Children, Media and Playground Cultures

Ethnographic Studies of School Playtimes

R. Willett, C. Richards, J. Marsh, A. Burn, J. C Bishop

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137318077
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de medios

Drawing on ethnographic accounts of children's media-referenced play, this book explores children's engagement with media cultures and playground experiences, analyzing a range of issues such as learning, fantasy, communication and identity.

1

Play, Media and Children’s Playground Cultures

Jackie Marsh and Chris Richards

Children’s play, as many have observed, can be elusive and puzzling to the adult eye. Roaming across different physical spaces, it poaches material from different sources, appearing often random and inchoate to adults used to the regulatory disciplines of sport and other games with transparent rule books. Sometimes, it is tactically obscure in its codes and practices. This scattered and confusing landscape presents us with profound and difficult questions about its purpose: our attempts to nail it to this or that function are often confounded, and it sometimes appears to be purely autotelic, as some have argued (Csikszentmihalyi, 2008). It is, in a word, ambiguous, as Sutton-Smith has famously argued (Sutton-Smith, 1997). But his thesis is not only that play as a cultural phenomenon is ambiguous, it is also that adult perceptions and interpretations of it are split across disparate ‘rhetorics’. These derive in part from popular opinion, in part from academic study. The work presented in this book is broadly poised between two academic disciplines, and the research traditions they represent. One is folklore studies, in its contemporary form and in relation to nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship, particularly that of Iona (1923–) and Peter Opie (1918–82). The Opies’ work on children’s play in the UK was pioneering in terms of its scope, methods and rigour, and remains both a monumental achievement and an indispensable point of reference. Combining historical and comparative methods with field research, their work has been seen as anthropology – in a review by Edmund Leach of The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (Opie and Opie, 1959) – and even as a precursor of the new sociology of childhood (James et al., 1998). For the Opies, children’s culture was a matter of tradition: a form of popular culture consisting of games, songs, superstitions, rituals and other material passed from one child to another. Their interest was in the persistence of traditional forms and their variation, though also in their various social functions. Today’s folklore studies has gone on to expand its purview towards the synchronic, considering not only context and function, but performance, communication and artistry. While textual analysis continues to develop, and historical and comparative studies are by no means rare, ethnographic research predominates, including in the study of children’s play, with a particular focus on the local and on insider knowledge and experience (e.g. Sutton-Smith et al., 1995).

The other ‘disciplinary’ tradition is, effectively, the study of children’s media cultures (e.g. Buckingham, 1993; Cook, 2004; Willett et al., 2009). Where folklore studies has shown itself to be concerned with history and tradition as well as the present, the approach from ‘children’s media cultures’ is typically concerned with the contemporary cultural moment. Folklore studies explores what appear to be organic cultural practices continually created, borrowed and re-worked by children, whereas the latter looks at TV, toys, films, comics, computer games and online play provided by mainly commercial producers. Nevertheless, there is much common ground. Both traditions explore a form of popular culture; both examine the creative work children do with cultural resources; both tend to emphasise the agency of children; both are caught up in the tensions between children’s ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ (James et al., 1998): between the function of their play for the moment and its developmental purpose. These themes will be visited in the chapters of this book.

Among these themes, and perhaps most persistent and most puzzling, is the question of children’s agency. In the new sociology of childhood (as in cultural studies and sociology more generally), constructions of the agency of individuals and groups are balanced by the study of the structures which in part determine what social actions they can and cannot undertake. Like all researchers in our fields, we do our best to negotiate these awkward binaries and their gravitational pull to one extreme or the other. On the one side lies an over-celebratory account of children’s autonomous cultural work; on the other, a pessimism about the power exerted over children by the adult and, in particular, the commercial world. If we incline to one side or the other in the analyses which follow, our intention is to recognise that the ways in which structure and agency combine are a matter of contingency and social situation as well as analytical perspective.

The overlap between ‘folklore’ and ‘media’ approaches to children’s play also applies more specifically to the work of the Opies. They were well aware of the ways in which children made use of material from their media cultures in their games of the street and playground: how they incorporated references from TV shows, pop songs, films, comics and radio dramas into the language, music and performative repertoires of their play. For example, in discussing games of ‘Peep behind the Curtain’ (or ‘Grandmother’s Footsteps’), the Opies document a version from around 1905 in which the lead player recited a jingle from an advertisement: ‘Sunlight Soap is the best in the world’ (Opie and Opie, 1969: 192). In their extensive survey of children’s traditional culture, which included some 20,000 children from across the UK from the 1950s to the 1980s, the Opies found performances of advertising jingles and pop songs, passing references to public figures, guessing activities based on film stars and advertisements, and numerous pretend games involving media characters.

In spite of this evidence of the resilience and adaptiveness of children’s folk culture over time, some contemporary researchers still insist that children’s play is currently at risk of being ‘usurped’ by commercial media (see Hill, 2011). More specifically, academics have argued that commercialisation of children’s play culture (among other factors) has pushed aside space for more imaginative play (Bishop, 2009; Kline, 1993). These arguments are part of a wider discussion about the commercialisation of childhood, which invokes debates about changes in society, children ‘becoming older younger’, and romantic narratives of times when children were outside climbing trees rather than inside ‘glued’ to screens (see Buckingham, 2011, for discussion). Many of these concerns position children’s consumption of media as detached from social processes, viewing children’s engagements with media as derivative, and attributing fixed and particular determinate meanings to consumer products.

Numerous researchers over the past two decades have shown that children are actively making meaning through their media consumption activities (e.g. Buckingham, 1993; Ito, 2008; Kinder, 1993; Tobin, 2000). This book focuses more specifically on children’s play with media sources in school playgrounds, arguing that playgrounds are sites where media culture is constituted rather than simply reflected. Meanings from home (and many other places) are carried to the playground where children participate in social processes of meaning-making and identification.

However, the research presented here carried a more specific emphasis on ‘the new media age’. In more recent studies, researchers of what folklorists term ‘childlore’ have observed changes in the media landscape, and thus in the relationship between ‘traditional’ play and media cultures. Curtis, for example, notes the ubiquitous use of computer game references in boys’ play across different playground sites (Curtis, 2001). The project on which this book is based took as its central question the relationship between children’s traditional play and their media cultures. This question acknowledged that, on the one hand, the media forms documented by the Opies are still important in children’s worlds: comics, TV, film, pop songs, advertising still perform the functions they did, though subject to changes in content and form. Our research found plenty of examples of the importance of these forms, and how they are differently incorporated into children’s play. Chapter 2 introduces categories of play: play closely imitative of media sources, hybrid/intertextual media-referenced play, and ambiguously referenced play where media influences and folkloric material are hard to tell apart. However, we were also interested in the ways in which playground games might draw on the scenarios of console games and online play; on the global video-sharing of YouTube; on old media re-mediated through online recycling; on the mash-up cultures of online fandom. On the basis of our work, we contend that the place of new media in playground games can be conceptualised through the use of three heuristic categories: cultural rehearsal, ludic bricolage and heterotopian play. These categories are developed fully in the concluding chapter but can be briefly summarised here. Cultural rehearsal refers to the way in which play frequently involves the adaptation, transformation and performance of media texts. It seeks to capture both the iterative practice of skills, dramatic enactments and performances, and the ways in which children’s culture rehearses themes, narratives and other content ‘scripted’ in the cultural resources they employ. Ludic bricolage represents the process in which the structures and rules of games – including computer games – are applied to play in the playground. It is distinct, then, from games which borrow contents such as narrative, names or dialogue; rather, it isolates the ludic skeleton underlying games, such as the rules of touching in ‘Tig’, or the complex rule systems programmed into the game engines of computer games. Heterotopian play enables us to conceptualise the way in which children’s engagement with onscreen virtual worlds overlays their imaginative play that takes place on the tarmac of the school playground. It proposes that there is traffic between these two kinds of virtual world; the avatar-based 3D world of the computer game and the imaginary virtual world superimposed on the playground by action, gesture, voice and the use of the physical environment. Heterotopias represent multiple worlds and, in Foucault’s influential essay which coined the term, they also represent transgressive spaces, which in some cases aptly characterise children’s play, in both computer games and playgrounds (Foucault, 1967/84).

Our project seems modest compared with the Opies’ extensive coverage of the UK: we conducted ethnographic studies in two playgrounds: one in London, one in Sheffield. Our aim, however, was not geographic breadth and variety but depth: these ethnographies lasted for two years, during which the researchers spent many hours on the playgrounds, in all seasons, observing, filming, talking with children, joining in their play at times, and encouraging children to consider and record their own play. This book, while it is about children’s play, is also about ethnography: about what it means to study a ‘culture’ close-up over time and what the tradition of ‘thick description’ (Geertz, 1973) can mean; about more recent conceptions of visual ethnography; and about the part children themselves might play in such investigations of their play cultures.

Our ethnographies took place in the period April 2009–March 2011. They were conducted as part of a wider project entitled ‘Children’s Playground Games and Songs in the New Media Age’, funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council Beyond Text programme. The project was a partnership between the Institute of Education (University of London), the University of Sheffield, the University of East London and the British Library. Two schools participated in the project: Monteney Primary School in Sheffield and Christopher Hatton Primary School in London. Findings from the project as a whole are discussed in Burn and Richards (2013) and Burn et al. (2011).

Other members of the project team also considered how traditional games are making their way into forms of new media. An application – the Game-Catcher – for physical interaction platforms, such as the Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Kinect, was developed and explored with children who participated in the project. It involved an innovative adaptation of the new generation of physical games, to capture playground activities (such as clapping) and make them playable as computer games. In addition, Grethe Mitchell made a documentary film (Ipi-Dipi-Dation: My Generation) representing play at both schools, interleaved with the children talking about their games and their enjoyment of them.

The project team also designed an interactive website entitled ‘Playtimes: A Century of Children’s Games and Rhymes’. Hosted by the British Library, it is available to educators, researchers, children, parents and the wider public. The website can be accessed at http://www.bl.uk/playtimes. Also at the British Library, other members of the project team produced a digitised archive of Iona Opie’s recordings (performances and interviews with children about their play from 1969 to 1983), with a listing and written commentary. This is available to researchers through the British Library’s online catalogue. The archive is available to researchers as streamed audio at http://www.bl.uk/sounds.

The remainder of this chapter introduces the theoretical sources that informed the interpretation and analysis of our ethnographic data. As well as folklore studies and media studies, discussed above, these include concepts and frameworks from the new sociology of childhood, cultural studies and play theory.

Changing childhoods and the new sociology of childhood

While acknowledging that there is a biological materiality to childhood (James and James, 2004), the work of the new sociology of childhood in the last decades of the twentieth century (James et al., 1998) has led to an understanding that ‘childhood’ is also a social construct. It has also given attention to the child as social actor and stressed the central place that childhood has in social structures (Qvortrup et al., 2009: 8). The new sociology of childhood has been characterised as embracing the child as ‘being’ rather than ‘becoming’: emphasising children’s social agency and contesting a developmental approach in which children are positioned as progressing through pre-given stages on the road to achieving adulthood. However, we also wanted to take account of children’s orientations to the future – as Uprichard suggests: ‘Looking forward to what a child “becomes” is arguably an important part of “being” a child. By ignoring the future, we are prevented from exploring the ways in which this may itself shape experiences of being children’ (Uprichard, 2008: 306; see also Steedman, 1982). We needed to acknowledge the complexity of ‘childhood’ as a social institution and as lived by children (James et al., 1998) at the same time as recognising that childhood is a ‘biosocial nexus’ which is, ‘at once a biosocial process of formation and a biosocial mode of power’ (Ryan, 2011: 11, author’s italics). Of course, bringing together social, historical and biological perspectives is not a simple matter. For example, it is apparent that ‘phases’ or ‘stages’, such as ‘adolescence’ (Bragg and Buckingham, 2009; Lesko, 2001; Richards, 1998, 2008), are neither reducible to biology (hormones) nor neatly demarcated from ‘childhood’. When does childhood end and adolescence begin? How are the boundaries of childhood redrawn by the construction of relatively recent phases such as ‘tween’ (Willett, 2006)?

In the UK, several somewhat contradictory and historically enduring constructions of childhood often operate simultaneously, persisting in contemporary debates. James et al. outline three prevalent discourses: children as evil, children as innocent and children as having rights (Bazalgette and Buckingham, 1995; Buckingham, 2000; James et al., 1998). For example, in relation to children’s use of the Internet, they are positioned both as victims at the mercy of predators and cyber-bullies who spend time online damaging each other (Livingstone, 2002, 2009; Livingstone and Haddon, 2009). ‘Childhood’ has no singular or stable ‘character’ and should be considered in its historical specificity. Furthermore, children are not contained by any one ‘childhood’ and live in complex, multifaceted social ‘worlds’ (see Heath, 1983/96: ‘Epilogue – 1996’: 370–6). So, our research contributes to understanding how particular children were situated in two primary schools in the circumstances that prevailed in 2009–11 and how they lived the more ‘playful’ aspects of their ‘childhoods’ through those years. The broader implications of such ‘local’ studies are drawn out more fully in our conclusions (Chapter 10).

In refining their account of structure and agency, James et al. consider the antecedents of the new sociology of childhood. Among these they include the Opies, locating their research among the emerging sociological paradigms because it ‘sets out from a commitment to childhood’s social worlds as real places and provinces of meaning in their own right and not as fantasies, games, poor imitations or inadequate precursors of the adult state of being’ (James et al., 1998: 28). The Opies, in James, Jenks and Prout’s analysis, provided a welcome corrective to earlier accounts of childhood as a preparation for adulthood, dominated by the social structures and norms of adult society. Nevertheless, the construction of childhood as orientated to the future is not denied in the new sociology of childhood – James, Jenks and Prout refer to ‘burgeoning competence’ and its value for educators. In the research presented in this book, as we have indicated above, we have been concerned with both structure and agency, both being and becoming.

There are a number of ways in which childhoods have changed since the decades (1950s–80s) when the Opies collected their data. Family structures are more fluid, and technological advances have transformed communicative practices between family members and peers (Buckingham, 2000; Jenkins, 2006). Children are the focus for more intense market research and a clearer target for the activities of commercial companies than in previous generations (Buckingham, 2011; Kenway and Bullen, 2001). The boundaries between various phases of childhood and adulthood are more unstable with, as suggested previously, the concept of ‘tween’ intervening between early childhood and youth in areas such as marketing (Cook and Kaiser, 2004; Weber and Dixon, 2007; Willett, 2011). To some extent children appear to be much stronger social agents with greater control over aspects of their lives than in previous generations. Children have access to more choices in relation to leisure activities, subject to socio-economic status, and some technologies afford them greater independence from adults than in previous eras (Seiter, 2004, 2005). Nonetheless, there are aspects of childhood that have become more constrained since the last quarter of the twentieth century. Further, one might suggest that the period from the 1990s to the present has seen the increased institutionalisation of the child, through standardised approaches to education and the extension of the welfare state into previously marginal areas of child-care and health, with the result that there is both...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables, Figures and Images
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on the Authors
• 1. Play, Media and Children’s Playground Cultures
• 2. An Overview of Games and Activities on Two Primary School Playgrounds
• 3. Children as Researchers
• 4. Framing and Interpreting Children’s Play
• 5. Reasons for Rhythm: Multimodal Perspectives on Musical Play
• 6. Computer Games on the Playground: Ludic Systems, Dramatised Narrative and Virtual Embodiment
• 7. Superheroes, Naughty Mums and Witches: Pretend Family Play among 7- to 10-Year-Olds
• 8. Agonistic Scenarios
• 9. Parody, Homage and Dramatic Performances
• 10. Conclusion: Forms, Functions and the Ethnographic Challenge
• Appendix – Survey of Children’s Play, Games and Media
• Notes
• References
• Index