Fall Conference 2025

Cindy Parson Puccio

It’s simple and it’s widely known. Children need more free play in their day. During free play children learn empathy, build confidence, develop language skills, practice social problem solving, explore cause and effect relationships, learn critical thinking, develop self-regulation and executive functioning, and navigate the nuances of friendships. The research overwhelmingly supports the many benefits of free play and unstructured time for children, and yet more and more, we see that young children are over-scheduled, over-stimulated, and overwhelmed. This presentation will address the ways in which free play supports emotional wellbeing, creativity, and self-regulation. We will discuss ideas for free play, decreasing screen time, and how children - and we - can increase our connection to one another.

Lorayne Carbon and Kim Ferguson 

In this workshop, we will discuss a community-based participatory action program and research project to redesign Sarah Lawrence College’s Early Childhood Center outdoor play spaces to better support children’s play. Children across the globe indicate a preference for, and engage in more complex play in, safe, green play spaces. The most positive of these types of spaces include spaces with places to sit, spaces where children can gather away from adult monitoring, spaces that provide safety and distancing from traffic and noise, spaces with natural elements, and spaces with physical characteristics and materials conducive to play, particularly when there is some gradient of opportunity to test out physical and cognitive competencies. In this workshop, we will discuss both the research behind our ongoing play yard redesign project and our ongoing collaborative research designed to better inform our ongoing work. This research involves play observations of children in these spaces; interviews, focus groups, and conversations with the children; insights from ECC teachers based on years working with children in these spaces; playspace tours by ECC children; and interviews, focus groups, conversations, and playspace tours with ECC alumni.

Jerusha Beckerman

A panel of teachers, moderated by Art of Teaching program director Jerusha Beckerman, will describe some of the ways in which they make space for different kinds of play to happen in their classrooms –  alongside of, and in some cases despite, increasing pressures and mandates from the school, district, state and federal levels. They will talk about their roles as advocates for children’s play and why this is important to them as teachers. Participants will also have time to ask questions and discuss how this relates to their own practice and experiences.

Emily Cullen-Dunn

Through looking at one teacher’s reflection of practice from a private progressive Preschool setting to a public self contained special education classroom, discussion will center on the place of play in our children’s education. Who has the right to play? How do we advocate and make room for play in the spaces our children inhabit? Participants will be encouraged to bring forth their stories to share and inspire others to push back on the systems that threaten play and find the cracks where we can center joy in our children’s lives. 

Yoni Kallai

Join Yoni Kallai, play:groundNYC’s Program Director, Head Playworker and Co-founder for this session where he will cover concepts of adventure play and playwork while participants  process their own experiences in childhood and figure out how we can each help in repairing the world through the power of play.

Kim Ferguson

In this session, we will discuss a participatory action community-based program and research project that includes the development, implementation, and ongoing evaluation of Community Adventure Play Experiences (CAPEs) in rural, urban, and peri-urban settings in the United States, southern and East Africa, and across the globe. CAPEs are play experiences created by children using “loose parts”, natural, recycled, and other found materials available in their communities such as cardboard boxes, tires, fabric, recyclables, sand, wood, and water. They encourage children across diverse contexts to use their imaginations, develop initiative, collaborate, and problem-solve using materials found in their communities. Play facilitators ensure a safe physical and emotional space and assist children in their play as directed by the children themselves. Thus, CAPEs provide the opportunity for children in both low- and high-resource settings to engage in the creative, child-directed, open-ended play that is a crucial mode of learning for all children. In this workshop, we will consider intersections of theory, research, and practice as we understand the theory and research behind the CAPE program and consider how best to introduce it in varying school, home, and community settings through hands-on play and collaborative discussion. We will also introduce a CAPE Toolkit developed for organizations, parks, schools, and families interested in facilitating CAPEs across diverse communities.