The Playwork Blog

Notes on The Sacred and the Profane
Gordon Sturrock, 1995

* Re-stating the purposes and practice of playwork

* therapeutic paradigm

* play as a drive not a behaviour ("ludido"?)

* play involves the acting out of neurosis - this is more beneficial than most other psychoanalytic approaches to neurosis which Sturrock categorises as "archaeology"

* play can highlight the "ontogeny of the sense of self"

* and then my brain started to melt...

I wonder if there is a scientific (cognitive-psychological rather than mystical) way of talking about ludic ecology and the therapeutic aspects of play?

Worked from home today, got lots of reading done on culture, play and shared meaning.

Notes on Collaborative pretend play: From theory to therapy by Susan Hendler Lederer (Child Language Teaching and Therapy, 2002 pp.233-255)

Frameworks for collaborative pretend play in young children

1. Shared script knowledge (references Schank and Abelson, 1977)
"A script is the underlying cognitive framework for an experience..."
Transformations between different scripts or agendas can be accomplished through metacommunication (Bateson, 1972)

2. Metacommunication
Metacommunication sets the 'frame' for interpretation (and thence communication)
A form of ongoing regulation of social interactions (specifically play transactions)
Check Giffin (1984) - quite old
Giffin - expressive (defining) metacomms ; and adaptive (refining/negotiating) metacomms.

Examples of metacommunication: Setting the stage for a game of doctors
Theatre metaphor - metacomms can be spoken in the voice of an off-stage director (a) or in the voice of an on-stage actor-director (b).
(a) "Let's pretend I'm the patient"
(b) "Oh doctor I'm feeling sick."

3. Rules knowledge
What are the rules? Giffin (1984):
a) Players must pretend
b) Players must collaborate *** Surely "collude" would be a better verb ;-) ***
- incorporate others' transformations or negotiate/propose an alternative; but not object.
Metacommunications must adhere to the rules

Relationship to language intervention
Pretend play skills linked to language and literacy development, cognitive skills such as divergent thinking (what it is?) and social skills

development of pretend play from solitary to collaborative
Solitary pretend play begins at age 1

Piaget : decentration -> decontextualisation -> integration
Becomes increasingly complex 30 months -> 5 years

Analysis of metacommunication, script and rule observance in play can be used as a developmental diagnostic marker when assessing children's language and social development.
Example in paper.

NOTE TO SELF:
Need to read Hughes on Evolutionary Playwork and Bateson's Ecology of Mind book.
Try some Roger Schank?

FURTHER RESEARCH IDEAS
shared culture and meanings
labelling and naming
attitudes towards play, particularly the concept of free play.
research into the psychology and politics (Guardian, Ecologist) of free play rather than ... the lower politics of playwork and funding etc. However attitudes towards playwork are important in both (sorry for the dualism, maybe it's a spectrum not a division.)

Whoa. Haven't stopped all day today, and it's nearly 6. Had a very interesting lecture this morning on "empowerment," maybe I'll let my thoughts on that topic simmer for a couple of days and then post them later. Bit of a "in at the deep end" introduction to social work ideology, I mean theory.

I was then in a dept of social care teaching team meeting for an hour, which was enlightening, and then I've spent the rest of the afternoon in the library digging out loads of play literature and battling the WebCat software. Then had a good chat with MH about play, and research topics, and other issues.

I have a lot of reading to do...

From a 1978 review by Susanna Miller of "Biology of Play" Barbara Tizard and David Harvey, eds.:

"Finally, there is a spirited attack by Barbara Tizard on the idea that 'play' among a plethora of toys and a minimum of adult participation and direction is essential or necessarily beneficial for learning. Apparently, this particular 'progressive idea' is not confined to the lunatic fringe of the fashion-conscious or incompetent. The picture of children in nursery schools throughout the country left to romp or shovel sand all day, and of teachers too brainwashed to know that habits of sharing and cooperation, and advances in practical and intellectual skills and knowledge require adult help, seems a little extreme. But her findings must be taken seriously. The moral for psychologists is to check practical implications of their findings carefully before drawing inferences for consumption by others, and to broadcast precisely what the evidence is for any of the educational fashions. It is never quite clear who are the arbiters of these. One suspects that they have at least as much to do with changing social aims and attitudes and economic conditions as with garbled versions of ill-established theories.

British Journal of Psychology, Vol. 69, Issue 2, p282

When Do We Have Fun? by Dave Pollard is far from the romantic pap I thought it would be.

Some quotes:

"When we're children... we are addicted to play -- we don't want to do anything else. This is a natural addiction -- it's how nature makes learning fun."

"[Our children's] toys and games are closed-ended: Specific rules, limited options. They are physically unchallenging. They are asocial or even anti-social, interacting with objects instead of people. They are highly structured. What kind of fun is this?"

"Instead of being addicted to tag they are addicted to a video game. This is a different kind of addiction -- one driven by adrenaline instead of endorphins. [Very interesting point - FB] It increases stress levels instead of lowering them. Winning becomes important instead of learning. Mental exhaustion replaces physical exhaustion. Reflex replaces creativity. Watch children playing video games, and listen: How much laughter do you hear?"

How very astute. I liked the piece a lot. It avoided quite a lot of the clichés about children and play, without being so contrived in the pursuit of being original that it was unclear.

The Journal of Experimental Child Psychology looks like it will be a good resource for my research.

A list of other possibly useful journals: ?

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/jws/chi
Children & Society

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/routledg/gecd
Early Child Development and Care

http://ecrp.uiuc.edu/
ECRP: Early Childhood Research & Practice

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/0732118X
New Ideas in Psychology

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00057967
Behaviour Research and Therapy

(BTW it is quite cool I just dragged these links over from Firefox Bookmarks Manager into my BlogThis! compose window.)

Found loads of online journals and that which I can access for free from a University IP address.

Have been browsing interesting articles and thinking about research topics.

Last week I searched for adventure play and child-centred play settings which I could visit in the future. Would be good to visit Dan and the Bath area play rangers?

Reading "Play Environments: A Question of Quality" by Bob Hughes (Saint Bob).

Also read a 2002 paper by Richard Bailey called "Playing Social Chess..." which links mindblindness with Dennett's "intentional stance" thinking and then draws in Piaget and Vygotsky. He ends up by saying that the pretence element of play enables, sorry, scaffolds young children (particularly when older siblings are present) to understand higher-order intentionality and false beliefs, other minds etc. Thus play enables children to develop mind-reading and avoid mindblindness. This happens at age 1 or 2, much before children show understanding of ToM in non-play contexts.

"...rather than play being a consequence of a child's developing mindreading skills... play is a precondition for the acquisition of these skills. In other words, it is through play that children first come to understand self-awareness, the distinction between appearance and reality, and possibily even the intentions of others..."

This "precondition", says Bailey, could be realised by a Vygotskyan process of the interpersonal becoming intrapersonal (ZPD stuff.)

"...a child's first experience of higher cognitive processes is social not personal..."

This train of thought reminds me of Dennett's story about Gregorian creatures and Popperian creatures, where creatures become able to internalise scenarios and then play them through mentally rather than physically. This is recapitulated in children; in the same way, children's experiments with the reactions and processes of other people in social contexts are first tested through external play, then can be tested internally. This then becomes subconscious, the sort of stuff non-autistic people do all the time where we anticipate other people's responses without even thinking.

Play then becomes a good way of helping strangers build relationships???

Apart from this, I don't really think he says very much in the paper, but for someone like me who loves Dennett and also loves play it is interesting to read someone else trying to put them together. Bailey spends a lot of the paper going over the background of ToM theory and defending Baron-Cohen's mindblindness concept. This was a little superfluous for me, but for someone not familiar with it I guess it would be valuable.

"...at every stage of infancy, children's social intelligence is unmatched by any other aspect of their cognitive development."

Funny how the process of writing up these thoughts on the paper has made me see new stuff in it, and understand more about it than I had done justby sitting and reading it ;-)