The chapter I chose to teach about from Rethinking Popular Culture and Media is titled "Why We Banned Legos: exploring power, ownership, and equity in the classroom". This chapter stood out to me when I was looking through the table of contents because of the seemingly bizarre premise. Why would a teacher ban legos in a classroom? After reading the chapter, I was struck by the connection between a children's toy and seemingly innocent game and the very real issues of the balance of power, equity, and private ownership.
The chapter centers around a school-age childcare program in Seattle. There are about 25 children in this program that are ages 6-9. The whole issue arose with the children building "Legotown", a collaborative lego world the children built with the large supply of legos in the classroom. The children built their own houses and buildings and the issues of sharing and fairness slowly started to take shape. About 8 children were involved in building Legotown and as other kids saw what they were building, they started to exclude other kids from playing. A power dynamic began to take shape, where some kids were in charge of Legotown and could choose to let others play and control which legos they were allowed to build with. When Legotown was accidentally destroyed by other children that were in the space outside of the childcare programs hours, the teachers decided to facilitate a conversation about the power dynamic that was forming and the issues of equity and ownership. What stood out to me was the different ideologies that started to take shape in the children. Some raised issues about why some houses were allowed to be bigger than others and how this was unfair. Some children felt as if they had a right to be in charge and "give" other children legos to build with, as if they had ownership over extra pieces. This prompted the teachers to have a conversation with the kids about what power is and why some of them had it and others didn't in this imaginative community.
The teachers used this issue of Legotown as a way to teach the children about structures of power and fairness. They did another experiment where they asked all the children to pick ten legos and then said that different pieces had point values based on the colors and told them to trade legos to gain points. Some of the kids had more points simply out of sheer luck because they picked legos before knowing the rest of the rules of the game. Then, the teachers asked the winners to establish new rules for the next round of the game. What struck me about this was the fairness of the rules the kids came up with. One kid said that you had to trade at least one piece so you couldn't win just by sticking with what you started with. Another kid said that if you had more than one green piece (highest point value), you had to trade one of them. The natural tendency of the children in these scenarios was to attempt to create fair rules. The teachers then led a conversation about new rules for legotown to promote fairness and sharing. The whole chapter and experiment by these teachers centers round this idea that children can be taught about complex social issues, like equity and power dynamics, through play. The original article from Rethinking Schools can be found here.
Hi Hannah, I loved your summary of this article. I also was curious about the content once I read the title. As a teacher who has used legos in the classroom, I was all too familiar with the dynamic that the author described. I loved the idea of restructuring the activity to promote fair play.
ReplyDeleteCoincidentally, I read the same article! I was equally fascinated wondering how Legos could be bad, but, as you point out, it was horrifying to see the power dynamics that students created in their make-believe society. However, it is inspiring, as you go on to write, that some of the students really tried to make new rules that would be fair to everyone, even in the experimental situations that the teachers fabricated where some students were fortunate enough to be lucky. I think that there are tons of teachable moments within these activities and I am very interested in the science of human behavior that exists behind the scenes from a sociological point of view.
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