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Elephant Seal Commentary (2:2) papertalker 110 views Why simple trumps perfect; why unfinished is the goal; why the focus is on process, not product; why connection is the point; why arts in education is not academic; why pu...
Elephant Seal Commentary (1:2) papertalker 60 views Why simple trumps perfect; why unfinished is the goal; why focus on process, not product; why connection is the point; why arts in education is not academic; why puppet me...
Play: Education's Big Bang Theory papertalker 606 views In Loren Eisely's, The Immense Journey, his book on the history of life, there is an essay, "How Flowers Changed the World",--sheer poetry-- a description of life on Earth ...
The Invention of Play............ papertalker 216 views .....and the invention of Play Language The drive to educate and care for the young is a core impulse buried deep in the trunk of the Tree of Life. The principle that 'educ...
Factory Farm Education: America @ Risk papertalker 115 views As most of us already know firsthand, the Institution of Education is simply and tragically stuck. It won't or can't move forward on its own---it is a world mired in its ow...
Play Tectonics (Let's Move Education Off Its Axis) papertalker 250 views The Theory of Plate Tectonics holds that the Earth's land masses glide on plates. Aliens peering through telescopes at Earth over the long course of evolutionary time would...
Teachers: You Can Outsmart the System papertalker 205 views Teachers I invite you to take an active role in changing the learning culture. Instead of just merely teaching, become an active advocate and practitioner of play. For in t...
Planning to Teach? Learn the Principle of Play papertalker 96 views If you are preparing to teach or considering a teaching career, you can play an active role in changing the culture in which you will one day teach. You can enter the profe...
Parents: Transform Your Kid's School. Stand up for the Principle of Play. papertalker 65 views Parents and friends of education, I invite you to learn more about my journey of 35 years into play. Let me to tell you what play can do to humanize our classrooms and allo...
A Challenge and an Invitation. To Educators-- at all Levels. papertalker 106 views By embracing the principle of Play, we can in the short term prevent the system from doing what it does to the spirit and creativity of teachers and children, and at the sa...

About The Puppetools Network

Advancing the Principle of Play in Learning and Communication

puppetools.com

Created by

papertalker

Latest Activity

Mar 2, 2011

Date Joined

Jul 12, 2006

About this user

I have worked on a lifelong project whose mission is to mainstream Play into learning environments around the world. I am the inventor of Puppetools.com which incorporates a communication system that applies puppetry as a Play Language.

My work with puppets and teachers has proceeded under a key assumption: Find a way to
systematically inject play energy into the flow of communication in classrooms, and you
will have harnessed important raw chemicals from the brain—needed for thinking and
communication—energy by which to warm and propel the field of education. Make
playful communication second nature on a systematic scale, and a strategic means to
transform the learning culture is suddenly available. Playful communication has the
power to surprise and destabilize the rigid character of conventional communication
practiced by adults in the worlds classrooms. Playful communication has the potential to
exert broad impact and overnight transformation on the learning culture. This may sound
like a tall order for such an amusingly innocuous tool as hand puppetry, but puppet play
is a highly contagious and emotionally charged visual language. We need languages that
fit the present time—that can deal with the collective as well as the individual and that
transcend traditional boundaries of tribe, nation, and culture, wrote Peter Senge. Puppet
Play, practically applied, qualifies as one such language. The hand puppet is a force of
nature—a symbolic bloom of organic art on the hand—at once a tool, a media, a
language, and a technology capable of integrating, transmitting, and transferring
information and opening the mind.
Puppets are widely known for their magical capacity to bring down psychological walls
or perhaps pass through them. Somehow the little buggers always get a response. They
always make it past the censors and the gatekeepers—Resistance, Fear, Control and
Rigidity. In a world where classrooms are increasingly consumed with a strictly
academic mission, play in the classroom stands out. The simple act of puppet play
engaged in by child and adult in which a lifelike form or behaving entity is made to move
and talk produces a catalytic, predictable impact on classroom group dynamics. My work,
which involves teachers making their own puppets and putting them to work, has
generated an extensive base of teacher anecdotes and video documentation attesting to
the changes which classrooms undergo after introducing and working with the puppet
medium. "I can hardly believe that a paper puppet can be so magical." "The children were
mesmerized." "This has been one of the most enjoyable first few weeks of school I can
remember," wrote one teacher.
When autistic children begin speaking in the presence of a puppet, the medium typically
works to unlock internal, psychobiological structures and pathways. Puppets send a
signal to disarm and that its safe to come out. Without puppets it is often very difficult
to broach sensitive subjects, but because puppets can symbolize and articulate and project
a given issue embodied in a third party, they make reaching children much easier and
less threatening, This has implications for neutralizing the conditions of stress and fear
that lead to alienation, violence, suicide, obesity, and substance abuse—and for
preventing adult-induced variations of these widespread conditions related to child
development and education. Play may send a strong enough message to derail the current
train of testing and accountability.
Using puppets, a teacher can personally transform common learning barriers—
oppositional behavior, negative moods, defensive attitudes—into a windfall of learning
benefits and surprises. Children become more responsive and motivated. Perhaps most
important, adults find themselves suddenly having fun. Teachers who tend to keep
themselves and their emotions at arm's distance in the classroom become fully involved
with the puppets and the children's response to them. The element of play induced by
puppets calls up in teachers and children something vital to a learning process struggling
to rise above itself. What many teachers describe as "magical" in puppets, I submit, could
be the brain's deep need and response to aural, physical, kinetic, visual, emotive
stimulation produced by a powerful species-specific, play- and art-based behavior.

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United States

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My dog, Penny, Education

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