“We would like to have some playing time here too” – Ghanian students push back at essentialist teachers and cognitive focused curriculum in resource rich school
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite extensive research highlighting the benefits of play in education, many educators still perceive it as a distraction from “real” academic work. Existing studies on play have largely overlooked learners’ perspectives, focusing instead on the views of parents, educators, and policymakers. Grounded in Michael Schiro’s curriculum theorisation, this qualitative case study explores how students in a resource-rich public school in Ghana perceive and experience play. Over one school term, we engaged 14- to 15-year-old students and teachers through interviews, observations, and photo elicitations. Our findings reveal that while abundant resources can enhance learning, they may also unintentionally restrict play opportunities, creating tensions between students’ holistic development and curriculum priorities. These contradictions underscore the need for a balanced approach to education. We call on educators to rethink curriculum design and prioritise holistic learning experiences that acknowledge adolescent students’ right to play as an essential part of their growth.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".