Play as a Creative Medium That Promotes Cognitive Development
This scene from “Bridge to Terabithia,” shows how make-believe play stimulates creativity and evolves into a spectacular realm of fantasy and role playing.
Buena Vista Pictures/Everett Collection
The concept of play as a creative medium has been expressed by both classical and modern play theorists. Foremost among these modern theorists are Russian psychologist, Lev Vygotsky, American interpreters of Vygotskian thought Elena Bodrova and Deborah Leong, and American early childhood educator, Vivian Gussin Paley (1929– ). Dramatic, or makebelieve play has been observed by each of these as powerful not only for expanding creativity, but cognitive development as well.
Vygotsky described makebelieve play as the creation of imaginary situations, in which
players take on and act out roles, using symbolic representation to transform the function of objects (Vygotsky, 1978). He suggested that such play was a natural pathway to learning (Bordrova & Leong, 2003). The intellectual freedom created by make-believe play opens boundless opportunities for language and thinking that are no longer restricted by the physical world. When pretending, children can be other people or objects and look at situations from inside the make-believe roles being portrayed. Their powerful imaginations are demonstrated by the multitude of fantasy scenarios that evolve as they play.