Everyday Playfulness

A New Approach to Children's Play and Adult Responses to It

Stuart Lester

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781784503260
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

Seeing play as an important and vital element of life for children and adults alike, this book addresses the ways in which practitioners take account of and act responsibly with moments of children's play and playfulness.

Working with the Playwork Principles, the book draws on alternative concepts to traditional approaches, including ideas from materialist and posthuman philosophy and human geography, to explore playing as process rather than product. Topics covered include play and wellbeing, play and space, and the micro-politics of playing, critical cartography and adult account-ability and response-ability. It concludes by considering the implications for professional practice and offering ways that professionals can develop practices that maintain and co-create favourable conditions in which children's play can flourish.

CHAPTER 1

An Introduction

Setting the scene

This book began life primarily addressing practitioner roles that have specific responsibility for supporting children’s play, notably in playwork and early years. But as it developed it became clear that the ideas presented here are also highly relevant for other adult roles that directly influence the conditions under which playfulness thrives (for example, schools, museums and other cultural institutions) and also for those which may be perceived as having a more remote responsibility but in fact have considerable influence in shaping conditions for children’s play, including planners, landscape architects, police and politicians. And of course, while this is directed to professional practitioners, the opening claim would be that all adults affect children’s opportunity to play from near and afar. Furthermore, this is not limited to adults: children have considerable power in negotiating conditions for playing and the material environment is not passive in this process. And herein lies a challenging dilemma which this book seeks to take up: playing is emergent, indeterminate, spontaneous, improvised and so on. Its appearance cannot be predicted in any direct cause–effect relationship. As Colin Ward (1979, p.86) observed, children will ‘play anywhere and with anything’ and adults’ attempts to plan for play exist on one plane, but children’s playful expressions exist on another. Similarly, Iona and Peter Opie (1969, p.11) remark that ‘where children are is where they play’. So how can adults begin to consider working with this apparent paradox?

This fundamental dilemma has significant implications for starting to think about supporting children’s right to play and these will be considered as the book develops. But a note of warning: some readers may be expecting a practical guide and tips on how to plan play environments for children or ways to ‘provide play’ (a notion which has always struck me as a well-intentioned but misguided statement that presumes play is within the gift of adults and something that can be ‘provided’). This is entirely understandable in the current policy and practice climate in which practitioners are expected to adopt quick-fix solutions to a range of perceived childhood problems and success is measured against predetermined outcomes. However, rather than seeking to establish a series of guidelines and ‘how to…’ prescriptions, the overall aim here is to explore ways in which professional practitioners may take account of and act responsibly and responsively with moments of children’s play and playfulness.

The terms ‘account-ability’ and ‘response-ability’ permeate all chapters and will be discussed in more detail later. Nonetheless, a brief and basic introduction is offered here. The ability to take account of, or ‘account-ability’, refers to the ways in which adults perceive and sense moments of children’s playfulness. Sensing is an embodied pre-personal and pre-conscious state that resists fact and meaning-based analysis. If the focus moves away from the imposition of meaning and its significance, it becomes possible to explore the production of children’s playful thinking, talking, doing, in more open and mobile ways (Olsson 2009). Account-ability is the basis for ‘response-ability’, an ethical position that seeks, as far as possible, to maintain favourable conditions for children’s play as a matter of spatial justice. This suggests that adults are alert to what unfolds as children are playing without prescription or projection of where it might go, which requires considerable sensitivity and restraint.

A starting position in responding to this challenge is to develop an opening consideration of ‘playing’ while as far as possible avoiding definitive statements. For the purposes of the discussion, play will be understood and presented intransitively, that is, as a verb that doesn’t need a direct object to complete its meaning; playing exists ‘alongside other intransitive verbs such as to hope, to grow and to dwell’ (Ingold 2011a, p.6) rather than as a transitive verb that is identified by a specific and definable product or activity. This establishes playing as process over the identification of a distinct and final form. For play scholars, discontinuous, contingent and multiple forms of playful expression that pervade and persist across life present a constant challenge to the production of conclusive and universal accounts.

Perspectives on play: an introductory overview

The primary focus for this publication is the by now well-rehearsed and indisputable argument that playing is an important and vital force of life (for children and adults alike). While most adults would appreciate the importance of playing to some degree, the value and associated benefits attributed to this form of behaviour for children are less straightforward. It is fair to state that academic interest and research in play and the subsequent application of this into policy and practice are dominated by a minority world perspective that inextricably links understandings with the wider matter of the nature and purpose of childhood. Increasingly, such perspectives are being ‘exported’ to majority world contexts as global economic and social aid programmes superimpose minority world development goals onto indigenous cultures (for a detailed examination of this process and the impact on children’s lives see, for example, Katz 2004). The terms ‘minority’ and ‘majority’ are used in this context to refer to so-called ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries. The terms recognise that economic, political and cultural power lies with a minority of countries and these directly and indirectly affect the majority of countries across the globe. These macro-terms are representative of ways in which children’s lives, in multiple locations, are shaped by broad-ranging political-economic and social-cultural forces (Philo 2000). And at the same time, it is acknowledged that adults and children are intimately connected near and afar as ‘embodied, perceiving, acting, expressing, connected with other humans and with objects, both natural and social beings’ (Ansell 2009, p.199).

Most societies use the concept of childhood to distinguish children from adults, a reflection of the presumed physiological and psychological differences of children. However, the cultural, political and social value of what these differences may mean for the everyday lives of children and adults varies considerably across the globe (James 2010). While play may be a ubiquitous feature of childhood, an understanding of the underlying relationship between play and culture is far from complete (Roopnarine 2011). Often the complexity of cultural practices is overshadowed by universal accounts of childhood and play based on minority world perspectives:

A fundamental problem with universal claims about play is that they basically ignore the contrasting realities of childhood experiences and the cultural forces that may shape caregivers’ ideas about play and early learning, and children’s role in their own play. Across human societies, even under difficult social and economic circumstances, cultural beliefs and practices, family structural arrangements and modes of production have a tremendous influence on the expression of play, the determination of play partners, the settings in which play occurs, time allocated to play and work and the links between play and cognitive and socio-cultural skills. (Roopnarine 2011, p.20)

Across a range of studies, the primary concern is not so much with playing, per se, but what it adds to children’s development. For the most part, common sense assigns an instrumental or utilitarian worth to play. It is a well-established and dominant position that proposes playing is an important tool that can be used to support children’s learning and development, matters which are deemed to be most important in ensuring children grow up to become fully functioning adults. From this perspective, play has acquired value for what happens outside playing or what Burghardt (2005) refers to as ‘deferred benefits’. This belief in progress (Sutton-Smith 1997) or advancement through play is a ‘cherished ideal that maintains considerable status…and influences the ways in which adults seek to organise and structure children’s play experiences’ (Lester 2009, p.535). A significant consequence of this dominant belief is that playing is cut off from everyday life, compartmentalised and situated in segregated times and spaces and furnished with specific play materials. The progress orthodoxy not only shapes the physical environments designed for play but also has a significant influence on adult practices which are largely directed to progressing children by ensuring the right kinds of play are taking place. Provision for children’s play becomes caught up in technological systems of governance in which quality standards, outcome measures, tight performance management, pseudo-scientific impact assessments and cost–benefit analyses are just some examples employed to maintain an accent on children’s futures.

Given the increasing emphasis on future-based outcomes for children and their ‘well-becomings’, there is almost a universal resistance in policy, funding and practice terms to articulate the value of playing. These seemingly trivial acts must have some purpose beyond apparently pointless moments of ‘messing about’. The material-discursive1 effects of this are profound, as evidenced by a review of promotional literature and policies at three play centres in Manchester, which for the most part suggest that children are engaged in purposeful play, such as ‘elemental play to learn about nature’ or ‘cooking activities that promote practical skills’ (Lester 2016a).

However, this does not align neatly with observations in these settings that show how practices establish or co-create environments in which moments of playing, or messing about, continually emerge from the prevailing conditions, typified by the following observation:

…rolls of tape offered a central point around which children improvised a range of playful actions, starting off with a small group of girls sticking strips of tape to their arms before peeling it off (with accompanying conversations about ‘waxing’). One child then places tape over their mouth with sounds of ‘mmmm’ and gesticulations. Other children copied this and ran outside to perform a dance routine before returning indoors to dance to the music playing in the background. There are more exaggerated sounds of ‘mmmm’ as children attempt to talk to each other when a playworker offers a challenge ‘let’s see who can scream the loudest’ (with one particular child producing a piercing scream). Shortly afterwards children started to also tape hands and legs together before shuffling outside. (Lester 2016a, pp.32–33)

When interviewed about this apparent incongruence between what happens in the setting (valued by practitioners and children as a place for ‘just chilling out’) and the articulation of value to the outside world, practitioners generally comment that funders would not consider supporting time and space for messing about worthy of consideration. This, to a certain degree, is understandable in the current policy and funding climate where the state of childhood and children’s futures is of overwhelming concern. But to invest such political, social and economic ‘hope’ in children as redemptive agents to secure a better tomorrow may unwittingly be harmful to children’s present lives. And the cycle continues: funding demands outcomes, practice supplies supposed evidence of meeting these. The aim here is to reposition these moments of messing about as vital life-enhancing processes for the time of playing.

Bearing in mind the principle of and/and, there is no great desire to fully dismiss the ‘play as progress’ rhetoric. Undoubtedly what occurs in play will trickle down into what happens in the near future (Sutton-Smith 1997). Yet in reviewing the evidence, Smith (2010) acknowledges that the numerous experimental attempts to connect play with learning, so often carried out in the laboratories of natural science or developmental psychology, have been largely flawed in design and implementation. The firm belief in the efficacy of play for development marks what Smith refers to as the ‘play ethos’, a cherished assertion of play’s importance and a justification for campaigns that seek to demand a greater share of resource allocation (money, time and space) for largely adult-designed children’s play. Equally, Sutton-Smith (1997) suggests that much of this belief is based on assumption and self-referential presupposition rather than empirical evidence. When subject to critical examination, ideas that play behaviour may replicate real-world skills necessary for progress and survival are found largely unsubstantiated, tenuous and often misleading. Closer examination of the claim that play is rehearsal for adult life reveals, for example, that playful movements are exaggerated, incomplete and de-contextualised. Children’s imaginations and playful plots and storylines are often irrational and unpredictable and accepted conventions are subverted and inverted (Lester and Russell 2010a). All of which would suggest that playing runs counter to the necessary skills and qualities associated with being adult.

A different but complementary reading can be found from proponents of play as an expression of children’s culture. The concept of a natural childhood as a period of biological growth and teleological development has been challenged from numerous disciplinary perspectives, most notably from the broad field of the social studies of childhood (see, for example, James and Prout 1997; Lee 2001; Mayall 2002; Prout 2005). The promotion of childhood as a social construction contests grand narratives (Lyotard 1984) by pointing to the multiplicity of childhoods (Holt and Holloway 2006; Katz 2004; Punch 2003; Tisdall and Punch 2012), questioning the presumed immaturity of children and the limitations of developmental psychology (Burman 2008; Mayall 2002), and adopting a sceptical stance towards adult understandings of and value given to play (Lester 2013b; Lester and Russell 2008a). This multi-disciplinary field has established both the contingency and agency of childhood; children are no longer seen as passive in their own development and playing is portrayed as the outcome of children’s agency, self-expression and creativity (Tisdall and Punch 2012). This repositions children’s play in time and space as something that children can create anywhere and everywhere when conditions are favourable. From this perspective, playing is less about progression and the ‘becoming-child’ and more about children being children in the here and now of their childhoods. Undoubtedly, this offers a contrasting perspective, but as discussed later in this chapter, this move is also beset by its own limitations.

Play in a wider context: the individualisation of life

Play as progress (a universal and natural biological/psychological perspective on life and development) and play as cultural expression come from fundamentally different disciplinary perspectives. However, both have emerged from what Henricks (2015, p.7) describes as: ‘Modernizing societies with strong middle classes [who] endorse commitments to self-control, the future, social mobility, material and cultural acquisition, procedural fairness and education as a pathway to success.’

Much has been said and written about the influence of developmental psychology in shaping understandings and practices in regard to the period of childhood. A summary of this position is presented at this stage, sufficient to develop the discussion while also mindful of making over-simplistic generalisations.

The predominant mode in western thought is the assumption that human development follows a pre-existing design pattern. Growth is presented as the phenotypic materialisation of this inner design, the observable characteristics of the interaction of genes and environment (Jablonka and Lamb 2005; Lewontin 2000; Oyama 2000). Models of development (largely from a minority world perspective but increasingly exported to the majority world) present the period of childhood as a universal unfolding of biological material accompanied by the acquisition of the appropriate cognitive, social and cultural skills required to become a ful...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Foreword: Jeremy Lester
• Foreword: Wendy Russell
• Front Cover Image – Unburdened Children: Just off to Play
• Preamble
• 1. An Introduction
• 2. Play: A Different Line of Enquiry
• 3. Some Thoughts on Play and ‘Well-Being’
• 4. Play and Space
• 5. The Micro-Politics of Playing
• 6. Cartography and Account-Ability
• 7. Critical Cartography and Response-Ability
• 8. An Ending that is Not an Ending
• References
• Index
• Join Our Mailing List
• Acknowledgements
• Copyright
• Of Related Interest