Don't turn your home into school...the Lego professor of play on lockdown learning
In a recent Guardian report, Paul Ramchandani, Lego professor of play at the University of Cambridge, explains how coronavirus school closures are a chance to follow your child’s lead rather than formal study.
Here at The New School UK, we couldn’t agree more. Our Founder Lucy Stephens said, “There are so many articles circulating at the moment focusing on the positive benefit to young people from coronavirus. The potential to be at home with family building relationships, to follow own ideas and interests, to play freely without hectic schedules of activities, is a wonderful opportunity for many young people. As this article shows, play is a fundamental requirement of childhood. Children do it naturally, and from it they gain so many benefits, much of which relates to learning – learning about the world, about relationships between things, developing imagination, playing out social situations and ideas. Parents being playful is also really important as it helps children to regulate the stress system, to understand their emotions, to learn social cues, to develop coordination and self-control.”
“But we also have to recognise that this is a privilege. The time, the space, the resources, the parental tools needed to support freedom to learn, or to play, is not every young person’s experience. It shouldn’t take a pandemic to remind us that we currently rely on schools to fill the gaps left by widening social and economic inequality - glaringly evident when we look at access to virtual schools, the privilege of social distancing, and the ability to optimise health outcomes through nutrition, supplements and exercise. If we don’t want the Coronavirus to contribute to an even bigger equality gap in education when schools return, we have to push for ‘freedom to learn’, for every young person.”
“So when the questions post corona quickly turn to ‘closing the outcomes gap’, we need to be louder – focus first on predictable care, nurture, and responsiveness from key adults; then emphasise developmentally appropriate learning environments that support unstructured play and opportunities to explore; that are inclusive and culturally responsive, where every voice is heard; where young people drive their education with critical input from teachers of ‘official knowledge’ that some young people have just by virtue of their family background; and where outcomes are not defined by standardised test results but by the values we want to see in education.”
