Each year, the LEGO Foundation holds its “LEGO Idea Conference.” It is an invitation-only event and I am fortunate to be on the guest list. The LEGO Foundation hosted me, along with about 300 leaders in the field of play, education, learning, and international development for three days in the LEGOLAND Hotel and Conference Center in Billund, Denmark. In playful all-day working sessions—often with bricks and mini-figures in our hands—we concentrated on identifying barriers to systemic problems in global education and on imagining playful solutions.
The name LEGO, a contraction of the Danish phrase “Leg Godt,” literally means “play well.” And the company is devoted to the importance of play. “Our idea has been to create a toy that prepares the child for life—appealing to its imagination and developing the creative urge and joy of creation that are the driving forces in every human being,” said Godtfred Kirk Christiansen (son of LEGO’s founder) in the 1960s while he was president of the board and the owner of the company.
Thomas Kirk Kristiansen (Deputy Chairman of the LEGO Foundation board), Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen... [+]
Today, the LEGO Foundation holds a twenty-five percent stake in the LEGO Group. I don’t need to explain the LEGO Group in detail as everyone is already acquainted with ubiquitous interlocking plastic brick. The company is both a cultural icon and a corporate behemoth. In their most recent annual report (here), they reported around a billion dollars in profit. At the annual results press conference earlier this year, CEO Jørgen Vig Knudstorp introduced the financial report by dancing and singing the song from The LEGO Movie, “Everything is awesome! Everything is cool when you’re part of a team.” Lately, they seem to announce record breaking growth year after year and now estimate that they are the world’s second largest toy company.
The LEGO Foundation aims to leverage its share of LEGO Group profits and assets in order to “build a future where learning through play empowers children to become creative, engaged life-long learners.” They provide support to a variety of global programs, as well as implementing some of their own programs, to promote “systemic, scalable change.” One of their big priorities is to spark a global dialogue around the importance of playful learning. To that end, they’ve recently been working on understanding how to build “next generation research and innovation networks.” Related, they also host the annual Idea Conference in order to bring a network of players together.
It is not called the “Idea Conference” because it is about sharing ideas, instead it is because the conference is dedicated to exploring something LEGO likes to call the LEGO Idea: “When we put things together, take them apart, then put them together again in different ways, we are not only creating, but also evaluating, reflecting, and re-creating to achieve new possibilities.” LEGO is all about experiential, inquiry and project based learning that values social and emotional skills just as highly as cognitive, or academic skills.
The conference works the same way. Unlike most education conferences, where experts deliver plenaries to audiences, the LEGO Idea conference involves building and participating in workshops. The majority of sessions are small groups of well-established grown-ups, many of which you’d normally find at Davos or the Global Education and Skills Forum. In Denmark, however, leaders from Brookings, the World Bank, and Unicef all look like they’ve returned to Kindergarten. Not only were participants erecting towers of Duplo blocks and playacting with Legend of Chima mini-figures, we were also sketching with magic markers and crafting 3D models of intricate systems with feathers, pipe-cleaners and glue sticks.
We were taking things apart and putting them back together again. We were learning, making, and doing together. It was an experiential exploration of real world barriers—economic, political, infrastructural and epistemological—that prevent school systems from adopting pedagogies that have been proven to be more impactful. Why, despite decade’s worth of research in child development which shows the importance, do we still consider “play” to be superficial? Is the baggage of the puritanical work ethic really so strong that we feel morally obliged to consider school to be “work?” These everyday mindsets and attitudes are in the way of providing children, all over the world, with the best possible education to prepare them to creatively solve the problems of an unknown future.
Certainly, it wasn’t all perfect. Many of the familiar dichotomies and hyperboles filled out the conversation at the LEGO Idea Conference. In particular, some participants took such a rigid stance against the current high-stakes testing practices that they seemed to forget the importance of assessment altogether. Absurdly over-polarizing things, they lobbied for the elimination of measurement. They miss the point: the problem is not assessment or accountability in themselves, but rather that the current measurement practices teach children that academic content is simply intellectual capital.
I suppose there is nothing inherently wrong with the notion of knowledge as measurable intellectual capital. It may even be helpful within a world that has so much adulation for economic ways of knowing. Besides, the metaphor works. We can imagine academic content and cognitive skills as a kind of wealth—assets that individuals acquire, cement, and maintain during their school careers. The trouble is that our schools are designed, with divisions and separations (by grade, by age, by classroom, by desk, by exam, by assignment, by ranking), in a way that implicitly teaches students that intellectual capital, like financial capital, is most valuable within a scarcity model. Hoard it and protect it. Knowledge belongs to individual proprietors. Don’t share it. Instead, invest it for long-term personal gain.
To the contrary, a more experiential learning model—playful, collaborative, creative—would teach young people that the importance of academic content and cognitive skills lies the capacity for the knowledge we learn to be used as transactional currency. In other words, learning manufactures the material through which we mediate and negotiate relationships—through which we interact and play together. Learning, one could say, is really about Playful Currency.
Which LEGO bricks does each individual bring to the play-date of human society, community, civilization? And how do they build with them? Thinking of education as the process through which we equip young people with the Playful Currency of shared languages prioritizes innovation, creativity, equity, and human dignity.
At the LEGO Idea Conference, I saw how this could work first hand. The people I played with each day brought unique skills into the game. We shared ideas. We iterated suggestions. We laughed and we played.
