Young Children's Play and Creativity

Multiple Voices

Gill Goodliff, Natalie Canning, John Parry, Linda Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315446820
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book draws on the voices of practitioners, academics and researchers to examine young children's play, creativity and the participatory nature of their learning. Bringing together a wide range of perspectives from the UK and internationally, it focuses on the level of engagement and exploration involved in children's play and how it can be facilitated in different contexts and cultures. This new reader aims to challenge thinking, promote reflection and stimulate further discussion by bringing together research and practice on play and creativity.

Divided into two parts, Part I is written by researchers and academics and explores key themes such as creative meaning making, listening to children's voices, risk and spaces, children's rights, play and technology. Part II is authored by Early Childhood professionals and reveals how practitioners have responded to the issues surrounding play and creativity. Each chapter is contextualised by an introduction to highlight the key points and a list of follow-up questions is also included to encourage reflection and debate.

Drawing on the wide-ranging writing of academics, practitioners and researchers, this book is an invaluable resource for students, practitioners and all those who are interested in the essence of play and creativity, what it means for children, and the far-reaching benefits for their well-being, learning and development.

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Part I

Researching young children’s play and creativity

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Chapter 1

Reflecting on children ‘playing for real’ and ‘really playing’ in the early years

Deborah Albon

Chapter introduction

The observations in this chapter by Deborah Albon, Senior Lecturer in Early Childhood Studies at London Metropolitan University, are drawn from her research looking at ‘food events’ (as in meals and snack times) in four early years settings over a three-year period. Using the narrative observations as a basis for reflection on play, she proposes it might be categorised on a continuum of ‘playing for real’ and ‘really playing’. She concludes that both categories of play are valuable, and encourages further reflection as the key to considering children’s own experiences and the role of practitioners.

Introduction

There is a range of ways in which to categorize types of play. Indeed, the topic ‘play’ has undergone thorough examination and continues to do so, such is its importance in the field of early years education and care. Examples of such categorizations include Hutt et al.’s (1989) taxonomy of play as involving either ‘epistemic behaviour’, which relates to activity that involves problem solving and exploration, and ‘ludic behaviour’, which is more playful, repetitive and/or symbolic. In thinking about young children’s pretend play, Hendy and Toon (2001) make a distinction between ‘socio-dramatic play’ and ‘thematic-fantasy play’, arguing that the former involves the child in pretend activities such as cooking a meal and the latter relates to imaginary worlds that children have invented for themselves, sometimes drawing on cultural narratives available to them and other times derived purely from their imaginations.

This chapter draws on five observations from three early years settings. It should be noted from the outset that I do not claim that all play episodes can be categorized exclusively as falling within one of the terms I have called ‘playing for real’ or ‘really playing’ and will also include play episodes that are not food-related. Possibly these terms are best thought of as opposite ends of a continuum with the observations discussed here viewed as towards the two opposite extremities of this continuum. In addition, as play is often shifting in its focus, a play episode that starts as ‘playing for real’ can turn into something akin to ‘really playing’ in a moment – such is the beauty of play.

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‘Playing for real’

The episodes of play that I am characterizing as ‘playing for real’ are those that seem highly imitative of real life, where the conventions that children may have witnessed at home, nursery, cafés or elsewhere are often highly recognizable to the observer. Hendy and Toon (2001) describe such activity as ‘socio-dramatic play’. I have often observed this type of play when children have access to real objects such as real food or cooking equipment and when they have access to a range of materials that they use to stand very directly for something else (as noted in Vygotsky, 1978). Children engaged in episodes of ‘playing for real’ tend to appear to be ‘purposefully’ engaged – sometimes for long periods – and seem to be performing an activity in their play at a higher level than might be expected from someone of their age and experience, such as cooking the dinner. I use the term ‘purposefully’ in inverted commas because it is the type of play that practitioners I have observed and spoken to tend to view highly. It is the kind of play where children seem to want to encounter reality (Moyles, 1989) rather than playfully pushing the boundaries of what is ‘real’ as we will see in the play episodes I am describing in terms of ‘really playing’.

In ‘playing for real’, children are able to explore aspects of the ‘real’ world from different angles but without the emotional stress that goes with real life. This is not to say that strong emotions are absent from play but that children are not really trying to feed a small baby and get it to sleep and can choose to come out of role when they wish to. When ‘playing for real’, children may take on different but recognizable roles. In so doing, they are able to experience the world from different vantage points, particularly those of people who have control over them such as parents (Mead, 1967).

In order to illustrate what I mean by ‘playing for real’, I will now reflect on two observations. The first involves a group of 3-year-old children, one of whom is making roti using play dough in the home corner. The second observation involves a group of 4-year-old children who are using real potatoes as part of their play in the home corner. We will see in these two observations that the play is very recognizable from the real world of cooking and serving food.

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Observation 1: Making roti (observation of children aged 3 in a nursery class)

Sarbjeet takes a lump of play dough into the home corner and uses it to make roti, speaking to me in Punjabi but interspersing it with ‘special for you’. She demonstrates a high level of skill in forming the flat, round shapes with her hands. Sarbjeet increases the heat on the cooker by turning the knob. Then she stands with her hands on her hips as if waiting for time to pass by, seemingly annoyed at the length of time the roti are taking to cook. To cook them, she places the dough directly onto the ‘heat’, pressing them down slightly as if they are bubbling up. As she does this, she piles the cooked roti onto a plate very carefully and carries on cooking.

Daspurnima comes over to join her and they both stand at the cooker cooking roti, saying ‘wait’ as the roti cooks. Sometimes they have their arms folded, chatting together as if gossiping. When all the dough is cooked and a huge pile of roti is made, they bring it over to the table and I am invited to join the group (a group of five children including Sarbjeet and Daspurnima). Sarbjeet gives me a roti on a plate and spoons an imaginary blob next to it saying ‘chutney’. She is concerned her roti are too hot to eat at the moment and says ‘careful – hot’ to make sure we all take care.

Observation 2: Play with potatoes (observation of children aged 4 in a private day nursery)

Today there are real potatoes in the home corner. This is interesting because the children run over to the cook in the kitchen with them and say they have found them and they belong in the kitchen. The cook seems a bit confused about this initially but then laughs and says ‘That’s OK!’ It is very noticeable in this setting that the kitchen is visible to all the children and the children are able to watch the meals being cooked or engage in conversation with the cook about the food they are going to eat.

The children seem to have a very strong sense of real and pretend in the home corner as evidenced by the potatoes. Once they realize that they can have the real potatoes in the home corner, I notice a marked change in the play. Mary gets the toy knife and starts to cut one of the potatoes into pieces and puts the pieces into a saucepan. This is tricky given the lack of a sharp edge. Other children do this too but with a lesser degree of ability and there is a very purposeful air in the home corner. The cook supplies extra potatoes at the request of the children, who run over to the kitchen and tell her what they are doing.

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The nursery manager brings over some real knives from the kitchen and the children become engrossed in cutting the potatoes and filling pans. Once full, Mary and Eva say that they need water in the pans to boil the potatoes. They have clearly seen this being done. A practitioner does not question this and puts some water in the water tray to enable the children to fill their pans with water (on top of the cut potatoes). The children are unable to access water from taps themselves owing to the building design. The children spend a long time at play – preparing, cooking and serving up food. The children comment on how the water is dirty now and talk about the need to peel the potatoes. Later, Mary says that she needs to get the water out of the pan like her mum does at home and takes the pans over to the water tray. Mary selects a sieve from a couple offered to her by the cook and takes it over to the water tray and drains her potatoes successfully. She then returns to the home corner.

What follows are some questions to reflect on in relation to these observations:

• How willing are practitioners to allow materials to be moved from one part of the room to another, even if it causes a degree of mess?

• How ‘real’ are practitioners willing to make play activities? In a play situation – one that is likely to be less regulated than a cooking activity, for instance – how willing are we to allow real knives, real sieving and real food, for example, in the home corner?

We might also question the extent to which the second observation, in particular, constitutes play. Arguably, these observations could be likened to an ‘in-between activity’ (Gura, 1996: 60) as they share many elements from the world of work as much as play. Certainly the skills developed in cutting the potatoes in Observation 2 appear more work-like than play-like (Wing, 1995; Gura, 1996).

• How willing are practitioners to allow children to eat food that has been placed in a play situation? My many observations in this area show that inevitably some children eat what is there.

• If we do allow such activity but are worried about the potential risks for health and safety, are we in danger of regulating such play to the extent that it becomes something that is not play?

• Can staff other than early years practitioners become involved in children’s play as in Observation 2? In this example, the cook was involved in the children’s play.

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• Should real food be used as a play material? There are decisions to be made regarding whether this is ethical, given the experience of some people in the world of food insecurity. Alternatively, by having the opportunity to play with real food, children may be able to alleviate any anxieties they experience in relation to food and eating in a relaxed environment (Albon and Mukherji, 2008).

In my observations, the use of real food tends to result in children ‘playing for real’ whereas plastic food tends to result in play that might be regarded in terms of ‘really playing’. Maybe this points to the need for both real and pretend items in play situations alongside the ability to mix media from around the play space(s). An example of this might be the child I observed putting dried pasta onto a plate that was available in the home corner and then carefully selecting a piece of red fabric from the workshop area to act as tomato sauce on top of it.

‘Really playing’

‘Really playing’, I wish to argue, differs from ‘playing for real’ because here, children appear to be stretching conventional boundaries. In my data this relates to what food is eaten, but more usually, how it is eaten and the kinds of unwritten cultural rules that exist about what is acceptable behaviour during food events. It is play that can be likened to Hendy and Toon’s (2001) thematic-fantasy play, but more than this, it is often characterized by its humour and playfulness. For Parker-Rees (1999: 61), playfulness enables us to cope with ‘the tension between personal freedom and social constraints that characterizes all forms of interaction’. Further to this, ‘really playing’ can be linked to ‘ludic’ behaviours (Hutt et al., 1989) and Kalliala’s (2006) notion of ‘dizzy’ play that turns the world upside down. It should be noted that the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) (DfES, 2007) lacks reference to such humour and playfulness – the few references there are seem to relate to babies.

‘Really playing’ can be contrasted with ‘good’ play, which is encouraged by practitioners as it emphasizes turn-taking and following approved rules (e.g. King, 1992). Bakhtin (1984) discusses the important role played by the carnivalesque in subverting and making fun of authoritarianism, order, officialdom, narrow-minded seriousness, dogma and ‘all that is finished and polished’ (p. 3). Carnival is a time when there is temporary liberation from the established order of things and it is always accompanied by laughter. Thus, my conceptualization of some play episodes as ‘really playing’ seems to fit well with this.

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Such playfulness is important as we can see in many examples in this book. Corsaro (1997) argues that playful activity is indicative of children’s ability to create and participate in their own peer cultures. In addition to this, the sharing of comic situations and the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Young Children’s Play and Creativity
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Young Children’s Play and Creativity – Multiple Voices
• Part I Researching Young Children’s Play and Creativity
• Part II Practitioners Responding to Young Children’s Play and Creativity
• Index