Play and delight « Linda's Meta-learning Journal

6/24/2004

Play and delight

I have had some more thoughts on this but still not very coherent.

Play doesn't have to be delightful. In fact children's play can be quiet cruel and painful.

This painful play can still be a learning experience.
So I am still struggling with the concept of 'delight' in this context.

Can creativity be taught?

See Blair's blog for more details
This may seem a million miles away fom what I should be working on for report 5 but I am starting to think that this is what I want to do in the longer term. To teach (or perhaps 'enable' is a better word) people to be creative and perhaps to do it using digital tools. This makes sense of my growing interest in blogging, web design etc. The only way I can cope with this module is to make it as real as possible and part of that reality is accepting that I do not want to stay doing this job forever.

Some one was telling me recently about being taught to be creative and what a painful experience that had been. It had involved letting go of many preconceptions about what the participants wanted to produce and accepting the limitations of the technology they were to use to produce their work. The implication was that these limitations actually forced them to learn to be creative. It reminded me of learning to write poetry and the demands that using a particular form such as the sonnet (or the hiaku) places on the writer.
Another incident also made me think more about this issue. I watched an adult 'playing' with technology to produce a piece of art and saw a very similar kind of intensity of concentration, frustration and pleasure to that displayed by the reception class.

Richard Millwood's The New Learning Landscape gives some interesting insights into why we all need to play. I saw this last week but he has added a lot more detail since then. In a comment on an earlier entry to my blog Richard says of play
"We need this because it allows mistakes to be made with delight, and sustains improvement / perfection of ideas."
I think this permission to make mistakes is key, at least in this culture. Not sure about in the US or even New Zealand.

Posted at 3:25:49 pm by lmhartley


	Blair Giles June 29, 2004 05:38 AM PDT HiLinda, thanks for your help on photos. you're briliant (not sure why i make you feel old though - is it the buffy thing?!! Bjork maybe?) :) In answer to your thoughts about NZ i would say at a guess that it is exactly the same here as far as risk taking goes. As teachers we always say to kids that risk taking and the making of mistakes as part of the learaning process are to be encouraged and even championed! there is a disparity then between true learning and the curriculum in some ways... and so we in NZ are attempting to provide as much of this 'permission' as possible too. i love the idea of "making mistakes with delight!" i should have rememebered that when my muffins met disaster inthe kitchen last week while i was trying to be innovative and creative!

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