Playing Imaginatively within Seerah Stories: A Multi-Site Design Experiment

A cluster of children waits for me to open the playroom door in a neighborhood in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. When I do, Tala, a four-year-old Syrian girl, bounces in first, arms outstretched in delight, strawberry blond braids flying. She runs to the costume basket, dons a flouncy dress that she will wear for the next two hours, then explores the fabric landscape of shells, trees, and sheep extending across the floor. As she crawls along a ‘river’ of blue silk to the ‘sea,’ Yacoub, her 7-year-old Pakistani–Saudi neighbor follows her, before diving into the puppet basket with a wide grin on his face. Amira, a shy 4-year-old Saudi, slips into the room, a tiny backpack on her back, and heads straight for the play kitchen, stocked with ceramic dishes and painted fruit, where she will busily spend the bulk of the next two hours. Agent Squid,[1] a robust 2.5-year-old, tugs on a pink lacy hijāb (headscarf), trying to figure out how to put it on his head. A mother rushes across the room to inform him: “Boys don’t wear hijāb!” This is the first of ten imaginative playgroup sessions in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, part of a collaboratively designed multi-site design experiment[2] across five sites of informal Islamic education including Abu Dhabi, Beirut, and Toronto. This essay is an overview of the study; more detailed explication of the study is in progress.

The study was aimed at exploring whether and how imaginary play within Seerah storytelling (surrounding the Prophetic life and biography) might be pedagogically appropriate in teaching and learning towards holistic child development. We wondered if infusing Seerah storytelling with imaginative play might be more transformative for children than the default approaches of memorizing facts from the stories. The study was guided by four overarching research questions:

1. How do children engage in imaginative play within a playgroup centering Seerah stories?
2. How does their play change over time?
3. How do mothers and other adults consequential in their lives value and/or support children’s imaginative play?
4. How do the play participants change the playgroup?

To answer these questions, we start with some definitions and a methodological overview.

Definitions and Previous Research on Imaginative Play

Islamic education, as the broader context of this study, is primarily defined “in terms of its rich theological, metaphysical, aesthetic, and ethical values and their enunciation, in myriad forms, to the ideas and practices of education.”[3] As researchers, we aimed to embody this definition in the playgroups that we constructed in each of the five research sites, where we centered Seerah storytelling infused with invitations for imaginative play. Play features in Islamic educational pedagogy in multiple respects: as a leading activity in the first seven years of life;[4] playful interactions between adults and children feature in stories of the Prophet Muhammad’s ﷺ life; ^[5] [6] and ʿĀʾisha reports having played with dolls and wooden figures of animals.[7] These few key references in the literature are further explored in the larger study, but little empirical research has examined imaginative play within the field of contemporary Islamic Education. In mainstream sociocultural literature, imaginative play has been described as pretend play in which children construct imaginary situations using props that stand in for other things: a block becomes a phone, a stick becomes a horse, and a piece of grey fabric becomes a cat. These are pivots in separating meaning from object in the transition to abstract thought[8] and children’s play action brings them to life: the father on the phone, the rider of the horse, the girl who cares for the cat.

Unique social rules inhere within each role and the child player must subordinate herself to the rules of the role to extend the pleasure of play: “Play continually creates demands on the child to act against immediate impulse” and an example is how “the child weeps in play as a patient, but revels as a player.”[9] This is the basis for the social and emotional development that occurs in play and researchers have found rich benefits on self-regulation,[10] executive function,[11] and creativity.[12] These references to play in Islamic tradition and imaginative play’s documented developmental benefits contribute to a compound rationale for this study, along with the suggestion that effective Islamic education must center children’s ways of thinking, feeling, and imagining.[13] The intention of this study was to explore how imaginative play might enrich early Islamic education while fostering holistic child development.

Methodology

To answer the research questions, we collaboratively designed the study on the principles of design experiment methodology,[14] whereby researchers introduce an intervention in real-world educational settings that they then study to understand how the intervention works in practice and with “an eye toward progressive refinement […]” (Collins et al., 2004, p. 19). The intervention was a 10-session playgroup structured around storytelling from the Seerah, the life of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, with deliberate pauses to invite the children to engage in imaginative play. In other words, the storytelling was intended to invite children to engage in imaginative play and through the imaginative play, the children would make deeper and more personal meaning of the storytelling. Our diverse research sites were informal mother–child playgroups and, across the five, we aimed for consistency in terms of:

1. Participant inclusion criteria: children between the ages of 2 and 8, with their consequential adults;
2. Playgroup structure (the ‘intervention’): an emergent, flexible, and sequenced two-hour play session;
3. Simple, natural, beautiful materials offered the children as playthings; and,
4. A ten-story ‘curriculum’ of stories from the Seerah, including sensory materials and play ideas.

Over six months, we led the playgroups, observing and documenting how 50 children played in real-world educational settings. The research questions aimed to illuminate children’s imaginative play and development of the playgroup itself as the children evolved its design via two primary methods of data collection: participant observation and active interviewing. We filmed each playgroup; we interviewed children and adults at various points within the study. The two methods resulted in a collective data corpus of 75 hours of video-footage and 47 hours of audio interviews transcribed into text. We also took still photos of children’s play constructions as artefacts for later analysis.

Each researcher analyzed her own data via thematic analysis: watching her playgroup videos, listening to her participants’ interviews, coding both and triangulating them with her own analytic memos and those of the other researchers. Then we repeated this process collectively, holding analytic discussions throughout. Finally, we collated the codes into three themes, each of which we defined and illustrated with data excerpts:

1. Ways of Playing Imaginatively: children engaged in various types of play,
2. Play Inspirations: specific features inspired children’s imaginative play,
3. Play as Islamic Pedagogy for Sustenance and Change: imaginative play is a way for children to make sense of Islamic concepts.

Three Themes

The playgroup structure offered the children a varied play landscape and each of the three themes we discerned offers a unique expression of imaginative play. The first theme, Ways of Playing Imaginatively, details several types of play in which the children engaged, from solo pretend play to mature imaginative play, the richest in developmental benefits,[15] characterized by relationships between children, plot, and robust play themes. This type of mature imaginative play has three distinct features: “children create an imaginary situation, take on and act out roles, and follow a set of rules determined by these roles,” each of which contribute to developing “the cognitive and social-emotional skills children need to function successfully in school and beyond.”[16] But across all the research sites, we observed impoverishment of mature imaginative play, a finding that is consistent with other literature on imaginative play including in Australia, England, and Russia.[17] Our data evidenced some potential and contextualized sources of this impoverishment, like increasing academicization in schools. Khadija (8 years old, Riyadh) described her earliest years: “I used to only learn about ABC. And we used to have a projector at snack time in Reception; we used to watch Blippi videos. But we never did this [type of imaginative play] ever.” Here, she described that rather than playing imaginatively, the children learned ABCs and watched videos. Similarly, Yacoub (7 years old, Riyadh) described a typical grade-two school day: “I don’t play, I work. I work like a man. […] I don’t know how many exams I have: six or—every day I have an exam!” In Yacoub’s case, academic work and exams took the place of imaginative play.

Digital devices also steal time away from young children’s play. In the Abu Dhabi English playgroup, one mother described:

A screen that is not being managed, well then, that’ll just ruin the whole thing! […] We had some iPads in the past and it was really difficult—they’re so magnetic! We went through some times where it was like the kids forgot how to play. (Jamie, pre-playgroup interview)

Here, the mother drew a clear connection between children engaging with digital screens and forgetting how to play. This dire statement echoes the previous research describing a lack of time in children’s lives for the development of imaginative play. Another possible reason for a lack of mature imaginative play was that the consequential adults in the children’s lives did not seem to know how to support its development. In the Beirut playgroup, for example, most mothers fixated on expectations for learning Seerah-story content and retaining Islamic concepts through repetition and recall. These mothers had enrolled their children in very prestigious, competitive schools in Beirut and wanted their children’s time to be spent in ways they considered productive. Despite the research describing how imaginative play supports creativity, abstract thinking, and perspective taking, these mothers did not consider imaginative play a productive learning activity.

But the impoverishment of imaginative play is not the end of the story. The second theme, Play Inspirations, identifies significant catalysts to imaginative play that we glimpsed across the research sites. Defined as conditions that prompted the emergence and development of mature imaginative play fluencies, we found that the role of the playgroup leader was key. In Riyadh, after a few sessions in which the children were actively supported in play, they started to initiate mature imaginative play on their own, assigning and accepting different roles. Playgroup leaders’ invitations to play within the Seerah stories were an important motivator of play. Here, the leader would fine-tune story delivery and play invitations in collaboration with the child players themselves. The materials populating the playgroups were important catalysts for both play and meaning making, as in the Abu Dhabi Arabic playgroup, whereby the leader invited the children to enter a story by engaging with some cultural tools from the Prophet Muhammad’s ﷺ place and time: the western Arabian Peninsula, 1400 years ago. Sitting on a palm-leaf mat, the children ate khazira, a porridge that the Prophet used to eat, from clay bowls and wooden spoons (see Figure 1). Here, the purpose was to deepen meaning making of the Seerah stories by engaging with their contextual material elements.

Children used the materials provided for play differently in the different playgroups. Figures 2, 3, and 4 illustrate how the children engaged in imaginative play differently in three research sites, within a story where they were invited to imagine what it would be like to live in the desert, like the Prophet ﷺ did.

Time for play, relationships with more experienced players, and simple, undetailed, natural materials for play were all catalysts in play’s development. Leaders included materials in the story that evoked the senses – such as incense, Qur’anic recitation, Zamzam water from a spring in Mecca, and real grains the children could touch, which enriched both the stories and play.

The third theme, Imaginative Play as Islamic Pedagogy starts with a definition of Islamic pedagogy as engaging young people with Islamic principles and practices in ways that reflect and mediate a larger Islamic paradigm.[18] This theme illuminates imaginative play as a pedagogical pivot between (Islamic) content material, including Seerah stories, and (Islamic) objectives of learning and development. Upon telling our first Seerah stories, we immediately realized that the children were highly responsive to this type of storytelling whereby we enacted events in the life of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ with small wooden animal figures, sand, rocks, and pieces of fabric. By mid-study, many children across the playgroups referred to it as their favourite part of the playgroup. By the end of the study, children wanted to tell their own stories.

In an example from the Beirut playgroup, one session focused on the story of the Prophet’s profession as a merchant, trading goods from various places around the region, and his reputation as the honest and the trustworthy (al-sadiq al-amin). In light of this story, and highlighting these qualities, children were invited to engage in trade. They were presented with an array of objects in small baskets – food, cloth, playdough, teacups, as well as a small bag of coins – and invited to buy and sell goods from each other. One of the participants said to Bassel (7): “I’ll give you a basket if you give me a cup, is that okay?” Bassel proceeded not only to give her the cup, but also took out a coin from his bag and gave it to her. As such, the children practiced enacting values like honesty and generosity through play (see Figure 5).

In this final theme, the children’s love for the stories and the related play that developed suggests that imaginative play may be an engaging pedagogy for holistic child development, including character development, mediating between Islamic content material and Muslim learners themselves.

Conclusions

Taken together, the themes point towards one main idea: although imaginative play was impoverished across our research sites, it can be inspired, it will be diversely expressed, and it may constitute a powerful pathway towards Muslim children’s learning and developing. Imaginative play can be taught, learned, and developed by both children and adults, as we saw within our research sites. With young Muslim children, we can invite them to play and support the process by providing them the time to develop imaginative play; content and play materials meaningful to their development as Muslims; enriched life experiences to explore through play; and engagement with more experienced players. With Muslim adults, we can offer teacher and parent education programs specifically on the benefits and processes of imaginative play, including how and when to enter into children’s play. Yet more research is needed. In addition, the value of this study in contributing to Islamic educational practice and Muslim child development will depend upon how we and others translate this research into practice and support each other in doing so.

Dr. Claire Alkouatli, Dr. Mariam Alhashmi, Tala Hammour, Nur Hidayati, Hadeel Dbaibo, Dr. Asma Ahmad

Acknowledgments

This study was funded by a grant from the International Society of the Learning Sciences/Wallace Foundation Emerging Scholars Program, 2022. The first author presented the study at the following universities and thank the audiences for their feedback: University of British Columbia (June, 2022); Warwick and Cambridge Universities (September 2022, with Tala Hammour).

[1] This study was conducted under ethical clearance from the Research Ethics Committee, Zayed University, January 2022. At the outset of the study, the children were invited to choose their own pseudonyms, hence the creative names.

[2] Brown, A. L. (1992). Design experiments: Theoretical and methodological challenges in creating complex interventions in classroom settings. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 2(2), 141–178. Collins, A., Joseph, D. & Bielaczyc, K. (2004). Design research: Theoretical and methodological issues. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, (13)1, 15–42.

[3] Zaman, 2016, p. 2

[4] Al-Aak, K. (2009). Rearing sons and daughters: In light of the Quran and Sunnah. Dar El- Marefah.

[5] This symbol ﷺ denotes an honorific expression translating to peace and blessings be upon him, which is traditionally uttered after Muhammad’s name. As the most important person in Islamic tradition, Muslims study his saying, his actions, and his life story, which constituted the ‘content material’ of this study.

[6] Ahmad, F.M. (2020). Understanding the occupation of play: A Middle Eastern revelation: A preliminary exploration into Arab parental values and children’s engagement in play in Kuwait. Doctoral dissertation. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing.

[7] Abū Dāwūd, 2009, p. 283.

[8] Vygotsky, L. S. (1967). Play and its role in the mental development of the child. Soviet Psychology, 5(3), 6–18.

[9] Ibid. p. 14

[10] Berk, L.E. & Meyers, A.B. (2013). The role of make-believe play in the development of executive function: Status of research and future directions. American Journal of Play, 6(1), pp. 98-110.

[11] Walker, S., Fleer, M., Veresov, N., & Duhn, I. (2020). Enhancing executive function through imaginary play: A promising new practice principle. Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, 45(2), 114–126. https://doi.org/10.1177/1836939120918502

[12] Russ, S.W. & Wallace, C.E. (2013). Pretend play and creative processes. American Journal of Play, 6(1), 136.

[13] Selçuk, M. (2015). Opening the eye of the heart: Parents and teachers as storytellers. Religious Education, 110(3): 255-261.

[14] Eg. Anderson, T. & Shattuck, T. (2012). Design-based research: A decade of progress in education research? Educational Researcher: A Publication of the American Educational Research Association., 41(1), 16–25. https://doi.org/info:doi/

[15] Bodrova, E. & Leong, D. J. (2019). Making play smarter, stronger, and kinder: Lessons from Tools of the Mind. American Journal of Play, 12(1), 37–53.

[16] Ibid. p. 38, 40

[17] Fleer (2021) Conceptual playworlds: The role of imagination in play and learning. Early Years, 41:4, 353-364, DOI: 10.1080/09575146.2018.1549024; Gleave, J. & Cole-Hamilton, I. (2012). A world without play: A literature review. Play England (www.playengland.org.uk). As retrieved from: https://www.eerg.org.au/images/PDF/A-world-without-play-literature-review-2012.pdf; Smirnova, E.O. & Gudareva, O.V. (2015). Play and intentionality among today’s preschoolers. Journal of Russian & East European Psychology 52:1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/10610405.2015.1184891.

[18] Alkouatli, C. (2022a). Muslim educators’ pedagogies: Tools for self, social, and spiritual transformation. Harvard Educational Review, 92 (1): 107–133. https://doi.org/10.17763/1943-5045-92.1.107; Memon, N.A. (2021). Islamic pedagogy for Islamic schools. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Oxford University Press