Posts tagged ‘knowing’
In praise of some colleagues of play
Reading through the posts and pages of this site, as I have been doing as of late, it’s occurred to me that I write a lot in praise of play, in support of children and their rights, about what those children do or how they are (it is a blog with a certain focus, after all) — in echoing A. S. Neill, of Summerhill, I am ‘on the side of the bairns’ (Neill, 1916; cited by Croall, 1983: 57), but I don’t always give as much credit where it’s due to the adults who are also focused in such a way. That is, in respect of the current thinking, I thought it high time I wrote a little about some of those who I’ve worked with, over the years, in our joint focus of working with and for the children, who I’ve either learned from, been inspired by, or just simply enjoyed working with because they enjoyed working with the children and were good at what they did.
Now, the caveat here is that I’m not looking to raise the status of playworker (or the playworking-minded) to an ego-focus (maybe, ‘raise’ isn’t the right word here) — as I’ve written elsewhere, and more than once, play (and the playground) isn’t about the playworker. What I am looking to do is to say that this person, or that person, has had a positive affect, even if they didn’t know it at the time. For this caveat above and because of privacy, I won’t mention any names: if those people read here, they’ll hopefully recognise themselves. If they don’t read here, then it’s here for anyone else, or for them if they ever find it.
There’s no particular rhyme or reason for the list I’m forming in my head, other than what I’ve already written above, so there will be omissions and that doesn’t mean that those people weren’t good either. There has to be some start process though. I don’t want to write things out in chronological order either, and nor do I wish to create some sort of hierarchy of ‘value’. I shall press the internal shuffle button and see what transpires.
This post wasn’t going to be written with the added extra of academic references, but now in the flow I can see another relevant one floating up in my mind’s eye: Hughes (2001: 172) writes about what he terms as six different ‘playwork approaches’ and the ‘quality of child/playworker relationship’ as he sees it, in each. These six approaches are broadly grouped into four degrees of relationship interaction, namely: poor (for the ‘repressive’ and ‘nosy’ approaches); better (for the ‘functional’ approach); good (for the ‘enthusiastic’ approach); high (for the ‘perceived indifferent’ and ‘controlled authentic’ approaches). For the purposes of writing about my previous play-minded colleagues, I find myself thinking about the latter three approaches of the above list. (I’m not differentiating between ‘good’ and ‘high’ quality relationships for the purposes of this writing: it’s all on a level).
I’ve worked in many places and with many people over the years, and some of those adult colleagues can easily be seen as enthusiasts (though they could spill over into taking over the play, they had their hearts in the right places and the children seemed to love having them around); some have practised, with intelligence and sophistication, that sometimes difficult skill of being acutely aware of what’s going on around them, though whilst exhibiting apparent indifference; some have been authentically engaged in support of the needs and preferences, the anxieties and just plain random strangeness of the children around them, and those children ‘know’. I’ll leave you to figure who fits where in the Hughes model. So, with the preliminaries over, onwards and onwards.
A long time ago (in a galaxy far, far away!), I worked with a group of teenagers who (though we didn’t call ourselves playworkers at the time) were playworkers in training. I wasn’t so much older than they were myself, but it did strike me that these amazing people were worth their weight in gold. One in particular was always bright and beautiful, always focused on the play, even when she wasn’t so upbeat in herself (she found a way), and I just appreciated her energy. I’ve written about ‘grace’ a few times before, in respect of those who populate a place where children play (whether they are the children or the adults), and when she and I worked together, I felt that. Years later, in another place and in another life, I remember another colleague who, I think, is probably the most grace-full person I’ve ever worked with. She was quiet and caring, fragile in some ways, but just right, in my opinion, for those particular younger children there.
Maybe this is turning into a list of attributes for the ideal playworking person. Let’s mix it up. Zoom forwards another few years: I met a male playworker of roughly the same age as me and we were fairly chalk and cheese in many, many respects. We worked together closely, a lot, and so we had the easy ability to wind each other up: he would do it deliberately and I often took the bait! That said, I have to give it to him, when he was on form as a playworker, he was definitely on form. He had a look in his eye that told me that not only could he sense the play and the actions of the adults all around him, but that he wanted to push his luck a little more and more, just to see what would happen! He enjoyed the provoking, but he also knew the importance of play and wanted others to see it too. The children, most importantly, I think, also ‘knew’ and sensed him.
I’ve been lucky enough, over the years, to meet and work with plenty of people from various other countries (those from India, America, Finland, Sweden, France, Italy, Morocco, and Spain spring immediately to mind). Some of these people became good friends. A while back I had the good fortune to work with someone who came to England on a form of cultural exchange, and who later became a music teacher, I believe: we worked with children in forest locations and he was open to trying just about anything, and he was softly amazing with the children. In a similar vein (and if you trawl through the posts on this site, you’ll find this next person quietly amongst the words), I shall always remember the support worker who pushed a child in his specially adapted wheelchair up the steep inclines to where the forest school session was being held, and she worked with that boy and focused all her energy and attention on him without a word of personal grievance (if she had any at all). Some people just stay in the mind for simple acts, for years gone by.
A few years back, I worked with a man I had so much time and respect for, and over our years of working together he would bring me stories of his own children’s play, or he’d show me short films he’d made of them at play. It took me a little time to acclimatise to his humour, to his ways of working, to his ways of being, but when I did I realised that this man was the absolute heart and soul of the place. Many of the children loved and respected him, and he would often go out of his way to do things for them if they needed it, in difficult circumstances.
In a slight detour away from playwork colleagues, I did a short piece of work in a school once and was just struck happy by the sight of one of the teachers I was working with as she got inside a plastic barrel and interacted with the children on the level of play. It could have been perceived as inauthentic, some could say, but in that moment, with that teacher, with those children, in that place, it felt good and fine. You can often read things fairly accurately by reading the reactions of the children.
When it comes to reading skills, in the context of how I describe it above, two more playworkers come immediately to mind: together, and in overlaps of time, we developed a place for play, somewhere that the children also developed in their own fashion and for their own reasons, and we adults all needed to be very aware of what was happening, when, maybe why, and what might happen next, and so on. My colleagues were excellent readers of the place (by which I mean a combination of the built, the natural, the human, the temporal environment), and I respected their opinions, their ideas, their observations more than I think I could ever truly get across.
There are many others who have also had such positive affect on those around them (children and their families, other colleagues, me), at the time, and in time. There are those who listen without prejudice (yes, you know who you are!), and there are those who give great care. It’s not all been plain-sailing, of course: there have been ripples and great waves and everything in between in the seas of playworking interactions; that said, there’s been plenty of fire and grace, attention to detail, softness and oddness of idiosyncrasy along the way, so far.
References:
Hughes, B. (2001), Evolutionary playwork and reflective analytic practice. 1st ed. Abingdon: Routledge.
Neill, A. S. (1916), A dominie’s log. Herbert Jenkins (1916), Hart (1975). Cited in Croall, J. (1983), Neill of Summerhill: the permanent rebel. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Immersed in the layer of the children’s city, then and now
Stories of play can prove immersive. I didn’t write a blog post last week because of immersion in others’ memories. There’s more to a place than what, at first, meets the eye: this I’ve known for a long time, but when you start to dig down deeper and deeper into the recollections of others, you realise just how much has happened somewhere and how much you didn’t ever fully appreciate before. When we stop to look around a playground, how much play has happened there? When we stop to look around a city, how much play — likewise — has happened there? How much play continues to shape itself, even as we look and speak?
Of course, this is only part of the depth story. With play in any given place, there’s also the on-going formation of attachment. When I think of my own childhood play places, I think of the physical reality that they were, that they are, and of the emotional, psychological and social realities of myself as linked to there. We’re interwoven with ‘place’. This is why, when I found a whole treasure trove of west London play memory stories that stretched back some seventy or so years, I found myself immersed not only in the play of those stories but also in the social history that I was delving into.
When I walk around the estate in London where I work, I sometimes stop and have conversations with the children that I know there. They’ll ride by on their bikes, or they’ll be walking to or from school, or the parks, or catching a bus, and they’ll often stop to have a conversation. Last week this happened a few times (the children who, at first, I overheard whilst they were riding their bikes towards me, talking to each other about the water slide in the adventure playground; one of the girls from the open access holiday provision who opened up conversation as I dragged our stuff back from a play in the park session; the child who stopped me on the way to the playground so she could rummage in the bin shed of her flat, offering me some bits and bobs of loose parts play materials, and so on). None of these children had any adults in tow, and it made me realise that here, now, were recollections in formation. More than this though: here, now, was a layer that the ‘old timers’ had touched on in the stories that I’d read, though I put my own spin on it — this was a layer of the city that I had privileged access to, the layer that is the children’s city. This is something that not all adults can see, let alone be allowed to enter.
Sure, the layer that I talk about swills around some adults (almost as if they can hear the children at their feet, but they mean nothing in the greater scheme of things); for some adults, the layer of the children’s city is wrapped up in the language of the ‘anti-social’; for others, as I felt last week, it’s something much, much richer. Yes, there’s play, but there’s also the aspect of the conversational trust of certain adults, of the subtle conspiracy of understanding. It’s a reciprocal affair. The language is on a level, adult-adult, as open as it can be. There’s more to this again though: between the words and the actions there seems to be an implicit knowledge of things that don’t need to be said.
Perhaps there’s some of this in the stories that I’ve read, though I’ll have to read deeper in yet to see if this is true. There are stories of the children’s city that have tales of trusted adults mixed into them. There are all the characters of yesteryear pacing through the pages as if they still exist like that: which, in essence, perhaps they do because memories work this way. When I emerged from reading and when I found myself standing, back in the middle of the site of all these tales, it was like looking at the place I have known these past few years with magic glasses on! The things you can appreciate in between the buildings, in the streets, if you learn to see.
When I walk around the estate, now, I think about the stories that are forming in the children that I know. I wonder what the place will ‘look’ like in the memories of those children when they’re seventy or eighty years of age. What will the buildings and the streets be? Which areas will be strewn with play? What play will fizz still? Who will they be thinking of from those they played with? Which adults will they think of and why? What will the layer that is the children’s city of the now look like to them?
We can’t entertain the idea that none of this matters. Despite the negativity towards whatever depth of the children’s city any given adult might perceive, those adults often seem to forget one vital thing: they were all children once too. In this there’s also the truth that we have all been immersed in a layer of the local environments where we grew up, and this was ours; it was also, possibly, alien to many of the adults around us at that time. What is it that we lose along the way to mean we can’t at least appreciate, in peering in, that place where we once were?
That place is quite unique. I call it the layer of the children’s city, but it’s also the children’s ‘wherever that child is’. It’s full in ways that are often invisible to the as-yet uninformed adult. There are nuances and trusts, actions, inactions, and possibilities within it that only the privileged are allowed to see. It is a privilege, however, that must be earned. All cities have their many layers, and in the continual updating of their various histories the layer of the children’s city should be further written in. In this way, perhaps, we’ll begin to see a richer depth of what a place is, having greater reverence for the ‘social’ embedded in the streets, in the built, and in the built upon.
playworkings 