Serious Play in Jewish Early Childhood Education

“It’s not a birthday party without cake!” Enthusiastic voices rang out in American-accented Hebrew song. With increasing fervor they sang, “Where oh where oh where is the cake?” The singers arose from their miniature chairs and began dancing around the birthday celebrant, placing a yellow paper crown upon her head as they whirled and twirled. When a woman entered the room carrying a large sheet cake, their song shifted: “Here oh here oh here is the cake!” At the song’s conclusion, they clapped and cheered as they lined up in a perfectly straight single-file line at the newly appointed cake table. With generous portions plated and in hand, they returned to their miniature chairs and immediately took out pencils and notebooks, ready to take notes. They sat silently waiting for me to speak.

These enthusiastic serenaders were early childhood educators, and I had come to their community to lead a week of professional development workshops—but not before, they insisted, singing and dancing and eating cake for breakfast. That first day, as I watched these adults earnestly make construction paper birthday crowns as they squeezed themselves into chairs designed for 4-year-olds, I mistakenly assumed that I had witnessed a morning of stark juxtapositions as the educators’ playful singing gave way to a seriousness of purpose in learning. But as the days wore on—each containing moments of spontaneous singing or crafting—I came to understand that for these early childhood educators, there was no distinction between play and learning. They conceptualized learning as a continuous endeavor that was, in every moment, both playful and serious.

The educational term for this approach is “serious play” (e.g., Mann, 1996; Rieber et al., 1998), terminology that connotes the profound importance of playfulness for deeply engaged learning. “Learning [is] at its best,” explains sociologist Sara Lawrence Lightfoot, “when it is deadly serious and very playful at the same time” (quoted in De Castell & Jenson, 2003, p. 649). It is the commitment to this kind of learning—playful and serious in equal measures—that unites the articles in this special issue of the Journal of Jewish Education, devoted to research in Jewish early childhood education.

Like the early childhood educators enrolled in my professional development workshops, renowned Israeli early childhood educator Malka Haas believed that every object held within it the possibility of playful learning. In “A Life Full of Meaning”: The Lifework and Educational Approach of Malka Haas, Sigal Achituv offers an intellectual biography of Haas’s life and work, making the case for how and why Haas was influential in shaping both the curriculum and the practice of early childhood education in Israel. Readers will no doubt delight in descriptions of Haas’s approach to serious play, including the transformation of the junkyard in her kibbutz into a junkyard-playground in which, Avituv explains, “children’s free play is encouraged with minimal rules for the use of time, space, objects, and social relations.” Haas understood—in a way clearly conveyed by Achituv in her examination of Haas’s work—that early childhood is a time for both deep learning and playful experimentation with everything from art materials to Bible stories to other people’s trash.

Early childhood educators and children in the United States take center stage in Anna Hartman’s article, “‘Let’s just spend a ton of time together building this thing that’s so important’: Children’s theory development in American Jewish early childhood classrooms.” In this piece, Hartman collaborates with early childhood educators to investigate children’s emerging ideas about Judaism. Through Hartman’s words, readers will catch a glimpse of what it actually looks like when children engage in serious play within a rich Jewish educational context. In one early childhood classroom that Hartman investigates, children pretending to sell challot at an imaginary restaurant in the dramatic play area turns into a formal class investigation into challah baking that culminates with the children learning from a kosher baker how to make and sell their own challot. In another early childhood institution, children’s accidental discovery that a mezuzah was missing from their classroom door led to children spontaneously exploring their own neighborhoods in search of doorposts with mezuzot. In her detailed descriptions of young children’s words and actions, Hartman illuminates precisely why children’s imaginative play is part of the way that Jewish children construct understandings of both Judaism and their own Jewish selves.

While Hartman’s work spotlights how young children make sense of a range of Jewish ideas and practices in the early childhood classroom, Ilana Dvorin Friedman and Kate Phillippo’s work drills down into one common early childhood practice: the Shabbat party. In “‘You Can Be Whatever You Want to Be’ Except for on Shabbat: Challenging the Traditional Shabbat Party,” Friedman and Phillippo conduct a feminist poststructural analysis of beliefs about gender held by educators in Orthodox Jewish early childhood programs. The authors identify a series of tensions that sit at the heart of this practice, including a tension between educators’ commitments to inclusive classroom environments that promote pretend play and the often rigid gender roles assigned to the children designated to play the roles of Shabbat Ima (mother) and Shabbat Aba (father). In addition to explicitly raising profound questions about the role that gender ought (or ought not) to play in the early childhood classroom, Friedman and Phillipo’s work also implicitly raises questions about the roles that adults ought (or ought not) to play in directing or redirecting children’s role playing. Readers of this article will encounter examples of the ways that children’s pretend play shapes and is shaped by their emerging understanding of the world and will no doubt wonder: at what moments and in what ways should adults help craft the experiences and environments that allow for children’s playful learning to flourish?

If Friedman and Phillippo’s work can be read as illuminating both the power and limitations of children’s play, then Meir Muller and Eliza Braden’s work can be read as a form of playful learning that occurs when adults investigate materials designed for children. In “The Stories We Tell Our Young Children: Using Picture Books to Explore Race and Black–Jewish Relations,” Muller and Braden describe how they have developed an inventory of children’s picture books that spotlight Black–Jewish relations and/or Black Jewish characters. They then explore the ways that existing children’s literature portrays either Black Jewish characters or interactions between Black and Jewish characters, and they imagine new possibilities for using children’s literature as a way of teaching about race and racism as part of Jewish education. In doing so, Muller and Braden suggest that early childhood educators—not only early childhood learners—must engage in work that both plays with the materials of the classroom in creative ways and takes seriously the import of their ideas.

As a suite, this collection of articles illuminates a range of ways of understanding serious play: play as both a universal and a deeply Jewish early childhood educational practice; play as both a way of reinforcing and a way of undermining beliefs about gender, race, and religion; and play as a process of both learning and pedagogy. Examinations of serious play in early childhood education—whether play in the junkyard-playground, the play of hunting through the neighborhood for doors with mezuzot, the pretend play of the Shabbat party, or the playful ways that educators might use children’s literature in the classroom—offer a window into the intentional choices and unintended consequences of early childhood educators and the children whose learning they work to support.