NEURONS AND NARRATIVES: THE HUMAN NEED FOR FREE PLAY IN EARLY YEARS DEVELOPMENT
Dr Pam Jarvis
The arena of early years education has, over the past decade, been pitched into a situation where we seem to constantly swim against a relentless tide of inappropriate policy ‘initiatives’. This situation appears to have developed because those charged with policy development are not developmental specialists. They have learned the lessons of the impact of early environments upon neuronal development, but appear to think that the way to respond to this is a fast pace of adult-directed activity at the earliest possible stage. This belief is highly misguided, and contrary to both theory and empirical research evidence, which will be summarised below.
What are the issues?
The current median school entry age in England, four-and-a half, isone of the earliest in the world. In 2014, the Chief OFSTED inspector, Michael Wilshaw, called for two year olds to be taught in schools ‘to improve their education’, primarily through a closely adult-directed agenda. The Early Years Foundation Stage, a statutory national framework for children from birth to five, currently stipulates 17 early learning goals against which a progress report must be made at age two, and a summative assessment must be made on entry to Year 1.In 2012, the government added a compulsory phonics test during Year 1, which childrenare required to repeat until they reach a designated ‘pass’ mark.
The early years sector is currently resisting an effort to bring in ‘baseline testing’- formal tests of children’s competency in literacy and numeracy- on their entry to the Reception year of schooling, which for some children, those born in the summer months, arrives shortly after their fourth birthday. Successful ‘performance’ on all of these tests predisposes education managers to place children in highly adult-directed situations, where they are carefully coached ‘to target’.So what is the problem with this? In essence, human beings are not factory constructed mechanisms; they are complex biological organisms; naturally evolved creatures who have an inborn developmental schedule.There is no empirical evidence to support an ‘earlier is better’ approach; in fact, a range of research in the fields of anthropology, neuroscience, psychology and education tells us that play-based learning is more effective in developing the core skills upon which later academic achievements are based.
However, the EYFS document refers to ‘planned, purposeful play’, cementing the dominant role of the adult in young children’s activities, particularly given the DfE ‘s relentless emphasis upon an ‘accountability system’in which adults are blamed when children do not ‘perform to targets.’ Such a regime comes down particularly hard upon those with summer birthdays, the youngest of whom will be just 48 months old when they don their school uniform for the first time. There is robust evidence to indicate that summer born children are more likely to be diagnosed with special needs, and that many never fully emerge from the problems caused by being pitched into aformal education environment at such an early stage in their development. In the event of a child experiencing a condition that results indevelopmental delay or difference, there is an even greater impetus to diagnose an additional or ‘special’ need as soon as possible to avoid the staff or institution being held responsible for any ‘failure’. This raises the spectre of early labelling and all that this situation entails.
Human ‘biocultural’ development: why young children need to play
Jarvis et al (2014)cite a range of evidence from a variety of academic disciplines to illustrate that human beings are, at base, members of a highly evolved, linguistic primate species, born with a highly plastic neuronal architecture which subsequently undergoes a huge amount of development in interaction with the environment. In common with other, non-human animals, children principally achieve such development through collaborative play activity, spontaneously engaging with both peers and adults. Within the field of biology, an ever-growing body of experimental evidence suggests that ‘play appears to provide young animals the opportunity to finely tune their behaviour in a contextually relevant manner with peers and so modify the brain mechanisms that underpin social skills’ (Pellis and Pellis, 2012).[1]
Human beings differ from other animals in that they have the ability to communicate in a richly symbolic language, and this in turn underpins the deeply-rooted organising role that narrative- cohesive stories- play within human societies, which are steeped in complex networks of collaboration, co-operation and competition. Early childhood is a naturaldevelopmental stage in which children have a deep need toexplore and practice their interaction skills. Consider the everyday example of small boys engaged in rough and tumble play- which is undertaken by all primates, pretending to be superheroes- which is only observed in human primate play. Ellen Jordan (1995) identified a male ‘warrior’ narrative that she proposes is likely to be part of a ‘tradition stretching from Hercules to Beowulf to Superman and Dirty Harry that depicts the male as the warrior, the knight errant, the superhero,’ [2] while Lyle (2000) proposes that human beings are a ‘storying animal’ making sense of thoughts and events via such narratives, initially learned in early childhood.[3]
It is proposed that physically active, collaborative free play creates important neuronal connections in both non-human animals and human beings. Naravaez et al (2012) propose ‘natural social play may be an experience-expectation process that helps certain forms of neural maturation with benefits for the development of higher executive brain functions.’[4]For human infants, such interactions need to be freely undertaken in a style that Suzanne Zeedyk refers to as ‘a jazz duet... partners are not dancing to someone else’s tune but are creating one of their own’ (Zeedyk 2006).[5] Such interaction mirrors the flexible turn-taking of human linguistic conversation; and as language develops, the need to practice this skill in a natural context of spontaneous mutual exchange intensifies. For example, Pellegrini and Blatchford (2000) concluded that, for five year old boys, the amount of time spent in active social play with other boys directly predicts their level of success in social problem-solving one year later.[6]
In the early 21st century, bio-psychologists discovered ‘mirror neurons’ which fire when we simply imagine ourselves taking part in activities. A practical example of this process may be found in the narrative that a child, or group of children might typically construct in making a towel ‘stand for’ Superman’s cape and consequently the child or children concerned, for Superman and other ‘superheroes’. In this way, children become able to flexibly view the world from a number of different positions and perspectives, a key human skill which most importantly underlies the development of ‘Theory of Mind’ (ToM). ToM allows us to guess what other people are thinking and use this knowledge to collaborate, co-operate or compete with them.The ability to fluidly and flexibly exchange meanings with other human beings, by ‘putting ourselves in their shoes’ is central to our species, and is used in all our interactions with each other, from playgrounds to committees to international negotiations.
The over-riding quality of free play-play in which the child chooses his/ her activity freely from the surrounding environment- is that the narratives that unfold are open-ended, as are the uses of objects within them.The child has to flexibly respond from moment to moment, to stay in the game. This is crucial for building effective interaction skills, which cannot be directly ‘taught’ by relentless immersion in adult-directed activity.Internationally renowned psychologist Alison Gopnik found that direct teaching at an early stage in a child’s development was less successful than play-led activity, because adult domination of the teaching and learning agenda ‘leads children to narrow in, and to consider just the specific information a teacher provides’.If children are not confronted with open-ended problems, they will not effectively learn how to find open-ended solutions; all problems will be perceived as having one fixed solution that only an adult can ‘tell’ you. There is no deep learning accomplished through such ‘telling’ asthere is no linkage of words to concrete events and activities, most particularly highly variable responses from other human beings. Therefore, ‘the teacher will tell you’ narrative is terminally impoverished from the very beginning.
If we continually constrain children into highly adult dominated situations at this stage of their development, we condemn them to an insoluble maze of ‘alienation and confusion’; a situation predicted by Jerome Bruner almost 40 years ago.[7]What ensues is an Alice through the looking glass world where the focus is not upon developing children’s natural human capacities to generate independent and collaborative problem solving narratives linked to action, but to ‘drill’ them to individually regurgitate rote-learned ‘right’ answers in response to artificial, disembedded assessment events.This, in turn, sets up a range of problems for them as childhood progresses and they are expected to competently engage in more formal modes of interaction, many of which they will meet within increasingly structured teaching and learning environments.
Emergent Issues
Practically-derived, comparative data on the ineffectiveness of the current English state education system has been ignored by successive governments. Nations in which children start formal education later (up to the age of seven) achieve better results on average than those where they start formal education earlier. For example, Finland, where children start formal schooling at seven, are allocated a substantial amount of time for play, and not formally tested throughout the entire primary school period is ranked fourteen places higher than the United Kingdom in the most recent PISA comparisons. These were undertaken in 2012, following23 years of an increasingly monolithic National Curriculum in England, and its extension to younger and younger children. There is also compelling practice-based evidence to suggest that a heavy reliance on phonics can actually impede later reading fluency. This is not surprising, when the importance of narrative to human beings is taken into account: the meaning is the key aspect of any human communication (which is, of course, what is intended by the writer). Expecting a human being to grasp the process of reading as a set of technical skills is inevitably counter-intuitive.
It is highly likely that, if our government persists in forcing through education reforms which utterly ignore research evidence from myriad academic disciplines, forcing children into artificial, adult-directed activity at earlier and earlier ages, we will continue to exacerbate problems that are already becoming apparent in our society. We have an approximate rate of 1 in 10 children under 16 suffering from a clinically diagnosed condition at any given time. More recent research undertaken in the US, whose child mental health situation closely mirrors our own, suggests that over the past ten years, there has been a slow but steady increase in this statistic. In 2012, the Children’s Society and the University of York estimated that in 2012 about ‘half a million children in the UK in the eight to 15 age range have low well-being at any point in time’. Correspondingly, two successive Unicef reports focusing upon the richer nations, in 2007 and 2013, have found British children to have very low levels of ‘well-being.’ UNICEF suggests that some of the feedback indicates feelings of isolation connected to the pressure of being continually assessed in competitive situations: yet again, alienation and confusion. The Liberal Democrat Manifesto for the 2015 election pledges an extra1.25bn to deal with the ongoing deterioration in juvenile mental health; yet another ‘through the looking glass policy’ which, however well meaning, attempts to provide a sticking plaster without considering how to heal the wound.
It is additionally becoming increasingly apparent that not only children are suffering from anomic despairwithin the current state education system; there is a tsunami of anxiety and depression rolling through the teaching profession. A letter to the Independent on 24th April 2015signed by 1,200 teachers proposed that their working lives were ‘increasingly difficult and for many, unbearable [with]a constant fear of being judged to be failing’; yetfurtherevidence of alienation within a deeply dysfunctional system.
Conclusion
In conclusion, an overwhelming body of evidence from a range of academic disciplines, alongside international comparison data, indicates that the provision of time and space for collaborative free play is a non-negotiable developmental requirement for young human beings. They cannot deal with formal instruction before they have sufficient experience to ‘boot’ the system that underpins engagement with the complex modes of interaction that underpin all human societies- of which formal instruction is one. Expecting them to do so without the benefit of such experience is the equivalent of artificially training an animal whilstkeeping it in a cage, then wondering why it later struggles to effectively interact in a natural environment. This is a situation that would cause public outrage should it be enacted upon any species other than our own.
Whilst literacy and numeracy are clearly vital skills within a highly technological post-industrial society, these abilities emerge from more ancient human interaction skills, which depend upon both evolved and environmentally mediated factors: nature via nurture. We attempt to ignore or truncate such processes at our peril. Parents and teachers should be acutely aware of this issue, and the current danger that, within state education environments in England, children are being systematically deprived in this respect.
Pam Jarvis is a Senior Lecturer in Education Studies at Leeds Trinity University
[1]Pellis, S., and Pellis, V. (2012). Play-fighting during early childhood and its role in preventing later chronic aggression.In R.E. Tremblay, M. Boivin, and R.DeV.Peters (Eds.) Encyclopedia on Early Childhood Development [online]. Montreal, Quebec: Centre of Excellence for Early Childhood Development and Strategic Knowledge Cluster on Early Child Development; 2012:1–4.
[2]Jordan, E. (1995) Fighting Boys and Fantasy Play: the Construction of Masculinity in the Early Years of School, Gender and Education, 7, (1), pp. 69-87.
[3]Lyle, S. (2000) Narrative Understanding: Developing a Theoretical Context for Understanding how Children Make Meaning in Classroom Settings, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 32, (1), pp.45-63.
[4]Naravaez, D., Panksepp, J., Schore, A., and Gleason, T. (2012).Evolution, early experience and human development: From research to practice and policy. New York: Oxford University Press.
[5]Zeedyk, M.S. (2006). From intersubjectivity to subjectivity: The transformative roles of emotional intimacy and imitation. Infant and Child Development, 15, 321–344. doi: 10.1002/icd.457
[6]Pellegrini, A., and Blatchford, P. (2000).The Child at School. London: Arnold.
[7]Bruner, J. (1976). Nature and uses of immaturity. In J.S. Bruner, A. Jolly, and K. Sylva (Eds.) Play: Its role in development and evolution (pp. 28–64). New York: Basic Books.