Are we putting our undergrads in playpens when they need playgrounds?

Last week I wrote about what we should be teaching students to prepare them for the future. That led me down a rabbit hole of how we should be teaching them

Image: Midjourney

Last week I wrote a short article in response to the historian and author Yuval Noah Harari’s claim that “Today, nobody has any idea what to teach young people that will still be relevant in 20 years.”

As I wrote, I’m pretty sure we can develop a reasonably good roadmap of present day learning that’s going to stand our students in good stead. But having written the article, I found myself unable to let go of the question of how we should be teaching our students to prepare them for the future.

How we should be teaching — especially at the undergraduate level — is, of course, a field full of scholarship, ideas, personalities, egos, and passionately defended assumptions. As a result, it’s one that I should probably stay well clear of. Yet as an educator who spends a lot of time working and engaging with undergrads on thinking about the future, I’m not sure this is an option.

I should also probably admit that I’m not that convinced by some of the current thinking around forward-looking teaching, especially when it comes to incorporating the latest greatest technology into education — usually as a solution in search of a problem.

Despite this, it does seem reasonable to ask whether the panoply of current and emerging teaching approaches that are employed in universities are up to the task of equipping our students for a future that will be very different from the present, or if we need to get a little more creative in now we teach — or maybe more relevantly, how we create effective learning environments.

Spurred on by this, I started playing around on Google after posting last week’s article — a research “methodology” that I feel is justified by where I ended up as, I hope, will become apparent.

My starting point was the idea of “edutainment” — enhancing learning through entertaining students, and often drawing on what works to keep audiences engaged in film, TV, and gaming.

I must confess that I’m a bit of a skeptic here, especially given a dearth of hard evidence on the effectiveness of edutainment-based approaches. But I was willing to have my mind changed and embrace the idea of entertainment as education in preparing students for the future. (And in full disclosure here, I use movies as a teaching tool!)

Unfortunately, one of the first sources I came across was a 2004 article by MIT professor Mitch Resnick where he writes “Too often, they [the creators of today’s edutainment products] view education as a bitter medicine that needs the sugar-coating of entertainment to become palatable.”

I say unfortunately as this confirmed all my fears about edutainment — Mitch’s article engaged my cognitive biases to the full!

Just in case this was an old and outmoded perspective, I reached out to Mitch to see if he still holds this view — just to discover that, 20 years on, it hasn’t changed much.

What Mitch did add though was that I might want to check out his work on the idea of the “lifelong kindergarten” — and especially the roles of passion and play in learning.

And this is where things got interesting.

Reading Mitch’s 2017 book Lifelong Kindergarten: Cultivating Creativity through Projects, Passion, Peers, and Play was a revelation — and began to help crystallize my thinking around the how of teaching students to prepare them for the future.

Mitch’s work focuses on learning in the early to mid years of a child’s educational journey. But as the book title suggests, many of the insights he has developed over decades of research are applicable across the lifelong learning spectrum. And the more I dived into this work, the more I realized that there’s a model here that may be a powerful way of approaching how we create effective learning environments and opportunities for undergrads in the face of rapid societal and technological change.

Here, one metaphor that Mitch mentions in his work stood out in particular: the metaphor of the playpen and the playground.

This actually comes from the 2012 book Designing Digital Experiences for Positive Youth Development: From Playpen to Playground by Marina Umaschi Bers, and is a metaphor that Mitch uses extensively. From Bers and Mitch’s perspective playpens are restrictive, and provide limited and prescribed pathways to exploration.

In Bers’ words, the metaphor “conveys lack of freedom to experiment, lack of autonomy for exploration, lack of creative opportunities, and lack of risks.”

This, to me, feels remarkably close to many of the ways we teach undergrads — especially when we’re integrating new technologies into the classroom. There’s an element of control to much of what we do that assumes a preset pathway to success, with clear cut objectives along a linear and predefined journey that is wrapped up in the “sugar-coating” of flashy tech.

In contrast, the playground “provides more room to move, explore, experiment, and collaborate” according to Mitch. In Bers’ words, “The playground promotes, while the playpen hinders …”.

This struck a deep chord with me — both from the perspective of thinking about how we help our students prepare for the future, and my own experiences as a student, learner, and educator. And this resonated all the more with Mitch’s further envisioning of learning spaces with “low floors” (to make them accessible), “high ceilings” (to allow students to excel), and “wide walls” (to allow many different pathways to learning).

None of these ideas around play, creativity, experimentation, guided freedom, and autonomy, are especially groundbreaking from an educational perspective — except that they continue to be sidelined by unimaginative attempts to constrict and quantify learning to the nth degree, and that they are rarely applied to undergraduate learning and education.

Yet if we are to equip our students for a future that will be radically different from the past, we need to build learning opportunities that foster the ability to adapt, to problem solve, to envision alternative pathways forward, and to do this in collaboration with others.

In effect, we need our students to be learning in playgrounds that equip them for the future, and not playpens that restrict them.

Of course, undergrads still need to learn core skills that allow them to do stuff that’s useful as soon as they graduate. But imagine a scenario where more conventional education pathways are augmented by learning “playgrounds” that fostered future-proof skills — the ability to imagine new possibilities, to creatively play and tinker with new ideas, to share these with others and expand the universe of possibilities through this, and to explore many pathways to possible futures rather than just those that convention and a blinkered education dictate are the way forward. And imagine that, in this scenario, student learning in these playgrounds isn’t measured, cataloged, compared, and quantified to the extent that all useful degrees of freedom are effectively shut down.

I suspect that many reading this will exclaim at this point that we have these opportunities already. Makerspaces, innovation labs, immersive learning environments, research opportunities, and more. Yet many of these opportunities are exclusive, inaccessible, over-quantified, focused on creating products rather than play and, in many cases, playpens masquerading as playgrounds.

Rather, I’m beginning to think that we need to get far more creative in how we think about the notion of “playgrounds for the mind” in higher education, and how we create learning spaces that equip our students for how to think in the future, not just what to build.

There is, of course, a long way to go here — although it’s probably no surprise that this is part and parcel of what we are doing in ASU’s Future of Being Human initiative. But the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that we need to be revising our ideas about how we teach as we prepare our undergrads to be builders of the future, as much as we engage in thinking about what we teach them.

And I suspect that we should be ditching playpens in favor of playgrounds as fast as we can!

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Postscript

One aspect of this idea of playgrounds for learning in universities that appealed to me as I began to explore it is how closely this matches my own learning experiences, and how I create learning environments for my own students. As a physicist I had plenty of “chalk and talk” lectures as an undergrad where we were bombarded with new ideas as fast as our instructor could write them on the board, and we could copy them into our notes. But these were augmented by physics labs where we got the chance to experiment, to be creative, to explore new ideas and to problem solve — to play in effect.

Of course, the play was somewhat restricted, and had a specific set of objectives. Nevertheless the tactile problem solving and creative exploration in my labs as an undergrad (and later as a graduate instructor) fired my imagination.

This became foundational to how I approached my research as a physicist — and how I still do, even though I cut across many different disciplines these days. So much of how I explore new ideas, put knowledge and understanding together in different ways, and revel in the serendipity of new discoveries, is grounded in play.

And this spills over to how I teach. In my course on sci-fi movies, responsible innovation and the future for instance, I aim to create a learning space where students are given the opportunity to explore and play with new ideas — and to share them and build on them with others. And in my “Pizza and a Slice of Future” class we explore and play with new ideas each week at the intersection of transformative technologies and the future — aided and abetted by pizza, and a physical space that’s intentionally designed to break down barriers and encourage creative thinking.

Because of this, there’s a part of me that felt that exploring the metaphor of playpens and playgrounds was like being reminded of what I’ve long accepted in my professional career.

There was also a moment of validation though — albeit one that was probably tinged with confirmation bias. I was reading about approaches to learning that I intuitively practice. It’s just that now I had a stronger foundation on which to build on these, and a clearer pathway forward.

It may be that there are metaphors other than playpens and playgrounds that are better for developing learning approaches that are responsive to future needs. But based on my own experience, I’m more than happy to continue playing with them as we explore how to equip our students for a technologically advanced and socially complex future!