The Role of Play in Secondary English Classrooms

ABSTRACT

Michael Young’s notion of powerful knowledge is attractive to many: to teachers wishing the best for disadvantaged students, to neoliberal governments that continually stress the need for teachers and students to improve their performance. This essay takes issue with this understanding of education. Firstly, it shows how classrooms are mediated by larger social and political contexts, arguing that the exchanges within classrooms are always inflected by the values and aspirations that students bring into class. No classroom can be treated as a neutral site, as though it exists apart from the conflicts and debates that occur within the larger society. Secondly, it shows how, through role-play, students are able to grapple with the social issues with which they and their communities are faced. Set in a classroom in Ramallah, the essay argues that through role-play and dialogue, students are able to activate their own prior knowledge in powerful ways that allow them to gain insight into their world.

KEYWORDS:

• Knowledge
• role-play
• performance
• representation
• catharsis
• politics of education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. What is meant by play will become clear in the course of the essay – in the concrete instances that I will be exploring.

2. The students frequently used a mix of Arabic and English and in written notes a curious hybrid originating in text language.

3. Seeds of Peace is an Israeli organisation that brings together Palestinian and Israeli teenagers in a summer camp. The students at the school were almost unanimously opposed to it as ‘normalisation’ of the occupation but there were one or two who had been at the camp and were strongly in favour of the initiative.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Monica Brady

Monica Brady taught history and humanities and English for 33 years in schools across London. She has written on teaching poetry in English and Education and was a regular contributor to Socialist Teacher, writing on subjects as diverse as Palestine, the history curriculum and school uniform. From 2013 to 2016, she worked as a volunteer in a school in Ramallah, Palestine. She is currently studying for an MA in philosophy of education at the Institute of Education, UCL.