Anji Play The Child’s Right to Play
Interview between Joleen Voss-Rodriguez and Cheng Xueqin (the creator of Anji Play): Anji Play The Child’s Right to Play
Quotes:
Anji Play, an open-ended, play-based early child-hood education approach.
Ms. Xueqin and the educators of Anji assert, “Returning the right of self-deter- mined play to children and communities in an environment defined by Love, Risk, Joy, Engagement, Reflection is the guiding principle of Anji Play.”
These seem like pretty great values to guide play.
In Anji, the educators entrust children with the right to self-determine play. The scope and breadth of the play is entirely child-determined. The children are given abundant time, open-ended materials, and the opportunity to play and to reflect upon their experiences.
I love abundant time and open ended materials
[Ms. Xueqin] Play is a fundamental right and a basic need of all children, regardless of where they live or their specific circumstances. The right to play flows from the rights to the love, respect, and trust of the adults in their lives. It is the responsibility of adults, particularly educational professionals and policy makers, to promote and protect these fundamental rights. When those conditions exist, children naturally engage in the deepest forms of play: discovery and insight. Therefore, the right to play is also the right to joy, the right to love, the right to engage in deeply meaningful learning experiences, and the right to grow, learn, and develop.
^^ Discovery and insight!
Interesting to take on “the right to play” from an activist perspective.
[Ms. Xueqin became head of early childhood education for Anji County in 1999] For many years, the standard public kindergarten in China basically warehoused kids. Kids were forced to sit still at their desks and teachers tried to teach them reading and math. That was a state of “no play.”
To this end, teachers began setting up situations for play, designing games and environments, and assigning roles and rules of play […] When I observed this play, I noticed that the children were neither happy nor meaningfully engaged. For the most part, children were simply doing what was expected of them. Our most painful realization was that their play lacked joy—and the teachers, having worked so hard to set up the play—were frustrated and tired. Despite their best intentions, they had created the conditions for what we began to recognize as “false play.” We saw that there is no joy in false play and, for the teachers and children, it was a relationship lacking in joy and love.
This is such an interesting point. The teachers tried their hardest to make meaningful play, but in the end it was a closed circuit with too many rules, the children were not engaging in open ended play and therefore their play lacked joy. Very interesting. Makes me wonder: do games have rules and play has no rules? Is that the difference between them?
We realized that to fulfill our mission, it was necessary to cultivate a deep understanding of play that was not bound by our expectations of what happens in school or even tied to learning outcomes. We realized these limitations created the conditions of false play. We quickly realized that play is the most natural and basic of all human activities—that it is characterized by joy, risk, and freedom— and that within each of us we carry a deep knowledge of play from our own childhoods that could free us from the confines of our adult misconceptions about play. This began our journey towards true play for both children and adults.
We began a process of recalling our play. I asked myself and my family and teachers and principals in Anji to recall our deepest childhood memories of play. Common themes began to emerge: outdoor play; risky play; play with big, minimally structured materials; play that took place over extensive, uninterrupted periods of time; and self-determined play, play that was selected and organized by us, children, ourselves.
We began to remove fixed play structures and thematic play. We made our environments minimally structured and open-ended. We increased natural environmental elements such as bamboo groves, streams, dirt, sand, and hills. We introduced large, minimally structured, and open-ended materials, and we gave children extensive time to create, imagine, and solve problems in an open-ended, self-determined way.
This is so amazing.
[How do children, teachers and parents have insights into children’s play] We did this through the development of two reflective processes: play stories and play sharing, which create complementary ways for children to represent in images and words their own stories of play and allow teachers to gain a deeper understanding of the child’s experience from his point of view.
We asked our parents to take part in play, allowing their children to guide them on the playground. They began to experience and understand the complexity and challenges of true play, that it requires brains and guts and heart. They saw that play is, in fact, learning.
Children in Anji draw a daily story of their play. They use materials like pens, pencils, crayons, construction paper, and glue and employ marks of their choosing to narrate or describe their experiences that day. Children may also decide to dictate their story to their teacher. Children bring these stories home and their parents are encouraged to continue the practice of transcribing their child’s descriptions
Thoughts:
Anji play is really interesting to me. This is an example of an entire education system being up-ended, reworked and then finally rebuilt with a focus on free-play for children (ages 4-6).
A couple comments stood out to me the most:
The comment about long, uninterrupted play.
Playing with large, minimally structured materials
Creating a natural environment
Im curious to learn more about this method, especially the design of the play-materials and the and the outdoor environments.
Its really interesting how both Cas Holman and Anji Play focus so much on play materials, mostly for building and construction. This is something I am interested in researching.
Photos from the Interview:
