Neta Ariely ‘28
Image credit: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02614367.2023.2210784
Playing with Legos® has always been one of my favorite childhood pastimes. I would spend hours building people, buildings, machines, and anything else I could think of. Legos® gave me an outlet to think creatively, and most importantly, for myself. Growing up in an era where so many childhood activities become passive, Lego® play was purely imaginative. My creations came from me — they were me, in lots of ways. What I didn’t know back then, however, were the ways in which Legos® could continue to challenge me years later, doing so in an exciting, creative, and stress-free way.
Serious Play takes activities and processes that generate creativity and innovation and applies this creativity to serious matters such as mental health and well-being. Legos® have specific and unique benefits in triggering our internal creativity and innovation. We engage in Lego® play by actively and physically connecting different parts together. Our thoughts and ideas are subsequently manifested in tangible representations of unlimited possibilities, patterns, connections, and relationships. Lego® Serious Play (LSP) is a version of serious play, combining the advantageous nature of Legos® with methodical and structured activity. In response to various questions, the Lego® Serious Play® method has participants build metaphorical structures with Legos, asking individuals to create a Lego® construction as their answer to said prompt. Individuals will then cultivate stories and narratives surrounding their structures, where their physical construction serves as a representation of their inner thoughts, ideas, and state of being. Originally developed back in the 1990s to help organizations and leadership-teams improve their strategy and problem-solving abilities, LSP has since been largely utilized in corporate retreats, business settings, and many more professional capacities.
To explore this concept with a new population, Shipway and Henderson (2023) researched the ways that LSP can help not only adults, but children as well, struggling in their schooling settings.
Children and Young People (CYP) face multitudes of challenges within their academic environment. Researchers have noted particularly intense anxiety struggles in transition periods, where CYP, specifically 3rd-6th graders in this study, move between year groups or to a new school. Amongst many struggles that students grapple with during this period, social realities remain a particularly prevalent challenge: navigating social identity, emotional development, overall sense of self, and more.
In this study, researchers facilitated LSP as students completed various tasks with Legos® within certain time parameters. Researchers posed a series of questions and tasks to participants:
- Build a model of a free-standing tower
- Build a model that reflects your favorite thing
- Build a model of something that worries you about changing classes
- Build a model of something that would make changing classes or school better
The idea that there are no wrong answers and that everyone should trust both their hands and the process was conveyed and reinforced to participants. After each build, participants and facilitators would enter a discussion, where the students assigned symbolic and storytelling significance to their creations.
Overall, the use of Legos®, a comfortable and familiar tool, in serious, intentional play, aided students in asserting their social identity, while fostering intellectual communication, emotional and social development, and an internal sense of self. This play created a safe space for experimenting and an outlet to confront and interact with their problems in a new way. Researchers also gained valuable insight into students’ state of being and how to alleviate some of their anxieties and fears surrounding educational transition. One such takeaway was the ways in which different grade levels felt anxious about different things. 3rd graders, for example, were much more stressed about their classroom and physical space, while 5th and 6th graders were primarily concerned with how they were perceived by peers. While stressors fluctuated across the age levels, LSP remained a powerful and effective tool. LSP is versatile, beneficial to students and business professionals alike.
This same line of reasoning is likely to apply to college students as well.
Legos® are one of the many materials provided at our Davidson Wellness Spot. Even without the active facilitation, we can individually partake in Lego® Serious Play. Give yourself a prompt, and allow yourself to think and build creatively. You can make a model of a stressful impending school assignment, your ideal dorm room, or quite literally anything else. By actively reflecting on what makes us anxious, and confronting these internal fears by engaging with Legos®, we set ourselves up to become better, more socially-confident and self-aware people.
College is hard. Sometimes we need to revisit the tools of our youth in order to set our future selves up for success.
Shipway, R., & Henderson, H. (2023). Everything is awesome! Lego® Serious Play® (LSP) and the interaction between leisure, education, mental health and wellbeing. Leisure Studies, 43(2), 187–204. https://doi.org/10.1080/02614367.2023.2210784
