SAGE Video
Early Learning Through Play
Contributors: David Whitebread
Pub. Date: 2018
Product: SAGE Video
DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781526434135
Keywords: boys' play, case study research, communication skills, costumes in play, development:
intelligence/cognitive, development: language, development: psychomotor, development: socio-emotional,
developmental psychology, early childhood curriculum, early childhood development and education,
educational research, fantasy play, fine motor development, game playing, gross motor development, Jerome
Bruner, language development, maturation, organized or sanctioned play, Piaget and play, play among
animals, play and education, play and literacy, play and playthings, play fighting, play in the classroom,
play school movement, play, nonsocial, and social-emotional development in childhood, pretending, problem
solving, psychological benefits of play, research findings, School readiness, Self-regulation, Sociological
benefits of play, Speech play, Symbolic play, teacher-child co-play, unstructured play
Disciplines: Education, Early Childhood Education, Learning Theories, Early Childhood Education (general),
Children's Play, Learning Theories (general)
Access Date: December 9, 2022
Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Ltd.
Online ISBN: 9781526434135
© 2018 SAGE Publications, Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
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DAVID WHITEBREAD: Hello I'm David Whitebread, and I'm currently the Acting Director for External
Relation for the new research center at the University of Cambridge, concerned with play in development education and learning of young children. This Center has been funded by the Laker Foundation, and is part of her rather exciting resurgence
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: at the moment in interest in play in young children and its impact
on learning and development. And we are attempting to undertake some serious research on play.
Looking at some quite fundamental questions, which actually have not been definitively addressed
in the existing research.
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: I want to try and address four basic questions in relation to this.
First of all, what is the evidence we have about the importance of play? Secondly, what are the main-the five main types of play that have been distinguished in the research?
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: Thirdly, what are the benefits of free play, where children initiate
their own play and are completely unconstrained by any adults or whatever. But also, what is the
advantage of adults being involved in children's play? And finally, the fourth theory I want
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: to talk about at the end of the talk, is what are the implications of
what we now know about playful learning in relation to schooling? So in relation to evidence confirming the importance of play in children's development, what's interesting is actually we have evidence
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: from a range of different disciplinary perspectives. So we have
evidence from evolutionary psychology, from anthropology, from neuroscience, and from developmental psychology. So perhaps one of the most significant publications that really kicked off a lot of
interesting research
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: in play and development was a publication written by a very famous psychologist called Jerome Bruner. Who, in the 1970s, wrote a paper called The Importance
of Immaturity. Where-- the nature and use of immaturity-- where he describes the evolution of play
through different species,
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: and finally finishing up with human beings. And talks about the
way that as we-- as animals become more sophisticated in terms of their brain functioning, you see
a longer and longer period of immaturity, and the sort of childhood is extended. And within that immature period-DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: in all mammals, for example, and then, of course in the primates
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and the higher apes, and then the human beings-- you see increasingly more varied and more sophisticated elements of play. Within anthropology there've been some interesting studies by an American anthropologist called Peter Gray,
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: who has written quite extensively about the anthropology of children in simple hunter/ gatherer societies. There are actually interestingly about 30 or 40 extant
hunter/ gatherer societies on the planet as we speak. And finally, the area that I personally work in
developmental psychology,
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: there's a range of different studies. And what-- in developmental
psychology-- we've been trying to do is to unpick what are the mechanisms through which play might
have an impact on learning and development? And there's been some interesting work showing that
there is a relationship, for example, between play and intellectual development.
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: Children who show early signs of higher levels of intellectual ability also show more evidence of playfulness in early life. And also children who grow up to have a
higher level of emotional well-being, also turn out to be more playful.
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: And, in fact, the link between playfulness and mental health, I
think, is a really important area of research. And in terms of mechanisms, we know that one of the
things that the play seems to support is the development of linguistic abilities, communicative abilities. Also play involves children pretending and so on
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: with different-- in different scenarios with other children-- and develops their communication skills and also their abstract thinking. And also, finally, there is some nice
evidence about the relationship between playful behavior and what we call self-regulation, which is
children's developing an ability
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: to be reflective about their own thinking and their own knowledge
and their own learning. So within all the research to date that's been conducted in relation to human
play, there seem to be five broad types that have emerged and been researched, to some extent,
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: so that we understand something about what those particular aspects of play seem to be involved in, in relation to children's development. The earliest type of play-which you'll see in all mammals-- and certainly in young children from very early on, we describe as
physical play.
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: So this would incorporate things like climbing and running and
jumping and swinging off things or playing on apparatus and so on, ultimately. But even in very young
children, you can see them starting to learn about their own bodies and playing with their hands and
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their feet on their toes and so on.
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: And it can be what we describe as gross motor, which would be
climbing and running and swimming and jumping and so on with your whole body. Or it can be playing with your fingers and developing hand-eye coordination through all sorts of finger games and
hand games and so on and so forth.
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: There's another particular type of physical play, however, which
serves a rather different purpose. It isn't really concerned with physical developments and developing
your dexterity or your agility or whatever. And this is a kind of play which is usually referred to as
rough and tumble. And this is where you roll around on the floor,
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: on the carpet, or you do sort of play wrestling with a sibling or
your mom or dad, or when you're a teenager or with the person that you think you've fallen in love
with. And this is often misunderstood, because it looks a little-- it can look, to an observer, like fighting.
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: And so sometimes it finishes up being discouraged by teachers
or by parents. But that's actually a mistake, because we now know that-- through the research in that
area-- that rough and tumble play, particularly amongst boys, turns out to be quite important in terms
of their developing their interpersonal emotional sensitivities.
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: So they're learning to read cues from the other child, or the adult,
whoever they're playing with, about whether they're still having fun or whether they want to stop this
or whatever. And it can be quite a beneficial thing for young children to do. It also seems to support
emotional bonding,
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: you know, between a parent and a child. For example, children
who are very securely attached to their parents often engage in quite a lot of rough and tumble play
with them. So that's physical play. The second type of play that emerges from as soon as a child can
reliably grasp and pick up an object
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: is what we call play with objects. And, again, you will see this in
many mammals. And certainly in the more intellectually developed mammals, it seems to be interestingly related to problem solving. And a child who does a lot of play with objects, you know, you
can see how they're developing
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: what might be described as engineering skills. But it starts very
young, with young babies putting objects in their mouths, dropping things, rattling them to see if they
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dren start to sort objects and classify them,
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: and to order to them quite often just spontaneously. And then
gradually, of course, it develops into making things with objects. And you get the whole gamut of
building with all kinds of different construction materials or blocks or whatever or making-- building
dens or make making collage,
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: anything that involves using materials to make anything at all.
And that's a very good area of play for developing children's problem solving skills and so forth. We
then get on to three further types of play, all of which you only really see in human beings. And the
first of those I would like
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: to call semiotic play, or symbolic play. This is play with the means
by which human beings communicate meaning. We have-- uniquely in the animal species-- an amazing ability to represent ideas, objects, events through, for example,
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: writing or speaking, or drawing, or we can convey emotions
through music and so forth. So we have all these kind of symbolic meanings of different sorts of representing our understandings and our meanings. And this is often a neglected aspect of play. But you
think about children loving puns and silly jokes
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: and making up silly words and communicating how they're happy
or sad through drawings. And what they understand about the world through drawings and so on are
also different ways of representing the world. And children engage in all those kinds of things. And
we certainly know that a playful approach to language,
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: for example, parents and children playing around with silly words
and making up silly rhymes and so on seems to enhance children's vocabulary and their communication skills quite significantly. We then go on to probably the most researched type of play, which is
pretense.
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: And, again, this starts probably around the age of one actually.
Children-- at the time when they start to use their very first words to convey meaning, mommy and
daddy and so on, me want more, and all this sort of thing-- they also start to use objects to pretend
that they're something else.
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: So they'll pick up a stick and they'll pretend it's a doll or an airplane or a telephone or whatever. And so you get this early transformation of objects. And then you
get the children starting to transform themselves. So dressing up, play where they become a character or a superhero, the queen, mommy, whatever. And then develops into a very sophisticated,
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collaborative
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: play with other children where whole narratives or stories are acted out and played around and so on and so forth. Very important areas of play for children's communicative abilities, for their social abilities and so on. And that something can become quite sophisticated
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: and go on quite late in childhood and right into adulthood. And
we all, you know, enjoy dressing up and pretending on occasions. And the very last type of play-originally identified by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget-- is what's called games with rules. And
this starts out in very early life with hide and seek
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: and peekaboo, and then perhaps very simple card games or
board games. And these days, of course, children very soon are starting to play computer games or
games on their iPad or whatever. And this-- one of the interesting phenomena
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: about this is that actually, in young children, they enjoy making
their own games and inventing their own rules and playing around with the rules of the game. And
actually that business of rule construction and debate about rules and so on turns out to be very significant. We live in a very rule governed world.
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: We live in a social world where you need to know the rules of any
particular situation. And children learn a lot about how society works, how interactions work, and so
on with playing games with rules. Now, coming on to the third section of my talk I
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: just want to say something about the distinction that's often made
between free play-- or unsupervised play in children-- and play that might be described as guided
play or play with adults. This is quite a controversial area, and some people will take a purist view
that it's only play if no adults are involved.
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: But, in fact, the research evidence we have so far suggests that
there is value in both contexts for play, if I can put it like that. So in regard to free play it's certainly the
case that there are big advances in children having the opportunity to choose what they want play.
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: Play in the way they want to play, play on their own, play with
friends, and so on. And just to give you a couple of examples of research in this area, myself, I ran a
large study known as the Kindle Project in the early 2000s. And this involved just going into a nursery-DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: preschool classrooms and reception classrooms-- all over our local area in the UK. And just where children often have plenty of time during the day just to play freely,
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and with all the equipment or whatever they'd like to do. And we just videoed what we saw the children doing,
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: and then analyzed the nature of that play. So you would see all
the five types of play this I've described being engaged in by the children at different times, both indoors and outdoors. And also we-- in that particular study were interested in the relationship between
play
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: and between language-- as I mentioned in the last section-- and
also with self-regulation, as I mentioned. And what I managed to-- what we managed to show through
that study was that in all those different sorts of play children were practicing their language,
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: developing their communication skills, and also learning how to
plan and regulate their activities actually individually and with other children. So they were learning
how to organize themselves, how to pay attention to things, how to concentrate, and so forth. And
some nice evidence of their ability to-DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: in free play children often, interestingly, can manage to do something that they probably couldn't do when they weren't in a playful context. It seemed to-- it seems
to act as a kind of supportive structure to enable children to raise their level of achievement. And
another study that was-DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: I want to mention that was carried out in the states, in America,
just a few years ago, headed up by Barker and a whole range of colleagues. Looked at children-the amount of time that children had opportunities to engage in free, unstructured play in the home
environment,
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: in the domestic situation rather than in school. And this partly
arises, I think, from some concern that children in the 21st century aren't getting as many opportunities to engage in free play just with friends, outdoors possibly, and so on, as used to be the case.
And, in fact, what they managed to show
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: in that study was that children who had more free play time-more unstructured time-- and that included-- it actually did include going to the beach for the day or
going to a zoo or something. But also, you know, playing out in the street or playing in the park with
friends, those children-DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: perhaps this seems a bit counter-intuitive, but was clearly the
case-- those children were the ones who made the best start to schooling. And this it probably arises
because of the kind of evidence I collect in my study-- and other people have collected as well-- that
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in free play children are developing their communication
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: skills, and they are developing their ability to regulate and organize themselves. And of course those are the kinds of underpinning skills that you need if you're going to make a start to your schooling. Now, some people take the view that once an adult is involved
with children then it's no longer play.
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: However, we do have some interesting research more recently
which suggests that, in fact, adults can involve themselves in children's play. And that when they do
so, this actually can enhance the quality of the children's play, providing that the adults don't start,
you know,
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: directing and governing and making all decisions, but actually
just take their part. A study that I did myself with one of my PhD students, Lisa O'Sullivan. And her
research, her PhD, was about development of children's pretend play. And she studied the children's
pretend play when they were playing alone with no adults involved,
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: and then what happened if an adult came and joined in and took
on a role within the play. And what Lisa managed to show very effectively in this study was that when
the adult did this well, and did it skillfully, and allowed the children to continue to set the agenda and
the way that the play continued-DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: that they were directed it-- that we saw richer vocabulary. The
play became more organized and more well coordinated. The roles that the various children were
taking became more clearly defined and more developed and so forth. And new types of events and
ideas
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: were incorporated within the play. So that was a very nice study
showing that the sophistication of the play was clearly enhanced by the presence of a sympathetic
and sensitive adult. And it is noticeable that the children actually-DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: when we've asked children about this-- really positively welcome
and enjoy the involvements of an adult. They love adults coming in and genuinely playing with them.
And it does seem to be beneficial. The other work I wanted to mention in this regard
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: relates to the notion of guided play. So this is where-- rather than
children just being provided with a space with objects or whatever and then just do whatever they
want in free play-- they are given some sort of target or goal or task by an adult. And the adult might
minimally involve themselves
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thing they want to do or something of that order. So it's not completely free play, it is guided. And
there are some constraints introduced. So it might be you've got to use these materials to do this, or
I want you to-- this is what I want you to make.
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: Or this is the story I want you to tell, sort of acting our a story from
a book or something like that. So there are constraints introduced. And rather than killing the play-again, in some ways if that's done well-- it seems to enhance the quality of what the children engage
in.
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: And certainly helps the kind of problem solving aspect of the play.
And so, for example, a study that I conducted recently with a team of researchers is known as the
Plans Project. And in the Plans Project-DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: this was called play, learning, and narrative skills-- we facilitators
children to play with the constructional materials. We used Lego. Other people have used jump modeling and so on and so forth, so that the children worked in mixed ability groups to build something
that they were then going to write about, or tell a story about.
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: And that playful element and the dialogue that accompanied the
playful elements as the three children tried to build something that would represent what they would
then go tell the story about, or the description they were going to describe or whatever. Again the
dialogue and the level of language that that building activity stimulate translated very well,
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: very effectively, into an enhanced level of storytelling and writing.
So that was just one example. And there are many more now that other researchers have done of
where very learning related activities or skills that you would develop in schooling can be developed
through this idea of guided play.
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: So what are the kind of elements that we need to think about
when we're think about having a play based curriculum in school? Well, the first thing to say is that
having an environment where there is emotional warmth, where the children feel-- particularly with
young child-- where they feel emotionally secure, really makes a difference. Children are their most
playful when
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: they're feeling emotionally secure and where they're feeling relaxed and safe and so on. And so that's really fundamental and important. But beyond that, we need
to think about providing a wide repertoire of play opportunities. So I've talked about the five types of
play.
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: And all those types of play should be supported with materials,
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with objects, with spaces, and with activities and so on, that the adults involved can facilitate. There
also needs to be opportunities for children to play alone, to play with peers in pairs
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: or in slightly larger groups, and with adults. All of those things
seem to have a benefit. They also need to be able to play in different environments. So there's a lot
of interest at the moment in outdoor play. And there are certainly things you can more easily outdoors
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: in different outdoor environments, with objects or just running
around or whatever. All those different contexts opportunities need to be provided as well as obviously indoor play. And finally, I think it's important-- particularly in early childhood education-- that we
do work with parents and with caregivers.
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: Because for very understandable reasons, a lot of people aren't
involved in education or psychology. Their understanding about play and its importance and its relevance for young children's early learning and development is not well-developed. And so there is a
big job that we can do in terms of communicating some of what we know about
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: play in early childhood and why it is such a significant thing to
support, makes sense, and to encourage parents to-- and caregivers-- to support children's play. And
provide them with a wide range of opportunities for playfulness and to play with their children
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: in the kinds of ways that I've discussed. So in this case study, we
have reviewed briefly some of the evidence we have about why play might actually turn out to be
important in children's learning and development.
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: We've looked at the five types of play. We've looked at some of
the evidence about why free play might be important for certain types of learning, but also why it
might be important for adults to involve themselves in children's play. And we've looked at some of
the implications
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: for how this might be translated into effective early childhood education. While you talk to many parents-- and particularly many early childhood educators-- they will
all tell you that, oh, yes children need to play, and they learn through play, and so on. Up until fairly
recently we didn't
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: have all that good evidence to support that position, from a scientific point of view. But what I've hoped to try and show you in this case study is that we are beginning
to have some evidence that starts to show that play is a significant aspect of early childhood development that needs to be supported and encouraged.
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DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: And we're beginning to understand some of the ways in which it
might play an important role in children developing, both in terms of their academic and intellectual
abilities. But also in their abilities as a rounded human being who is emotionally secure, able to make
friendships
DAVID WHITEBREAD [continued]: and able to realize their potential in terms of lifelong learning and
a happy and fulfilled life.
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