Re/Defining Play in the Pop Culture Landscape: The Creative Potential of Play Across Generations

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 3:20 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 2-3
  In Roundtable Session: Podcasts as Public Scholarship: (Re)Imagining Theories in Everyday Life (Table 6)

Abstract

Research highlights the benefits of play, yet it is often overlooked as essential to social and cultural life. In the zero-sum game of productivity, play’s value is tied to outcomes—higher test scores, socioemotional skills, or a break from “real work” (Kromidas, 2022). Thus, play that is frivolous, purposeless, undecipherable, and goal-free diverges from utilitarian definitions. However, contemporary scholarship on children’s play illustrates play as elusive, hard to define, and slippery in its categorization™. Instead of working to nail down and standardize play, scholars embrace this ambiguity as a complex site of infinite possibilities (Sutton-Smith, 2001). Children grow and develop while navigating tensions around identity, belonging, and equity in what seems like messy, chaotic, and carnivalesque spaces (Cohen, 2011). Building from the sophistication of children at play, this podcast explores play’s benefits beyond childhood into adulthood. It challenges the notion of play as merely “children’s work” (Paley, 2007), redefining what counts as play, who plays, and how play occurs. Society’s over attribution of play in (early) childhood overlooks its necessity for young people and adults to innovate and find joy. Despite the boundaries drawn between work and play, what if we view play and work as simultaneous, reciprocal acts to reimagine our social conditions?

Produced as a platform for public engagement, the [BLINDED] podcast amplifies the intellectual and creative value of play across disciplines, age groups, professions, and institutional boundaries. Each episode serves as a site for public discourse where theories, ideas, and research translate into an interdisciplinary artifact reaching multiple audiences—scholars, educators, industry leaders, and graduate students. The actors, designers, writers, gamers, teachers, and children who populate the podcast offer a vision of learning that cultivates, elevates, and expands play. They demonstrate how workplaces, homes, schools, and institutions of learning can be places of radical possibility – places where we imagine, build, and play with new futures. Play manifests across multiple platforms and spaces—television and media; costumes and materials; on-line and offline games; art and performance; role playing and fantasy; writing. Collectively, the series asks: How do the many different forms of playful encounters advance definitions of play? What issues of power, identity, and equity are raised through different forms and formats of play? How are the personal and affective dimensions of play also collective and political? The nature of the podcast format opens up theories of play to interrogation–examining in practice what is typically researched and documented in closed publications and institutions.

At the root of play is community—the social, cultural, and intellectual conditions that bring individuals together across different and similar identity markers. Community creates the conditions for mentoring and learning, provides safety and support for exploration and experimentation, and facilitates a collective sense of joy and camaraderie. An emerging consensus by guests is how playful acts—exploration, experimentation, creativity—mobilize their “work”, encouraging them to imagine “otherwise possibilities” (Green, 2020). Put simply, our best work comes out of play.

Authors

• Haeny S. Yoon, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Nathan Holbert, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Billy Collins, Teachers College, Columbia University