The Value of the Humanities

PlayBuild is an after-school program located in New Orleans which repurposes vacant lots around central city to engage kids with the architectural history and design of public spaces with outdoor play with imagination playground and design challenges. Do these activities have unique cognitive learning opportunities that warrant investment, and if so what curriculum decisions contribute to positive learning outcomes and what kinds of methodology are feasible to measure such a cognitive development among children? A literature review on play and children’s cognitive development has been done to explore these three questions.

Before detailing particular research findings, below is a brief summary of this literature review. Research suggests that role play, joint action, and physically modeling objects, spaces, or systems can develop perspective-taking and systems literacy (Harris, Vygotsky, Schwartz et al., Sebanz et al., 2006). Research comparing invention-based curriculum with teaching-practice curriculums show evidence of perspective change (e.g., seeing deep structural relationships vs. surface feature covariation) and evidence that perception of deep structure correlates with increases in understanding and transfer.

Invention-based curriculums have the potential to engage participants in fantasy and role play as well as scale to forms of meaningful sociocultural participation in the community. Design and construction of diagrams and models of homes, cities, spaces, or city systems grounded in the community and history of New Orleans is worth an investment because it affords opportunities to develop perspective-taking, systems reasoning, metacognition, and mathematical and spatial thinking skills through meaningful participation in local community culture.