Consciousness

This paper examines the important role that artistic play could have in teaching, transforming experience and learning. A range of teaching and learning conceptions about creative play are explored from a wider educational perspective to a more specific primary educational perspective. The works argues that artistic play is convincingly an intentional, value orientated and structured learning experience.In productive ways, these factors can be used by the teacher to enhance learning and its relevance.

Indefensible as it may seem, I will argue that those who take a negative view of play are misinformed as to the significant educational value of this activity.Although this paper principally explores play from an artistic podium, the discussion will have implications for other disciplines.

On first view, it is difficult to take the notion of play seriously when the term is shrouded in experiences that one could describe at one level as trivial, amusing or infantile.Playing on the swings or running and jumping around the playground screaming because someone is chasing you, can be seen perhaps as amusing rather than as educationally engaging, as juvenile and mischievous.From this reasoning, play perhaps is at odds with a competitive society, as it seems to contradict the notion of educating, training and teaching.Admittedly, play can be deeply satisfying but, satisfying as play can be, many would still argue that satisfaction alone is not an adequate criterion of what constitutes learning.One can be satisfied with many things, such as the pleasure of eating ice cream, collecting leaves, building a snowman or having a pet rabbit in the garden.

Some playfulness is seen as something we do when we have nothing better to do with our time, as mere fantasy, as a form of amusement; however, intelligence of mind is not something we would necessarily associate with these kinds of play activities.On the face of it, play appears diverse, elusive and awkward to classify and the facts that people play for a variety of reasons and that play is multifarious in kind, confuse further how to determine play in art.One might be unwilling to undertake to learn anything from an experience that seems vagarious.All this gives the impression that one can ignore whatever qualities that play may possess as negligible in subject teaching, if only because it appears to exemplify a lack of discipline, deserving of special consideration. When we think of competencies in education, it is unlikely that we would be thinking of play activity as immediately being one of them.

It might be proposed, though, that frivolity and significant learning are two opposite ends of the concept of play, as well as the possibility of being two aspects of a particular play activity.For in many artistic creative learning situations, the child’s experiences will postulate a whole range of trivial and deep thinking reflections.So much so, that it is arguably the case that in general artistic play activities involve a synthesis of self and world, an interactive social and cultural experience that is basically infused with aesthetic sensibilities.

To claim that play experience must be seen as fundamental to art teaching, is a vexed issue for some educators.Yet, on the face of it, who could deny that art teachers teach children to play imaginatively with pictures, words, music and images.An encounter which if misunderstood by the art teacher may lead to disastrous results that can impoverish the view of what constitutes artistic learning.For to play imaginatively with pictures, words, music and images may ignite a depth of thought, of conscious behaviour and striving of some realisation of meaning important for expressive and cognitive development.I will come back to these issues shortly.At this stage, let us note that play and playfulness have a long history, one that has had major influence in society.AsHans-Georg Gadamer mentions: “We discover forms of play in the most serious kinds of human activity: in ritual, in the administration of justice, in social behaviour in general, where we even speak of role-playing”. (1995, 124). Equally, as Johan Huizinga remarks, the culture of play presupposes human activity: “as animals have not waited for man to teach them their playing” (1980, p1).Certainly, there are parallels between human and animal play, but as we know in human play, children can adapt and extend their thinking and bodily forms and behave as though they were an aeroplane, a key, a monolith, a goldfish or a computer.We can also recognise that all kinds of distinctions and assimilations can be made between playing football and playing a musical instrument, between playing a part in a drama and playing with the medium of paint.

As indicated, part of the attraction of play is that it entices a feeling for enjoyment that can be suitable for art learning purposes, something that can be seen as fundamental to human needs.Seen as delightful, play can be an authoritative experience that can stimulate the basis of genuine insight.In many instances, the passion that play generates, is neither discursive nor aloof from the activity of learning when its purpose is directed by ideas connected to what confirms understanding and self-esteem.Prior learning and success attributable factors in how playfulness is pursued and experienced as rewarding.The satisfaction that we may get from play might be relevant in various ways to one’s work, not least, in how we might ultimately value this experience.One’s delight, of course, is often down to the development of learning dispositions.When children say, “let’s play house”, such experience is intentional, often demanding and seriously engaging, creating scenarios that can introduce new objects of attention and subsequent changes in thought and behaviour.The joyful experience gained from playing house, may carry forward social, emotional, virtuous and intellectual projections and challenges.Those are situations where the qualities of love, sharing, caring, giving, protecting and respect may all be exhibited.In a sense, the dramatisation of play is capable of displaying any number of social, aesthetic and ethically strong characteristics as noticeable in children’s play as in the work of Shakespeare.Evidence of convention, tradition, style and idiom can be found on different occasions of play activity.

If one’s actions are choiceworthy and these choiceworthy actions involve pleasure, then, as Aristotle at one point implies (1985, 266), pleasure is of great significance to ethics.Although more involved than can be stated here, Aristotle seems to be suggesting that pleasure can harmonise with the facts and complete an activity (1985, 276-9).The notion being that pleasure can add something to certain knowledgeable claims.This is not to say that pleasure is knowledge but rather that in completing an activity it may fulfil a desire, be pertinent, justified and / or be the possible impetus that motivates further growth in learning.We should not assume necessarily, then, that because children take pleasure in play this pleasure is not without its merits.Aristotle further says that pleasure is of different kinds: intellect, sound, movement, emotion, perception, smell and touch.Such pleasures are not only different in kind but are experienced differently depending on the particular content and the unfolding context of events, the mood of the individual, their personality and motives.

Let us emphasise that when children play house it is regularly the case that some of the play is structured, purposive and collaborative.Where we find these qualities in play, the actions of play will be deliberately staged and pose considerable problems for the participants in organising, constructing and transforming their actions.As claimed, it might even be perceived that a shared and compassionate experience, where the child openly wants others to partake in the activities of the house in collaborative ways, might signal that such a child is demonstrating qualities of being virtuous and noble.Furthermore, this can be an experience so engrossing that the child can be practising imagery, problem solving, inventiveness, language and social skills within the play activity.As Roni Tower and Jerome Singer mention, the child “may be developing its abilities to maintain attention, distinguish between internally-and-externally-generated information, organise the information, rehearse and retain it, reflect on it, correct faulty perceptions and cognitions, elaborate on them, make plans and integrate and retrieve experience” (1980, 30).It may be a mistake not to realise that play expounds the virtues of an inquisitive mind, skills that force mental “stretching” useful to many areas of learning.The actions of play whether in music, drama, painting, or dance seem often invigorating, refreshing, stirring one’s passions, and awakening imaginatively one’s mental and / or physical awareness.

A certain unease about what constitutes learning, however, may occur when one insists on complete conformity with a set of objectives, an activity which can rob play of its individuality and as we will see later in this paper, of stating precious intimate feelings and thoughts which can engage one emotionally.To attempt to control learning and reduce it to a disembodied experience will ultimately inhibit the educational creative process.For children are partly emotional beings who are guided to some extent in their learning by their feelings; as Stocker remarks: “Mathematics is not emotional.But at least many people are better at doing it by being emotionally engaged by it” (1996, 176).Thus, in artistic endeavours, one usually attempts to maximise what moves and touches our experience, one considers its affectivity to the point that one persists in this adventure because it enriches learning.

The determinate sense in which children make relevant to themselves their experiences in play, is a significant characteristic of art practice, ensuring for many a peculiar kind of learning.In most artistic play activities, the play is often a complex phenomenon that concatenates and overlays different kinds of play; collaborative, idiosyncratic, competitive, planned and managed.Similarly, it is not unusual for a child to be a stage manager, a theatre designer, a producer, a director and an actor in his or her play activity.In addition, when we think of play in the arts it is important to realise that this experience is often sustained through different kinds and degrees of cognitive, aesthetic, emotional, social and moral intentions.We must think of play in artistic terms as being constituted imaginatively by these powers. A further connecting point is that there are many common procedures of construction evident in various play activities in such areas as music, dance and drama.

A reoccurring essential feature of play its spiel, an experience which combines both surprise and freshness, a sense of wonder and flexible response.One feature of this spiel, from a Kantian position is“free play”, a notion that seeks out in satisfaction an imaginative feeling specific to its activity (1992).Its spiel being a force which can both torment and disturb even the most experienced, since it has the capacityinvolving the free movement of mind.In this context, play has a multiplicity of senses and applications, but this is not a flaw as the combination of spiel and free play permits new and elaborate meanings to be constructed.Kant thoughts were that the free movement of mind exerts an activity of its own as the indispensable condition guiding its artistic construction, an experience that intensifies both the cognitive and sensuous side of human activity.Free play can operate without the reliance upon defined distinctions since it is not dependent only on total rational thoughts.It represents an experience that can allow the possibility to see things differently, which a more predetermined way of proceeding would not permit or tolerate.From this it emerges that certain rule procedures can obstruct the passage to some deeper perceptions.Partly because play is an unconditioned experience, an enormous amount of questions that would otherwise not have been addressedcan be contemplated.This is because the spiel of play can open up what is at stake or what is an issue by seriously entertaining diverse thoughts of mind and feeling, in an imaginative encounter.This in turn might lead us to think that the particular way this factor is woven into the play activity can give the performance or object we are working on, its significant form.In play, body and mind interact.

If children are to show that they understand play they must first recognise a seriousness of purpose about play (Gadamer, 1993, 102). This seriousness of purpose comes about when the children show endearingly that they are interested in revealing the expressive experiences of the selected play activity itself. Such seriousness involves the virtue of honesty and attentiveness to what one is doing.One cannot play adequately at anything unless honesty and attentiveness is present. The child can only play with serious possibilities (Gadamer, 1993, 106) in play, because there is always a task that must be purposely shaped.However, this play experience is constantly at risk and endangered, for its character enjoys a freedom that is susceptible to error.If too much freedom is granted, play looses its sense, its ability to perform.Fortunately, the criterion of concerned play demands a disciplined approach, one that propels an intensity of reason, feeling and purpose beyond the confines of mere sensation, pretence and desultoriness.New revelations are what play experience exerts when the child discriminates imaginatively.Of course, the down side is that for some, when there is a lack of logical reasoning, there are considerable challenges in artistic play in the way it organises and refines its enjoyment and intellectual interest.Play experience is often, however, not reducible to reason alone, something that can confound critical analysis, for in the art of play there are experiences that can be self-feeling.The child may respond to the marks that they make on a sheet of paper or to the songs they sing, using intuitive awareness.

The activity of free play as one aspect of playfulness can be a difficult task to achieve when set against those standard stock judgements which avoid any personal commitment.It often takes courage, apart from anything else, to play with uncertainties, to be guided by one’s own feelings and ideas.Granted the autonomous nature of free play can cause conflicts that are potentially worrisome if taken to extremes.But, to rebuff the value of independent thought, the child’s individual effort and the emotional life as experienced in play, would pose considerable problems for a democratic educational system.Moreover, to disregard inner reflection and independence of mind so much in abundance in artistic work, would be to reduce significantly the contribution that art works make to human understanding.

The distinction that Kant makes in The Critique of Judgement, is that feeling takes the lead in the play experience and becomes the determining ground of artistic judgement.If experience is not "always obliged to look to with the eye of reason into what we observe", (Kant, 1991, 62), one can assume that in play there can be unconditioned aspects which do not necessarily have to be limited or constrained by some logical rule.Indeed, no one exact proportional element calls forth for each child the same play experience in artistic involvement.Individual experiences can differentiate discrepancies of meaning and configuration, factors that do influence the making or performance of the play activity.However, one might reasonably insist that predictability in education and not what the mind entertains, is demanded.Yet, predictability can mask bad teaching and produce rigid codes of practice that can ignore individual aspirations and with it the exaltation and acquisition of learning.A calculating approach by the teacher can become too didactic or comforting, forcing the child to rest satisfied on specified attainment targets.

In artistic play a bewildering array of possibilities often emerges that exerts a fascination in playing with these possibilities, producing their own rewards when purposively driven.The child is engrossed by this experience because there is a feeling of noteworthiness and accomplishment that one becomes aware of when one sees through doing what these possibilities can transform or open up.Particular gestures, a smile, the movement of bodily rhythms, or the sound of raindrops are elements that can awaken and heighten the child’s play experience.Aroused by emotion, thought or sensory encounters, all manner of creation may be formed and this is something that I will explore further in a moment.

It does not follow that guided by the sphere of play the child is necessarily ignoring learning issues as it may be counter argued that in play activity one is making something into a self, constructing a mind.For example, John Dewey surmises: “play has an end in the sense of a directing idea which gives point to the successive acts.Persons who play are not just doing something (pure physical movement); they are trying to do or effect something, an attitude that involves anticipatory forecasts, which stimulate their present response” (1944, 203).This implies that play activity is a goal constructive power.

Most of what follows is an attempt to construe how relationships between play and learning can operate in artistic education.In the world of art there is a natural coexistence between play and learning, one which obliges us to harmonise these concerns in a mutual accord to raise a more fulfilled sense of understanding.In fact, one might question the degree to which any depth of learning in art is free of play experience.What I will attempt to explain, is that play experience in artistic education is often used as a strategy which frees up perceptual difficulties, advances technicality, generates awareness and spearheads creative thinking.

Arthur Danto statement “ For the child to be imagining or pretending that a stick is a horse, he has to know something about the horse, and the limits of his knowledge are the limits of play” (1994, 128), implies that the involvement of play is vital to learning.Danto's failure to discuss what he means exactly by play may be overshadowed by the fact that, in various ways, for the stick to be a horse for the child, presupposes the involvement of metaphor.Yet in this instance, part of the significance of the metaphor rests on its play form: a complex interplay and coordination of words, images, sounds and movement.In recognising the metaphor all kinds of changes, densities and expansions of experience can occur when children are encouraged perceptively to form their own responses.One might think that the performance requires the child to understand how a stick can be used to represent a horse.According to Wittgenstein, knowing that the stick can be used in this way, involves the technique of knowing what corresponds to the image and thought of a horse.A child will not be able to use a stick as a horse unless they can interpret it "not as a property of an object, but as an internal relation between it and other objects" (1989, 212e).In accepting this premise, it is still the case that the child must learn to play with metaphor and discover what is and what is not there to be used, what Donald Schön (1987) calls knowledge in action.Often, for the stick as a horse to be convincing artistically, successive passionate interpretations involving a way of seeing that is personally constructed will be needed.Everything wondrous about the stick as a horse is often dependent not so much on the metaphor itself, but how one is capable of bringing this experience to life.

The metaphor is not readily perceivable unless it is enriched by explicit qualities, such as, rhythm, movement and shape.Continually exploring qualities expressive of a horse and its experience requires a broader awareness of the metaphor's use and elaborate meaning.Cultural understanding is necessary, but there is no denying that the stick as a horse has many possible connotations symbolising values not evident in a first viewing of this form.A teacher is able to assist the awareness of such an object, by subjecting children to different kinds of relevant representations and experiences that can provoke a wider understanding of the metaphor.Many thoughts in artistic terms are dependent upon various diverse sensuous qualities perceived in colour, movement, space and light that can be used to develop aspects of the metaphor.Getting, for example, the children to tear-up and rearrange their painting compositions several times can excite other intimate thoughts and qualities, enabling them to relocate the metaphor differently.This is a process that can be refreshing to the mind and express a complexity of feeling which the words 'stick as a horse' do not begin to reveal.

Different play experiences can produce different tonal ways of expressing the metaphor.When various relationships of form are combined, multiple play forms can be read simultaneously, so that there may be more than one angle to the metaphor in the art work expressed.The worry is that the teacher can potentially neglect and construe as irrelevant this kind of learning experience when there is a definite single outcome to be achieved.Our knowledge of the stick as a horse increases artistically when one realises that there can be many felt experiences colouring the meaning of this metaphor beyond its literal sense.Factors such as movement, scale and position do help to change the image of the metaphor and signify perceptually how to project a certain view that will make visible more thoughts about the object. Furthermore, without allowing pupils, through their own order of values, to refine and edit by direct translation and reflection the artistic work, the teacher will be cutting off a primary source of creative energy and mode of satisfaction pertinent to learning.Children have desires and insights that they want to pursue and reveal.

Confronted with the thought of letting go, of removing constraints, of working with vague or distorting images with no guarantee of certainty, the teacher may feel insecure.Pressure to produce results can force the teacher to abandon any desire to work in a freer fashion. The worry is that the teacher’s sovereignty in determining the full nature of the experience may be called into question by the children, when the artistic work advances only from the teacher’s point of view.When the child is given the freedom to churn ideas around, it is not possible to predetermine how things are going to turn out.In this process when the teacher is not perpetually defining the nature of the representation, children can make a worthwhile contribution both to the teacher's and their own self-understanding.Children are able to do this when they are able to impose their own desires and rational thinking upon the work.In other words, there is room for self-interest and personality to exercise their own forms of judgement upon the artistic work that are not invidious to understanding.The learning experience, then, does not blow constantly from the teacher to the child when the pupil's own experience becomes the guiding principle for the production of the artistic work.This is a process that can seem strange and out of step with main-stream educational requirements.

The skill and perseverance necessary to move between 'language games', images and making can be considerable and pose in themselves formidable obstacles.To slice open, to displace and to play with faint or provocative relations may come across as though one is breaking the 'rules'.In play, endless variations can be imagined.This possibility, however, can allow thoughts that are more fruitful so that something 'new' can be made.Whatever the concepts that influence the particular form of play in the artistic work, the devices that one uses in play, such as line or movement, can serve a plurality of personal responses that can confound the pigeon holing of any experience.Moreover, a teacher can rightly argue that creating a highly polished look to the art work can be more detrimental and less promising, than a clumsy effort which attempts to seriously play with the configuration of artistic experience.

This must not mislead us into thinking that there are no serious educational problems with play experience, for it may be correctly stated that play can be quite capricious.It is an obvious fact that children left to their own devices, without any guidance or supervision, are unlikely to progress effectively in their artistic work.There is the real possibility that when children are left to get on with things for themselves, the play activity may amount to no more than letting off steam.Even so play stirs and perambulates the mind and with it a view of reality.Such reality may of course be questionable.However, without an understanding of how a child is exploring an object, the teacher when faced by certain problems in the child’s art work may find it impossible to assist a pupil to overcome his or her current experience.

Let us illustrate how play experience can operate to enhance learning.One might surmise initially that confusion about play may arise when learning to play a musical instrument.A factor in mastering an instrument is the mechanical drill of playing which in itself is not at all playful.In contrast, another reading of this situation would suppose that play activity stimulates and absorbs hearing through practice.Consequently, the diversity of the different notes played sets up changes, stimulating recognition and expediency.With the support of the teacher, through this rotating play experience, further note differences are recognised that combine eventually to summon what the musical sound should express.The process of artistic transformation, therefore, often requires play experience, as the play experience brings to the surface the possible realisation of artistic sense, sustaining as it does feelings about the object.The ability to turn things around enlarges one’s capacity to examine objects.Artistically, the phenomenal effect of the work may only be established in the intensity of playing, the more it goes on it passes through experiences until it reaches a state of eventual critical selectivity.Recognising what form an object should take, will only show itself in art through commitment and labour.

A heated question is, how far does the play experience itself influence the art form and vice versa?It figures that if the mode of play is deemed as relevant to a subject’s understanding then that mode of play must be revealing some truth necessary for artistic progression.Also, it would follow that a teacher unaware of why play receptivity and its configurations have important consequences for artistic practice must be teaching at a naive level.On this account, the teacher would fail to recognise the requirements in art for creative independent thoughts, which become qualified by the manifestation of play experience.Strikingly, the artistic standards in play activity are educationally important because this experience ultimately is responsible for individual excellence.I will proceed to give an account of how the presence of play in art education can be successfully developed.

It is often expected of pupils in art education to explore their understanding of the world around them.The recording of this world usually starts as vague and indeterminate.Here, the painting vision is secured only by being attracted to those conditions, which at some stage in play are being purposively driven.As such, the play experience supports the development of meaningful creative thought when fused to a learning process underscored by an attentive outlook.To negotiate and arrive at any insight into the art work, the child will have to work out and make various ongoing adjustments that integrate the visual properties of the painting in a unified manner.Uniformity, of course, relates to the traditions of practice that are individually shaped by the demands of the art work and its history.

In its play form, the use of line can entice children to consider countless applications in its projection.The teacher is aware that even playing with the tempo of personal experiences through changes in the brushwork alone, can shift entrenched views, alluring other distinctions and images.For this reason, an exhaustive array of mark-making lines can be represented and in the process provoke thoughtful questions for the child to consider.The playing itself brings to the surface many questions that penetrate the mind of those who enter its world.Consequently, the teacher must be concerned with the series of played configurations in the art work as this experience establishes how the painting is being handled.A teacher can point out to a child where things are going wrong in the art work, but there are imperceptible factors, which the work itself can hide.If confidence is to grow, particular playful experiences are required to build impressions that become increasingly perceptive.It is only when the child knows how to play with colour, line, image, movement, sound and texture noting their differences that the work is capable of being transformed.I have indicated that there must be a tripartite connection between the child’s understanding, the particular art form itself and the teacher’s understanding to manifest a higher order of play in the work.Together, these factors superimpose upon the particular aesthetic of the art work.In this interdependency the impulse to rely on one's own imagination, to draw upon principles that relate to the art form, to listen and respond to the teacher’s criticism, are not usually straightforward matters when taken together.For in criss-crossing conceptual barriers and different senses of understanding, the imaginative play in the art work becomes dependent on cognitive-feeling powers interacting simultaneously, cooperatively and dynamically.To feel the ‘life’ of the art work means engaging in this experience.

If the argument holds that play experience is responsible for the creation of original ideas in an art work, does it follow that the teacher has to emphasise this point?If, conversely, the teacher decides not to discuss the sphere of play in the art work, what consequences follow?In dealing firstly with the second question, if the sphere of play is removed from an art exercise the child will be deterred from generating individual thoughts and experiences about the art form he or she is creating.Consequently, removing any personal comprehension that can border on profound truths about the art work would inevitably contradict an essential principle about artistic practice.That is to say that independent thought and autonomy serve to further artistic ends.In play, the play experience can release secrets that have remained concealed about the art form and more importantly perhaps, about ourselves.Play experience, then, heightens the awareness of the art form, and, in addition, reveals valuable information about the kind of person one is.The child cannot begin to tap these treasures unless he or she is urged to do so on a personal level.An entire world of experience would remain closed to the child, if he or she becomes solely dependent on other peoples' knowledge and requirements.It will equally turn out to be the case that art without play will lead to a form of reductionism in artistic thinking that can decontextualise experience.

In dealing with the first question, children delight in play and such play in itself may appear puerile.What then is the teacher to do about this?As argued, the realm of play must relate to subject practice which entails that the child’s playfulness must accord with the discipline of the subject.The freedom that the child has is one that is limited by the particular art form and his or her social-cultural experiences.To some degree, the child is duty bound by the principles of the art form.So it would seem that there has to be a deliberate treatment and understanding of the art form if the child’s play is to be significant.The teacher will have to show to a child how to make intelligible use of play stimulation in relation to the art form.We must now explore this crucial issue.

How, then, in a classroom situation is the painting play experience to be developed?There are numerous ways in which this can be done but I will cite here only one approach.Let us take a common example of school children going on an outing to the local zoo in their area.Back at school, in an art session, the children are asked to create a painting of their experiences at the zoo, using card, cotton wool, scissors, glue and poster paint.To begin with, it is worth repeating that if the activity of play experience is to excel, all children must develop a kinship with what is being played.Kinship with the art form brings an affinity essential to self-realisation.Guided by imaginative powers of play the children are taught to respond to their experience striving for accurate qualities of expression.The teacher might ask the class to consider from their zoo experiences how the elephant was walking, the colour and texture of its skin, the sounds it was making, how it seemed to move and whether the children found the elephant sad, whimsical and / or magical. The teacher is not imposing some external standard, nor determining the experiences for them, but wants the students to exercise their own imaginative powers when they play with thoughts and materials.Part of the teacher’s role in such an exercise would be to encourage selectivity, control and reflection.It will take some time for this to happen for the child will have to explore their feelings, impressions and conversations they had from the zoo.To understand their experiences in visual ways, the children will have to play first with this content and manipulate its imagery so that it reflects their own engagement in a sharper communicative fashion.In so doing the children must learn to respond to the work as it is developing.One problem here relates to the materials themselves, which will cause difficulties in execution, they are by no means easy to work with in order to get across one’s personal experience.The power to make, one might well argue, is essential to understanding and hence to education, as it involves the ability to know.One comprehends oneself in the making process as one learns to construct one’s thoughts and what they express.

It is in the nature of the child’s impressions that the play activity takes a grip and is correspondingly stimulated.Initially, much of the child’s experience may be fragmented, layered with several images and perhaps even indistinguishable.There is no disguising that until attention is paid to individual experiences, what the child may feel relates to sensations only.To explore this experience the child will have to play with different modes of perceiving and understanding his or her image-making, estimating its felt qualities.Children are unlikely to do this properly for themselves without constant feedback from the teacher.Playing over events, forming and reforming, matching and rematching, association and reassociation are part of the practice of getting to know one’s experience and of enlarging it.When the child drags the pencil, he or she is being stimulated by this sense-perception experience, which in turn is influenced by the use of the sense-perception experience; the stimulation and use feed off each other.

Some of the images that the child draws are in profile, others are in perspective and others seem flat.Gentle light brushstrokes and a yellow green transparent tinge fill the background of these images.These features as aspects of the work itself, can become sensitive to how one justifies the relevance of the art work.But as aspects they may be experienced imaginatively and in relation to a production that is responding to the flow and beat of its play.Aroused and fascinated by what this process seems able to produce, the children’s art work reaches a level which sharpens their own personal understanding as they attempt to exhibit their feelings. Working across different areas of mind, as the child must do to make a success of his or her painting, presupposes the providence of play.The child’s approach must demonstrate curiosity with what is being played with, for it is easily forgotten that the play experience provides the essential substance needed for continuing investigation and enjoyment.The teacher becomes the catalyst and mentor of this experience.

Knowing that play experience has the capacity to unlock stubborn moments of thought, the teacher can use the catalytic nature of play experience as a device to regenerate and brighten interest in discovery.Subsequently, what the teacher discusses with each individual child in connection with how to take his or her own work forward may be the significant factor that determines for the pupil how to interplay with colours, shapes, texture, sounds, tempo and ideas.What the child can learn from play experience is the search for and discovery of feeling and thought.It is the playing that electrifies the representation, charging in the process the possibility of sensuous delineation and discourse.

The stand taken by this paper has been that as an experience, play can, through teacher guidance, awaken a more sustained sense of self in action and confirm a depth of mind that enables articulate thoughts to enter.What I have tried to emphasise is that play experience can produce acute realisations of some magnitude for artistic educational development and experience-based learning.It would seem that there is constant self-discovery in serious play of sufficient diligence, sensibility and daring.Thus, an attempt has been made to show that play and learning become intertwined in artistic education as a mutual accord.It is neither discursive nor arbitrary when such art work through its play activity reflects something about life that seems worth expressing.Furthermore, it has been my argument that creative play is of some consequence to personal well-being and educational fulfilment.There is a need, therefore, for a more radical rethink of the lessons that can be learnt from play.

Correspondence: Dr. Howard Cannatella, School of Art and Design, Coventry University, Priory Street, Coventry CV1 5FB.

Danto, A., 1994, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

Gadamer, G., 1989, Truth and Method, (trans.) Weinsheimer, J. & Marshall, D., London:Sheed and Ward.

Gadamer, G., 1995, The Relevance of the Beautiful and other essays, (ed.) Bernasconi, R., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kant, I., 1992,The Critique of Judgement, (trans.) Meredith, J.C., Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Schön, D., 1987, Educating the Reflective Practitioner, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

Stocker, M., 1998,How Emotions Reveal Value and Help Cure the Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories, in (ed) Crisp, R. How Should One Live? Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Singer, J & Tower, R., 1980, Imagination, Interest and Joy, in (ed) McGhee, P & Chapman, A. Early Childhood in Children’s Humour, Chichester: John Wiley & Sons

Wittgenstein, L., 1989, Philosophical Investigations, (trans) G.E. Anscombe, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.