Contextualizations of Play: Cultural Understandings of Play and Learning in School in East Africa and AsiS

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Play is an essential human characteristic. The centrality of the role play has in childhood development becomes even more vital in our current moment, characterized by the pandemic and the instability, resource shortages, and mass migration on a global scale that compound the current global crisis. The integration of play in formal education systems, for example in teacher professional development, can bring about a myriad of benefits for systems, schools, teachers, and learners. Learning through play is being increasingly acknowledged as an effective approach to children’s development and learning. However, the cultural aspects of play and learning need to be acknowledged if we are to discuss the benefits learning through play can bring to children across different contexts. When designing teacher professional development models or interventions for child-centered pedagogies in which play has a central role (Parker and Thomsen, 2019), we need to understand how play, and indeed learning, is understood by teachers, parents, and children. This roundtable discussion will focus on the cultural understandings of play in school settings in East Africa and Asia.
Teachers College will present the results of a review of 189 articles and 30 interviews with 37 key informants with experience in refugee education and teacher professional development to discuss how socio-cultural constructs of play can inform, enable, or inhibit teachers’ uptake of play-based approaches to learning. Matthew Jukes from RTI will present an approach for adapting pedagogy to cultural context. The approach involves designing teaching activities to achieve the cognitive learning goal of the activity and a culturally appropriate social goal of the activity. Examples of this cultural context adaptation pedagogy will also be discussed. PlayMatters will present the results of a regional study of case study schools in Ethiopia, Tanzania and Uganda in which learning through play is already being integrated into refugee and refugee-hosting schools. The results of this study will help to understand the cultural nuances of play in refugee and refugee-hosting schools in East Africa. BRAC will present the results of workshops with 288 teachers from across Bangladesh which resulted in the creation of a book in which the traditional plays and games of Bangladesh are set within a framework of teacher-led learning through play with a view to develop children’s holistic skills.
The four projects represented in this roundtable session result from different initiatives funded by the LEGO Foundation that support teacher professional development projects in East Africa and Asia. This roundtable contributes to the field of teacher education and teaching practice by providing diverse perspectives on cultural perceptions of play and learning from low- and middle-income country contexts which will have impacts on the development of teacher professional development programs for holistic skill development.

Sub Unit

• Teacher Education and the Teaching Profession SIG

Chair

• Patricia Castanheira, The LEGO Foundation

Individual Presentations

• Socio-cultural Constructions of Play for Teacher Professional Development in Contexts of Forced Displacement - Chris J Henderson, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Principles for Adapting Playful Pedagogies to Cultural Context - Matthew Jukes, RTI International

• Meanings of LtP in East African Refugee and Refugee-Hosting Communities and Schools: Initial Findings from a Positive Deviance Study - Anne C Smiley, IRC

• Discovering Traditional Play and Games of Bangladesh: an Unintended Consequence of COVID-19 - Emerald Baidya