Some thoughts on international playwork

For any regular readers out there, it’s worth mentioning that during my slack times here (when I’m too busy reading novels and drinking tea to blog) you can find other interesting stuff on the Pop-Up Adventure Play blog here. I post there sometimes as well, though not nearly as often as Suzanna would like. It is a source of great information and thoughts – really far more than an ad for our little charity.

If you do head over there you’ll see that I’ve been particularly lucky in the travel department lately and have been to Bogota, Cairo and London, all in the name of play. Because of Pop-Ups, I’ve been talking with people doing playwork all around the world – they email and we provide a package of resources and some Skype time to help them through the process of creating a pop-up adventure playground in their neighborhood. Very often, as I talked about in my last post, the conversation begins with questions such as “the parents around here are all worried about their children getting muddy”, and “how can I explain that play is important, when people care more about test scores?”. This is pretty familiar ground for most of us.

Sometimes, however, that ground shifts beneath me. One organizer said that “now that the military has moved out the guerrilla fighters, people want to come out of their homes again. I think play might bring everyone together. Can you help me make this possible?” Unfunded as this project has been, who could turn down a request like that? It’s surely the absolute point of what we do, and has been one of the most educational experiences of my life. We look away from the problems we don’t know how to solve but wishing that children didn’t live in places of extraordinary poverty, of conflict and violence and continual uncertainty doesn’t change a thing. Instead, I am lucky enough to hear from brand-new playworkers on the front line of practice, teaching me about the ways in which play weaves between trauma and hope. Questions such as “you say that scrap is best for play, but in my village everything is used and the children are fed up with making dollies from leaves and scraping lines in the dust. What do you recommend?” have absolutely forced me to become a better playworker.

Next week I fly to Boston. I have a lot of family and friends there (all of whom are alarmed by recent tragedies, but fine). It turns out that we never know where our next place of violence and loss, of confusion may be. We all clutch our loved ones when we are scared.

As in the village where residents are finally safe to leave their homes, we all find that an impulse to play that rises up when the barriers fall. Eventually silliness sneaks back into our conversations, an unlikely visitor greeted at first with hesitation. No matter the trauma, our need to play has never gone away. Play is always moving in us, the world’s anima, like a whisper from ourselves that we hear echoed on the wind.

So, there are many pieces of news to share, from my travels and my time at home. Over the weekend was Play Fight at the South London Gallery, where a group of people from a variety of backgrounds talked about play and conflict. There’s also the super exciting launch of a project we at Pop-Ups have been working on for some time, and which directly feeds into my developing thinking about international playwork.

You’ll hear more about all this soon.  In the meantime, here is a picture of me terrified on top of a camel. Yes, I do know that these animals have terrible lives – if it helps, immediately after the photo was taken this same camel ate a Norwegian tourist. 

Everyone should come to this

… not because I’ll be there, but because many other fabulous people will be.

It will be great!

Sat 20 Apr, 2-5.30pm, £5/£3 conc

Clore Studio & Sceaux Gardens Estate

This afternoon symposium explores the social uses of conflict through looking at ‘play-fighting’ in various different forms, the ‘rough and tumble’ of children’s play, the role of conflict in socially-engaged art practices, as well as the organisational/community contexts through which the process of conflict and resolution take place.

Playworker, writer and activist Morgan Leichter-Saxby frames the debate, exploring the ways in which play can help us access aspects of ourselves that we fight against knowing or accepting. She argues that, both in psychological and neighbourhood contexts, play can be a process by which the marginalized becomes incorporated into the whole. Artists Laura Eldret and Anthony Schrag talk about their recent work with children exploring play-fighting, commissioned as part of SLG Local, along with contributions from young people and children themselves.

This event is part of  SLG Local, which is sponsored by Bloomberg and funded by the National Lottery through the Big Lottery Fund.

Booking is essential. Book online or call 020 7703 6120.

Photo: Lauren Willis

65-67 Peckham Road London SE5 8UH mail@southlondongallery.org 020 7703 6120

On play deprivation and our fear of one another

It was a whirlwind few days in Bogota, spent almost entirely giving interviews.  I felt peculiarly popular and also rather isolated – not speaking Spanish, there were times when the only conversations I could join in were when someone asked me a question (via my translator) and I answered as best I could.  

That said, there were some questions asked of me that I’ll be chewing over for a long time to come.  

A reporter, who is also a single mother of one young daughter, asked me what I thought the greatest barriers to children’s outdoor play were in the US and UK.  

“Well,” I said.  “This is going to be a generalization, of course.  But I think it’s a combination of factors.  There’s definitely a sense that adult-organized activities are more worthwhile, and parents are certainly worried about dirt and mess.  But I think the biggest factor is a general fear of public space and strangers.  There’s a sense that “outdoors” is really dangerous for children, and that terrible things will happen to them there.”

She stared at me, confused and fascinated.

“Really?  That’s true, in the US?  Because here in Colombia, we absolutely feel that way.  There’s this idea that we’re still a country at war – and in some places, we still are, so there’s that – but to hear that people in the US feel that way too…”  She shook her head and we talked a little bit more.  Were we looking at a constant level of generalized anxiety and mistrust, present in both countries?  Based on our own experiences, do people in more violent areas feel more afraid of public space?  Or less?  What is that fear based on, if not an accurate assessment of the risks?  The reporter asked, quietly, whether this fear might be a “modern” problem, shared internationally.

After we said goodbye I kept coming back to the warning not to talk to strangers.  As a child I heard it from my parents, from my teachers, even from a inappropriately cheerful Social Skills Puppet that visited schools to speak on such subjects as bullying and kidnapping.  This warning has joined a whole host of other helpful advice lodged at the back of my brain, such as to chew with my mouth closed, sit with my legs crossed, and eat my vegetables first.  The problem is though, increasingly, everyone I meet is a stranger.  

It seems that this is true for a lot of people, in the US and the UK and in Colombia.  The reporter had told me a story that felt very familiar.  She left a hometown a short distance away, coming to the capital for work.  Her mother wanted to help with the daughter but wasn’t always available, and city apartments don’t have a lot of space for three generations to live together (this said with a wry smile).  She worked long hours and her child was in what we might call wraparound care.  Where were her community networks?  When her daughter is older, who will be keeping that distanced eye that makes playing out possible?

The Forum itself was astonishing, bringing together a range of speakers who looked at the issue of children’s outdoor play from angles of physical health, human rights and cognitive development.  Unfortunately, I missed a great deal because of not speaking Spanish – but when I went up to speak I saw something else very familiar – the room was about 98% women, the vast majority of them parents as well as professionals.  Mothers are blamed for an awful lot, but I do wonder whether it’s harder for women to trust public space and the strangers there.  There are good reasons for that, and it’s understandable that we might find it hard to encourage our children to take chances that we have been warned off of ourselves.

My last interview was with a radio journalist, who asked me my favorite question of the bunch.  

“This is in two parts,” he said.  “Firstly, do you agree that these issues which affect children, such as obesity and technological lifestyle changes, are passed along from industrialized nations such as your own?  And secondly, if you agree with this, why should we listen to you for the solution?”

What could I say to that?  I agreed with the first part, and as for the second said that we had been working within the US and UK and that people in Colombia had contacted us, not the other way around.  People all over the world are concerned that their children don’t play out – they want to do something about it, but aren’t always sure what that “something” might be.  That I didn’t think I had all the answers, but that I could share some ideas and that I hoped this might be a trade for the problems he had listed – that these vast changes in how we live might allow us to share our stories more easily with one another, might help us to feel less alone.

The funny thing is, I’ve been part of the problem too.  I’ve been the sort of hypocrite who travels to a job in community outreach then gone home to an apartment where my neighbors were just names on envelopes in the hall.  I’ve stayed at home on lonely nights and watched TV shows about busy groups of friends.  And it’s because of those experiences that I suspect that our fear of one another is very likely a “modern” problem, stemming from the loss of social networks that renders everyone a stranger.  And it’s also why I suspect that, for children as well as for myself, an over-reliance on high-tech fun is more a symptom of this situation than a cause.

Given the chance, children are our most sociable citizens.  Their outdoor play is both indicator and catalyst for strong local networks.  This is something that can be helped from above, with the sympathetic design of public space, traffic calming measures and so on, but fundamentally it’s a change we need to make ourselves.  Going out and meeting one another, trying to make new friends at any age can be scary, but it’s essential if we’re going to be improving opportunities for children’s play, and for our own.  It’s up to us to be the change we wish to see – but the happy news is, going from the various studies and statistics, most people feel just the same.

Off again

I’ve hardly caught my breath after the excitement at Eastbourne, which was bracketed by road trips and home visits with Suzanna.  But by the time you read this I’ll be en route to Manchester Airport and then to Bogota, Colombia.

Pop-Ups was asked to provide a keynote for the second International Child Education Forum to talk on the importance of children’s play outdoors, and that’s me!  I’m very excited to participate in this, and to visit Colombia for the very first time.

No big thoughts or questions this week, though they’ve been piling up in my journals, silently growing in the dark.

On First Sessions

I was at the Berkshire Museum recently, doing training and event support for their Ten Days of Play. It was fantastic fun at a wonderful location – and they made a funny little time lapse video of the first day. It includes our conversational training and play session at the beginning, then some scurrying when children arrive, and a brief sit-down before re-staging the materials.

You can see a busy period of den-building, sword-fighting and tape-tearing when a childcare group were there, and an abrupt lull when they all departed. The new playworkers looked at each other with wide, exhausted eyes, panting audibly in the loud and sudden quiet.  A storm had passed and been survived.  Everyone fell towards a circle of chairs, just visible at the edge of shot.

“Oh man,” one said. “Is there a part of this training that involves sitting down for awhile?”

“Yup,” I replied. “Reflective practice!” And we had a our first chat about what we’d seen and done, before the next group arrived.

I love being there for events like this, providing information at the beginning and then supporting the new playwork staff through their very first sessions. Whether they’re teachers, museum educators, park rangers or any other adults interested in children’s play, there’s a glorious combination of enthusiasm, confusion, instinct and nervousness all bubbling together like champagne.  I know lots of you have had similar experiences of training and mentoring new playworkers – some have generously contributed their thoughts, feeding into my workshop on the subject at the National Playwork Conference in Eastbourne.  More are always welcome.

It also reminded me of a post I drafted ages ago, reflecting on one of my very first visits to an adventure playground. I wasn’t a playworker then, just an anthropologist doing fieldwork. It would take another few months before I took the leap and set the clipboard down to join in – and in the meantime I was totally unprepared for my carefully scheduled chat with the Senior Playworker.

I had my pen and paper, voice recorder and interview questions laid out on the bench in front of me. The Senior had smiled and we were just about to start when a child approached. The boy was agitated, shifting his weight from foot to foot.

“I’m doing a thing,” he said to the Senior, who nodded. “A hard thing.”

“Okay,” she said softly.

“I need some. I need some help.” He pointed towards the back of the site, where the high wooden frames reached into the dense treeline. There were moldy blankets back there tied to high branches, broken pallets and flattened drink cans littering the ground. There was a scuffling sound around the adventure playground’s perimeter and the boy looked towards the noise, looking equal parts impatient and afraid.

“I’m going over there and can you look out for me?” He pointed towards the noise with a large stick.

“Look out for you how?” the Senior asked, her voice neutral.

“Like, be here. If, if I need you.”  He scarcely looked at her, eyes scanning the far wall and twitching with his need to go, his need to stay.

“Yes,” she said. “I’ll do that.” He nodded, satisfied, then looked down at his stick. It was almost as thick as his arm and very solid, with a few bent nails poking out.

“Do you need to take that stick with you?” she asked him gently. He nodded.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s… important.”

“Okay then. I’ll be right here.” Then he ran off and she turned back to me, to the dull and forgotten interview I’d planned. “Now,” she said. “Where were we?”

Witnessing that one exchange changed everything for me. I was shocked by the faith she displayed in him, her willingness to be what he needed without question.  I’d gone to look at children’s building, but had seen something far more revolutionary – evidence of freedom.  More than anything, I realized how rare this exchange was beyond the adventure playground fence and how desperately I wanted to be doing this work rather than any other.

Are you a playworker?

Reminder emails about the Eastbourne Playwork Conference keep appearing in my inbox – I can’t believe it’s so soon!

I’ll be presenting the award for Playwork Writer, and want to send my Big Fat Congratulations to everyone shortlisted for the many various and wonderful awards.  It’s going to be an amazing group of people, and I’m so excited to be there for the whole thing, talking about the Study Tour to Istanbul last April, and facilitating a workshop called The Processes of Becoming a Playworker.

I cannot tell you how much grammatical tinkering I did with that title.  Swapped out Process for Processes.  Added Being to Becoming.  Was this the right time to resort to the old academic trick of titling it Something Catchy: Many Obscure Terms in a Ridiculously Long Sentence, I wondered?  Luckily reason prevailed – it is never the right time for that.  At one point I lost my mind a little and started throwing in festive parentheses as if I was back in undergraduate Women’s Studies.  The Process(es) of (Being and) Becoming a Playworker.  Finally, I abandoned all of these changes in favor of the simple title that Meynell had drawn out of our conversation, but this back and forth demonstrates the reason why I’d been excited about this topic in the first place – and why I started and keep this blog.

Playwork is COMPLICATED.  It is a nuanced and personal process.  Becoming a playworker takes time and is never finished.

So, dear readers, I’d like to enlist you all in considering these questions:

- What makes someone a playworker?

- How did you start becoming a playworker?

- When did you feel like a playworker?

- Is there such a thing as a “natural playworker”?

- What are, in your experience, some of the landmarks of a playworker’s development?

- What have you seen and felt when training or mentoring other playworkers?

All stories, anecdotes, and answers-in-the-form-of-more-questions are welcome, either here in the comments or to me by email!

 

The Witness and the Elf

When I was in Belgium a couple of months ago, I ran a training workshop with a bunch of people from different professional backgrounds – games people, sports people, youth work people.  I wanted to make it clear that there were some similarities we all shared, and some important differences as well.  Because the training preparation for a large school visit, I focused our conversations around the doing of playwork, rather than its theoretical basis.

In groups, they brainstormed all the different roles that it was possible to take in a games/sport/play setting, and wrote them up on big pieces of paper.

Teacher.  Confidant.  Big brother, big sister.  Mentor.  Advocate.  Friend.  All were pinned to the wall.

Then we went through and considered whether and if each would apply to a playworked environment – discussing how, yes, sometimes a child might ask explicitly to be taught something but that this didn’t happen all that often.  More frequently, a child might want a tape-holder, toast-maker, co-player, or cleaner-upper.  Looking at the list, there were only two roles that I could think of playworkers taking that weren’t listed on the giant flip chart paper, that these games and sports and youth workers hadn’t come up with.

I called them Witness* and Elf.

Witness

How many times have you heard “watch me do THIS!” ringing out across a play area?  How many times have you seen a child emerge from a deep absorption in play to make eye contact with you, grin, and then return to their frame?

This concept came up a couple of days ago, in conversation with Bernie deKoven (recorded as video here).  He is writing a book on “having fun as a spiritual activity; playing as a spiritual activity” and linked this idea to the notion of “bearing witness”.  He said “it’s easy to belief that play is a divine commandment.”

Elf

Elves in fairy tales have what I can most politely call a mixed reputation, so to be clear I’m talking here about the shoemaker’s elves, the Keebler elves, those small and useful invisible people who make everything work. With Beatrix Potter fans, it might be better to talk about helpful mice.  Whatever their name, these are the characters who don’t ask for praise but actually prefer to go unnoticed, and who make magical leaps of bravery and achievement possible for those who need it badly.

This was a useful way of teasing apart some of the different stances which might be encompassed within a playwork approach, and helping people develop a portfolio of responses to rapidly changing situations.  Of course, whatever a person is doing in support of children’s play they are playworking, first and last.

What roles have you taken on to support children’s play, and what would you add to the list?

—-

UPDATE:  Since posting this, Arthur Battram commented below that I am not the first person to talk about playworkers “witnessing” children’s play.  This is absolutely 100% true, and I would like to apologize if in recounting this workshop exercise I gave that impression.

We all draw upon the work of others, and I’ve been particularly privileged to have that process enriched by lots of conversations with enormously clever people.  Sometimes it’s also possible to think that you’ve invented or reframed something, only to find that someone else had that same realization decades ago, then explained it far more eloquently.  Playwork is still a small field and that makes it even more important to keep referencing and referring readers to one another and to give credit where its due.  I haven’t read everything I ought to have, and my attempts to reference ideas here (both the ones I think are mine and the ones I know are not) will always be incomplete.  I am still learning, still catching up on my reading, so please everyone do what Arthur has done, and draw my attention to the gaps.

The people that plexity lists in his comment are Gordon Sturrock, Bob Hughes and Eddie Nuttall – follow those links and get your mind expanded right now!

Also worth looking up is plexity himself, Mr. Arthur Battram.

Childlike versus Childish

“When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”  (C.S. Lewis)

Children play whenever they can – as soon as their most urgent needs are met, and whenever they are not prevented from it.  That ability to stay in the moment, to grasp opportunities for exploration, joy and challenge whenever possible, is probably what most people mean by the word “childlike”.

Adults often assume that we don’t need to play in the same way that children do.  Our brains are more fixed, our hormones more regulated.  Blah blah blah.  What if those things are true, but utterly beside the point?  What if we need to play – desperately?  What if we long for that sense of being powerfully in love with the world that play provides and celebrates?

Adults seek to redevelop their playful attitude via every method from meditation to motorbikes.  Why doesn’t it come more smoothly to us – why are we adults so play deprived?  Even those of us who ought to know better don’t necessarily find the time we need.  It’s like attending a feast and accepting only black coffee.

For children, those needs which outrank play are listed at the bottom of Maslow’s chart (food, water, shelter, warmth) and safety.  Studies of children in the most horrific circumstances show that children can be amazingly opportunistic – playing as soon as they can, even for a tiny moment.  Children continue to strive for play, against all odds.

And yet adults, who seem to have so much choice and control over their lives by comparison, seem hardly to play at all.  Play isn’t even listed on Maslow’s chart, even though the first “behavior leading to self-actualization” that he lists is “experiencing life like a child”.

I mean, honestly!

Is it simply that, as adults, we prevent ourselves from playing?  We ignore that little voice that has all the best ideas for what we could do differently or teasingly or controversially. We prefer to spend our time mulling over those uniquely adult fears of money, of disapproval or humiliation, of “being found out”.  We tell ourselves that there are so many “more important” things we ought to be doing, that we’re “no good” at art or music or dancing or singing and so we shouldn’t bother to try.

Worse than that, we tell ourselves that we are not truly safe.  It is not enough for us that our needs are met in the moment.  It is not enough if we expect to have food and water and warmth for days or months or years to come.  For many adults, fretting and striving and working all hours but feeling they’re getting nowhere, it is never ever enough – which means it is never time to relax, never time to play.

And so we gently cease to feel part of the living joyful world.  We stop celebrating our place in it, stop exploring new corners of it.  We grow staid in ourselves, and suspicious of spontaneity in others.  Exhausted, we stop feeling that the world loves us and we stop feeling in love with the world.  All because we stop playing.

This kind of thinking infects me too, even though I ought to know better, so I thought of times as an adult when I have truly played.  Alone in a summer garden, when I knew no one could see me running about with no clothes on through the flowers.  In a conference workshop, when being playworked by the marvelous Maggie Fearne and Pete King and making little figures out of mud and moss.  Whenever I sit down to write and draw I still, every time, give myself a little speech about how this is “my time”, and that I can’t get it wrong.

All of this makes my friend and colleague Suzanna Law’s current project all the more amazing to me – she’s playing and documenting it every single day of 2013.

Does anyone else want to take a play pledge too, even for one week?

Questions and more questions

Every so often I’ll meet someone suspicious at the idea of playwork.  That happened recently at a party.

“What if the child doesn’t want to play?” The man asked.  I hastened to explain that, unlike others who might have similar job titles, playworkers do not demand that the children play.  We don’t carry whistles, and we get that if you’re forced to do something or pressured to look as though you’re having fun, it doesn’t really count play at all (at least, not for the children).

“We set out to create environments that are great for playing in,” I replied.  “And we have a really broad definition of play, and we’re on board with pretty much whatever children actually want to do there.”

“Even leave?” He asked.  I nodded, thrilled because while we were talking about play, we were really talking about freedom.  Children’s rights!  Children’s choices.

Of course, we’re often predisposed to certain play behaviors.  Bonfires, mud fights, tiny houses made of bark and crisp packets.  We all have certain kinds of play that twang at our hearts like a sitar.  And that’s okay, so long as we recognize what’s happening and keep it out of children’s way.

So, here’s my question.  If we could not be called “playworkers” what else might we be?

Currently Reading…

I’ve got a larger-than-usual collection of tabs at the moment – all the pages I just keep coming back to as I think about work and play and playwork.  They all seem to dovetail and suggest a shape that I can’t identify yet.

Here are they are, for your consideration.

How to Avoid Work: a 1949 Guide to Doing What You Love

Joan Didion on Keeping a Notebook

Play Makes Us Human Part 4: When Work is Play

Neil Gaiman’s No One Gets to Be You, Except You

Joel Seath’s Children’s Play is Not About You

Fosterwee’s Petroglyphs and Rays of Sun

I came across this last one late yesterday evening, getting sucked into the story of one couple’s fostering so deeply that I went to the archives started the blog again from the beginning.  There should be a word, just for that.

When I finally let it go and went to bed, I took a copy of David Almond‘s Heaven Eyes, that I picked up for 20p the last time I was traveling.  It included something rather wonderful – the first reference I have ever come across to playwork in a novel.  It was so surprising, seeing it so unexpectedly, like bumping into a friend from home when you’re on holiday.

Set in a children’s home, the book is narrated by Erin Law, who carefully explains the following:

“A dozen or so children live here.  Some of us, like Maureen, are filled by sadness, or eaten up with bitterness.  Some of us have broken hearts and troubled souls.  But most of us love each other and look out for each other.  We always knew that if we cared for each other, we could put up with the psychiatrists who came, the psychologists, the social workers, the care workers, the play workers, the drugs workers, the health workers, the welfare workers.  We knew we could put up with Maureen with her assistants.  We could put up with her questions and her coldness and her circle times.  We knew that we could find a tiny corner of the Paradise that we’d all lost.”