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Colloquium explores inventing through free play
Christine Harold presented a colloquium on "Motherhood is the Necessity of Invention: Rhetoric, Politics, and Play" on Wednesday, April 8. Harold is an assistant professor in the UW Department of Communication.
Inspired by her recent studies on the consumer culture of associating objects with market brands and her own experience as a mother of three children, Harold advocates using the “play” model in the fields of parenting, academics, and politics.
The model of free play encourages parents to allow their children to stretch their imaginations with open-ended, rather than instruction-based, toys and activities. As a mother herself, Harold became mindful of the types of play objects parents would buy for their children. While popular video games require following rules and instructions, open-ended play objects such as toy blocks are simple and flexible in use, which encourages children to think of creative ways to use them. “Children should be the agent of invention and parents should be the facilitator,” Harold says. “Play should be 10 percent toy, 90 percent child.”
Similarly, Harold says, the free play model can apply to the academic and political world. “There’s the current notion that it is the job of the parent to shape his or her child. The job of the state is to shape its citizens,” Harold points out. She says allowing students and citizens to enter those worlds with the opposite notion of free play can develop and shape their role and support independent critical thinking.
Harold says, “The metaphors or assumptions in politics or communication are of our own making and could be otherwise. We don’t have to think of everything in binary relationships."
- By Christina Nghiem
