“I began to conclude that children’s role play was concerned with the larger themes of life, like love and power, rather than mundane things like the price of potatoes.” (Gifford, 2005)
The above quote appears at the top of Dr Helen Williams’ PhD thesis on role play in mathematics, and I was immediately intrigued.
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The “Gifford” in question is Dr Sue Gifford who was Williams’ PhD supervisor, and challenged Williams to prove her wrong. Instead, her eventual findings were largely consistent with her supervisor’s ideas, with some important provisos.
Clipboards and dinosaurs
“I’ve learned that small children don’t really care about the price of potatoes,” says Williams, a maths expert who works in schools across the UK. “But they do care about who’s opening the shop, who’s operating the till and who’s taking the money. They also love stocktaking; clipboards are good.”
Are clipboards materially different from potatoes, in this respect, I wondered - aren’t they still “mundane”?
Not according to Williams, who - in an episode peppered with academic references - presents a serious theory of mathematical learning and power at odds with the sort of conversation about children playing shop I was first anticipating.
“Learning can’t be considered separately from roles and relationships in the classroom,” she explains. “It’s all about power and control.”
The clipboard and the money, of course, can be considered powerful symbols of both.
And maybe they are just fun to handle, too. Williams’ work is so grounded in practice - which in her case means spending hours on classroom floors with the messy multiple realities of young children - that she has a remarkable ability to blend the academic with the pragmatic, the serious with the comic.
This is important, as we are talking about the very real and authentic problems in mathematics and pupil engagement, a subject that has been considered in the research for some time.
“Maths has been out of a limb in terms of being in touch with what children are really into,” she says.
I look at the example problem from her research article and I can barely get through the next sentence without giggling: “How can dinosaurs order food at a café if they can’t speak?”
I’m immediately entranced by this problem, and can see why it might be fun - but is this really how we can teach maths?
Maths + play = fun and learning
Absolutely, Williams says. Far from “come and do your work, and then you’ve finished and now you can go and play - unmonitored and unobserved”, the worlds of work and play can become more intimately and excitingly intertwined through mathematical role play. Not maths then play any more but maths and play.
This is because enjoyment is really, really important to learning, she says.
“If, as a teacher, I operate under an ethic of caring, then I have to accept and receive children’s feelings about the subject as part of teaching it. So, if I achieve my ends instructionally, but children hate the subject, then I’ve failed.”
Williams is deeply saddened by the experience of people still telling her “I hated maths because…”
“There is so much evidence of people feeling divorced from maths and we are in danger of continuing to recreate that in the classroom with very transmissive teaching,” she observes.
But teachers can change this: “Thoughtful teachers able to make a contagious identity of us being mathematicians, which is very powerful.”
This leads us on to a discussion about the power of role play to enable us to make mistakes as someone else, and the way this might relate to an identity of being a mathematician. “I often ask pupils to come to the front and pretend they are the teacher,” she says.
“Role play is not just about silliness or props or costumes; it’s about the intention to create a common, shared experience to build our maths around.”
Listen to the episode to hear more: about drama teacher and maths teacher “liaisons”; determined pupils putting on their life jackets and setting sail; worksheets and time wasting; megagames; unpredictable cocktails; being a “mathematician in residence”; and me patiently explaining the plot of the film Kindergarten Cop to Williams, who had *gasp* never seen it (I’m sure there’s a reason why it came up).
Lucy Rycroft-Smith works in communications and research for Cambridge Mathematics and is the presenter of the Tes Maths podcast. She tweets @honeypisquared
References
Lucy mentions:
1. Helen’s thesis
2. The article Role play in mathematics - a problem or a solution?
3. Social constructivism
4. Authentic and real problems in maths
5. Megagames
6. Kindergarten Cop
Helen mentions:
1. Harris’ definition of role play
2. Vivian Gussin Paley’s work including A Child’s Work/Wally’s Stories
3. The RME project
4. Sfard on identity being ‘important and contagious’
5. Foucoult’s ideas that identities are situated, layered, cumulative and forever changing
6. Dorothy Heathcote, Tim Taylor and Mantle of the Expert
7. Garvey’s book Play: The Developing Child
8. Valerie Walkerdine
9. Janine Davenall and tidy-up time
10. Sutton-Smith’s Seven Rhetorics of Play
11. Sue Gifford’s ideas on playful maths
12. Tony Cotton’s work on maths and drama
13. Hot seating
14. Noddings on the ethic of caring
15. Helen’s BERA article with Ruth Trundley
