Hands-on theatrical experience and children’s pretend play
Virginia C. Salo, Kenneth H. Rubin & Meredith L. Rowe
Empirical work shows a decline in the creativity of American children over the past 25 years (Kim, 2011). One possible reason for this decline is that schools are treating play and learning as dichotomous and separate, and children are not given as many opportunities to play as they were in the past (Howes, 2011). Play, and in particular sociodramatic play, promotes creativity and flexible thinking, (Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff, Berk, & Singer, 2009; Russ, 2004; Singer & Singer, 2005) as well as the development of vital social skills (Berk, Mann, & Ogan, 2006; Elias & Berk, 2002). Participation in the arts is another route to creativity (Reed, Hirsh-Pasek, & Golinkoff, 2012), however this area is much less studied and understood. The goal of the current project was to build on previous research on the role of the arts and play in development by asking whether engaging with theater during early childhood enhances preschoolers’ pretend play, creativity, and cooperation.
We addressed this question by observing free play sessions that occurred immediately before (pre-play) and immediately after (post-play) children participated in an early childhood theater production in the Greater Washington, DC metropolitan area. The performance involved two actors engaging with the children in the audience as they enacted a story of siblings playing in their bedroom. Play sessions were seven minutes long and children were provided with an array of materials (i.e. dress-up clothes). Approximately 450 preschool-aged children were observed across 15 performances. For ten performances, there were both pre-play and post-play sessions. For five performances, there was only a post-play session. The play sessions were live coded by research assistants trained to assign group-level ratings on five dimensions including: 1) cooperation (e.g., sharing materials or playing together toward a common goal, such as playing ‘house’ together), 2) misbehaving (e.g., taking materials from another child), 3) character driven pretense (e.g., putting on a tie and pretending to be ‘dad’), 4) object transforming pretense (e.g., pretending that a pile of scarves is a puddle to jump in), and 5) overall engagement (i.e., the extent to which the group as a whole were engaging with the materials and each other). We hypothesized that: (1) children would engage in more pretend play during the post-play than the pre-play and that (2) children would use the materials more creatively during post-play than pre-play.
Results show that children were more cooperative (t = -2.27, p = .049), engaged in more character driven pretense (t = -2.94, p = .016) and more object transformation pretense (t = -3.45, p - .007), and were more socially engaged (t = -2.68, p = .025), during post-play sessions compared to pre-play sessions (see Figure 1). Comparison of post-play sessions when there was no pre-play preceding the performance (n=5) and when there was (n=10) suggests that the increases in pretend play do not seem to be due to the pre-play experience. These findings suggest that engaging in early childhood theater may be one route to improving pretend play and creativity in young children.