Archive for July, 2012
The speculative effect of playful adults on children’s culture
What is the effect of playful adults on children’s culture? I’ve been reading a research article on PlosOne, When the Transmission of Culture Is Child’s Play (2012). The question that this research asks is: How does culture get transmitted between children? The answer is obvious to playworkers: it’s through play, of course. The paper’s author, Mark Nielsen (of the School of Psychology, University of Queensland, Brisbane), defines culture by writing:
. . . in order for any behaviour to be considered ‘cultural’ it must propagate in a social group.
In other words, a spread of habits and traditions in that group. It’s no great surprise to me, reading the research, that children’s playing will develop those children’s culture: the culture of stories and habits, traditions and obsessions, will ripen and grow in the unfolding playing of the children. Nielsen himself writes:
[Children] entering into playful games with peers is much more about engaging with others than it is about acquiring object-related skills.
So, it’s more interesting when reading this paper, I think, to ask the question: What is the effect of playful adults on children’s culture? I ask this because Nielsen’s research is based on a simple task demonstrated by an adult. He and his colleagues conducted experiments with two groups of pre-schoolers: one group in Australia and one in Sri Lanka. They got an adult to demonstrate to one child how to open a box. The Australian and Sri Lankan children were split into different groups and then, individually, shown how to open the box by the adult in two different ways: for children in the first group, Nielsen calls the method ‘Functional’; the second way is called ‘Playful’. In the Functional way, the adult makes use of a key or a stick to show how to open the box. In the Playful way, the adult uses a toy car or a toy cow. In both the Functional and Playful ways, the demonstrating adult deliberately uses the object (key, stick, car, or cow) with some actions that are irrelevant to how the box can be opened. So, for example, the object is scraped along the box’s lid or round and round the ground next to the box. The box can only be opened by either pushing or sliding the opening mechanism. In the Functional way, the key or stick actions are reinforced with functional words. In the Playful way, the car or cow actions are reinforced with sounds like ‘vroom, vroom’ or ‘moo, moo’. The final piece of the experiment here is the ‘control’ children: these individuals aren’t shown how to open the box by the adult and are given the opportunity to poke around with the box and find out for themselves.
So, that’s the set-up of the science bit. What the researchers were looking at was, when the first child in each of the Functional, Playful and Control groups was then asked to show a second child what they could do with the box (i.e. open it) – and then the second child did the same for a third child, and so on down a chain – how many of the irrelevant actions, like scraping the object along the top of the box, demonstrated by the adult would be copied and kept going by the children down the chain.
The researchers found that the children down the Playful chain (i.e. the ones who started off with the adult using ‘moo, moo’ or ‘vroom, vroom’ sounds with cow/car) kept a lot more of the irrelevant actions going (even though ‘child three’ in the chain was copying from ‘child two’ and not from the initial adult).
In the Functional chain (basically where the adult was teaching in a rational ‘this is how to do it’ adult sort of way), the children quickly lost a lot of the irrelevant actions, i.e. the actions that didn’t help them open the box, like scraping a stick in the dirt around the outside of the box.
Not surprisingly perhaps, to the playworker, the Control children chain (who had no initial demonstration by the adult and were given the opportunity to work it out themselves), didn’t really copy the irrelevant actions of the other children. The adult was still present and encouraging the child though.
Nielsen writes:
We reasoned that the . . . lack of children’s over-imitation of other children might be attributable to the nature of the initial adult demonstration. That is, when an adult seeds the target action in the first child it is typically done in a serious, pedagogical manner. This might facilitate adult-child transmission but not subsequent child-child transmission; especially if children have little or no reason to view their peer model as an expert.
So, in other words, this research is saying that an adult who playfully shows a child how to do something, will be faithfully copied (over-imitation) by the children more than the adult who functionally teaches a child how to do something. The play in the action is the attractor. The functionally taught child will work out how to perform the action from the adult, but won’t pass on all the adults’ irrelevant actions to other children.
Nielsen goes on:
In contrast, when playing, children will unhesitatingly adopt the non-functional, arbitrary actions and behaviours of their playmates.
So, playing children tend to copy other children’s irrelevant actions and arbitrary ‘make it up as you go along’-ness. This, then, is the children’s culture.
. . . in contrast to adult-child transmission, the reproduction of redundant actions [should] diminish or disappear in child-child transmission. This is precisely what happens.
In other words, because the child doesn’t see another child as an expert in what they’re doing, unlike the way they might see a functional adult, Nielsen reasons, redundant and irrelevant actions passed from functional adult to child, tend not to then be passed from child to child. However, children’s culture is such that that redundancy of action is passed on when no adult initiates things. This is how I understand this research.
Where does this leave us with my initial question? What is the effect of playful adults on children’s culture? Could it be that the playful adult is acting in the same cultural landscape as the adult-less child-child culture? That is, despite received wisdom in some of the playwork literature (that is, in effect, the adult must not pollute the children’s play by their actions), the playful adult may become ‘absorbed’, by the playing child, into their cultural landscape: aiding and abetting that culture’s formation and evolution – its ripening. The playful adult, according to this research, is more faithfully imitated (believed?), than the functional adult.
This may come as no surprise to some playworkers; it may be heresy to others.
Beyond being just out of sorts
How do you know your children are out of sorts? Or just slightly more than simply out of sorts? Sometimes they’re just not themselves, not there in themselves; something almost too tiny to spot for other people who don’t know them well. What do you see that, to others, just gets absorbed in the whole slop and swill of the play space they’re in? What tells you that you’re focused hard on your children as individuals?
Do they get spooked by strange things, things that don’t usually bother them? Just tiny agitations that others might ignore or not pick up on. Things like momentary, out of character and only very occasional selective mutism. Things like a fleeting irrational response (even more irrational than the irrationality that play is). Things like a sudden look or twitch?
Do they give up on their usual play cues? Are corners or other places in the environment – where unreturned or rejected cues happened – shied away from, ignored, taken aggressive grievance against? Can you see the usual manner of cues, for any individual child, shifting slightly into other types of cues?
Do the children you’re observing, focusing on, find it difficult to absorb themselves in the play flow? What’s causing this? Are they preoccupied, do you think? Is there too much or too little stuff? Are you in the way? Are you in the way even if you think you’re well out of the way? Following on from some of Bob Hughes’ thinking, in the quantum world – the science of the very small – at the atomic level, the instrument used to observe an electron (so, a light beam) affects that electron. Zoom back out: is it the very fact that you, the instrument of observation, are observing that child that affects their ability to drop into play flow? Is the child out of sorts because of you?
Is the child associating what happened with some play resource, on any other day, or in any other place with a similar play resource, in a negative way? Did the feel of that resource affect them, or the way it broke suddenly, or the way it fell down and trapped them underneath for a few seconds? Do your children seem to merge days and play and resources into one huge swill? Is it as if time and space and objects can be easily interchanged with other time/space/object constructs? That’s not to say your children can’t differentiate, simply put, one place or time from another; rather, I wonder how time and space runs through children.
Just how much are your children picking up on your own mood? You’re hot, you’re tired, you’re hungry, you’re feeling slow to respond. You do respond, return cues; you do this in good time for your child to be vaguely satisfied, but it’s all vague, it’s all ‘not quite quality enough’ for them. They know you’re returning, though not in those words; they know you’re mostly there; they know you’re not totally with it. Their subsequent play cues aren’t exactly aberrant, dys-play, perceivable as aggressive, ‘wrong’: they’re just listless cues. They cue but they half-cue.
How do you know when your children are out of sorts? Do you know them well enough, within the context of the general slow-motion maelstrom or great huge whirl of the whole group, to be able to look beyond ‘they’re feeling tired, unwell, hot’? What’s unseen, beyond what we usually see?
Reflection cubed
Question everything. The subject of reflection has come up a couple of times in the last few days, and with different people, when discussing children’s play and playwork. When training, is it possible to teach someone how to think? (Of course, we all think, but thinking play and playwork is another thing altogether). Maybe we can teach the value of thinking, or the potential for thinking, about these things. Or can we ever teach anything at all? Question everything.
I’ve been thinking about reflection because the subject area and the act have been sparked into life in me by the conversations I’ve been having. However, in order to get my thoughts down here, I need to take this one step at a time (it could get messy if I’m not careful; it probably will get messy!) I’m thinking of levels, and I’ve got three levels going on so far (there is the possibility for more). It’s rather like the film, Inception, where DiCaprio goes down progressively deeper dream levels. So, to start off: an observation as story, partly also in observation of myself; a reflection:
Notebook:
Lulu (9) is walking from the car park with me and a small group of other children. We’ve parked the minibus at the other end of the site and have to walk all the way to where we usually are. We go down the alley where there’s a low wall. It’s about three feet at its highest, going down to about a foot and a half high as the path slopes up. I’m talking with some other children. I turn around, after I get to the end of the wall, and I see Lulu up on it and she’s doing cartwheels along it. She looks quite in control of her movement, flipping over, even able to balance her weight on one hand at the very top of the cycle and slowly lean her feet down before spinning on again. Even so, she’s doing this cartwheeling and has bounced off the end, landing on her feet, before I can even think what to say or raise myself to any action. I open my mouth, shrug, move on.
Reflection (Level 1a)
What did I do, and why? I stood and watched. I thought slowly. I thought about what words to use, and if I should use words at all. I thought if I should just understand that this was play in front of me and that Lulu was quite capable. I watched because I was torn between personally having no problem with how Lulu was choosing to manoeuvre through space and by feeling like others might look unfavourably on this. I shrugged because I was fine, because I was happy to have my instincts proved right, to be relieved.
Reflection (Level 1b)
Question everything. Why did I feel the way I felt? I felt as if I should trust Lulu; that Lulu wasn’t trusted by others passing by and who didn’t know her (‘children don’t know how to move safely’); that others would look unfavourably on me for ‘letting’ her cartwheel along the wall; that I would look unfavourably on myself if she fell off.
Reflection (Level 1c)
Why did I feel the need to feel these things? I worried that others might think poorly of me, that playwork practice might be seen as deficient or even negligent in some way; that I would question myself so much, if Lulu hurt herself, that I would stamp down unjustly, in the future, on even such low-level risky play as this. I felt the need to feel this way more because I was worried about how people would perceive Lulu, children, play, playwork and me, more than I was truly worried about Lulu hurting herself. I was concerned about her, a little, but she has so much more ability in her risky play than even her mother gives her credit for, in my observation and opinion.
Reflection about reflection (Level 2a)
If meta-data is ‘data about data’, and if meta-communication is ‘communication about communication’, then could meta-reflection be ‘reflection about reflection’? I’m sitting out in the sun, thinking. I’m thinking about the act of thinking. I’m reflecting about my reflections, such as above. Why do I reflect? What do I get from it? Isn’t it better just to ‘do’? I reflect to find out things I didn’t know, things I thought I knew, things I might know. I get further thoughts out of the act of reflecting; I get confused by the act of reflecting sometimes. When I just ‘do’ I wonder if I am just doing at all. Even if I’m not consciously thinking of playwork ideas or suchlike, is it all still swilling around in me, agitating, making me ‘just do’ in a certain way anyway?
Reflection about reflection (Level 2b)
Question everything. If I get confused, sometimes, by the act of reflecting after the action, or by my reflection-in-action, in the moment of the play taking place, why do it? Why reflect? It must be that I enjoy being caught up in webs in my thinking. Do I actively seek out conflicting thoughts, stimulus for thought? Or, are these webs out of my control? – it not being a matter of enjoying the creation of them; rather, some things happen, the web-making, and I can’t stop them, so I cope the best I can. If I ‘just do’, because I’ve read a lot, or because I’ve done a lot, or because I’ve already made a lot of mistakes, do I need to read, or think, any more? Or, if I ‘just do’, am I not doing enough?
Reflection about ‘reflection about reflection’ (Level 3)
Or, in a simpler way: thinking about meta-reflection. Is this a superfluous level? What is the message I transmit to myself, and to others, in declaring thought about ‘reflecting on reflection’? Why ask questions like ‘why reflect?’? What can I hope to achieve by these questions . . . ?
Question everything . . . Quick, where’s my ‘kick’ to get me up, out of this level, back up to the surface world?!
In celebration of play-friendliness
In celebration of the play-friendly space, rather than the child-friendly space (thank you, Lily, for the direction in the thinking here), a small descriptive scene. I’m busy varnishing the children’s chairs and table when they come, and the eldest, three, pokes her head gingerly out into the garden space (because she’s been foretold about what I’m doing). I finish off the last chair, leaving the bits and bobs of my previous hours’ focus on the paving slabs in the baking hot sun. The children have been told these things are sticky and they stay clear (though the youngest is sneaky and determined to find a way, once in a while, to stick himself to the table like the summer flies do).
Before long there’s a paddling pool out with a good array of stuff floating around in it: bits of guttering, tin cans and other things that will no doubt rust. I’d picked up the broken glass a little while earlier, but there are still the husks of dead snails’ shells piled up in the corner after the brutal salt massacre of a week or two ago. There’s an unfenced pond full of water so green it ceases to be green any more. Somewhere down there is Steve the Fish (after Steve McQueen, the motorcycle jump over the barbed wire fence? You can piece it all together from here).
The youngest, who’s not yet two, wobbles as he tries to climb the chunks of railway sleepers that are laid out as steps up to the inclined grass. He’s preoccupied with balls: any balls; he throws a foam one down the hill and falls after it, throwing himself after it too, just managing to avoid landing on his face. Last week, he landed on his face on the paving slabs wedged into the grass slope. He cried, got up and went mountaineering again. Today he reaches out for my hand and we do the mountaineering thing, paving slabbing (or whatever it is inside his head).
The shed door is open and the play stuff is piled up all on one side. The shed is also home to the usual paraphernalia of all good sheds: lawnmowers, nails and screws and hammers and various junk. We pull out paints and a good thirty brushes, more pots and cans and containers. The children paint stones and the eldest then wants to varnish them. I give her the sticky pot and she chooses five brushes to use, one after the other. One brush, apparently, is not enough to smear with and, once sticky, needs replacing. I remind her again how sticky things might get. She’s careful, but she manages to varnish her toes anyway.
At the top of the garden, the decking is getting overgrown with thistles. All the children pick their way around these whenever they’re up there. Sometimes, the big heavy wooden chairs will get climbed upon (and noses and chins making contact with hard surfaces are occupational hazards for those wishing to climb to the very top; tears get shed; snot gets wiped into adults’ t-shirts; children get deposited back at base camp on the decking and asked: OK, that didn’t work, which way up next?; chairs get climbed up again from the other side); the table will get climbed up onto and sat on.
The children know where the wobbly paving slab is, and navigate it carefully or jump on it; they have a healthy respect for the sharp fact that is the point where the grass stops and the steps and imminent downwards start; they know that the thin white fencing made of old bits of banisters is very close to being ineffective as a fence at all; they sometimes ignore their parents when walking into the shed with bare feet, not because of belligerence, I suspect, more because they’re watching where they’re stepping.
This play-friendliness is a work in progress. The adults in the space are understanding of the children’s play and that things are playable with. In contrast, there are two ‘play parks’ within easy walking distance of where I live. I use the term very loosely. Gack and I recently visited both. He only went to the things in the parks that moved (and, even then, only the things that were novel for him – he doesn’t do swings). So, for an hour non-stop, we fed the small steel circular contraption that looked like a tipped-over bird bath: we fed it grass and twigs and sticky weeds and Gack’s rucksack and Gack himself, and swirled it all around and spun it round and scooped it out and did it all over again. And again. And again. Gack contained his play in that small ten feet wide diameter of tarmac (later steering off to investigate the lifting, moving, squeaking whatever-it-was contraption, coming back again for more spinning) whilst a man stood smoking, waiting for his dog to do its business thirty feet away from us.
At the other ‘play park’, after we stopped in the middle of the pavement up the hill for Gack to rest his plastic ba-rarrow (wheelbarrow) and sit and have a replenishing sugar-hit of cake, Gack stood and surveyed the scene for a few seconds. He made for the moving parts of the fitness contraption, not being able to reach the bars himself, sliding the pads on their rails, back and forth, back and forth. He alternated between this and the static wooden truck, the saving grace of which being its moveable steering wheel. Gack didn’t even see the platform where the paltry ‘home corner’/den was built nearby. Nor did I, till I began to tire of the back and forth between truck and fitness contraption.
These ‘play parks’ are not so play-friendly. They have limited scope. It’s lucky for the park that Gack is so forgiving. He seems to get a lot more scope, despite its smaller space, out of the garden where he, and his cousins, can mountaineer, jump on wobbly slabs, balance on the edges of steps, run down the steep slope, poke around for snay-eels and slugs (and I swear we saw a grass snake last week), gawp at slug slime, slop watery purple paint into the pool, and varnish their own toes.
On knowing how best to be
The barmaid at my local is talking with a punter who’s obviously into her. He kisses her hand. When she’s near me, I ask her, ‘How do you do that?’ She says, ‘I smile.’ She gets me. She knows. You know? We know.
I’m still on my mystic kick. There are people out there in the play and playwork world who understand, of that I’m sure. Every so often I come across one of these fellow followers of this fashion of belief, or I re-find them and we talk these things, or linked things, which we haven’t talked before.
Arthur comments on a recent post of mine:
Penny Wilson knows this – this being the thing you said about those fellow human beings who are considered different from you or eye [sic] – she knows about that playfulness that powers, mediates, underpins and transmogrifies the play of the children ‘who are considered different from you or eye’. Maybe we should re-label the other children as ‘the children that we don’t feel the need to give a label to’.
Hugo Grinmore (who, once, under his other name, observed and analysed me in play connection with a child, a privilege to hear him tell me how I worked) wrote about children who he grouped as ‘scintillators’:
‘[Scintillators] are beyond neuro-typicality. My belief is that what we see is not a component part of [autism] spectrum disorder but rather a new emotionally transcendent type of human . . . These children have very highly developed emotional antennae. They are deeply sensitive to others’ emotional states and can respond accordingly . . . [These children] have and value knowledge that is centred on the notion of what we might properly call wisdom.’
Hugo Grinmore (2009), Scintillators. iP-Dip Magazine [print] Issue 14.
More succinctly, I sat with Eva Kane on the sofas in the car park at the International Play Association conference in Cardiff last summer. Eva, from the University of Stockholm, and I talked around this sort of thinking. She looked at me and agreed, saying: ‘Children know.’ That was all. That was all I needed to know there was affirmation of similar thoughts out there in the play and playwork world.
I was recently given a link (my dancer friend who knows about how play runs through us). She offered me the writings of O. Fred Donaldson, Ph.D:
I’m not talking about teaching children what we know. I’m suggesting something radically different. I’m suggesting learning from children.
Donaldson is writing about learning peace from children. OK, so it’s a case, perhaps, of ‘rose-tinted spectacles’ in seeing all children all the time in this light, but the message to me is clear enough: we, adults, should not suppose we know how best to be.
‘What’s the biggest thing in the world?’ I asked a five year old, once, in a quiet moment. Without hesitation or thought, he looked me straight back in the eye and said: ‘Love.’
Donaldson writes:
Children bring with them four basic unadulterated raw materials of life: love, belonging, an urge to thrive, and a trust in the mystery of it all. These lessons have reality for me now as they have been ground into me like dirt into a young child’s [trousers]. I have found them throughout my play with children.
His play with children? He’s not a playworker, but wait here: the world I swim around in, when it’s a difficult swim, would think very warily of him. What’s he saying here? What’s he got to hide? What’s wrong with him? Stay clear.
Stand back from the edge though. Assume the best. Be child-like in understanding. In the spirit of ‘there is no such thing as absolute altruism’, what we get from our work with children is the glow of connecting with these higher beings (as Grinmore would have it). There is much to be learnt from them.
I walk into my local and I’m looking around at what I might want, and the barmaid is standing there, dutifully, respectfully, waiting a few steps back from the bar with her hands lightly held together in front of her. She’s smiling. I feel her smiling before I even register she’s physically there waiting for me. It’s genuine. It’s beyond any other communication. She seems to know this. I know this. It is a child-like openness.
These are things I’ve learnt.
playworkings 