By Coco Delaporte, Teacher
Play Summit, a follow-up to last year’s Play First Summit online conference, was held June 20–25. At the conference, alongside a world-wide audience, 17 Bing teachers attended and viewed 26 national and international “childhood champions” engaged in conversation with education consultant Tom “Teacher Tom” Hobson, organizer of the online event. In a year of redefinition for education, the conversations shed light on how educators, parents and communities can work together to face the challenges of learning online and reopening schools, advocating for learning through play and fostering successful experiences for children.
Kisha Reid is founder and head of school at Maryland-based Discovery Early Learning and a board member of Defending the Early Years, a non-profit organization advocating early childhood education for all children. She is powered by her passion to create indoor and outdoor classroom environments that allow children to thrive naturally and build confidence. Places of childhood, as she fondly calls schools, value each individual’s voice and ideas and set the stage for a child to develop and feel accepted. She advocates for a term she used, authentic childhood, as, “what the child naturally needs and does when no one’s telling them what they need and what to do.” Reid stressed the importance of honoring children who have different interests and empowering them to be self-directed with the agency to choose, which aligns with Bing’s founding principles of freedom of movement and choice.
Similarly, award-winning musician Raffi Cavoukian, who goes by his mononym Raffi, advocated for efforts to address the universal needs of children. He told conference attendees that his vision at the Raffi Foundation for Child Honouring is a social change revolution with the child at its heart. Its principles encompass restoring natural and human communities and prioritizing the needs of their youngest members. Raffi highlighted that it is the community’s responsibility to nourish a child’s love for life and to honor and respect the child as a whole person. This, he believes, can be achieved through dialogue, the celebration of diversity and universal love for children.
Two speakers who contemplated the post-COVID-19 situation in schools and at home were John Yannoudis and Laura Markham. Yannoudis is a returning guest speaker and the founder of urban play-based school Dorothy Snot Preschool and Kindergarten, in Athens, Greece. Yannoudis said children are naturally capable of adapting to the world and embracing what is seemingly new. He suggested that the current preschool child does not recall a world before COVID and thus, has already adapted to the changes implemented in schools and daily life. At his school in Greece, much as at Bing, families and caregivers are temporarily restricted from entering the classroom and daily temperature checks are enforced. As a result of the protocols, Yannoudis said children come to school healthier, and fewer children and teachers are getting sick. Noting the vast amount of information that the current preschooler is exposed to on a daily basis, Yannoudis recommended working with the child to think more critically when presented with information from media outlets.
Markham, a clinical psychologist known as the guru of peaceful parenting, described the pandemic as a year of uncertainty that propelled parents into “a crash course of big emotions” resulting from the demands of caregiving and balancing work and home life. She urged parents and teachers alike to remember to regulate their own emotions before “showing up” for the child, adding that self- and co-regulation are pathways to fostering connections that fuel the influence a parent has on a child. Building a trusting and secure relationship allows the adult to respond to the needs of the child in trying and peaceful times, she said.
Event organizer Hobson chronicled the previous year as one of breaking apart and coming together, honoring different perspectives. The summit enforced the pressing need to continue to advocate for a child’s right to be part of community building and to respect and honor childhood experiences. Childhood champions enforce the idea of letting children take agency of their daily encounters. Play affords children the space to process experiences and build necessary connections vital for future experiences.