Embracing Risky Play at School: A Teach Outdoors Podcast Interview With Dr. Mariana Brussoni

This is a transcript from a Teach Outdoors podcast interview with Dr. Mariana Brussoni.

Embracing Risky Play at Schools by Megan Zeni and Mariana Brusoni

Lauren: Welcome back to the Teach Outdoors Podcast everybody. Today we have an amazing guest speaker here. It's Dr. Mariana Brussoni, who is a professor at the University of British Columbia's Faculty of Medicine, the director of the Human Early Learning Partnership, and a scientist with British Columbia Children's Hospital where she leads the Outdoor Play Lab.

Her research reimagines how outdoor and risky play can be integrated into everyday life to help children thrive. I know how busy you are, so thank you so much for being here with us today. How are you doing?

Mariana: Oh, it's my pleasure. Our research is utterly meaningless without people like you and the teachers on the ground who are putting it into practice. So I am always delighted when I get the opportunity to speak directly to teachers.

Lauren: Thank you so much. I am very excited because you have a new book coming out with Dr. Megan Zeni called Embracing Risky Play at School. I want to first ask you what inspired you and Megan to write Embracing Risky Play at School specifically for the school context, because I'm sure there was a gap that you were trying to fill.

Mariana: Well, Megan is a force of nature, so part of it is that she's a tornado vortex that I got caught into. But in a more official capacity, in our work, in terms of the work in my lab, we had started working with parents quite a long time ago, which was very useful work to understand parents' mindsets and the kinds of things that got in the way. But in terms of making a real big impact to the lives of children, particularly focusing on equity, we realized pretty quickly that putting more burden on parents around "your kids need access to risky play" was not the way to do it and just increased the stress level and anxiety. We're still doing work with parents and wanting to empower parents, but in terms of thinking about kids and what they needed, we wanted to reach kids where they already spent their time. So childcare and schools was really the natural next step.

We did a lot of work with childcare in the early years and then more recently have gotten into risky play in schools. Certainly a lot of this has been driven by Megan Zeni and her incredible background. She did her PhD with me at UBC and was able to use that as an opportunity to do some deep research—participatory action research where she heard directly from the teachers who were the most experienced in this kind of work in BC as well as across the country.

What an opportunity to have them tell us what they needed, what they felt was most useful, and how they could provide what ended up being a digital companionship to fellow teachers who were at different stages of thinking about and trying to integrate this kind of play into their teaching practice.

Lauren: Is that where the Outdoor Play Lab, the online portal and the modules came from? It stemmed from all that work?

Mariana: Exactly. So we have the outsideplay.org website where we put as much of our resources as possible so they're easy to access. We have a parent tool from our past work in early childhood education, and then the teacher tool really spun out of that. It was those teachers saying, "What did I wish I had known?" or "What are the common 'yeah, buts' that come up when teachers try and do this work?"

In the end, the teacher tool—an online free tool with 16 little modules—addresses the most common concerns or challenges or areas where attention needs to be paid.

Lauren: It is one of those resources that I find is like a rabbit hole. I can just get lost into it because I can look into that question and search out what I really need to help me figure my way through that.

Mariana: Beautiful. It's working the way it's supposed to. Yay.

Lauren: Now I wanted to ask you a bit more about this definition of what risky play could be, because I do think that when a lot of us as educators hear "risky play," we think of a big injury, having to take them to the ER, or getting in trouble by the principal or the superintendent for liability issues. So how do we define risky play? Because we know that's not the intention—we're not putting them into harm. But what is risky play in the school context?

Mariana: Yeah, we have the academic definition of risky play, which I'll give you, and then there's qualifiers in terms of how we talk about it in different contexts for exactly the reasons that you're talking about.

The academic definition is thrilling and exciting forms of play where kids are engaged with uncertainty and there's a chance of physical injury.

If you break that down into the different components, you've got the thrill and excitement that comes from kids just trying new things, pushing themselves—maybe climbing a bit higher than they did yesterday, sliding faster, chasing, et cetera.

Then they're engaging with uncertainty. They don't know what's going to happen. It could be positive, it could be negative. That actually is probably what drives adults the most crazy. But it's such a critical part of risky play, not only because without it you don't have risky play, but also because it's such an important factor in terms of microdosing—getting kids ready for being out in the real world. The real world is abound with uncertainty every day, all the time.

Play in and of itself forms an incredible function in terms of children's learning and development, and risky play in particular, in the context of a situation that's not that dangerous—we'll talk about that in a moment—helps them microdose and get those little experiences that help them build their understanding of themselves, of what they're capable of, of what they're comfortable with, of how the world works—gravity, slipperiness, et cetera. And the fact that you can't control everything.

Importantly, things can go well and they figured it out by themselves, and that builds their self-confidence. Things can go badly, and that's also important because they learn so much from that and they also learn that they're capable of managing that. The world didn't fall down on my head. There's a lot of confidence that comes from that. In the rest of the context of their lives, it helps diminish the likelihood of anxiety where new and uncertain experiences aren't experiences to be feared and drawn away from, but experiences to be like, "Oh, this could be interesting and exciting, and I actually do have the skills to manage this," and kind of lean into it.

Now the last part of the definition is physical injury. That of course is what really scares people. But being an injury prevention researcher, I have dug deep into this topic. I've looked carefully at the injury statistics and the likelihood of injury.

We have our perceptions of the risk. This is play where you're moving your body. Anytime you're moving your body, particularly if you're moving it in new ways, there is the increased likelihood of injuring it. But to put it in context, for example, when we look at the injury statistics and the time spent doing an activity, you're more likely to get injured doing sports than you are during play.

In terms of the really serious or catastrophic injuries, they're very, very unlikely. Death is almost unheard of. We have, through the course of our societal norms and the way that we structured our schools, childcare, municipalities, et cetera, this deep risk aversion because we're so afraid of these injuries and the uncertainty that kids could face, without realizing, first of all, that that is quite unlikely, but also the vast negative consequences of that overprotective approach on children's development, wellbeing, learning, et cetera.

Lauren: Well, I have to say, I think I am more nervous as a parent than I am as a teacher, and I don't know why. I almost feel like it should be the opposite. I was much less anxious when they were toddlers, and I feel like my anxiety is actually worse now that they're a bit older—five and six years old. I don't know, is it because I am around and I'm watching the play now? I'm climbing the trees with them. I almost think for me it's that if other people see that I'm allowing it, that I'm going to be the one to get judged. I know I have to get over that. I mean, I'm still allowing it, but I have that pit in my stomach. I am the nervous parent. But I feel like I have Megan, and now you, in my head being like, "No, no—risk versus hazard. Risk versus hazard."

So actually, do you mind telling us a bit more about the difference between risk and a hazard before we move on?

Mariana: Sure. Yeah. And maybe first I'll tackle the parenting side of things just briefly. Don't feel bad. You are everybody. We've done lots of interviews with parents, and really there are kind of three main things that they're afraid of. The first being abduction of their children if they're not constantly supervised. The second being serious injury, like getting hit by a car or something. And the third is judgment by other people. So you're definitely not alone. They might go so far as to be afraid that social services will get called or the police will get called or whatever.

We do break down—the likelihood of abduction is one in 14 million. You'd have to leave your child unattended for 200,000 years. It's just not likely, especially by a stranger. These serious injuries—I can give you the stat—but an example is, over the course of over 20 years, we've had zero injuries from falls from trees and only two from falls from play equipment. At the same time, you've had over 2,000 from cars—being a passenger in a car.

Getting back to risk versus hazard: in some ways it's a bit of an artificial dichotomy, but it does help people get their head around it in terms of how do I support risky play. Also getting back to why we use the term "risky play" rather than just outdoor play or challenging play or whatever—part of the reason is because we want to uncouple the idea that risk is equivalent to danger or hazard. Risk is a neutral term that could have a positive or a negative outcome. We want to very deliberately uncouple those to make it clear that just taking risks doesn't mean that it's dangerous or hazardous. That kind of play in and of itself has value over and above outdoor play.

Hazards would be those things that kids might have a hard time identifying or managing. Maybe they don't have the lived experience to understand that something is dangerous, or they don't have the skills to manage it—like broken equipment on a playground or those kinds of things. If you're in a natural area, you want to pay attention to things like wind speed and weather—is there thunder, clouds, that kind of stuff? Kids might not have the lived experience, and then it's up to an adult to really be the supervisory adult and be able to manage the hazards. Ideally, bringing kids along so that they also are able to participate in that.

Risks would be those kinds of things that we want to maintain in the play environment so that kids could make a decision for themselves whether they want to engage in that—how high they climb, how fast they run, how steep a slope they go down when they're sledding, those kinds of things.

As an adult, we want to look at a play environment as kind of a risk-benefit assessment. Have a look at this place, figure out are there serious hazards—we're not going to be able to fix them all—serious hazards that we need to mitigate so that kids have the freedom to be able to explore the risks.

Lauren: That actually is a perfect segue because I also wanted to ask you about these categories that you have of risky play in school—the heights, speed, tools, rough-and-tumble play, disappearing or chance of getting lost, and there's actually dangerous elements.

Mariana: There's a couple of new ones, and these really come out of Ellen Sandseter's work. She's a Norwegian researcher, so I cannot take credit for them. There's a couple more that have been identified. One is play with impact. Another is vicarious play—when younger kids are watching older kids and getting a vicarious thrill from that. As well as play involved in breaking rules.

Lauren: So all of those are ones that have been identified. In terms of the school setting, which ones of these categories of risky play involve a bit more of that intentional planning by the teacher or admin, or even which ones might we need to encourage some policy shifts so that we can encourage a bit more of this?

Mariana: I don't know that you would necessarily plan for, "Okay, I want to make sure risky play at heights emerges during this session." That's not really how it works. There are three key ingredients to supporting high-quality outdoor play experiences: The first is time. The second is space. And the third is freedom.

With respect to time, it's the intentional—this is something that kids need every day, just like they need to eat and sleep and all of these other things. Recognizing that we need to save time in kids' days to do this, including as part of their school day.

The space looks at having it be accessible and having the affordances of that space be such that there's lots of things that can be done in that space. Often it involves things like loose parts or provocations or those sorts of things.

The third is freedom. The biggest challenge there really is us adults being really afraid and limiting what kids are allowed to do. When all of the ingredients are there, risky play will emerge. But if we've designed our environment well, kids can—all of those kinds of risky play can emerge depending on what the kid's imagination shapes the play to be or whatever.

Megan talks about a continuum of teaching. At one end of the continuum, you have play with rules—for example, when you're playing Simon Says or things like that, very intentional. At the other end is entirely free play, which is where what I'm talking about really lies—the kids being able to direct that play. Then in the middle is often the sweet spot for many teachers, but there's no right or wrong here. Teachers can play with the whole continuum as they see fit. The middle might be a bit more intentionality in terms of what happens—like maybe you want to make sure to cover the water cycle, so you have provocations that would lead to that sort of thing. There are ways that you can think about and play with the play environment depending on what your intentions are.

Lauren: I love that you talked about vicarious play because I have a lot of students that we might think are not actively engaging in play or learning, but you see them—they are watching their classmates like a hawk. You can tell they lean in or their eyes get wide. I know they're learning. I know they're very excited. So I love that that part is now being included in the research because we can see it as teachers. They are still very much engaged in that play. It just looks a little differently.

Mariana: Yeah. And it helps scaffold for those kids. They watch first, maybe they try later.

Lauren: The other thing that I would like to piggyback onto that conversation is the idea of how teachers or adults can step back, or how we can see ourselves versus, do we have to step back? Do we have to supervise? When do I have to intervene? Is there a framework or some questions that you could suggest that we could ask ourselves as the educator in the moment? I'm seeing a group of learners engaging in risky play and I'm getting that pit in my stomach—what do we do?

Mariana: Yeah, it's a great question. We have a term called dynamic risk-benefit assessment, which is pretty much what you're doing all the time when kids are engaging in risky play and you are the responsible adult.

There are some things that you are going to think about and set up beforehand that will help with that dynamic risk assessment at the time. Let me give you an example. There are these different kinds of risky play. Some of them have more challenging aspects to them than others. Let's think about rough-and-tumble play or play with tools. Having said that, play with tools could just be scissors and then it's not as dangerous. But my point being that, for example, with rough-and-tumble play, which is such an important kind of play, you might need to think about the area.

Megan talks about "yes spaces"—spaces where rough-and-tumble play or, when there's snow, snowball fights, those kinds of things can happen. So you're not saying no, but you're setting up a controlled boundary area so that kids who want to engage in that kind of play can go. It means the other kids who don't want to engage in that play don't get sucked into that. It doesn't take over the entire space. And you also think about the kind of oversight or supervision that needs to happen in that space.

Megan's rule is don't have two high risky play things going on at the same time. If you're doing this, then you're also making sure that there's not major stuff going on elsewhere because you can't divide your attention.

Also, the intentionality around that—games like Simon Says or command games are also an important early stage when new learners come in. You don't have a relationship with them. You want to get to know them, and you want them to start to get some understanding around how does this environment work? First, getting them used to hearing your voice and taking commands so that when things happen—like a coyote shows up in the play yard—they know when they hear this or see that, that they have to come back.

If you really integrate this throughout your learning, you're going to create some norms around how kids engage with this kind of play that make it quite easy to do management of these kids outdoors.

With rough-and-tumble play and other types of play like that, you also want to bring the kids along around setting the rules, if you want to call them that, for that space. You don't want to front-load the rules because then the play where you're breaking rules component—you're just activating that. But you also don't necessarily need a bunch of rules. Let's work together around how do we think about the intentionality of this activity in this space. Also having reflection circle time and that sort of thing.

There's so much other learning that happens with this kind of play that you can also scaffold other aspects of the curriculum. For example, with rough-and-tumble play, consent is an incredible learning opportunity from that.

Lauren: Well, it's from a few years ago now, but this idea of rough-and-tumble play—we had a parent complaint. We were playing soccer during recess time, so not a teaching time, but still school hours. The parent complained, "My child has a lot of bruises. Obviously soccer is becoming a bit too aggressive." The principal at the time went out, watched the soccer play, and emailed brilliantly saying, "I watched. I've been watching for a week or so. I saw some amazing soccer. Soccer is a physical sport. This is what happens."

Again, a bit of that is that child knew—soccer, there's going to be pushing and shoving. There's kicks. Sometimes you don't always hit the ball. You miss. Sometimes your leg is going to get kicked. Sometimes the ball is going to get kicked. So that is consent. If you are going to be playing soccer, you need to know that you could get hurt. If you don't like getting hurt, you've got to step out. But I have yet to come across so many principals in my career that would be that supportive of that type of play. I really appreciated it. I mean, the parent wasn't that upset, but it was more of a concern type of email.

I think there is a lot of work that sometimes needs to be done in terms of how we support these students. Would you have any advice on what a teacher could say—I mean, not necessarily with the soccer example, but any type of example—what we could say if there was an injury during outdoor playtime? Because I don't want us to shut down any more opportunities to still be outside because of one injury. But I also need to honor the kids' experiences. Do you have any advice on how we help those difficult conversations?

Mariana: Yeah. A couple of things come to mind for me. First of all is the importance—when we work with schools, one of the first things that we ask that they do is that they think deeply about their values around this kind of play. Why is it important to them and how can they best support it? That's where you want—as teachers, you want to feel like the principal has your back. Otherwise, it's really hard to take that risk. It's got to be an all-of-school culture where you're thinking very intentionally around this and you're revisiting it. For example, it comes up at every staff meeting or whatever, so you're bringing everybody along the whole way, including parents.

When parents are signing their kids up for this school, this is the school that their kids are going to—from the very beginning, they understand what they're getting into, why this is important and so on. That ongoing communication too, to show them—really make it obvious what their child gets out of this experience, so that they can see it for themselves and value it.

The other thing that I would add is more from an injury prevention perspective. In terms of how injury prevention has changed our approach—many, many years ago we had an "as safe as possible" approach. Let's minimize every injury, even the minor ones, because just in case it could have been a major one. What that didn't consider was the vast, unintended negative consequences of trying to prevent every injury. Not only is that unrealistic, it's also undesirable. So we shifted to an "as safe as necessary" approach. How can we think about the play environment as a place where we limit the likelihood of very serious injuries and death?

I will say that serious injuries are not even broken arms or broken limbs. I would not actually classify that in many—I'm at Children's Hospital right now. My orthopedic surgeon colleagues who are down the hall would also say, "You know what? Let them play. The benefits that they get from that are so important that we can fix the broken arms and those kinds of things."

I know that sometimes parents and teachers have a hard time with this, but you have to keep it in the bigger picture in terms of the benefits that kids get from these experiences. When we think about play environments, we really think about safety management from that perspective.

There is a lot of predictability around what leads to serious injury and death, and it's actually not that hard to manage. In terms of the dynamic risk-benefit assessment, for example, noticing if it's a particularly windy day and you're around trees—get away from the trees, maybe go inside, those kinds of things, because those things can cause serious injury and death. But like playing soccer, a few bruises, even a broken arm—the monkey bars are infamous. That's where we see most broken arms on the playground. Are we going to take out the monkey bars? You know what you're going to have then? You're going to have kids without upper body strength and without coordination. And then you know what offshoots of issues you're going to have—just because maybe a handful of kids across the city will have a broken arm that year. We really need to think about this as a balance.

Lauren: Yeah. I'm trying to even imagine—from K—I am a K to five school. What risky play is going to look like for a kindergarten is going to be drastically different from a grade five student. I can't even begin to imagine a high school, but we would also have to have those conversations as a staff when we're coming together every staff meeting, so that we're on the same page, but having those discussions that for a kindergarten, this is what it could look like and this is why it's developmentally appropriate. We need to be on those monkey bars, as you said.

So here's my question—what about the kids that can't reach the monkey bars? Are we lifting them up so that they can reach it?

Mariana: No. Thank you.

Lauren: Okay. It's okay for me to say to my daughter, "No, you have to wait till you can reach."

Mariana: Yeah. Okay.

Lauren: I just think she needs to be independent. Yeah, I don't want her to wait for me because then I'm not picking her up. She has to be able to drop to the ground as well.

Mariana: Well, it's actually from a safety perspective too. You increase the likelihood of injury if you are scaffolding in that way. Same as with climbing trees. You don't want to lift kids up into trees. They need to have the strength and the coordination to do that for themselves.

You can support and scaffold. Part of the dynamic risk-benefit assessment when kids are—you can help them along the way. Let's say they're up in a tree and they're having trouble getting down, or you're noticing that one of the branches is maybe a bit thinner than the others. "Hey, what's your planned route up there? Have you noticed anything?" That sort of thing, so that you're putting the power as much as possible and building the competence as much as possible for those kids. You're scaffolding their risk management skills, not leapfrogging over important skills that they need to develop independently.

Lauren: That's a good visual. I like that.

One of the last questions that I did want to ask you, and it's sort of from the beginning of our conversation—we were talking a bit about how outdoor play is going to build that resilience piece for some kids and it will help decrease their anxiety. Is there a connection between the lack of risky play in childhood and resilience or perseverance? I think perseverance is a big one that we are seeing as teachers—that a student will try something, it doesn't work, and so they just stop. So if we can increase the time and space and freedom of having these risky play experiences, will we see some benefits in terms of their mental health as well?

Mariana: Yes, yes, you will. And we have more and more research around this. If you think back to that idea of uncertainty—one of the key markers of children who have anxiety is that when they see new situations or uncertainty, they're more likely to interpret that as a danger or a hazard to be pulled away from, rather than a thrill or excitement opportunity to be leaned into. Then you have a self-perpetuating cycle where they avoid and avoid and avoid, and more things and more things become scary. They don't get past some of those fears, and in some more extreme cases, they develop into phobias.

Even from that perspective, it's really important. From a resilience side of things, things will go wrong. They absolutely will go wrong. Kids will need to learn how to pivot, learn how to do creative problem solving. "Oh, that didn't work. Let's try something else." Or, "Oh boy, that was a big mistake," and kind of backtrack and figure other things out. But all of that, without having adults guide that and force that—kids, it's coming from themselves. They are also recognizing their own abilities to do this, and they're practicing those executive function muscles.

This is a really important aspect of learning that everybody needs. It's predictive of long-term outcomes—health, wealth, wellbeing, et cetera. It's not a natural ability that you are born with and then you're done. It's something that needs to be cultivated and practiced throughout learning and life. This is an amazing opportunity to be able to dig into and practice some of those skills to build executive functioning and cognitive development.

Lauren: I would love to then ask you what else are we learning, quote unquote, when we are engaging in risky play? The one small nugget that is stuck in my head right now is when I taught in Richmond—flat, mostly paved—and I took this kindergarten class to UBC. I had all these activities planned, but they didn't know how to walk in a forest that was not paved. We didn't know how to walk on logs without falling off. So that's the connection that I'm making. When we're trying to show and prove, I guess, to parents how much they're learning when they have these risky play experiences, what else are they learning?

Mariana: I mean, so many things. I think that the easiest way maybe for people to wrap their head around this—I often ask people, "Think back to your favorite play memory. What was it?" Really dig deep into that memory. Where you were and what you were doing and who you were with and was an adult around. Were you supervised? Were you taking risks? And then, what did you get out of that?

People often talk about a sense of joy and fun and excitement. Even in an educational context, we're having so many issues with children's engagement with learning. So even that aspect of it alone—the kids are engaged, they're leaning in, they're having fun.

You're also applying—you're learning things in the real world. It's not this abstract—risk management skills is a good example. It's not like somebody—you're opening a textbook and you're like, "Well, in this situation you've got to do this." That doesn't work. You need to experience it for yourself. Engage in that for yourself. Realize how painful gravity can be sometimes, and like slippery pavement. I would rather learn that wet pavement is slippery when I'm running than later when I'm driving in a car and I can cause much more serious harm and damage.

But you also learn—you're moving your body in new ways. So you're learning physical literacy skills, like you said, the kids being able to figure out how to walk and manage these kinds of things. You're engaging with other kids, so there's a lot of negotiation involved in that, a lot of social competence required. You're experiencing strong emotions like thrill and excitement. The emotional literacy that comes from that—for example, recognizing thrill and excitement as positive emotions versus something that's negative that you want to shrink away from. And on and on and on, really.

Lauren: Yeah. I think it is a never-ending list for sure.

I know that I have kept you for a long time, so maybe my final question would be, if you could wave a magical wand, what would be something that you would like to change about how schools approach outdoor play and learning?

Mariana: I would want this to be a part of every child's day, every day, and every teacher teaching outside. But I also recognize that people can very quickly feel overwhelmed by, "Oh, how do I even start?"

The outsideplay.org teacher tool is part of that. But what I would encourage somebody who's considering this, just getting started, is: What's one really small, simple step that you can take next time you're in the classroom that feels like it's so easy that it's not this huge thing that you have to think about? Think about this as a journey where you can incrementally change your practice along the way.

The importance of mentorship—having podcasts like yours where teachers can get new ideas, being able to access other teachers to say, "Hey, this happened, what should I do?"—those kinds of things are just so important. I really want, and we're in the process of it, building out the infrastructure that makes this just a no-brainer for teachers. The pre-service training, all of that. So you have this ecosystem where teachers just—it's just the way they do things. They don't even think about it.

I would add the vast benefits that teachers themselves would get from this over and above the students and the learning that can happen—the wellbeing, the health benefits, the less likelihood of burnout.

Lauren: Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing all of this. I have an entire page of notes, and I've heard you speak three other times, and every time I hear you speak, I'm learning more. So I appreciate how much wisdom and excitement and confidence that you're giving us as teachers. I really do appreciate all of the work.

Mariana: Well, thank you for inviting me, Lauren. It's inspirational to have teachers like you and Megan and others who are doing this work on the ground and really teaching all of us how possible it is.

Lauren: You are too kind. Well, thank you so much. If people would like to get in contact with you, what would be the best method?

Mariana: Well, go to the outsideplay.org website and there is a contact link there and they can get in touch with the lab.

Lauren: Amazing. Well, thank you so much. I hope everybody enjoyed our episode today and I will end the episode as always with the song from Brandon Grant called "From the Trees." Bye for now.