Play Informed

Pursuing the Public Good, "How Playful Technologies Can Build More Meaningful Schools" by Teachers College, Columbia University
Teachers College, April 8, 2024

Play is serious. So serious, in fact, that Nathan Holbert, Associate Professor of Communication, Media, and Learning Technology Design at Teachers College, claims “all good learning should involve play to some extent.” In the most recent Pursuing the Public Good podcast, “How Playful Technologies Can Build More Meaningful Schools,” President Thomas Bailey of Teachers College teams with Holbert to pick up where the late British Cultural Anthropologist, Victor Turner, left off. Both Holbert and Bailey believe that, broadly speaking, academia views the concept of play to be good, if unserious and superfluous to the actual point of education. Bailey and Holbert invite listeners to reconsider their posture toward play, and to view it as serious work. They invite educators to be free to imagine the multitudinous ways in which play can inform teaching and learning. Greater still, the host and guest push educators to do that which is hard, but necessary – taking young people seriously, and taking their play seriously.