblings; she simply replied, “We did everything we could to put ourselves out of a job in 18 years.”

I think that’s what our task is now.

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Life Lessons Through Tinkering

Speaking of the benefits of boredom, Merlin Silk recently reminded me of an old TED Talk that Gever Tulley gave a few years back. Tulley titled his talk “5 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kid Do,” and it was about exactly that: Tulley shared experiences like building and tearing things apart, playing with fire and using pocket knives, and experimenting and tinkering – experiences that are crucial to children developing aptitude and their own self-competency.

Certainly not welcome things in our risk- and mistake-averse society – but Tulley’s message is made all the more compelling by the fact that he works with actual kids to build, make, deconstruct, and tinker during a week-long, not-your-usual summer camp he founded, called “The Tinkering School”. It’s a place, as he says, where “kids can pick up sticks and hammers and other dangerous objects, and be trusted. Trusted not to hurt themselves, and trusted not to hurt others.”

That there is no more convincing evidence in support of his message than the sight of actual kids in action – building, creating, experimenting – is I think the way it should be, and it’s something Tulley is able to share beautifully.

Now Tulley is back with another talk, discussing life lessons learned through tinkering. It’s another fine – and truly captivating – look at the creative processes of children, and the unimaginable possibilities that emerge when they’re given the time and permission to tinker.

I hope you enjoy it.

Jul 08, 2009 :: Tagged under: , , , , , :: #

Summer Camp... in Your Front Yard

The San Francisco Chronicle has a great feature article on one particularly special front yard in California:

It’s a warm summer morning, and a Menlo Park play area is already teeming with children. Day camp is about to begin as the youngsters dig in the sandbox, take turns on the swings, shoot hoops and scribble on a 30-foot long whiteboard. Parents chat at a picnic table, and nearby, two toddlers splash in a bubbling fountain.

A typical scene – except that it’s not taking place at a city park; it’s in Mike Lanza’s front yard.

Lanza, the father of three boys, built the outdoor wonderland with a mission in mind. He wants children to rediscover the joys of playing freely outside, so he’s given all the kids in his neighborhood an open invitation to play in what he calls his “front yard family room.”

Since Mike first wrote about his Camp Yale plans over at Playborhood.com, I’ve been tickled pink about the idea. Wish I lived in his neighborhood!

It’s something that’s been talked about a lot lately, but it’s still easy to forget how crucial it really is for children to have time to play during the summer months. Declaring your neighborhood a “Playborhood” might be just the ticket for encouraging the kind of free, open-ended play that’s so valuable to all our lives…. The more thought I give it, the more I realize, too, how wonderfully perfect the “Playborhood” concept is for engendering the very significant, but often less considered benefits of rebuilding community among our neighborhoods, using our children’s play and our front lawns as catalysts.

We should never underestimate the value to us all when we build real communities: with our friends and family, among our neighbors, amidst those around us. The benefit is incalculable, especially when these communities happen to be built around our children.

So here’s to Camp Yale and Mike Lanza’s Playborhood. May there be many more like you everywhere.

Jul 05, 2009 :: Tagged under: , , , :: #

Michael Chabon and The Wilderness of Childhood

A truly perfect Fourth of July treat from author Michael Chabon:

But the Wilderness of Childhood, as any kid could attest who grew up, like my father, on the streets of Flatbush in the Forties, had nothing to do with trees or nature. I could lose myself on vacant lots and playgrounds, in the alleyway behind the Wawa, in the neighbors’ yards, on the sidewalks. Anywhere, in short, I could reach on my bicycle, a 1970 Schwinn Typhoon, Coke-can red with a banana seat, a sissy bar, and ape-hanger handlebars. On it I covered the neighborhood in a regular route for half a mile in every direction. I knew the locations of all my classmates’ houses, the number of pets and siblings they had, the brand of popsicle they served, the potential dangerousness of their fathers. …

Childhood is, or has been, or ought to be, the great original adventure, a tale of privation, courage, constant vigilance, danger, and sometimes calamity. For the most part the young adventurer sets forth equipped only with the fragmentary map—marked here there be tygers and mean kid with air rifle—that he or she has been able to construct out of a patchwork of personal misfortune, bedtime reading, and the accumulated local lore of the neighborhood children.

Reading this is worth every ounce of the time and attention it asks of you.

(Via the tastily-named Media Macaroni.)

Jul 04, 2009 :: Tagged under: , , , , :: #

Physical Spaces in Support of 'Whole Child' Education

The story of Manassas Park City Schools, and how the innovative redesign and renovation of their physical school facilities intersected with – and in many ways inspired – the school system’s rich Whole Child education.

School buildings deteriorate and have to be replaced or community growth mandates the need for new structures. Children enter those buildings, look around, and decide whether they feel valued and welcome. Teachers often spend as much if not more time in their respective school buildings than they do anywhere else, and a community speaks volumes through the leaders it chooses, the programs it creates, the culture it nourishes, and the physical spaces it designs for learning.

May 26, 2009 :: Tagged under: , , :: #

Playing on Playgrounds Yields Better Math Students

A recent study, whose efforts initially emerged out of the Boston Schoolyard Initiative (an public-private partnership in the mid-1990s to restore Boston’s playgrouds), considered an important question: whether renovated playgrounds had an impact on student achievement.

From Boston University’s campus newsletter, BU Today:

“I really wasn’t expecting to find anything,” says Russell Lopez, a School of Public Health assistant professor of Environmental Health, citing the relatively small sample of schools. “I thought, even if there is a real effect, there are so few schools involved that it doesn’t have a lot of statistical power.”

When Lopez studied the 2003 results of the fourth-grade English language MCAS (Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System), standardized tests that almost all public school students must take, he saw no discernible differences between children at the 70 schools with new playgrounds and children at schools with old playgrounds.

But when he looked at math scores, he saw a very different picture. In schools where fourth graders had new playgrounds, 25 percent more kids passed the math MCAS. And that remained true after he and his team controlled for factors such as demographics and the number of students receiving free or reduced-price lunches.

The researchers suggest several reasons for the association between better schoolyards and improved test scores. It may be that students at schools with upgraded playgrounds get more physical activity, which may make them more willing and able to learn once they’re back at their desks. It could also be the result of more parental involvement in the schools. Or, Lopez says, “It could be that students and teachers feel better about going to schools that are not dreary, jail-like settings and that look more inviting. That might set up people to want to learn.”

While Lopez acknowledges the limitations of his ecological study, I think we’d do well as a society to consider education from a more ecologically-aware, holistic vantage point. Lopez gets this, too:

Lopez believes his findings are particularly important at a time when the slumping economy is forcing schools across the nation to tighten their belts. “I worry that the first thing that gets cut is the outdoor space,” he says. “There are a lot of people who think that it’s not important, that all kids need is reading, writing, and arithmetic. And I think what this shows is that getting kids to learn is a broader experience. How places look and how they’re used are as important as what goes on in the classroom.”

Apr 25, 2009 :: Tagged under: , , , , :: #