Fessing/Catching Up

I am hideously, monstrously out of date when it comes to cataloging the various adventures on this trip.  My pockets are full of little wads of paper, each covered with hastily-scribbled descriptions of the projects I’ve visited and quotes from the dedicated and inspiring people who have shown me around.  I’m trying to catch up, but for awhile it’s safe to assume that whatever I’m talking about happened some time ago.

After New York we flew to California, landing in Arcata and then exploring the redwoods, the coast and inland.   Then down south to San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley – which is where I am now, ensconced in a comfortable sublet and surrounded by all my bits of paper.

Doing this trip without a private car has been an exercise in patience and sociability, waiting for buses and cadging lifts from colleagues and new friends.  The most recent leg, down the coast from Arcata to San Francisco, logged some serious bus hours.  I’d made the crucial mistake of checking all my reading material into the compartment bel in favour of looking out at the scenery, and this had seemed like a great plan until we stopped outside Santa Rosa in a line of traffic that extended up the nearest hill and away.  I’d stared out the window until my neck was cricked permanently to the right, my brain slowly turning inside-out from boredom.

Luckily we weren’t that far from a stop and, knowing that there was much more traffic to come, I leapt off the bus and grabbed one of every free publication available in the Greyhound station racks.  Once back aboard, I saw I had four different real estate magazines and an old copy of the Christian Science Monitor.

Having perused the luxury condominiums of Marin County as long as I could bear, I turned to the CSM and found, to my glee, an article on summer camps.  Having just spent two weeks working at one, a piece on their history, cultural resonance and potential demise was perfectly timed.

I was on a grant-funded day camp for children aged 8 – 12 in rural Northern California and spent a happy session tie-dyeing shirts and playing rainbow tag, wading through icy creeks looking for crawdaddies and panning for gold.  The local area has been economically deprived for many years and, in spite of a recent influx of new farmers, tells a classic story of a long-closed timber mill, widespread unemployment, young parents, large families and few teeth.

The children were all local and represented a range of family cultures, expectations and experiences.  For the most part though, the children at the camp had an amazing facility with their worlds and were confident in their ability to navigate and master it in a way I had rarely seen in city kids.  Many kept animals and had their own produce gardens at home, went hunting in the woods, were strong swimmers and able collectors of tadpoles.  During a ‘get to know you’ game on the first day, we paired off and came up with two things we could teach our partner.  Mine told me that she could teach me “how to raise chickens.  And babies.”  They were bright, engaging, curious and expressive – at the end of the session I waved them all off with that peculiar pang of knowing that they would stick in my memory, and that they had already moved on.

The classic American summer camp is residential and all summer long in semi-wild surroundings, with a vaguely ‘Native’ sounding name and lots of sleeping outdoors, singing around campfires, pulling pranks and getting dumped in lakes.  This one, day and run in two-week sessions, had a core curricumum of arts and crafts followed by trips to creeks.  It was tightly scheduled, but with time for free play built in.  All campers and counsellors were reminded of the two core rules of respect (for self, one another and surroundings) and safety.  In all of these respects the camp I was at seems indicative of the wider changes cataloged by the CRM article.

At the same time though, it was not about improving their test scores or literacy.  It was about showing the children the wonders of the natural world that surrounded them – which some of them had scarcely seen.  It was about making friends and new connections, being with adults who were there to support you, rather than grade your achievements.  For the co-ordinator, it ultimately about fostering a sense of pride in children for where they come from and broadening their ideas of what they were capable of.

Camp counsellors are not playworkers, but I learned so much about supporting children’s explorations of the natural world and about different ways of structuring adult-child relationships.  I’m understanding more and more how culturally particular the UK notion of playwork is, and how if a version of it is to develop here how it must be equally particular to the cultural needs and touchstones of American children.

New York and London Catch-up

Before leaving the city, I did some training for the marvelous NYCoalition for Play to prepare their volunteers for the Figment Festival.  I couldn’t make the day itself, but heard that it was a resounding success.  The attendees were so enthusiastic and open at the training, all with a clear idea of what we talk about when we talk about play.  One of the attendees was Susan Solomon, author of American Playgrounds: Revitalizing Community Space, and I’m hoping to talk to her further once I’m back in the city at the end of the month.  All in all it was a thrilling afternoon, sitting in Strawberry Fields and developing a crack team of NYC-based playworkers, primed to seize any opportunity they find for play.

There was also an article in The New Yorker about the new Imagination Playground, where I’ll be heading to do some more training at the end of the month.  I’ll be following on from the illustrious Penny Wilson, who is quoted in the article – she’s an amazing playworker, artist, writer and advocate for play who works widely with PATH (Play Association Tower Hamlets) and the Alliance for Childhood.  She’s more extensively quoted in an article here, and photographed on a local Adventure Playground.

It’s been wonderful to be so immersed in the fledgling US Playwork field – and slightly bizarre to be so far from home now that everything back there is changing.  I flew out on the day of the election and have been getting scraps of news about changes ever since.  It’s strange only getting news online again, without the benefit of colleagues and friends telling me what it looks like on the ground.

Play England is reshuffling and you can sign up to their Play Manifesto here.

Nick Clegg’s speech at Barnardos last month had children’s play as a core focus, as he said:

…Every parent understands the importance of a secure environment for their children. Spaces where they can play, where they can feel completely free, where they can safely push at the boundaries, learning and experimenting. Places where different generations can meet, binding the community together… If you ask adults if they used to play near their homes as children, 71% will tell you they did. Every single day. That compares to just 21% of children now. It’s not right, and it has to change. But, despite how obvious that is, I do appreciate that there’s no easy answer.

He goes on to talk about the need for low-cost, local community-based solutions – essentially, a return to ‘old-school’ outside play opportunities.  It’s worth remembering that long before Adventure Playgrounds had government funding they were created and built by local volunteers, by the adults and children who lived nearby.  Far more important than these places (remarkable as they can be) are all of the incidental playspaces which children are allowed to make their own.  For those freedoms to become commonplace, we need to be having conversations about the importance of play not just with our political representatives, but also with our friends and relatives, our neighbours and everyone else we share our social responsibilities with.

What these changes may mean for play and playwork are yet to be determined, and I have very little idea what context I’ll be walking into when I get back to the UK.  It does seem like a good time to be seeing what’s going on here though – in a country which hasn’t provided any federal funding for play and where people have had to organize for themselves for a long-time.

Also, a reminder that Play Day is August 4th, for those in the UK!  For those outside, I’m sure you’ll take any excuse to go outside and have a good time.