Transcription
Play is the way the child finds its way in the world. The first playful interaction is between the mother and the baby. When the mother sticks her tongue out and the baby copies it, and it becomes a game, and that goes on and on and on. And through this playful translation of the world and ourselves, we learn to live creatively. Which is a burning creativity, a desire for life and love of new things and learning experiences that give us a fresh perspective on the world. So for me, that creativity is at the core of why play is so important.
It's also important, I think, because it is so ancient. Originally, playing was a device that was developed so that we could learn the basic survival skills. When we look at all of these different types of play, we can see that they all have an evolutionary or survival element to them. If you're being chased by a saber-toothed tiger, there's a really good reason why children need to run and hide. The same with climbing trees, same with making dens, digging in the soil to plant things or to bury, for moving water and sand around. All of those types of playing, even the dressing up, has a tribal quality of identification. Play is so deeply rooted in all of us as humans; we have to pay due attention to it, and we have to allow those experiences to come out in children's play.
I do a lot of play work training with people from all over the world, and I start each training by asking the adults present to remember their playing as a child, and to get the most wonderful, rich conversations coming out. And what happens is that I get the same stories from groups from Bangladesh, from Jamaica, from Chicago, from Denmark—the same types of playing coming out—and that that's not a coincidence. There's responsibility with us all as adults to remember our playing and remember how urgently important it was to us and to allow that to be for our children. In fact, it's our responsibility as adults to give kids as much risk as they can handle, at the time that they can handle it, and in the way that they can handle it, because it helps to form a boundary for them. It helps them to know the parameters that they're safe to work within. I think it's a very dangerous thing to give children no risk at all. If children aren't presented with things that they have to work out for themselves and challenges that they need to meet for themselves, then they're never going to be equipped to meet the challenges of life.
The role that we'd always used—that the playground that I ran—I have the best time you possibly can, but to try not to hurt yourself or anyone else while you're doing it. And we know that we're not the experts in playing; the children are the experts in playing. And still, we need to preserve the spaces and to hold the world away from those spaces so that the children can play freely within them. We know that the smallest interventions that we can make are going to have the maximum outcome for the child. Because if we start to put our thoughts, our play needs, our social or educational agendas onto the child, we're going to adulterate their playing. If we go up and show a child, "Oh, you're digging in the wrong way, you don't do it like that," we're taking away that whole, the whole wealth of the experience from a child. So a play worker intervention is the smallest possible with the maximum outcome from the child.
My heart lies in the adventure playgrounds that are that we have in London and throughout England, because their space is set aside, inside and outside, and the area is marked out. And inside what happens within that fence is wild and wonderful and certainly very centered around children's playing. And so I got myself a job on one of those playgrounds. Adventure playgrounds have been going to the end of the Second World War, and they started from the work of Lady Allen of Hurtwood. She had this wonderful phrase that was children that the kings and queens of the playground. She coined the term adventure play, which in itself was quite quite amazing. She also had the wisdom to put in play workers. The play worker set aside the space and protected it for the children, also maintained the space, looked after it, got ownership of that space for themselves and for the children, so built up the community that happened within that space. The play worker also watched what the children were doing and saw different sorts of playing happening and for those in mind and brought in new bits of equipment. So the role grew, and the playgrounds grew, and they mushroomed out through London, through England, through Europe—a wonderful growth of these places because they fitted exactly what children needed, and they were fairly maverick but very exciting. So that the ward children grew up, they had their own children, their own children grew up through the adventure playgrounds, then another generation and another generation. And the surprising thing is that the playing of the children hasn't changed one bit on the adventure playgrounds where children are still allowed to play as they feel motivated to do. There's not really any difference from the plane that their predecessors were doing, which I think reminds us that playing is going to be the same wherever you find it in the world.
The expression "loose parts" comes from an article that was written by Simon Nicholson in the early seventies, and he describes in this how the richest space to be in as an adult or a child is the space where there are things that you can move about and manipulate—flexible environments that you can adapt to do whatever you need to do. The best example of this is the seashore, where you can use the water and the sand and the sun and smells and the sounds of the sea and the branches and the pinecones and all the bits and pieces that are found around, and you can make whatever you will of that space. It's a very adaptable, flexible experience being at the seaside. When we translate that into terms of play work, we see that a child has a much richer play experience when they can take bits and pieces of stuff that they find around them in the everyday world and turn them into the things that are coming from their deep-rooted play desires at that time. So a child can use a cardboard box to create a den, or it can be a tortoiseshell, or can be a prison, or it can be a swimming pool—it can be anything that the child needs in their playing at that moment.
The play worker role developed, and play workers started talking to each other and finding the commonality of this playing, and they got together and identified these commonalities and started building up a shared theory of practice. And that has developed into a process now where you can train as a play worker to a degree level, to a master's level. It's a profession; it's a study that's respected, and we're very pleased to say that play workers stand separate from teachers, separate from social workers, separate from therapists, but equal to all of those. A major part of the work of a play worker is to learn how to observe and how to watch what the children are doing and how to see from that distant observation what it is the children are getting from their playing and think about how the environment could be adapted or changed or enhanced to give them more experiences that they could discover for themselves.
A good play work skill is to be able to take the observations, the reflections, and the analysis of what you're what you've seen and you thought about and considered from the play day that you've observed and to take it back and to use it to analyze what was going on in that session and work out how you can better understand the in the world of the child that's playing or the group of children that's playing in the context within which they're playing. So thinking about the environment around the play space that you're working with so that you can think holistically about the life of the child and what the play offer is bringing to them. So we're in a unique place as play workers because we're the people who get to spend real time watching children playing, and part of what we've developed as our practice is the knowledge that observation and reflection and analysis of the playing is the most important thing. You become very attuned to the play needs of the children. This happens especially when you're working with children who may have additional needs or disabilities, because their playing isn't always very obvious. We have to work hard at understanding what they need and what they want from their playing, and our reflective practice enters into that so that we actively become attuned to what the child needs and take our cues from them. We don't define play, but we do have a phrase which we use to help us identify what is play, and that's phrase is that play is a set of behaviors that is freely chosen, personally directed, and intrinsically motivated. And we use that as a touchstone for testing out whether we're providing a rich play environment for children.