Misty Ferguson
Harnessing Play for
Mutual Humanization
in the Classroom
Play is never “just play” . . . [I]t is during play that humans are most human. They learn to
extend the limits of human experience.
Dehumanizing Dullness
We lingered in the hallway after the final dismissal
bell, as teachers do, swapping another day’s worth
of complaints about our students. It was October,
a notoriously long month for high school teach-
ers; school had barely gotten started, yet we found
ourselves struggling to engage students in their
classwork. Trudging back to my desk to tackle ex-
pansive piles of grading, I paused for a moment to
gaze out the windows of my third-­story classroom,
casually surveying the colorful autumn scene. Be-
neath my window, the Mighty Vikings sprinted
yard-­line to yard-­line, in full pads, at the coach’s
whistle. The cross-­country team dashed in a tight
pack around the cinder track encircling the football
field. The junior-­varsity cheerleading squad stacked
and unstacked themselves in the far endzone in
time to their captain’s counts. Behind them, on an
adjacent practice field, the marching band, giant
faux-­feather-plumed hats contrasting comically
with their street clothes, marched their routines in
silence, gripping imagined instruments, a hundred
eyes glued to the drum major’s staccato movements.
In a parking lot in the distance, a gaggle of skaters
had set up a makeshift ramp over which they were
heedlessly hurling their buoyant adolescent bodies.
Observing my students at play, I suddenly
realized that these racing, soaring, straining, per-
severing, focusing teenagers were, obviously, highly
engageable. They ran, loving the weight of the
Copyright © 2018 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.
EJ_July_2018_B.indd 43
Playful teaching is a
little-explored way to
reinvigorate secondary
classrooms with our
vibrant mutual humanity.
—Michael Ellis, “Play and the Origin of Species”
pads, anticipating the thrill of Friday nights under
the lights; they marched, believing in the commu-
nity of the band; they tumbled end over end, and,
relishing the challenge, tumbled again. They were
so alive out there. These were the same kids that
I could not get to stay awake, much less engaged,
for a 45-­minute language arts class. The realization
stunned me. What, I wondered, does play offer that
our classrooms withhold?
I am by no means the only educator of ad-
olescents who has bemoaned the impotence of
secondary settings to engage students effectively.
Jacqueline Ancess assessed the comprehensive US
high school and found that, by and large, it offered
little more than “an impersonal and uncaring envi-
ronment, emotionally distant social relations, weak
group cohesion and communication, high levels of
anomie, silencing, [and] disengagement” (1). Sarah
Fine lamented in the Harvard Review that, over the
course of her two-­year study of “high schools that
aspire to engage all their students,” she encountered
“fairly bleak places to spend time” (3). She describes
these aspirational schools as having narrow views
of rigor, of quite literally “containing” passively
listening students tasked to form their “arsenal of
facts and skills that might pave the way for inter-
esting work in college and beyond”; at their worst
these highly intentional schools, she says, felt like a
place where students “wait out the four years before
becoming a legal adult” (3). These appraisals of the
English Journal 107.6 (2018): 43–47 43
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 Harnessing Play for Mutual Humanization in the Classroom
US high school experience reveal that, in spite of an
onslaught of reform efforts involving various shades
of standardization, alleged college-­preparatory cur-
riculum, and accountability measures, secondary
schools remain places that struggle to invigorate
and inspire students (Ravitch).
Having spent the years since my aforemen-
tioned epiphany-­at-­the-­window pondering the par-
adox of thriving adolescents stupefied by school, I
have come to believe not only that the ludic can
be harnessed for academic engagement and growth
but also that play can infuse the US secondary class-
room with the humanity, equality, and democracy
it lacks. It all begins with imagining what would
happen if students were as alive in the classroom as
they are on the playgrounds in their lives, be they
practice fields, dance floors, skate parks, or social
media applications.
Play and Playful Teaching
For years, scholars have struggled to achieve a sat-
isfactory definition of play; nonetheless, Scott G.
Eberle took on the monumental task and offered
this “ongoing, onward-­ rolling” definition in the
American Journal of Play. His definition highlights
the multifaceted nature of play and its fundamen-
tal place in human experience across the lifespan.
“Play,” he writes, “is an ancient, voluntary, emer-
gent process driven by pleasure that yet strengthens
our muscles, instructs our social skills, tempers and
deepens our positive emotions, and enables a state of
play that leaves us poised to play some more” (231).
He explains that anticipation—­imagination
and pleasurable expectation—­is where play begins.
Laughter is typical because anticipation, paradox-
ically, gives way to surprise. This anticipated sur-
prise occurs because “memory and prediction share
a neural substrate . . . [thus] players in a state of an-
ticipation may be remembering a ‘future pleasure’”
(Eberle 223). Curiosity, inquiry, discovery—­all a
form of anticipation—­lead to the next element:
pleasure. Pleasure may feel like delight, satisfac-
tion, joy, happiness, and/or fun. It creates incentive
to play more. As we play more, our play begins to
build understanding, even empathy, into our expe-
rience. We gain insight into cooperation, sharing,
connection, and sensitivity, all of which make us
better playmates. Play strengthens our bodies, but
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EJ_July_2018_B.indd 44
it even more powerfully shapes our emotional and
intellectual experience in the world. We face our
fears in play, and as a result, we build resilience and
flexibility, social bonds, and common experiences.
This leads to poise, to flow, and to balance, both of
body and mind (Eberle).
While the elements of play are certainly re-
alized through action, an attitude of play, or “play-
fulness,” can accomplish the same effects through
“engaging with particular contexts and objects
[in a way] that is similar to play but respects the
purposes and goals of that object of context” (Si-
cart 19). This is to say that the function of play can
be accomplished without engaging in the totality
of the action called play. Miguel Sicart exempli-
fies a playful approach to non-­play pursuits in the
modern corporate values in which workplace and
worker are to be “dynamic, engaging, and full of
the expressive capacities of play, but . . . effective,
performative, serious, and valuable” (21). He argues
that playfulness is appropriation, “taking over a sit-
uation to perceive it differently; this appropriation
can be transformative, disruptive, or political, but
it is fundamentally expressive” (27). In approaching
a task or project playfully, a worker or student has
power to personalize their world and to defy the ab-
solute authority of the system—­whether corporate
or curricular. Put another way, to playfully appro-
priate tasks is to enact one’s humanity.
Playful teaching, then, is teaching that ac-
knowledges and draws on the drive to play, the
joy of learning, and the humanity of teacher and
students—­but it is more than that. It is the act of
taking over your own practice to make it more faith-
fully an expression of yourself and your students.
Playful teaching intentionally presents content,
assignments, and structure in imaginative, open-­
ended, and active ways, attempting to integrate play
and learning in a way that provides anticipation,
understanding, and enjoyment and leverages stu-
dent interests and passion on a path toward transfor-
mative, even transgressive, learning (Moyles).
Some might argue that play and secondary
education are incompatible; in reality, play is an
adaptive human activity throughout the lifespan
(Göncü and Perone). Though it is often overlooked
in school, what causes students to laugh, to love,
and to feel alive is central to their identities, their
motivation, their cognition, and their well-­being
7/8/18 3:18 PM

(Herrera et al.). When we invite their laughter and
pleasure into our classrooms, we are expanding the
scope of their humanity and our own.
A British teacher, Toby Garfath, reflected
on this phenomenon in a self-­study published in
the journal Changing English. He writes about the
changes in his own practice and in his students
when he embraced a playful point of view in his
secondary English classroom. Garfath confesses that
he spent years “denying his own playfulness as a
means of bringing the will of the children into ac-
cordance with his own will” (113). His change in
perspective was born of an introduction to Donald
Woods Winnicott’s work in play therapy; Garfath
embraced the psychoanalytic value of playfulness as
a foil to the “work obsessed” learning environments
of the modern secondary school (118).
He soon realized that the biggest enemy of
play and playfulness in his classroom was his own
ego, his own need for absolute control. Borrowing
Winnicott’s metaphor, he began allowing the stu-
dents to be babies that “bite your knuckles with-
out guilt” (Garfath 118). He reports that this shift
enhanced his connection with and compassion for
students and, to his surprise, deepened their inter-
action with the content of his classes. He observes
that much of the misbehavior in his classroom was
actually “an invitation . . . to play, an irrepressible
determination to communicate something forcefully
genuine and to discover something equally genuine
in me” (Garfath 118). He writes about using playful
dialogue to “frame and understand . . . ‘off task’ . . .
behavior as an intentional response to the lesson or
text under discussion” rather than a personal affront;
a simple question like, “You seem really bored—­do
you hate this poem? What do you hate about it?”
was much more effective in generating instructive
conversation than punishment had ever been (119).
His final reflection is that, as he began to
frame the students’ expressions of their negative
feelings or “playful [a]cts of hatred” as “an accept-
able part of the dialogue of the lesson,” the students
felt less compelled to perform them (Garfath 121).
Ultimately, Garfath describes playful teaching as
“pedagogical patience,” which acknowledges and
“[a]llows for the creation of a purposefully, pro-
ductively unstable inter-­ subjective space” that
might be called a “playground . . . in which . . . all
held a stake” (121). This flexible, dialogic, playful
EJ_July_2018_B.indd 45
Misty Ferguson
approach recognizes the humanity that every stu-
dent and teacher should be free to enact at school.
As this authentic mutual humanity emerges, so do
new possibilities for learning in conjunction with
the development of individual and collective voices
expressing this freedom from imposed opposition-
ality in the classroom.
Humanizing Practices and Perspectives
through Playful Teaching
Classroom action/activities described as “playful
teaching” in secondary settings have included the
following elements: the creation of fictive worlds
and characters, hands-­on projects, role play, physical
movement, choice and self-­direction, humor, non-
stressed conditions, technology, music, cooperative
learning, change of venues, dramatic play, and games
(Conklin; Patte). Importantly, playful teaching is
more than “JGT”—­Just Good Teaching. According
to Lilia Bartolomé, inviting mutual humanization
into the classroom requires a commitment to engag-
ing with the full scope of each student’s humanity,
a construct that has its center in what it means for
each individual to be alive, to love and be loved,
and to laugh. Bartolomé goes so far as to insist that
teachers “cease to be overly dependent on methods as
technical instruments” and to instead “work toward
reappropriation of endangered dignity and toward
reclaiming our humanity” (190–­91). At the heart of
playful teaching is this pursuit. Beyond best prac-
tices or dog-­and-­pony-­show teaching ideas, playful
teaching implies cultivating a fresh understanding
of the nature of learning, of ourselves, of students’
identities, and of what they need from their educa-
tional environment. Engaging in playful teaching is
an invitation to critical reflection on the schooling
status quo in light of the joy and creativity at the
heart of human learning.
Attempting a prescription for playful prac-
tices with secondary students is far from possible
and certainly not desirable. As play theorists have
repeated time and again, play is what players say
it is; thus, what feels playful for ourselves and for
a given group of students will differ. For some,
playfulness will mean designing activities that are
lighthearted and rigorous such as games, songs, and
innovative applications of technology; for others, it
will mean creating powerfully authentic activities
English Journal 45
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 Harnessing Play for Mutual Humanization in the Classroom
in which students are challenged to play with ideas
to solve problems or complete projects that directly
influence themselves or their environments.
I can only describe what has felt playful in
my own practice. For example, laughter and play
permeated an American drama unit I designed for
my eleventh-­ grade English III students explor-
ing The Crucible. I began by purposely scheduling
the unit around Halloween when witches and the
paranormal are already a topic of increased inter-
est and invited my students into dramatic play
and a sense of fun by creating simple construction
paper “costumes”—­pilgrim hats and bonnets—­for
all students to wear during classroom read-­alouds.
I included a beret, faux spectacles, and a director’s
chair for “Arthur Miller” to read the stage direc-
tions peppering the script. Adding a silly paper hat
or huge circular glasses infused the usually dreaded
dramatic readings with a sense of play; students
took themselves less seriously and engaged more
fully in acting their characters. As they did so, they
also invested more in the story, which meant that
they struggled less with the difficult dialogue and
richly layered themes. They often playfully vied for
favorite roles, calling “dibs” on certain characters as
they left the classroom.
I designed a writing requirement for the unit
that invited students to select among several choices
including creating a graphic novel adaptation of a
section of the play or reproducing the situation as
they imagine it “going down” in their own high
school. These options facilitated the infusion of stu-
dents’ academic work with their own sense of humor
and worldview. A memorable trio of students chan-
neled Tina Fey’s movie Mean Girls, somehow man-
aging to maintain the movie’s comedic tone even as
they explored Salem’s darker themes.
In another attempt at playfulness, I banned
all serious topics from argumentative writing while
maintaining the usual SAT-­style standards for tone
and use of logic. Instead of asking students to de-
bate staid topics rife with opportunities for Internet
plagiarism (e.g., gun control, school uniforms, etc.),
I asked students to tackle questions such as “Which
would be better—­having three arms or three legs?”
or “Which superpower is most effective in prevent-
ing crime—­flight, mind-­reading, or super-­speed?”
If I wanted to include research and use of sources,
I asked something like “Which creature would
46 July 2018
EJ_July_2018_B.indd 46
make a better teacher—­an octopus or a poisonous
tree frog?” I also drew questions from their class
readings: “Who would make a better politician—­
Gatsby or Tom Sawyer?”
Before writing, students participated in “speed
debates” that were modelled after speed dating: stu-
dents faced each other and were given two minutes
each to defend their position on a ridiculous question
like “Who would have more friends at your high
school—­Super Mario or Pokémon?” before moving
to a new partner and a new question. They also held
formal group debates, vigorously defending their
positions. These debates were marked by laughter,
dramatic play, and the total lack of stressed condi-
tions. As I demanded better examples, more com-
pelling logic, academic vocabulary, and impeccable
cohesion, students delivered. They were thoroughly
entertained by the sheer hilarity of constructing an
argument to defend, for example, the power of a
poisonous dart frog to maintain students’ attention
over and above an octopus’. When I framed argu-
mentation units in play, I saw students connect with
one another, putting aside usual divisions. Even my
most serious students found it difficult to resist gig-
gling as their classmates passionately illustrated the
mechanics of running with three legs on the white-
board to a three-­ arms defender questioning the
physics of their claim of increased speed.
Other playful ideas I have seen implemented
include asking students to use social media and
other sites to confirm celebrity gossip and having
them defend and compare the credibility of their
sources, eventually reporting their findings in ex-
pository writing assignments published for a class-
wide glossy magazine. This unit causes students to
critically think about what credibility really means
and where to find it; once they develop a concept
of what it means to set criteria for trustworthiness,
making the jump to broader media literacy is less
of a leap. In another example of playful teaching, I
observed a fellow teacher leading students to con-
nect themes from their classroom novel to popular
songs lyrics (text-­to-­text connection) and to stories
from their own experience (text-­to-­self). They com-
municated their thematic collection multimodally
in a presentation that included their song’s music
video and a short animation telling their own story
created using Web-­based software. The possibilities
for playful teaching are limited only by our ability
7/8/18 3:18 PM

to imagine what might connect to students’ sources
of life, love, and laughter and to believe in our abil-
ity to fulfill curricular mandates even as we explore
ways to generate joy in our secondary classrooms.
Joy as Resistance
The problems caused by inequity in our schools are
deadly serious, as are the challenges that students
are up against in their personal lives and in our so-
ciety. They face personal threats such as cyberbul-
lying and testing alongside existential threats such
as climate change and terrorism. I often ask myself,
Why focus on playing, laughter, and joy when the global
moment feels so dark? What I cannot ignore, though,
is that the presence of darkness makes joy all the
more vital to create and protect.
Peter Gray, in his book Free to Learn, points
to an absence of opportunities for play—­an activity
that predominantly produces an emotional response
of joy and interest—­as part of the dramatic rise of
mental health problems such as depression in young
people in the United States. The preeminent play
scholar Brian Sutton-­Smith posits that “play works
because it is refructifying,” meaning that humans
play to renew their “belief in the worthwhileness of
merely living” (254). Embracing classrooms less as
sites of contested control and more as shared play-
grounds will require radical acts of critical self-­
consciousness in which, at least initially, we focus
less on “what to do on Monday” and more on our
role in building a space where we can be, above all
else, human beings who laugh, live, and love learn-
ing alongside our students. Playful pedagogy, then,
revolts against the dehumanization of education,
certainly from a place of outrage but also to honor
the joy of learning that is a fundamental part of the
human experience. Playful teachers engage in “joy
[as] political work” (Meyer and Whitmore 282).
Misty Ferguson (misty.ferguson@utsa.edu) is a doctoral student in Culture, Literacy, and Language at the University of Texas
at San Antonio. Her first 15 years in the classroom were spent either in the United States teaching English and Spanish or
abroad teaching ESL. She has been a member of NCTE since 2017.
R E A DWR IT E T H IN K CO N N E C T IO N Lisa Storm Fink, RWT
Play is important in all classrooms, even in written responses. In this activity, students answer a prompt, trying to
include three main explanations for the “why” of their answer. The spin here is that students draw a picture that
illustrates their answer. http://bit.ly/2dFK1TY
EJ_July_2018_B.indd 47
Misty Ferguson
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