A Moral Case for Play

Judd Kruger Levingston, who received rabbinical ordination from The Jewish Theological Seminary and his doctorate from The William Davidson Graduate School of Jewish Education, literally wrote the book on the role of play in Jewish education. Now director of Jewish studies at Jack M. Barrack Hebrew Academy outside Philadelphia, Levingston researched his book, A Moral Case for Play in K–12 Schools, with support from the Sylvia and Moshe Ettenberg Research Grant from the Network for Research in Jewish Education. Sylvia Ettenberg devoted her career to Jewish education within the Conservative Movement and was a fixture in educational leadership at JTS for decades. For six years Levingston ran the Rebecca and Israel Ivry Prozdor High School at JTS, which was founded by Sylvia. “It felt significant to receive a grant honoring people so deeply connected to JTS and Jewish education,” Levingston said, “especially given that it was my dissertation advisor and mentor, Carol Ingall, who encouraged me to apply.”

Levingston’s career trajectory features both practice and research. “Being connected to the living environment of a school and its students continually inspires my scholarship,” he said. His academic work builds on the ethnographic approach Levingston learned from JTS faculty Ingall, Barry Holtz, and Aryeh Davidson.

Ethnographic research—taking what Levingston called an “anthropologist-like” perspective to observing and interviewing subjects—was the approach he took with his dissertation on moral education some 25 years ago. He studied six tenth grade students who had graduated from K–8 Jewish day schools and then attended the Ivry Prozdor.

Working full-time in a Jewish day school for most of his career, Levingston has remained interested in the moral lives of children, especially as he questioned how children’s play shapes their moral identity and character development. The NRJE grant enabled him to take a trimester off from his school obligations and focus on this question through an ethnographic study of three Jewish day schools, differing in denomination, geography, and pedagogy.

When Levingston began studying play, he came upon the author and game designer Ian Bogost, author of Play Anything. Bogost defined play—often considered frivolous—to be a kind of work, with the intensity and productiveness that is associated with the term. He compared this to a kid who comes off the soccer field sweaty and tired. “Seeing the effort and impact, you can definitely call what the child did ‘work,’ but adding choice to the picture makes it clear that it is play, especially from the child’s perspective,” Levingston said. “We can see play as just as important and effective as the hard ‘work’ of learning a new math concept, and as educators, we can intentionally integrate play into our teaching.”

Levingston’s book starts with a new definition. “Play involves the free and deliberate choice to transgress boundaries, transform experience and tradition, and transcend time, space, and convention in an expression of one’s self, one’s conscience, and one’s place in the world,” he wrote. Thus defined, play has a powerful role in education.

During play, said Levington, you lose track of time and you break down barriers. Play can take many different forms—artistic, dramatic, verbal, numeric (think about gematria/numerology and number puzzles), kinesthetic/athletic, competitive, vicarious (video games, sitting in the bleachers to watch a game, attending a performance). “In many ways, through play we kind of rehearse what might come later in real life,” said Levingston. “When children play, they are learning teamwork, loyalty, gratitude, all components of moral development.”

Based on what he observed in the three different schools, Levingston identified the “moral ecologies of play” that teachers establish and facilitate. He developed a three-tiered taxonomy to help educators “understand what they may observe, experience or have an opportunity to cultivate” with regard to play in schools. Play can be: 1) conceding, cautionary, and complementary; 2) committed and curricular, and 3) character-building and character driven. He used the example of teaching about Passover to demonstrate each tier.

When a teacher creates a game to find the number of times a word appears in the Pesah (Passover) Haggadah, she is engaging learners in an activity that matches their intellectual development and has a dimension of hide-and-seek (“complementary”). A teacher that asks learners to put on a “Hollywood seder” and turn Pharoah into a movie star works when learners connect the play to the knowledge they have gained in formal study (“committed and curricular”). Asking learners to discuss the moral issues behind the four children or asking them to define what it means to seek freedom pushes them to meaning making (“character-building”).

“It is easier for teachers in lower school or middle school to leverage play in the classroom,” said Levingston, highlighting how a lot of Israel education is playful, such as the makeshift El Al “jet” that teachers set up to transport children to Israel, complete with mock passports and Hebrew-speaking teachers posing as flight attendants. “At the high school level, teachers need not sacrifice academic learning to integrate play-based pedagogic strategies like role-playing or debate.” Levingston described a high school class that had studied Yossi Klein Halevi’s book Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor and then imagined that they were the Palestinian neighbor and wrote back to the author.

The most obvious place people look to observe play in a school—outside of the playground—is the gym. Levingston believes that physical education teachers model the value and potential of play in ways that have a lasting effect on children’s development. “Athletic directors know that they are not creating NBA stars or Olympic athletes (usually).” They know instinctively and by their training that they are teaching skills, such as how to compete thoughtfully or the different ways one can lose, that will result in human beings who know themselves, have a moral compass, and understand the ways they can contribute to a better world. “Isn’t that pretty much the goal of all Jewish education?” asked Levingston, playfully.