Playful Environments and Science Education

Record: Jennifer Bachman and Lynn Dierking, “Co-creating Playful Environments That Support Children’s Science and Mathematics Learning as Cultural Activity: Insights From Home-Educating Families” in Children, Youth and Environments 21(2011): 294-311. [Abstract here]

Summary: Dr. Jennifer Bachman is the Director of Programming and Operations Oregon State University. Dr. Lynn Dierking is a professor also at Oregon State. Her primary research interests are lifelong learning, particularly free choice, and out-of-school learning with an emphasis on youth, families, and community.  This is an article that was published almost a decade ago, but until recently it escaped my notice.  So I’m reviewing it now.

The authors begin with the important and frequently made observation that modern children do not have enough play time, especially open-ended, self-directed play.  Bachman and Dierking agree, and they think it’s especially a problem in science education.  Schools, policy makers, and parents are all to blame for overscheduling and sapping learning of the fun that play provides.  To remedy this dismal situation, the authors look to science pedagogy as practiced by some homeschoolers.

Bachman and Dierking found eight homeschooling families in the Mid-Willamette Valley of Oregon.  One of these families was Bachman’s.  The rest, presumably, were Bachman’s friends from her local homeschooling network.  As she describes the families in the study it becomes clear that this is not the conservative Christian subculture under study.  The mothers here are a mix of secular and Jewish, ranging from eclectic and relaxed homeschoolers to unschoolers.  The researchers examined activities done in these families over six months of observation and interviews.  All of this field work was converted into data, which was then presented back to the subjects for comment.  This particular article hones in on three examples of science learning from three of the subject families (none of them Bachman’s).

The authors found that there were three main ways these families incorporated play into science instruction.  The first was intentional.  An extended example was provided of a mother who deliberately crafted play scenarios aimed at teaching mathematical concepts to her child.  The second was unintentional.  An example was provided here of a family who interrupted their academic science lesson to mix baking soda and vinegar out on the porch for fun.  The third was what we might call opportunistic.  Here a father and two boys were having fun stoking a fire, in the process learning some science accidentally, as when the father explains that a pepper that has just been thrown into the fire and is now burning up is releasing carbon dioxide and turning to carbon itself.

In their discussion, the authors stress the co-creative, cooperative nature of the science teaching and learning in these vignettes.  Science learning was fun, and children were empowered to engage their own natural curiosity and interests.  In their larger study, the authors note, older children tended to focus more on learning scientific concepts and theories than the examples with the younger children highlighted in this article reveal, but the point is that for homeschoolers this is a both/and, not an either/or.

The authors conclude that the take-home lesson for formal schools is that children should be given a role in the construction of science curriculum so that they can “create/modify/co-create the learning setting themselves.” (p. 308)  Such a pedagogy would more effectively prepare these children to be life-long learners than the top-down model currently dominant in educational institutions.

Appraisal: This was a fun article to read given the entertaining anecdotes, and the authors will get no argument from me about the importance of play for child development and overall human well-being.  One of my all-time favorite historical works is Johan Huzinga’s famous 1955 book  Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture, which argued that play has been at the center of human cultural development since prehistory.  As a piece of research, this article is par for the course for homeschooling scholarship–it’s a convenience sample representing some of the best-educated, most resourced, most connected homeschoolers.  That this is a secular group is especially significant given the topic of science education.  It would be interesting for Bachman and Dierking or someone else to run a similar study of conservative Protestant homeschoolers and science education.  None of the vignettes offered waded into the turbulent waters of human origins or geology, but had such topics come up in the course of play I have a feeling that they would have been handled very differently in these families than they would have been in a different homeschooling sample.

Milton Gaither, Messiah College