Play Is Not Just a Hermeneutic Theory: William Doll, Hermes, and Pedagogy as Play

• In Event: 30.047 - Echoes of God's Laughter: Entertaining the Generative and Generous Gifts of William E. Doll, Jr.

Abstract

In the fall of 1992, I sat down in my first curriculum theory class at Louisiana State University with a Professor William Doll. I did not know him. He posited that in education we have forgotten that a few principles are all that is needed to enable a child to grow in the classroom.
We have created so many rules, quantified every movement of teacher and student, and controlled every piece of information; we have stunted the natural order of life in an attempt to control. Control was a big issue for William Doll. Instead, education had to be given freedom to play, which would enable each class to find its own order through self-regulation. For Doll, play was everything. It was the heart of complexity theory, the heart of life itself. If play was not allowed to stay in play, if it becomes so overly defined, so rule bound, so pre-determined, then the thing dies – curriculum, pedagogy, the very imagination that should be the center of all education. His pedagogy reflected his theory. Doll sent me on a hunt to follow the concept of play and its significance, which through a non-linear, self-regulating process, I came across the ultimate player – Hermes, who became my patron teacher and who I believed lived within Doll and guided his unending search to answer (knowing it can never really be answered) that ultimate curriculum question: “What knowledge is most worth.” Throughout Doll’s works, keeping curriculum in play meant it would be a field that could shed its old skin and try something new. For Doll, language could not be controlled and was the key to understanding play in curriculum theory.
And who is the one who brought language from the gods to humankind? Hermes. In effect, Hermes taught us that language is education. And within that act, s/he decided play was the beginning principle. The spirit of play can never be consumed or controlled, and speaks to something very old within us all, what the Latin description calls homo ludens – man [sic] the player, the one who plays (Huizinga, 1955). This notion of play has an etymological connection to the very thing we are concerned with in education – knowledge. Despite our best efforts to define knowledge as something to be owned and controlled, an etymological trace takes us to the idea that knowledge means an invitation to continue the infinite dance of finite existence (from the Icelandic Knaw Leche: to know the dance, to know how to play). In fact, Hermes first act was a prank: sew ambiguity into the physics of language, a nagging frustration for western philosophers and scientist for millennia. However, it was this play that made communication and the creation of the new possible.
In this paper, I will investigate the nature of Hermes, of education as play, always keeping in mind Doll’s (1992) warning of the “ghosts of curriculum” always there to either keep the play alive or quantify an kill it.

Author

• Douglas Mcknight, The University of Alabama