The Leader Board

The Hard Intellectual Work of Play

Kyle C. Arlington, Superintendent of Schools

January 2023

My writing partner and I were recently asked to contribute an article to Literacy Today magazine on the topic of “play” with adolescent students. The timing was great. I just finished taking a course on contemporary childhoods rooted in theories and practices of play. Plus, my homelife as a dad revolves a lot around play. 

My four-year-old son’s favorite playtime activity is wrestling me. (I’m not the wrestling type, but I do it to make him happy). In contrast, so much of my eight-year-old daughter’s play involves making crafts to (re)create things that already exist. (See the picture I include in this blog of a rainbow-colored Chromebook she made inspired by the one she already owns).

While there were abundant examples of play around us, my writing partner and I struggled to find examples of how schools can encourage older students to play as part of curricular learning. We concluded that our struggle nests inside our own challenge as adults to identify how we engage in “grownup” play. 

The Post-Pandemic Rise of the “Kidult”

The post-pandemic moment we’re living in has created a new space for adults to play. Even though the term “kidult” has been around since the 1950s, COVID-19 and its required quarantines have given rise, and opportunities, for adults to play. For example, “a 2021 Toy Association Survey found that 58% of adult respondents had purchased a toy for themselves…of those, 65% purchased board games; 61% bought craft or building kits; 53% threw down on collectibles; 52% got into video games” (https://thehustle.co/07052022-Kidults/). 

(I tried to get into the puzzle fad during the pandemic but quickly remembered how much I hate puzzles). 

The notion of “kidults” is an interesting one. It’s pejorative in its connotation — adults who play must still be associated with childhood as a developmental phase, even though popular toys and play in contemporary society are marketed for adults. My recent trip to NYC’s Lego Store and the American Girl Doll (AGD) Store reinforced for me the blurred boundaries between play designed for adults vs. kids.

Legos & American Girl Dolls

The Lego Store is chock full of building sets aimed at adults. With 18+ age designations on their boxes, builders can recreate the sets of Seinfield, Friends, or The Office. (The suggested age designation makes me scratch my head too. Who decides these things? If a 17-year-old is interested in the lego set, should he be dissuaded)?

In similar ways, the AGD store confuses me. I feel bad for the poor schleps, me included, who walk out with heavy shopping bags but a much lighter bank accountant. What’s not confusing is the appeal the dolls have to those who buy them, not necessarily those who play with them. 

Or are the customers who play with the dolls the same people who pay for them?

Take the AGD Courtney, for instance, whose picture I included in this blog. Her side ponytail, fluorescent spandex, and accompanying Care Bears sleeping bag mean nothing to my daughter, who has no socio-political context for, or schema about, the 1980s. Rather, the doll seems to be marketed to Generation X’ers who buy (and play?) with her. Similarly, I ask myself: is it kids, adults, or “kidults” who are excited to spend $3.00 on an American Girl pack of goat brie cheese? (A pretty adult-type of cheese, I might add.)

Framing Questions Around Play

More seriously, I’ve been thinking about play through these framing questions lately.

• In what ways do our raced identities surface in our play? 

  • A deep study of whiteness, antiracism, and cultural responsiveness could be enacted from theorizing the racial identities of the AGDs, but I’m sure some scholar has already beat me to it. 

• How does our socioeconomic status promote (or inhibit) our play?

  • The privilege I reap from having an education and a good job allows for specific play resources and experiences that I can provide my children that others might not be able to access. What does this mean for schools, a place where students of all different socioeconomic backgrounds and play experiences come together?

• In what ways does our play support or disrupt gender norms and heteronormativity?

  • Play is gendered. How does the Lego Store market to its gendered players? Why is there, still in 2023,  only one AGD who's a boy? (And, not to go too deep into the AGD subculture, but he’s from the doll line “Welly Wishers” – sort of lesser doll friends of the AGDs. And, of course, he’s fashioned after a masculine dragon.)  

Alternatives to Play as Preparation 

In the elementary grades, even when there is time to play, it’s in preparation for something academic or to achieve an instructional goal. For example, our Pre-K Tools of the Mind curriculum has students create a play plan to prepare them to learn alphabetic principles. In this mode, the play revolves around the specific ways teachers have designed play because it reflects pre-determined outcomes teachers have for their students. Across grade levels where play is “permitted,” teachers “teach into” kids’ play; they use it as an assessment; they hold it as a reward. (I.e., “If we finish our work this week, we can have thirty minutes of play on Friday.”) 

These play moves and others, like recognizing the importance of play on a day like Global School Play Day, are not inherently bad. I support them fully! But, they call our attention to the play practices we may wish to consider pushing past in school. 

As part of that push, I hope you join me in thinking about how we may embrace a more emergent, responsive approach to play. We can do so if we start asking ourselves:

• How can we teach the curriculum and encourage play while allowing children to make decisions and choices around their play? 

  • Children come to school “full.” That is, they have lived experiences and funds of knowledge. What if we encouraged their play to help them reveal ways of knowing? What if we encouraged their play without having goals for it?

• What if we stopped focusing on what play does for children and instead think of what it means for kids?

While I’m still not sure how to strike this balance in schools, particularly amidst neoliberal pressures of high-stakes testing, teacher evaluation systems, and school-based outcomes, I do know it’s worth continued thinking because play is hard intellectual work.