Category Archive
The following is a list of all entries from the Play category.
Play and Culture
April 16, 2009
In the introduction to their article “Play and Cultural Differences” (which is one of more than 90 articles in the new Exchange resource, Promoting the Value of Play CD Book), Elizabeth Jones and Sharon Cronin observe…
“Culture — a people’s way of behaving, being in, and understanding the world — is learned by each new generation through a process of enculturation. A culture’s solutions and life strategies are acquired by children as they watch and listen — and reinvented as they imitate, talk, and play. Language, including both words and art forms, is central to the unity of a culture.
“In the first five years of life, children learn to ta lk their people’s language and play their people’s daily life scripts — homemaking and going places, talking to friends and buying and selling, making and fixing, singing and dancing, and storytelling and celebrating rituals. Children’s imitative and playful grounding in their culture is the foundation for identity development and for trust in the world as a predictable and meaningful place.
“For many children, this learning process is disrupted by racism and other biases that devalue their home culture, or by sustained discontinuous experiences that ignore it. A child in out-of-home care will be aware both of differences and of the unspoken values attached to these differences: Are my language, my hair and skin, my games — myself — welcome here? Am I expected to change in order to be acceptable? Child care can be an alienating experience — or an affirming one.
“If no one in the child care program speaks the child’s language, if none of the toys recreate home, if no familiar adult is present in a caregiving role, the young child is thrust into the confusing but all-too-common experience of stranger care — of long days in a setting which doesn’t resemble home and whose people will have no lasting relationship with the child’s family. In such a setting, it’s hard to play and learn.”
Taken from ExchangeEveryDay, a free service of Exchange Magazine.
The Fear of Play
March 2, 2009, ExchangeEveryday
Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think. Ralph Waldo Emerson The March issue of Exchange, which is now on its way to subscribers around the world, features a Beginnings Workshop section with four articles on the challenges of play, including one by Joan Almon, “The Fear of Play,” from which the excerpt below comes and which can be viewed in its entirety on the Exchange web site.
“Real play — play that is initiated and directed by children and that bubbles up from within the child rather than being imposed by adults — has largely disappeared from the landscape of childhood in the United States. There are many reasons for this, such as the long hours spent in front of screens each day or in activities organized by adults. In addition, preschools and kindergartens that used to foster meaningful play and exploration often spend long hours on adult-led instruction instead.
“All of these are the outer manifestations of something deeper — a modern mindset that does not value play and is even afraid of it. Some fears are easy to identify. People freely admit they are afraid of accidents in play and want to minimize risk. Yet playgrounds that offer genuine risk, such as Berkeley’s adventure playground, where children build two-story play structures with hammers and nails, tend to have fewer accidents than traditional playgrounds. Give children real risk and they rise to it; they learn how to handle it.
Give them sanitized play spaces, and children often are less conscious of risk and have accidents, or take outlandish risks for the sheer excitement of it all. “There is also a widespread fear of ‘s tranger danger.’ Most parents will not let their elementary-age children go out unattended. Yet most crimes against children, such as abduction or abuse, are perpetrated by people the family knows rather than strangers on the playground.
“These are the easily recognized fears. There are underlying fears that are harder to describe. “The current mindset in the U.S. leads us to create a life that is as safe and risk-free as possible. We want life to be ultra-organized, and we want to be in charge at all times. We’re taught from early on that life should be rational and measurable. No wonder people love to see young children sitting still and working on worksheets or at computer screens. It’s so tidy compared to play, which is messy, not only physically but also emotionally.
“In play, the full range of human feelings and longings surfaces at one time or another, some of which are not very beautiful and can even be a bit scary. In addition, play is hard to track or assess. It wanders in and out of different realities like dreams. It may start out looking familiar, but will often go into deeper realms that are not easily understood. Play is full of symbols and metaphors. It has some elements that seem familiar and arise from our everyday life, but in the next moment it is full of magical thinking. It is a way of perceiving the world that is reminiscent of fairy tales and myths. It is the antithesis of didactic teaching and scripted lessons, which are highly predictable, although their outcomes tend to be much weaker than promised.”
