Beauty of Play Conference

On the lookout for new ideas?

Then come along to the Beauty of Play Conference (4 – 6 September) which is an annual celebration of play, music and story-telling under the Staffordshire stars.

I’ll be facilitating a completely wordless workshop that will be an investigation of non-lingual play cues and communication.  It’s a first for me, and this is how excited I feel.

For booking information go to the Ludemos website or email info.ludemos@virgin.net.

“My ship is rock now”

I’ve been going through the notes from the Sarah Lawrence Conference and found a little stack of papers from our morning of observations at their Early Childhood Centre.  Apart from the rather old-fashioned nature of these observations, in which adults sat silently on the fringes with notepads and pens as if on some sort of safari, it was strangely liberating to watch children who were not my responsibility.  The four and five year olds moved through the two rooms, crossing in and out of play situations and selecting materials from their surroundings as necessary.

Child 1: “Pretend this is a wire.  Pretend this is a huge wire.”

Child 2: “But it isn’t.  It’s for this.  It keeps it strong.”

Child 1: “Well, let’s drive.  This is a car.”

Child 2: “Okay, but we need a steering wheel.”

Setha Low, the New York urban anthropologist who studies public spaces, said that we should be able to do whatever we like in our play areas. However, Low notes, “people are willing to compromise those rights in order to be there together.”  The same could be said of play itself, which may seem chaotic or anarchic at first, but is conducted according to complex and evolving ordering systems.  These systems, the rules of the game, have to be constantly renegotiated, and it was this process that interested me most during the observations.  The children undertook these negotiations because the ultimate goal of playing together was worth the effort required – even if it took longer than the play itself.

Child 3: “Can I tell you something?  This is a vacuum cleaner.  To suck up dirt.”

Child 4: “It’s actually not.”

It struck me forcibly how many play cues were offered for each one that was accepted.  Rapid-fire exchanges dominated, pushing the play on and changing it, as one child’s imagination conjured up the storm that struck another child’s spaceship, who then avoided a crash by changing the storm to a “twister with no lightening in it” and then turning his spaceship to rock.  Children offered ideas for play which were rejected or taken up, adapted through the complex negotiations that determined what compromises each child was willing to make in order for play to go on.

On the way out we passed another child, who had previously pushed another into starting a game of chess.  His partner had said “but you’ll win, you always win” even as he acquiesced.  The partner left soon after when a former play friend called him back, and the first boy watched him leave.  Then, unsure of what to do, he parroted the conversation that took the boy away, repeating the phrases of others in a loud and squawking tone.  When no one responded to this warped play cue, he just kept going, his voice getting louder and louder as he became angry, echoing that play conversation that did not open to include him.

It seemed then that the basis of social participation then was flexibility, the capacity to keep sending out offers until one had the desired response.  For the boy with a limited range of entry behaviours, losing a play partner was nothing short of a catastrophe. 

Fanta!

I have had the excellent good fortune to live around the corner from one of the famous new Pathfinder sites.  Here is some info from the DCFS website that explains a bit about the government’s investment in play, for those not familiar with the scheme.

I wrote about the absurdities of the building of this place  here, for the Play Times Project I’ve been working on at the Play Association Tower Hamlets, but the space looks beautiful now.  The grass is still a bit patchy and there’s an internal fence that’s been trampled down, but they’ve been busy planting flowers around the edge and you can start to feel the shape of it.

And someone’s been engaging there in an on-going ‘consultation’:

I’m not sure exactly what about this made me so deeply happy, whether it was the oddness of seeing cherries speared so deliberately onto a familiar railing, or if it was the way their headed tilted as if they were – what?  Resigned?  Impaled?  All in agreement?

There was also this little contribution:

Now, I hate litter.  When I see someone throw a paper cup out of their window I want to grab it and throw it back in there, on fire.  But this is something different, it’s intentional and it’s a bit ridiculous and it’s playful – you can feel the sense of humor.

There’s also something about the fact that it’s along a railing – Penny Wilson’s writings on liminal spaces and play is worth a look.  It’s also interesting that the creators made these contributions here, and not outside the far posher park a few streets away.

More than anything, these two artifacts are both proof that people use this place to meet one another, to mess around.  The social behaviour that so often gets prefaced with ‘anti-’.  And where more appropriate than under a DCSF-funded sign that says ‘PLAY HERE’?

“When he’s eight…”

Risky play is big right now.  Play England’s Managing Risk in Play Provision is both symptom and contributing cause to a storm of public and practitioner interest on the subject.  What do we allow on site, how and why?  Children need risk in their play, need to be able to learn how to conduct their own assessments, but how can we support them in this process without becoming negligent?  If Adventure Playgrounds are supposed to be places where children can climb trees, have fires and build hideouts, why have so many playworkers succumbed to the same Health and Safety anxiety as everyone else?

I’ve made arguments before for more talk about emotional or social risk, and will be speaking at Islington Council’s Risky Play Conference next Wednesday about the need for a fully inclusive framework for risky play provision.  Like many other people, I think I know what I’m talking about and I talk about it a lot. 

In Gambia, however, I was amazed by the extent to which children were engaging in play behaviours which I would have classed as profoundly risky, but which they took entirely for granted. 

Most obviously, they climbed very high trees, for pure fun and to collect mangoes.  I saw one small child get stuck at the end of a branch and intentionally fall out, shake himself off and start again.

Much more startling to me were the stories of the boys’ hunting expeditions out into the bush.  Older boys make bows and arrows to hunt wild pigs, bringing their knives with them.  I asked one if he brought his younger brother with him.

“No,” he said.  “He’s too little.  He (hunts) rabbits.  When he’s 8, then he come.”

Some of this blurs the line between children’s play and work – a distinction which many theorists have pointed out is largely one of adult construction.  If children choose to go hunting and gathering with their friends, sometimes singing or playing games along the way, calling it child labour seems absurd.  That said, the boys’ voluntary hunting expeditions directly contribute to the welfare of their family and village as rabbits and wild pigs regularly destroy crops.

They said it was exciting to go, and they seemed proud of being both old and strong enough to do this important, useful thing.  It was clear that bringing back the meat to his family would be a very important moment in a boy’s life, and many of the younger boys were sitting in the playground making toy bows and arrows for their games.  The element of danger made it all the more exciting.

What interested me though, was that the younger boys weren’t formally taught to make bows, and none of the boys were taught by their parents.  Each generation learned in stages, first by observing the preparations of their elders from a distance, by mimicking what they had seen.  Then, when they were old enough to be taken along on rabbiting trips, they were allowed to watch but not participate.  Only gradually, after many halts and stages, would they be considered hunters.

This was a child’s cultural knowledge, hoarded and shared according to the judgements the eldest ones made of those younder, and however much the wider community may have benefited from the hunt, it was conducted by and for the boys themselves.

So how can we add this to what we know?  That children can conduct their own assessments of risk and benefit, both for themselves and for those younger or less experienced, can largely be taken for granted.  But these boys demonstrated that children can do this from a younger age than we might imagine, in the face of risks that we would not willingly take ourselves – how many readers of this would hunt a wild pig with a knife?

It reinforced for me how particular our ideas of risk are, and how paranoid.  These children take their freedom to roam for granted, as well as their ownership of a knife and ability to use both in whatever way they see fit.  Our fears over paving stones that get slippery or climbing walls with too high a drop demonstrate how we still take carry the false belief that we can control all elements of our children’s environments.  Even when we argue for more risk in play provision, we think of it as something we can “manage”, when we know that the real dangers are always unexpected.  The middle ground we seem to be striking for, of building designated playgrounds that offer carefully considered opportunities for risk, is still not nearly enough.

Michael Jackson, Playground Zombie

I wasn’t going to post on Michael Jackson.  Apart from the fact that this is a blog on playwork theory and practice, I didn’t feel that I had anything particular to add to the recent conversations.  I admired him for his music and choreography but didn’t count myself a particular fan and haven’t followed the coverage of the legions of mourners or the memorial service beyond what was unavoidable.  His life and death, however, has been inescapable – not just when I turn on the television, go online or talk to friends, but also when I go out on session.

The children, who see and notice everything, have been feverishly playing ‘Michael Jackson’.  It is so popular that it has even overtaken playing ‘Swine Flu’.

Children’s ability to play out aspects of their experience that interest, confuse or trouble them had been well documented.  When the children put on one glove and act out Michael Jackson as a zombie that tries to eat children, it seems likely that they are mixing together the videos they have seen with a knowledge of his death and turning it into something new.  However, the Playground Michael Jackson, so far as I have seen, has been only a source of fascination and terror.  He does not sing, he does not dance, he is not interested in issues of race or global warming.  The Playground Michael Jackson wears masks dripping red and presses paint-covered hands onto the arms of children laugh-screaming with terror.  He sucks their blood and keeps them captive in the corners of the play area.

“When he died,” one girl asked me, “were you sad?”

How to explain that one?  I don’t know whether separating an artist’s personal habits from their work is possible or advisable, and this cocktail of disillusionment and nostalgia makes me queasy.

“A little,” I said.  “It was complicated.  He was popular when I was about your age, so I remember him a little differently.”  She squinted at me as if I hadn’t given her quite what she was looking for.

She was in a conspiratorial huddle a few minutes later with her best friend, whispering and looking over each other’s shoulders for eavesdroppers.  I wandered past casually (blaming my incurably nosy nature on anthropological curiosity) and caught a few words from them.

Jackson.  Paedo.  Why?  Scary.

Now, children are far more aware of the existence, proclivities and dangers of dangerous members of society than we might wish.  They talk about them to one another, sometimes hurl the terms at adults and are blisteringly suspicious of anyone wanting to take their picture.  They were not asking “why was he a paedo?”, but “why do adults care so much, that a paedo died?”

I realized then that the earlier question had been a test, had been an investigation by her into whether, or how, a person who spends their days with children in a position of trust and care would be sad at the death of someone everyone believed to have behaved inappropriately with children.  If paedophiles are, as widely reported, terrifying and predatory and dangerous to our most vulnerable citizens, why was the death of one so terrible?  In short, so what if he could dance?

Acquittal aside, most people I speak with take for granted that they would not have let him babysit their children, and yet they get teary at the thought of his death.  How can we explain this to children?  When we address, or fail to address, the difficulties of being unable to trust someone we think we know, children are paying close attention.  When we say “yes, but…” and weigh our own belief in his guilt with our fascination with the moonwalk, they are watching and making judgements of their own.

Home Again

I’m back from my travels now and it’s taken me a little while to get recollect myself.  I never seem to understand what the traveling has meant until I’ve been home for a week or two, and this has proved truer than usual after my back-to-back trips.

I was in New York first, visiting friends and going to my Vassar Reunion, then upstate to Sarah Lawrence to speak at the Play’s the Thing Conference.  After that I flew back to London.  I had about 18 hours to dump out my backpack and refill it for a week in the Gambia, where I joined a group of playworkers and set about rebuilding a nursery and doing playwork in a community an hour outside of Banjul.

So, in a single vacation that made me sound far more jet set than I normally do, I enjoyed the nostalgia of formative theoretical debates, visited a thriving space for new discussion on play, and involved myself in a community that was wholly new to me, with issues and opportunities all its own.

In short, I was reminded of social concerns identified and addressed by one community:

And introduced to those of another:

This is the nursery school that we were helping to rebuild, closed since its roof fell in more than two years ago.

And here are some of the children who came along to help us, play with us, and see what we were all about:

There’s a lot more to come as I go through my notes and journal entries – both from the Gambia and from my time at Sarah Lawrence and their amazing Child Development Institute and Early Childhood Center.  My workshop was on the history and practice of playwork, sparking some interesting conversations on what the future of something similar might be in America and making me think critically about some of the directions we’ve taken in the UK.