Playing to Learn

        On my very first venture into Philadelphia with Play in the City to experience the Quiet Volume, I thought that Agatha, Phoenix, Thea and I were wandering aimlessly.  But after reading Mary Flanagan’s writing about “critical play,” I realized that we were, indeed, playing critically.  She references a paper by Brian Sutton-Smith, in which he categorizes play into four sections:  play as learning, play as power, play as fantasy, and play as self.  Though this is not entirely the concept Flanagan uses for her work, I found it incredibly interesting that what I think of as “play” might not be play to everyone and that though many people argue that something is not play if there is a product at the end, play nearly always has a product, albeit not a tangible one.  When we were in Philadelphia we were playing to learn: to learn about the city, about science, and about ourselves.

        While we were not doing anything that would appear as play to passersby, once we reached Philadelphia we began exploring, not just for the sake of exploration, but for the sake of learning.  We walked from place to place, taking in the sites and learning about Philadelphia.  We walked from Logan Circle and the Free Library to the Rodin Sculpture Garden where we took in the amazing sculptures.  We walked around the Parkway and noticed little things that helped us to learn more about the city.  The sculptures, the flags and the people all came together to create a more solid idea of Philadelphia for everyone in the group.

        We continued playing once we wandered into the Academy of Natural Sciences; we were playing to learn about science.  We walked around the exhibits laughing and joking about dinosaurs and poorly worded signs.  We were playing, yes, but we were also learning.  We learned about the creatures who lived before the dinosaurs and that velociraptors are much smaller than we all thought.  When we walked through a hall of dioramas of animals from North America, we played a game that was essentially “I Spy,” though it was more along the lines of “Hey, look, a bluejay!” and “Haha, all the beavers.”  We played while we looked at the animals posed in their natural habitats, but we also learned about their natural habitats, what they could eat and what other creatures they could interact with.  When we finally got to the Glow exhibit, the entire reason we went to the museum, we were playing even more.  We pressed buttons, watched videos, and dressed up as jellyfish and fireflies.  But we also learned the differences between bioluminescence, fluorescence and phosphorescence and why these traits are useful.  Though most people would believe it to be impossible to play in a science museum, when we  opened ourselves up to the possibility of learning and playing at the same time, there was no limit to what we could learn.
        When we finally had a chance to experience the Quiet Volume we had the ability to really reflect on the day and what was going on.  We were still playing critically, but we were playing to learn about ourselves.  I had never really noticed all the noises in libraries or thought about books the way this experience allows you to.  The Quiet Volume taught me how to think of the world around me in a more critical way; every noise and every letter has a meaning that I had been blind to before.