Celebrating Abundance in Collabaction
Guest Curator: Sparkling Mindz Global School
This a bi-weekly Bachpan Manao Badhte Jao newsletter

There is a place in children’s lives where they experience unbridled joy, a burst of sensory inputs, friendship, and uniquely self-paced learning about the possibilities of their minds and bodies.

Can you imagine this place?

It is the same place where children experience deep hurt, a burst of contradictory inputs, interpersonal conflicts, and self-destructive learning about the limits of their minds and bodies.

Can you still imagine this place?

This place is the playground.

The playground - which is free from adult intervention, supervision, and any systemic regulations - is a significant and unique space in a growing child’s life.

Research has agreed that play not only boosts cognitive development and the building of neural pathways but also builds emotional regulation and resilience.

However, the playground is also a place where bullying is rampant.

As per a study*, the frequency of bullying is higher in the playground (4.5 episodes per hour) than in the classroom (2.5 episodes per hour). The nature of bullying is different too - more aggressive and overt on the playground.

How can we ensure playgrounds are spaces of joyous learning and empowerment for children?

We need to ask the children themselves!

Below are snippets of two of the many emergent discussions with children at the Sparkling Mindz Global Preschool and School which led to the creation of a collection of poems ‘When I play…” as well as a ‘Playground Toolkit’.  

“Rude to Me”

What can we do when someone is doing something I don’t like on the playground?

The Playground Toolkit

A fun, empathetic, practical guide to empowering play

In the school, children, as part of the Changemaker Mission that works with Empowering Communities, took up this ‘Problem’ as a ‘Project’ and went through an iterative design thinking process to solve it.

Step 1: Gather - What’s happening on the playground?

We first needed to collect more data to really understand the problem.

Children observed each other on the playground, wrote and drew their own experiences and also interviewed their peers.  

Step 2: Map - What is really happening on the playground?

From the observations and data, they saw a few chunks of issues on the playground. These ranged from interpersonal issues (bullying, name-calling, blackmailing, saying hurtful things) to equipment related concerns (not clean, broken and unsafe bars/ropes), self-connection related (scared, not trying something because of previous experiences, feeling lonely and not able to make friends, zoning out) or cultural (stereotypes).

Based on the issues, together, we also arrived at a few archetypical personas that are seen at the playground - so that we know ‘who’ needs addressing to solve this problem.

The personas were:

1. Feeling left out or not fitting in with others (others are gossiping or stereotyping this person or they are judging others behaviours)

2. Very scared of others and seeing others as better, more confident, prettier or smarter than self

3. Large group of friends and want to constantly play, play, play

4. Have only one friend who now befriends someone else and is feeling betrayed and lonely

5. People pleasing (doing things to fit in that may not be a kind thing to do or something that they agree with)
   

   
   

Step 3: Empathy - Oh! This makes me feel….

For each of the above personas, children first did a process of empathy. They first acknowledged and resolved their own feelings when faced with a certain persona or while being a certain one.

Then they empathized with the other.

They did this using a non-violent communication based in-house Empathy Tool.

Step 4: Ideate, Agree, and Implement - Let’s Do Something About It!

Finally, they ideated on ways to turn the scenario around, empathetically. Using the power of experiential learning, children used role-plays to ideate and come up with solutions for handling various scenarios on the playground.

The final draft of their work resulted in a ‘Playground Toolkit’, which they want to take to apartments and schools to implement.

If your school is interested in making play empowering for children using a child-led, empathy-based process - please get in touch with us and children from the SM Changemaker Mission CSP will be glad to take up that problem and convert it into a project!

The Bachpan Manao Network at Play

Interested in curating the next edition of the BMBJ newsletter? Write in to us at bachpanmanao@gmail.com.