Play, adventure and creativity: unearthing the excitement and fun of learning

Many scholars discuss the role of play in early childhood education and the notion that play is the child’s vehicle for learning (Bodrova and Leong 2015). The justification for this is partly due to the power of play to engage children in the process of learning; it creates dispositions for intrinsic learning which are self-motivating and inherently rewarding. Play-based learning is often positioned as an approach to overcome the lack of motivation to learn which can be caused by schools if they impose mechanisms which Bruner (1966, 127) suggests ‘fail to enlist the natural energies that sustain spontaneous learning’. As a result, play is thought to alleviate the potential for learning to be mundane, tedious, or repetitive because children see play as exciting and fun. These positive dispositions associated with play stem from children’s familiarity with playing – a process which is typically engrained in childhood by parents and caregivers from birth – creating a sense of control and ownership for children to direct their actions and experiences, or to exhibit control over others in certain play situations (Corsaro and Eder 1990). Play, however, has not always been the solution to obstacles in children’s learning. While play is a useful or familiar term to encompass many elements of pedagogy, the terminology of structuring or planning play specifically for learning can often cause challenges, particularly in relation to the adult’s role in the process (Wood 2010). The fact that play is variously defined and debated (Howard 2017) leads to uncertainty amongst educators about how best to facilitate play experiences to optimise learning potential. Furthermore, play definitions are sometimes met with criticism, particularly when exploring ‘pure play’ versus ‘structured play’. Its self-directed intrinsically motivated nature is brought into question when considering adult-led play experiences, for example. In general, divergent ideologies occur where child-centred versus institutionally structured play, bound by regulations and curriculum, occur (Canning 2020) fuelling the complexity for supporting children’s learning through play. The debates about what play is, or is not, can create roadblocks to confidently scaffolding learning experiences for children. Yet play is not the only mechanism through which pedagogy can be developed, planned and experienced and a potential solution to this dilemma is to adopt broader explorations of pedagogy, which focus on harnessing the key positive contributions that play makes to children’s learning – for example, engagement and intrinsic motivation. Developing plans for pedagogy around these concepts may offer a new potential in leading children’s learning. In response to the above raised concerns about play-based pedagogy, I propose a focus on fun, adventure, excitement and creativity as some indicators of intrinsic motivation and engagement in children’s learning experiences and as a more observable and less contentious platform for planning pedagogy. I argue that we need to redirect our focus towards these embodied or emotionally endowed characteristics of experience to facilitate children’s engagement in the learning process. Play is still prominent, and essential, as a key approach or technique to fostering fun, adventure, excitement and creativity but in this scenario play is not the headline. Here I suggest we reverse the narrative. Rather than start with an adult envisaged playscape in the hope it fuels learning through intrinsic motivation and engagement,