“But your classes aren’t real classes, right?” Rayaan responded after I told the children that I would write a small report about their progress. I had been teaching theatre at the school for a few years now and we were near the end of their theatre curriculum. I asked the group what they thought a real class meant. “Something where you learn stuff, about history or math or spelling,” Rayaan replied. His reaction did not surprise me, but I could not resist asking carefully: “So you don’t learn anything during these classes?” The children thought about it and it was Rayaan who raised his voice again. “We do learn stuff. But it is different, you know, it’s more like playing.” The others nodded their heads and the room was quiet for a while. Then Romaissa burst out: “All right, can we start now?”

This research project explores what a pedagogy of play could mean for sustainable (art) education at primary schools, with as the main question: How can we design and practice art education in which children grow, learn and emancipate themselves through play? The process of this research is shaped by parallel trajectories of a literature study, auto-ethnographic study, and experiments executed in the context of my practice as a theatre teacher working at a primary school. To understand and define the concept of play in relation to learning, I refer to the theories and work of Francis Alÿs, Gert Biesta, Pascal Gielen, Johan Huizinga, Rob Martens, Aziza Mayo and Laura van Dolron. The theoretical framework became the foundation for sharpening my pedagogical ideals and exploring a pedagogy of play in art education.

To describe this pedagogy, I use the notion ‘play as also-learning’, which defines play as an open-ended process that invites children to explore and learn by calling upon their natural behaviour and curiosity. I define play as ‘also-learning’ because I want to argue in favour of approaching play as learning and to invite educators to explore the possibilities and value of play in education. The project took place at the Park16hoven primary school and was carried out as action research in collaboration with a music teacher, my colleague Rosanne. We organised a curriculum focussing on key elements such as calling upon the children’s imagination, encouraging autonomy and agency, and the development of artistic behaviour. The days were shaped by an interdisciplinary program and we used methods and exercises based on dialogic communication, embodied- and Social-Emotional Learning, and collective meaning-making.