Forming Ethical Identities in Early Childhood Play

Brian Edmiston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134108466
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Through compelling examples, Brian Edmiston presents the case for why and how adults should play with young children to create with them a 'workshop for life'.

In a chapter on 'mythic play' Edmiston confronts adult discomfort over children's play with pretend weapons, as he encourages adults both to support children's desires to experience in imagination the limits of life and death, and to travel with children on their transformational journeys into unknown territory.

This book provides researchers and students with a sound theoretical framework for re-conceptualising significant aspects of pretend play in early childhood. Its many practical illustrations make this a compelling and provocative read for any student taking courses in Early Childhood Studies.

Chapter 1
Ethics in play

I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child, and that if these faculties are encouraged in youth they will act well and wisely in the adult, but that if they are repressed and denied in the child they will stunt and cripple the adult personality. And finally, I believe that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination.

Ursula Le Guin, 1979, p. 44

Introduction

When my son, Michael, was three he turned into a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Right in front of my eyes, as he looked at a book on dinosaurs, his face, body, and voice changed. He loved everything about T-Rex from the powerful legs that it used to pound after any other dinosaur that crossed its path to the nine-inch-long razor-sharp teeth that could rip apart its dinner before gulping it down. Michael seemed to become this ‘king of tyrant lizards’ when he strode on his tip-toes, held up his first two fingers, and roared. Even at the dinner table he pretended to be this creature as he ate his food with his first two fingers and his teeth.

I was faced with a question that the parents, teachers, and care-givers of so many young children must answer. How should I respond to this apparently violent play? Should I just let him get on with his pretending or should I try to manage his play? At different times, adults will do both. In doing so they follow the advice of most play theorists. Despite the noise and movement that can be annoying, children are, after all, ‘only playing’. Because their play is understood as vitally important for their development, it should be encouraged and not banned. On the other hand, children have to learn appropriate social behaviors for particular situations. So play will, at times, need to be controlled. Eating like a dinosaur was not going to go down well with Michael’s grandparents whom we were due to visit; and it certainly would not be well received in our favourite Saturday morning restaurant. This book, however, does not address these two alternatives. Instead this book describes and analyses a third alternative – how I played with Michael.

In this book I use examples from a long-term case study of playing with my son (Edmiston, 2005), as well as with other young children, to analyze how extended child–adult play can promote the formation of ethical identities (Edmiston, 1998a; 1998b; 2000) and to develop theories about play, ethics, and pedagogy. Between the age of eighteen months and seven years I encouraged Michael’s play and regularly played with him. I made meaning with him not only about the stories that we read and the movies that we watched, but also about life and ethics. As I wrote drafts of this book I often talked with Michael about past events, read him draft descriptions, and asked for his reactions.

One of this book’s strengths is that it provides readers with multi-layered analysis of the significance of a child–adult relationship that is interwoven with playful interactions. At the same time, as with any theorizing based on case study research, its implications are necessarily limited. As a child in a middle-class home with academic parents, Michael’s experience was atypical. Though this book is unique in describing a father’s play with his son, it only briefly touches on issues of gender or class in play. The examples in the text are not intended as recipes, nor is the book presented as a prescription for how adults ought to play with boys or with children in general. Rather, as long-term research I have used a case study to generate new theory by contesting many of the implicit assumptions of the existing theory and research of play, ethics, and pedagogy.

As a teacher–researcher I had engaged in reflective practitioner research into using play and drama with children for curricular purposes in my own classroom with children aged seven, eight, and nine as well as in other teachers’ classrooms (Edmiston, 1993; Edmiston and Wilhelm, 1996; 1998; Edmiston and Enciso, 2002). I was comfortable playing with school-aged children, taking field notes, tape-recording, and using reflective analysis to guide my practice. Inquiry as a father-researcher was more seamlessly woven into the fabric of everyday life than it had been in the classroom. Though I had originally intended to document my interactions with our daughter Zoë, who is four-and-a-half years younger, after over five years of tracking my interactions with Michael I had largely stopped keeping records by the time Zoë was three.

The writing of this book has been a topic of family conversation since its inception. Aged seventeen, at the time of writing, Michael has read and approved the manuscript. His sister, Zoë, now aged thirteen, and their mother, Pat Enciso, have also read the sections where they are referenced. From when Michael was very young he wanted me to play with him rather than watch from a distance as he played. I mostly recorded our interactions in notebooks because using a tape recorder or video camera was largely impossible. Michael rarely stayed still as we played and if he noticed a recording device he would become more interested in it than in imagining he was elsewhere. It was not until he was older that I could have discussions with Michael about the project. Aged seven I asked his permission to share some of his drawings as I interviewed him before making a scholarly presentation. He knew that the words I wrote down carefully were going to be quoted and he changed his register accordingly. Michael, Zoë, Pat, and our children’s cousins who are referred to in a later chapter, have all formally signed consent forms. However, they did more than consent to participation in this project and approve the references made to them. All have been highly supportive throughout and have been eager to see the manuscript in print.

Ethics in early childhood

In recent years, scholarly attention has refocused on the ethical dimensions of schooling while stressing that learning and teaching are social practices within cultural institutions (Dewey, 1909/1975; Ayers, 1994; 2004; Jackson et al., 1993; Noddings, 1984; 2002; Wolf and Walsh, 1998; Sockett, 1993; Brooks and Kann, 1993; Buzzelli and Johnston, 2002; Dahlberg and Moss, 2005; Wortham, 2006). Most adults in early childhood institutions assume that children will develop into rational morally objective thinking individuals, either because the adult facilitates whatever individual moral reasoning a child is assumed capable of, or because the adult just tells children what is right and wrong. Such assumptions, which are based in a largely acultural and only minimally social view of learning, are pervasive despite feminist critiques of the atomized view of the individual self that stress the importance of social relationships (Midgley, 1981/2003; Gilligan, 1982; Noddings, 1984; Walkerdine, 1988; Tronto, 1993; Hauser and Jipson, 1998; Sevenhuijsen, 1998; Butler, 2005) as well as postmodern critiques of the modernist theory of ethics underlying such views (Best and Kellner, 1991; Bauman, 1993; 1995; Levinas, 1989) and more general postmodern, post-structural, and critical reconceptualist critiques of the universalizing, objectivist, normative, and rationalist theoretical assumptions of child development (Lather, 1991; Kessler and Swadener, 1992; Day and Tappen, 1996; Packer and Tappen, 2001; Cannella and Bailey, 1999; Soto and Swadener, 2002).

The dominant early childhood discourses of hierarchical stages of cognitive and moral development (Piaget, 1975; 1962; Kohlberg, 1984) assume that young children are too egocentric to be capable of cognitive and moral reasoning and thus unable to develop ethically until they are older (DeVries and Zan, 1994; Gibbs, 2003). Similarly, despite the narrative turn in moral development theory (Tappen and Packer, 1991; Day and Tappen, 1996) and a postmodern critique of the didactic nature of character education (Nash, 1997) as well as a focus on the need to situate moral education within a relational caring community (Noddings, 2002), many parents, teachers, and caregivers think that children will become moral simply by being told to be virtuous (Lickona, 1991; Kilpatrick, 1992; Brooks and Kann, 1993).

Drawing, in particular, on Bakhtin’s (1981, 1984a, 1984b, 1986, 1990, 1993) poststructural theories of ethics, discourse, narrative, authoring, art, imagination, dialogism, and the self, I propose an alternative to the dominant moral developmental and character education theories and pedagogies: the formation of ethical identities through play, especially child–adult pretend play. I align myself with those scholars who have applied a Vygotskian and Bakhtinian analysis to moral development (Tappen and Packer, 1991; Day and Tappen, 1996; Tappen, 1997; Buzzelli, 1997). In complementing Bakhtin’s theories I draw, in particular, on inter-related social constructivist theories of development, imagination, and play (Vygotsky, 1967; 1978; 1986), post-structural analysis of power relationships (Foucault, 1977; 1978; 1980) in early childhood settings (Dyson, 1997; Dahlberg et al., 1999; Grieshaber and Canella, 2001; Tobin, 1997; 2000; Mac Naughton, 2000; 2005), as well as a social positioning and cultural anthropological analysis of improvisation, agency, and identity formation (Davies and Harré, 1990; Harré and Langenhove, 1999; Holland et al., 1998; Holland and Lave, 2001).

In early childhood institutional settings adults are largely seen as facilitators of children’s play with limited adult participation being encouraged by most scholars (Paley, 1986; Jones and Reynolds, 1992; Bennett et al., 1997). The adult’s primary role is a ‘play watcher’ so that children will become ‘master players’ (Reynolds and Jones, 1997). The adult role of ‘guide, friend, counselor and facilitator’ of children’s play means that ‘intervention should be of the gentlest kind … lying in the provision of appropriate materials for learning, and the structuring of the classroom context, both social and intellectual, so as to make learning more likely and attractive’ (Meadows and Cashdan, 1988, p. 3). Smilansky (1990) suggests that adult participation should be as ‘play tutors’ in order to enhance cognitive development. Similarly, Shefatya believes that adult ‘intervention should be skill oriented and not content orientated … with sensitivity to the child’s level of play development and in congruence with the content that the child is trying to express’ (1990, p. 153).

Research has shown the benefits of adults playing with children in terms of improving communication and developing intimacy (Kelly-Byrne, 1989), engagement with and interpretation of literature (Wolf and Heath, 1995), literacy learning (Kendrick, 2003), and extending learning in general (Tizard and Hughes, 1984; Sutton-Smith, 1993; Kitson, 1994; Wood and Attfield, 2005). Despite a turn toward social constructivist theory in early childhood (Bennett et al., 1997, p. 14), concerns that adults may over-power children have meant that adult–child play in general tends to be minimized, dismissed, or discouraged (Brown, 2003; Bennett et al., 1997; Scarlet et al., 2005). As Bruner put it, the romanticism of Rousseau, combined with a view of play that wanted to relieve children of adult pressure, created an ideology that, ‘real play had to be free of all constraints from adults and be completely autonomous of their influence. True play, in a word, came entirely from the inside out’ (1986, p. 79).

In this book I develop a theory and pedagogy for the formation of ethical identities in early childhood play through three intersecting strands: play, ethics, and pedagogy. I use the terms ethics and ethical interchangeably with morality and moral though I tend toward the former usage because, for me, those terms carry fewer negative connotations. Adults’ tendencies to moralize in their interactions with children assume an adult moral superiority that I dispute. Likewise, adult reliance on a moral code often infers an even more universalizing authority than assumptions about the need to adhere to predetermined ethical rules, both of which I resist.

This introductory chapter provides both an overview of the book and an introduction to the major theoretical ideas about play and ethics that ground the premises of this scholarship. In chapter two I examine the contentious issue of superhero or war play that I re-conceptualize as ‘mythic play’ and contrast with everyday play. I show why mythic play, based as it is in narratives of power, is significant in forming ethical identities. In chapter three I discuss the formation of selves and identities and how they may be authored in pretend play. In chapter four I examine how children’s ethical identities may be co-authored through child–adult play. I consider the implications for adults’ ethical identities when they are committed to playing with children. In particular, I analyze how my own ethical identities have been challenged and changed through play. In chapter five I synthesize the theoretical frameworks developed in the book and consider implications for pedagogy in early childhood institutional settings. I explore what play as ethical pedagogy might look like if teachers, parents, and care-givers were committed to sharing power with children and changed their practice in response to the theoretical ideas and practical approaches outlined in this book.

Play

Binary thinking about play

My attempt to make sense of Michael’s play and respond, when he pretended to be a T-Rex, was more problematic than it may seem. Anyone who talks or writes about play, whether in an academic, daycare, or family setting, is unavoidably using a term that is populated with other people’s assumptions and beliefs about the value of play in different situations and relationships (Bakhtin, 1981). Understandings of play are linked to various images and experiences about what is wise parenting, nurturing care-giving, or good teaching.

In both professional literature and everyday usage, when people talk or write about play the dominant way of thinking is in terms of binaries. Play is framed as an activity set apart from real life (Huizinga, 1955; Winnicott, 1971; Bateson, 1972). Huizinga argued that human culture emerged out of the human instinct to play but he did not see play as part of cultural reality. Play is a special, irrational, fun activity that is different from ‘ordinary’ life (p. 4). Winnicott regarded play as essential for creativity, communication, and psychological health but bracketed off from real-world appraisal. For Winnicott, playing, creative, and cultural experiences like art occur in an intermediate area between inner and outer reality (p. 15). Bateson regarded play as essentially an ironic communication about reality (p. 180). Such binary thinking leads to divisions of activities, whether those of a...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Illustrations
• Introduction by the Series Editors
• Chapter 1 Ethics in play
• Chapter 2 Mythic and everyday play
• Chapter 3 Playing with possible selves and authoring identities
• Chapter 4 Co-authoring ethical selves and identities
• Chapter 5 Play as ethical pedagogy
• Bibliography
• Index