When thinking about play, I tried to keep telling myself to stop defining it in a traditional way (doing something for the sole sake of having a good time), but instead defining it as a way of experiencing something and evaluating that experience as it pertained to my life.
On these terms, I think play is not only an acceptable way to teach, but also one of the best. Rodriquez cites Jorn, "... learning does not consist in the transmission of skills from teachers to students, but in the active design and execution of experimental actions by the learners themselves, without any utilitarian purposes."
It reminds of that saying when you see someone about to do something stupid (say, touch a hot burning), and you're about to stop them but someone say, "Don't, they'll never learn."
Learning from experience, from failure and curiosity, these things are much more engaging than a classic "learn from what I'm telling you" approach. Engagement and interactivity encourages individual expression and lessons.
To say that there is a structure, and that one must mold to fit it, seems to infer that there are those that live outside that structure. What does that mean for them? That they haven't learned properly? People have their own boundaries to cross, boundaries that challenge them and that they learn from and surpass via experience.
Therefore, I definitely buy into Rodriguez/Huzinga's promotion of learning through play.
The learning through play aspect of the reading is something that I struggled with. I kept reading that play and education could not mesh, or at least that is how I interpreted it. I agree with you when you say that engagement and interactivity encourages individual expression and lessons so it is strange to me that there has to be a group of people that are living outside the structural boundaries. The boundaries in my opinion could be so- excuse my terminology- loosey goosey. Everyone should have been able to fit into some sort of structure at some point in their lives, I find it hard to believe that there are people out there who have never been within the structure. I am not a huge supporter of fitting into something but play is a structure that I don't think many of us could escape.
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