A video made by undergraduates and kids to represent B-Club, the after-school program that we describe in this chapter, opens with three fifth-grade boys waving at the camera. One of the boys, whom we’ll call Tristan, wears an orange tie-dyed graduation gown that he took from a box of dress-up clothes. Peering at the camera from under thick-rimmed glasses, he announces with a grandiose voice: “Hello! We’re introducing you to our movie!” An UCLA student (Hermán) jumps and waves behind them. The camera pans around an open, grassy field to show other kids laughing, jumping, and kicking a soccer ball; five fourth-grade girls turn graceful cartwheels and another UCLA student (Alana) follows suit, achieving a half-wheel and giving a thumbs up to the camera. From here, the camera leads us to an outdoor patio where tables are set up: one with materials for scientific exploration, another with recyclable materials for creative expression, and a third that boasts a talking world globe and a handwritten invitation to read the books on the table about children’s lives in various countries around the world. We see kids mixing water, salt, food coloring, and oil in empty water bottles to create lava lamps, guided by UCLA students; they mix and pour with steady eyes, using flashlights to illuminate them, with delight and surprise spreading over their faces as they view the results (Figs. 6.1 and 6.2).

Fig. 6.1
A photo of a standing child who wears a cardboard-box-turned-mask over their head, while holding a long paper tube sticking out from a hole in the box. The box has the text written over it that reads, Perfect produce.

A third grader, Erica, walks around wiggling the “nose” she has created out of a long paper tube, which extends from a cardboard-box-turned-mask worn over her head

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Fig. 6.2
A photo of a group of people, including children, who stand around a table with eggs, cold drinks, and water bottles. They engage in activity with 3 people making videos from their mobile phones. Faces of 3 people are blurred.

A group of UCLA undergraduates, faculty, and kids conduct a science experiment

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Viewers of the video then follow the camera through the open door into a cafeteria space where three boys munch on goldfish crackers and pretend to feed their stuffed animals. Two sisters are showing an UCLA student how to make shadow puppets with their hands, projected against the wall from the light of a portable projector. One girl sits with a pencil in hand, studying photos on a laptop that a UCLA student (Sara) has brought to discuss college and career pathways. A girl and boy are playing chess while three others look on. There’s a station with paints and large poster paper and another with paper for writing notes to each other. Across the way, a group gathers to check on the latest growth in the garden we have planted. Another mixed group of kids and undergraduates run to see a bottle of coke spout a geyser into the air over the field as a Mento mint is dropped into it. Another mixed group smiles and waves to the camera, shouting, “We love B-Club!” This is echoed by individual kids who explain that they like B-Club because “it’s fun” and “you get to play.”

Introduction

In this chapter, we look beneath the surface of the joy that fills the screen in this video and our own minds’ eyes as well, as we reflect back on our days at B-Club over the last decade. We offer examples of creative play and joyful human connection that took place in this multilingual, cross-age space, showing how children and university students worked and played as they moved across activities in this free-flowing, indoor-outdoor space. We illustrate the learning that happens for children and adults alike, and argue for creating more such learning spaces that integrate mind, heart, and activity, approaching learning as a playful and creative act. We also underscore the importance of connection and the ways in which open-hearted and open-minded relationships can nurture buds of development, promote agency, produce powerful forms of learning, and support the wellbeing of body, mind, and spirit.

​​The opening vignette provides glimpses into a day at B-Club, an after-school program that engaged children in a densely populated, low-income community in the heart of Los Angeles from 2009 through 2020. On any given Club Day, kids from the school and UCLA students could be seen moving freely between our indoor and outdoor spaces, trying out different activities, laughing and talking, their bodies revealing a sense of relaxation and ease that is rarely seen in school classrooms. They decided for themselves what they wanted to do each afternoon, experimenting with the many materials that were offered to them. University students participated in the play themselves, while supporting or “mediating” kids’ learning in non-didactic ways and building relationships with them that make visible what it means to be a college student. Virtually all of the children, and many of the UCLA students, identified as people of color and as immigrants or children of immigrants from diverse national origins including Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, the Philippines, Bangladesh, India, and Korea.

The authors of this chapter have different life experiences and identities, which informed our work at the club as well as the ways we write about it here. Andréa and Janelle were graduate students who supported the work at B-Club during their doctoral training. Janelle wrote her dissertation based on work at the club (Franco, 2019). Both were also mothers of young children at the time, and sometimes brought their children to work and play with us at the club. (See Chap. 12 for Janelle’s reflections on this unique positioning.) Marjorie was the faculty director of the club and lead instructor for the university class; she is the parent of two now-adult children, and had been a former elementary school teacher at a nearby school from 1983 to 1993. We brought our experiences with diverse learning environments and different kinds of learners, both in and out of classrooms: as teachers (of pre-K through graduate school), caregivers, and learners ourselves. What united us was our commitment to co-creating spaces where children and adults could collaboratively engage in play that facilitated joyful learning and development for all, including for ourselves, as life-long learners.

Program Context

Children’s natural love for play and connecting with others is at the center of learning at B-Club, a program that took different forms across the eleven years of its existence (2009–2020). The program varied based on the school’s needs and our capacities. Sometimes we worked with children from transitional kindergarten (TK) to 5th grade; some years we constricted the age range from 3rd to 5th (as in the year represented in the video described in the opening vignette). Some years we were able to sustain the program for three days a week; other years we limited it to just one afternoon. Some years, the club was held in a multi-purpose room at the school; other times it was housed in a large cafeteria with windows looking over a grassy yard (the site of the video we described in the opening vignette). Most years, the university participants were undergraduate students who enrolled in a service-learning course as part of UCLA’s Education minor program. For three years, we ran the program with teacher education graduate students who participated in B-Club as part of their educator preparation fieldwork. Doctoral students consistently participated in the club in various ways—engaging and playing with kids, taking field notes and analytic memos, participating in the university course as teaching assistants, and reading and responding to field notes written by undergraduate and teacher education students. Three dissertations were produced from work at the club (Franco, 2019; Rodriguez, 2016; Rodriguez, 2019). These variations were shaped by the needs of the two institutions (the school/after-school program and UCLA). They were also driven by our interest in exploring how informal, playful learning environments can respond to the needs of diverse learners, including undergraduates who are considering the field of education, pre-service teachers who are learning about children, learning and development, graduate students who want to look closely at these processes, children, and researchers, who are continuously learning with and from all of the participants.

The program was organized around UCLA’s quarter system, running for 8 to 10 weeks each quarter with short breaks in between. Designed as a club that was part of the school’s larger after-school programs, child participants were absorbed back into the main programs when the university was not in session. Kids were always excited to return to B-Club after these breaks. Undergraduate students participated at the site for at least one quarter, with many opting to return for a second and even third quarter, schedules permitting. Teacher education students worked at the club for at least two quarters and saw some of the children in their classrooms as well, allowing them unique insights into how children engage in different kinds of learning environments (Orellana et al., 2019).

The school that housed B-Club was located in a linguistically and culturally diverse, print-rich community in central Los Angeles, making and connection. (See the blogpost “Minding the ‘Word Gap’” [https://uclinks.berkeley.edu/chapter6] for consideration of the under-utilized wealth of urban print environments; see also Orellana & Hernández, 1999.) In other work, we discuss the challenges and opportunities that this provided, as we thought about how to organize language collectively, and reflected on language and cultural processes together (Orellana & Rodriguez-Minkoff, 2016). The school itself also highlighted language as a resource; students at the school were enrolled in dual-language programs during the school day (either Spanish and English, or Korean and English), and the community around the school was rich with multilingual signs and sounds. See Franco et al. (2021) for an in-depth exploration of young children’s play with language (and literacy/numeracy) within this multilingual space; see also Orellana (2017).

B-Club is the direct descendent of a program run by Kris Gutiérrez at another Los Angeles school (Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010) and cousin to the other programs that are represented in this volume. Our intention was to create a Community of Learners (Rogoff, 1994) that linked theory to practice in significant and meaningful ways and that provided opportunities to apprentice into ethnographic research. Writing field notes or reflective memos was central to this work; see Ángeles et al. (2023) for a discussion of how field notes helped students deepen their understanding of theory as well as use theory to guide practice. We also offer a few examples from students’ field notes in this chapter to illustrate this point. Like other University-Community Links (UC Links) programs (https://uclinks.berkeley.edu/programs), we were guided by sociocultural principles of learning (Vygotsky, 1978), with our own contribution defined as integrating heart into the mind-culture-activity triad that is central to socio-historical approaches to learning (Orellana, 2019).

A socioculturally informed approach to creating a community of learners emphasizes collaboration between participants of all ages and the fluid shifting of expertise, as was evident in the opening vignette, where people of different ages learned from each other in different ways. Often, kids were positioned as experts, with UCLA students as learners, as for example in the cartwheel modeling in the opening vignette. We encouraged university students to reimagine expertise as not just located within the teacher/adult, as is typical in school settings. We illustrate these shifting views of teaching and learning with a field note written by a teacher education student after engaging in a card game with kids at B-Club:

Alison (an elementary student participant at B-Club) and Mark (a UCLA teacher education student) are playing Uno at the game table. Alison teaches me the rules of the game. I believe this is a great example of shifting the teacher and student roles. In this instance, Alison is the expert and I am the student. What other activities can we set up that would allow the students to teach us from their knowledge base? Alison was very enthusiastic about her instruction, so I imagine it is a confidence boost to explain something to an adult.

This field note illuminates how teacher education students took up the expanded notions of expert and novice that we highlighted at the club (and in our talk about the club in their related coursework). The note reveals this student’s recognition of the value for the child in acting as her teacher. He further wonders about other ways of creating more space for youth to be the experts. He sees the enthusiasm and engagement that occurred when children’s knowledge and expertise were validated.

University students under the guidance of the research/instructional team facilitated activities by providing materials with which the children could engage in creative processes and sometimes brought their own ideas and interests to the club. But our emphasis was always on following children’s leads and interests, centering their agency, and seeing where they “lit up,” where they seemed to be animated from within. This animation is more than mere “engagement,” a term that can suggest the image of cogs being caught in a wheel (see Orellana, 2017 on this point). This, too, was evident from the sparks in children’s eyes in the video that inspired our opening vignette.

The activities at B-Club varied each year, and changed or evolved over time, as we followed the interests of the children and university students, who were encouraged to “bring what they love’‘ to the club. For example, in the year in which the video was made, the children and their caregivers had expressed interest in science learning; undergraduate students brought their own love of science and experience with exciting scientific experiments. Our hope was to motivate playful engagement with science, language, literacy, and learning of all kinds. Generally, we set out a wide range of materials and activities for children to choose from: art materials; stationery supplies for writing letters to each other as part of our club “mail” system; cardboard, tape, and glue for what came to be known as “cardboard city;” sports equipment, dress-up clothes, games, and much more. Our goal was to create a “permeable curriculum,” which Anne Haas Dyson first introduced in 1993 and revisited in 2016 (Dyson, 2016). As Dyson wrote: “a shared world is essential for the growth of both oral and written language, and it is essential as well if teachers and children are to feel connected to, not alienated from, each other” (p. 1).

In these and other ways, participants and practices varied at B-Club throughout the years. In other work, we have detailed how the space supported children’s learning of language and literacy (Franco, 2019; Orellana, 2017; Orellana & Rodriguez-Minkoff, 2016; Rodriguez, 2016) and math (Franco et al., 2021), as well as the learning of undergraduates (Ángeles et al., 2020; Ángeles et al., 2023; Orellana, 2019) and teacher education students (Franco et al., 2020; Orellana et al., 2019). In this chapter, we want to unpack two key themes that anchored our approach to engaging and co-creating with youth: (1) a commitment to play and joyful explorations of learning and (2) the significance of relationships.

Key Idea: The Value of Play

In this section, we explore themes of learning and through a relational lens. As suggested in the opening quote by Gabrielle Zevin (“to play requires love and trust”), we recognize the value of play at B-Club and consider what it means to center relationships and connection in the process of engaging in play and facilitating learning. In particular, we consider possibilities for educator preparation. Classroom learning environments (where most pre-service teachers are socialized into the profession) have traditionally invoked hierarchical structures that reinforce distance between educators and students. These contexts position teachers as authority figures with power and expect students to comply with rules established by those in charge. By participating at B-Club as part of their educator preparation program, teacher education candidates were able to see a different kind of learning environment and experience joyful and playful connections as a foundation for learning.

The value of play is well established in sociocultural theory as a platform for “children to act a head taller than themselves” and engage in skills such as planning, negotiation, cooperation, and creative problem solving (Goodwin, 2006; Thorne, 1993; Vygotsky, 1978). Developmental theories also speak to the value of play (Bodrova & Leong, 2015; Fisher et al., 2010; Hughes, 2010; Vygotsky, 1978). However, there are many debates within educational circles about the place of play in learning environments, beyond proscribed spaces and for limited purposes. Play is often minimized (as in “they were just playing”) and children as well as adults may counterpose play with “real” learning.

Recently, there have been some renewed calls to bring play into schools in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, however, it is often seen as a means to an end: to release post-pandemic tension so that children can focus on the real matter at hand: catching up on the learning that was “lost” during the pandemic. Play is not generally treated as valuable in and for itself.

Souto-Manning (2017) cites Fred Rogers in asserting that play should not be constructed as a privilege but a right of childhood:

If we are to unleash children’s infinite potential, not only do we have the responsibility to position play as a right, we must also understand the agency children need to have during play. Their play will likely come to life in ways that are unfamiliar—and at times uncomfortable—to adults. May we blur the roles of teacher and learner and learn alongside them. Mr. (Fred) Rogers explained: ‘Play gives children a chance to practice what they are learning.’ I posit that play allows children to rehearse and enact change, by asking questions, developing community, and standing up for fairness—which will later be (re)named justice (p. 786–787).

At B-Club, we took seriously this notion of play as a right. We also took up Souto-Manning’s call for “blurring the roles of teacher and learner”—by learning and playing alongside them. We honored the practice of play for the sake of play and the joy that it fosters. Play was the core practice in which we all engaged. Scholarship on play and development tends to focus on children’s play, but at B-Club we invited older youth (undergraduates) and other adults (pre-service teachers, doctoral students and researchers) to join in. As illustrated in our opening vignette, these forms of play were co-created with children in the space. Sometimes, children initiated the activities (for example, by sharing their love of cartwheels or shadow puppets with undergraduates). Other times, UCLA students brought their interests and experiences to the club (e.g. sharing about college life, science, and gardening). Most often, there was some merger between the two, as undergraduates listened to children’s ideas and then expanded their interests.

This was a departure from approaches where adults take on positions of authority in their play with children, often guiding their play and channeling it toward particular ends (usually academic). Educational literature on guided play tends to focus on how adults can scaffold and guide children’s play (Fisher et al., 2010; Weisberg et al., 2016). At B-Club, we co-created spaces where children had opportunities to guide themselves and the adults (undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty members, etc.) as they collaborated, negotiated, and engaged in play together.

Initially, university students seemed to struggle with the idea that they were in a space where they were expected to partake in play themselves as part of a learning experience. We especially saw this when the teacher education students were asked to step outside of a traditional teacher–student dynamic. Their experiences at B-Club were initially perceived as existing in contrast to what they experienced in their classroom settings, where they were being asked to take up voices of authority and to clearly establish themselves as “in charge.” In their student teaching assignments, much attention went to “classroom management.” We were asking them to do something different: to engage with youth in order to experience for themselves the power of play and to see how it shaped their relationships with the youth. This prompted reflection upon the kind of teacher they wanted to be. For example, one student wrote in her field notes:

We started with the opening circle. Since I was leading the opening circle, I was nervous about keeping the group together and orderly. I had to keep myself in check with my teacher tendencies. I wanted to keep the students engaged but not seem too much like I was managing behavior and in charge. I wondered what was the best way to lead, in the middle? On the side? I decided that since my voice is quiet, I would stay in the middle and walk around as we sang the song. We sang a song about a gusanito (little worm) and I was happy with how much the kids seemed like they were enjoying it. I noticed myself trying to control a lot of the behaviors of the students and I kept wondering, “What is my role here? Am I supposed to control them? Am I supposed to let them run around?” I also realized how self-conscious I was about what other adults in the room were thinking of my style. Did they think I wasn't being strict enough? Too strict? Not in control?

Reflecting on the ways in which this anxiety gave way to feelings of connection, one teacher education student wrote:

I was pretty energized during B-Club. I had feelings of anxiety (will I be able to connect with a child? Will there be conflict?) and some self-consciousness (are they going to like me?) … I was glad that throughout B-Club, I connected with both Jeanine and Sandra, and I think that made me feel great about my ability to connect with students. At the end, I felt exhausted, but satisfied…

We offer this example as a way to show that while we firmly believe in the reciprocal relationship between play, learning, and connection, we also have seen the ways in which these develop over time and through establishing relationships and connections.

University students came to see the value of creating more space for children’s agency in play. In reflecting on an early experience at B-Club, one student wrote about the ways in which a fellow graduate student had prepared an opening activity, and how it became more engaging when she surrendered control and invited the kids into the process:

We started in the main circle with all the students. They came running in loudly talking and laughing. Lena was ready with an opening activity and had us do “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” many times. At first the students seemed not that into it, but when Leslie asked for suggestions and made it more participatory, they took ownership over the activity and seemed to enjoy it more.

In describing the same activity, another student reflected on the importance of including kids in decision making in her future classroom: “I didn’t see anyone in the circle not participating. This made me think that this was a really successful activity and I liked how Lena integrated the students and it was not just her leading the whole time. I really liked this activity and it is something I definitely would want to use in my classroom on a day when the kids have a lot of extra energy in them.”

By working with a broad definition of play, university students were able to use their imaginations alongside kids to create games, write letters, move their bodies, and even create a mini metropolis (which was referred to as “Cardboard City” by B-Club kids) within the context of our after-school program. Activities like these surely contribute to the development of critical thinking, reasoning, language and negotiation skills, as well as socio-emotional development—all of which support children’s learning and development in and out of academic contexts, but our commitment to play was not outcome-driven. Rather, our team prioritized the process of play and the ways in which relationships were built and nurtured through play.

The creation of “Cardboard City” also paved the way to other kinds of creative and playful expression and engagement. Work by Franco (2019) details ways in which kids would fluidly move from building houses and stores out of cardboard to using the materials to create props and costumes that supported their vision. For example, she describes how Ben10,Footnote 1 a kindergartener, created a superhero identity for himself and utilized cardboard to make a costume to wear when he became “SpidermanWolverine” (one word), a superhero who went on “misión secretas” to help the world and the people in it. When talking with two graduate students (Janelle and Lilia) and one undergraduate (Jasmine) about his plans, Ben10 decided to create a comic book as part of a secret mission in his quest to save the world. Ben10 asked for paper, carefully folded the pages to resemble a comic book, and began writing and drawing. It is important to note that Ben10 was clear in his desire to craft and write his own book. As he wrote, he dialogued with three adults, detailing his metalinguistic choices as he considered what elements of the comic would be written in Spanish and English. He intentionally reflected on his audience (explaining that his mom would be a reader and that she preferred to speak in Spanish, but could listen to and understand English). This suggests how play facilitates language and literacy and allows room for children to display what Martínez (2018) refers to as the “richness of bi/multilingual students’ linguistic repertoires” (p. 515).

We see joyful connection as an important element that facilitates play, and in our framing, we are inspired by work from Ward and Dahlmeier (2011) that asserts that joy is not the same as instant gratification. They state “Achieving joy is a process, parts of which are not always pleasurable and may require considerable effort” (p. 94).

Discussion: Re-Imaging Education

We write this chapter at a time when concerns about “learning loss” and calls for “acceleration” are driving forces in the discourse around schooling. Equity-driven trauma-informed educators Venet and Casimir (2021) state, “There’s a belief that we have to work twice as hard with students from marginalized communities, that we have to be vigilant and not waste a minute of learning time in effort to ‘close the achievement gap’ and help them compete with their peers. What we are now calling an ‘opportunity gap,’ can be interpreted as the many opportunities we miss, as educators, to foster joy, love, and peace in tumultuous times in our classrooms.” As we move beyond the pandemic, consider what is possible, and re-imagine education, we hope for the creation of more educational spaces that look and feel like B-Club: places for play, connection, joy and belonging, where learning comes along for the ride.

B-Club was a site where children and adults collaboratively engaged in play that facilitated joyful learning and development for all. It offered a collaborative space that reimagined how people of different ages could co-learn and grow together. It took place on a school campus, but the energy and felt experience was different than in most schools. We offer this model to contrast with educational institutions that have historically been places that have privileged logic and rationality and seen emotion and connection as potential obstacles, rather than vehicles for learning. Classrooms and classroom activities are typically designed to constrain bodies, control minds, and divide and separate. Schools often group students by age, grade, and supposed abilities. They carve up time and space for different subject matter. They separate heads and hearts, bodies and spirits. Schools seek to control learning rather than to spark curiosity.

At B-Club, in contrast, we tried to create the conditions for people to learn, and the desire to do so—without necessarily even realizing that they were learning. The kids in the video, and in our many conversations with them, never talked about the learning that happened at the club. They saw it all as play. As educators, we see both. We see the joy and learning and we also recognize how B-Club participants engaged in language and literacy development (including developing communication skills in various languages, dialects, and communicative repertoires), as well as social-emotional skills (i.e., negotiation, advocacy, collaboration, cultivating voice, etc.).

In order for joyful learning to take place, we assert the importance of inviting reflection and emotionality into the space (Riley, 2010). Connection is important, so much so that Maslow’s well-known hierarchy of needs includes love and belonging right above safety and security and physiological needs (Maslow, 1943). B-Club offered a space where children could form secure attachments with others in their school context. In addition, we underscore the fact that adults can and do learn from kids—a reality that we wish more schools would recognize. This is particularly important for educator preparation and development. Since teachers tend to teach how they were taught, spaces like B-Club offer a new paradigm for seeing and relating with children.