June Factor

Tree Stumps, Manhole Covers and Rubbish Tins: The Invisible Play-Lines of a Primary School Playground.

The physical features of a primary school playground – dimensions, textures, furnishings, etc. – are incorporated and adapted for their own purposes by children in their free play. Youngsters create an intricate network of usage, play-lines invisible but known to every child at the school. Unfortunately, the general adult indifference to children’s playlore often results in a lack of consultation with the playground’s users when well-meaning but ignorant ‘landscaping’ of a school playground is undertaken.

Child's play : Dorothy Howard and the folklore of Australian children

An American academic who pioneered as an advocate for the play of children in the 1950s, she observe and documented the play and folklore of children in Australia, meticulously documenting accounts of childhood games such as hopscotch, marbles, and string games. Her insights into the world of the child are truly relevant today.

Books worth (re)readingShocking, Shocking, Shocking: Improper Play Rhymes of Australian Children, compiled by Wendy Lowenstein, Prahran (1974)

This rhyme, collected from a group of schoolgirls in Melbourne in 1967, provided the folklorist and social historian Wendy Lowenstein with the title of her lively – and for some, provocative – collection of Australian children’s verbal lore. The title is also mock serious, suggesting an exclamation of moral outrage: what are these children chanting! It is precisely such prudishness that Lowenstein challenges with her presentation of children’s clear-eyed and unembarrassed exploration and celebration of the human body. Long before the publication of Shocking, Shocking, Shocking, Lowenstein had been a leading figure as a folklore collector and populariser in Australia. Together with the historian Ian Turner, she established the Folk Lore Society of Victoria in 1955, and she edited the major Australian folklore publication, Tradition, from its inception in 1964 till its demise in 1975. She travelled to many parts of the country collecting folklore, but showed no special interest in the lore and language of children until nudged in that direction by Turner, who was beginning the research which would result in Cinderella dressed in yella, the first book of uncensored children’s play rhymes and autograph album entries published in the English-speaking world. Lowenstein contributed some of her early findings to Cinderella. Always practical and downto-earth, and with young children of her own, she saw nothing either romantic or repulsive in children’s ‘improper’ verbal play. Indeed the traditional meaning of the word ‘improper’ is declared an adult perception in the very first paragraph of Shocking:

Looking back over the first year of the International Journal of Play

Having now completed one year of publication of the International Journal of Play (IJP), with three issues, it seems timely to look back and reflect on the past year. From its earliest days, IJP was conceived of as a multi-disciplinary journal. The very first challenge to this, for the editors, was in selecting images for the cover page of the journal; to capture, in just those four letters that spelt ‘play’, a range of play-related disciplines, cultures, ages and gender. In addition to these variables, we were also challenged to depict a diversity of settings for play and alongside this, to acknowledge that the materials and resources that support play are as varied as the artefacts that exist in the world, both indoors and out. Then began the ongoing process of selection from the generous number of submissions we have received. In the first year we have published four papers derived from sociological perspectives and three papers from each of the disciplines of anthropology and special needs. There have been two papers with an educational focus, two from playwork perspectives, two from psychology and two also from the area of sport and leisure. We have published one paper that has focussed on methodological approaches to researching play and one that has prioritised children’s perspectives on play. Geographically, we have published six papers from Australia and eight from Europe, with six being from the UK and two papers from Scandinavia. We have published five papers from the USA, and one paper from Asia. Noticeable by their absence from the journal cover page are images of adults engaging with players. The young man pictured in parkour, or urban jumping, on the cover, is clearly the player here and not a play facilitator. As yet, we have not received an article about adult play – we await such writing with interest. However the role of the adult in the play experience was the subject of the very first ‘What is the state of play?’ piece provided by Elizabeth Wood and as she says: ‘although adults’ attempts at understanding play will continue to be challenging and exciting, their attempts at managing and controlling play will always be problematic’. She pointed to the dilemmas of ‘policy-sanctioned versions of play’. These two aspects do seem to be deeply inter-connected across the developed world in particular and are at the forefront of many debates on the place of play in our societies and within the journal. Wood’s work has focussed on the pedagogies of the early years classroom but we also published, in this first issue of IJP, an article from Penny Wilson where the pedagogies of ‘playable cities’ are in focus and where the policies of powerful adults serve to limit children’s playful experiences rather than to liberate them. Play, it seems, must always fight for its place, especially as our urban environments are increasingly sanitised and controlled. But who better to conduct that fight than the players themselves? We see examples of the power and longevity of play subversion and persistence in the first issue of IJP in an extended interview with the leading play scholar, Brian Sutton-Smith. Not only do Brian’s reflections reveal a continuing, indeed a lifetime’s quest for an ever deepening understanding of play, the interview concludes with a beautiful moment of pedagogy. But this is not the pedagogy that Wood warns against, the ‘managing and controlling’; it is a pedagogy borne of sensitivity and knowledge of the human condition, as Brian Sutton-Smith speaks of reaching across to his wife, asleep but in the tumult of nightmare, and how ‘just a touch on the arm or leg and the devil disappears’.

Books worth (re)reading

Years ago I met Miriam Morton, the translator of Kornei Chukovsky’s remarkable book From Two to Five, at a conference in the USA. She told me that her family had emigrated from Russia to America when she was quite young, and she remained homesick longer than the rest of her family. Determinedly, she helped maintain her mother-tongue by reading, and like most Russians she knew and loved Chukovsky’s long rhyming children’s stories about smiling crocodiles and talking mosquitoes and other fantastical creatures. It is thanks to Morton’s continuing attachment to Russian literature as well as her adult awareness of the significance of Chukovsky – journalist, poet, translator of Shakespeare, Kipling and Oscar Wilde, and above all, in her words, ‘the dean of Russian children’s writers’ – that a book first published in the Soviet Union in 1925 to great acclaim was finally translated into English in 1963. From Two to Five is that rare treasure: a book about the linguistic and cognitive development of young children written for a non-specialist readership which has much to offer specialists and scholars. What gives the lively conversational prose, with its shifting palette of humour, drama and passion its enduring value, is the substantial knowledge and reflection from which Chukovsky builds his argument for the critical importance of fantasy and language play in children’s lives. This gifted story-teller – and there are many true-life stories in the book – was writing after years of collecting, listening, learning and reflecting on the way preschoolers speak and act. An example of his approach is his account of his young daughter’s first joke:

Children and play in the Holocaust

The scholarly study of play is a comparatively late bloomer in the garden of academia. It remains largely dispersed among the disciplines, and in fields such as anthropology and education it has pu...

Out to play: the middle years of childhood

I can no longer remember when I first came across Alasdair Roberts’ writing on play. An article titled ‘Boys and girls come out to play’ – an early sounding of the ideas at the core of his 1980s book on children’s play – appeared in New Society on 1 June 1978. It signalled some of the qualities of the forthcoming book: clarity of expression, careful research across a number of disciplines, and affectionate but unromantic observation of urban children’s play, especially in the Scottish city of Aberdeen. A couple of years after the publication of his book, Roberts wrote a lively piece for the Scottish edition of the Times Education Supplement (17 December 1982): ‘Alive and kicking’. It was a robust challenge to the seemingly endless chorus of voices declaring that children no longer played as once they had – play that lingered in the nostalgic memories of the naysayers. In his Introduction toOut to play it is the subject of his first sentence – ‘It is generally believed that children no longer go out to play’ – and the primary motivation for his writing: ‘The main purpose of this book is to remove children’s games from the realm of nostalgia and demonstrate that they are as lively and varied now as they ever were’ (p. xi). It is a rueful truth that neither Roberts’ articles and his scholarly and eminently accessible book, nor the considerable scholarship on the subject of children’s play that has been published before and since then, appears to have significantly shifted this chorus of commonplace denial. Roberts was not the first to point to what he calls ‘middle childhood’ – from about 8 to about 13 – as a period of special richness in children’s play lives. A nuanced thinker, he readily acknowledges that in different societies this age range will vary. But in the Britain of the late 1970s – the place and time of his chosen focus – he points to cultural and educational as well as developmental reasons that explain why the ‘play culture’ thrives in those years. This is the age, he says, ‘of secret societies and clubs with many rules. It is the age of collecting (sea-shells, football cards, stamps), of jokes and riddles and odd customs’ (p. xiii). It is also the age in which children increasingly separate from adults, marking out their own spaces, activities and friendships, with play as a central focus, a powerful passion. Roberts is a moderate; he recognises that adults – parents, teachers and youth workers (‘the new profession of play leader’) – have a genuine interest in the well-being of these children, including during their leisure times. Politely, he suggests that these adults ‘might benefit from knowing about the games of middle childhood’:

Literature--Why Bother?.

The arts are peripheral to the major concerns of the rich and the powerful in societies such as Australia, and do not feature prominently in education systems of such countries. Yet evidence from a range of sources indicates the central importance of the arts to human life. Children exhibit, through play, the essential qualities of the arts, and the arts provide us all (children included) with a means of individual expression and forms of common experiences.ResumenLas artes son periféricas a las principales preocupaciones de los ricos y de los poderosos en sociedades tales como Australia y no se destacan mayormente en los sistemas de educación de tales países. Sin embargo la evidencia de una serie de fuentes indica la importancia central de las artes en la vida. A través del juego, los niños exhiben las cualidades esenciales de las artes y éstas nos ofrecen a todos (incluyendo a los niños) un sentido de expresión individual y ciertas formas de experiencias en común.RésuméLes arts sont périphériques aux principales préoccupations des riches et des puissants dans des sociétiés telles que l’Australie. Ils ne ressortent pas particulièrement dans les systèmes d’éducation de ces pays. Cependant, l’évidence de diverses sources indique l’importance capitale des arts dans la vie. Les enfants expriment, a travers le jeu, les qualités essentielles des arts et ces dernières nous offrent à tous (y compris aux enfants) des moyens d’expression individuelle et des formes d’expérience commune.