Thinking with play

Drawing 17: This is a pool for the people:

I draw me i am on pool and i swimming with my friends

to participation. I sought to understand and read into the expression and stories these learners were offering in response to our call.

Reading the theory on play helped me to progress in understanding about these skits and what they expressed. According to Vygotsky’s theorisation of play in childhood (2016), play is the mode through which individual development occurs, in a context specific and self-determined manner – herein we find a root and source of play in the lives of human beings. Engaging with Vygotsky’s theory of play enabled a few things for this pedagogista (me):

• To think and reflect on my own thinking about children and their activity,

• To see multiple dimensions of the skits - a fuller ontology and,

• To ‘read’ what was expressed in the skits about water.

It was through reading about different kinds of play, and diving into Vygotsky’s theory and concept of play, that I managed to find a way of thinking that was expansive enough to think about play in context, and one that engages with the world of children, and for why their

‘age’ matters rather than their age being the essentialised matter. Although, contrary to dominant assumptions, play is not limited to early childhood (Holzman, 2009, p. 53), play takes on a particular role in relation to individual development in the child stage of life (Vygotsky, 2016). It is a negotiation, a sense making and a communicative activity. Children are fluent in the medium of play.

5.3.2 Ground clearing

I was first drawn to discussions in the literature about socio-dramatic play, which is described as the following in an emergent literacy teaching guide: “Where children act out imaginary situations and stories, become different characters, and pretend they are in different locations and times” (Education and training: Victoria State Government, 2019). So, socio dramatic play includes ‘assigned roles’, ‘implicit rules’ and sometimes has children playing roles

‘beyond their years’ (UKEssays, 2018). The terms ‘rules’ and ‘roles’ link into Vygotsky’s work on play and warrant two clarifications about what play is not. In a lecture on children’s play, Vygotsky (2016) argued that 1. Play is not merely pleasurable and free and simply a time filling, care-free exercise. 2. We should avoid abstracting play and rather ground it in the

“needs, inclinations and incentives to act” of the child.

The notion that play is always pleasurable and free is contested by the fact that in empirical studies there seem to be other activities that are more pleasurable than play such as eating.

Vygotskys theory explains that a better basis for understanding about play is the common denominator of rules and roles. This is a radical shift from thinking about play as a

pleasurable time filling activity that only children do. Rather it is as a phenomenon of social quality that is part of being and becoming (developing) in the world.

The second caveat is that if we do not ground play in the child’s “needs, inclinations and incentives to act”, we run the risk of intellectualising play and locking play into particular age-based theories of predefined stages of development. It is not only children who play, but it is in the childhood phase that play leads to development (Vygotsky, 2016). A South

African case study by Joseph et al. (2014) emphasises the culturally specific developments of play and argued that play was a space of reinvention and cultural reproduction by children learning from children. Vygotsky’s socio-cultural perspective on individual development within society, requires us to emphasise the cultural context of play. Aitken (2001, p. 176)⁠

agreed that “there is no universal form of play any more than there is a single monolithic children’s culture”. Releasing play from this abstract and age-based theorisation, grounding it in context and in the child’s “needs, inclinations and incentives to act”, allows us to see play as a participative, context-dependent enactment in the world.

It seems ironic that we move away from thinking about play as a pleasurable activity without meaning towards the more serious sounding notion of ‘rules’. However, the notion of rules signifies something different to the kinds of ‘rules’ obeyed in an authoritarian manner. The way in which rules make up the particular relation of play reveals a liberatory and self- determined quality of ‘rules’ rather than the conformist sense of those things adults ask children to obey.

5.3.3 The essence of play in a non-essentialised way

Vygotsky (2016, p. 9) noted that no play occurs without rules nor without children’s dispositions – emotional responses – towards those rules⁠⁠. Sometimes these rules are predefined as in a game of tag and sometimes these rules are taken on through roles and pretend socio-dramatic play. Thus, tag and pretend play can be seen as composed of similar components but they can be seen as different kinds of games. In both cases, counter-

intuitively, games with rules include the exercising of will power: to resist immediate impulses to break the rules is necessary for the overall satisfaction of the game. So, in an act of play, those participating are commonly invested in the game. In this sense, the rule ‘wins’

over immediate impulse. Vygotsky explained, that this will power occurs when the concept

of the game, captured in the rules, turns into a ‘passion’ or something that feels worthwhile investing in. Thus, the engagement with these rules or the child’s relationship to these rules has a quality of “self-restraint and self-determination ... not a rule that a child obeys”

(Vygotsky, 2016, p. 16). This notion of rules is an important consideration because it allows us to embrace the rules of children’s socio-dramatic play through a quality of freedom rather than obedience for the sake of it. It allows us to see agency instead of mimicry or over-

determined views. In this way, dramatic play is more than a time-filling, pleasurable activity.

Although it might include these things it is also an expression of a relational and co- developed understanding of a concept.

Understanding play in terms of rules and roles or an agreed upon game allows us to see the activity of play further in terms of two interacting planes. Specifically the ‘dual affective plane’ to refer to the double experience in play situations which makes it possible that one can be ‘weeping’ in play but revelling in reality (Vygotsky, 2016, referencing Nohl). To understand what is going on in play we can thus think about both these planes: the game – rules and story line (which will be interactive and co-defined with others); and, child’s experience of playing the game – roles (linked to rules) and acting. Somewhat paradoxically, that “ when children are pretending, they are least like what they are pretending to be”, as they are doing it by virtue of their own agency (Holzman, 2009, p. 53). A simple example is to think about how children might find playing ‘school’ a different affective experience to actually being in school.

5.3.4 What does play tell us about children’s experience?

It is important to think about what we can infer, interpret or ‘read’ when we observe play. In socio-dramatic play and play more generally, children can make meaning of their worlds (Cutter-Mackenzie and Edwards, 2013). Children’s geographer Aitken (2001, p. 176)⁠ echoed this when he wrote that “play is the active exploration of individual and social imaginaries, built up in the spaces of everyday life”. It makes sense to think about play as “reality as it is encountered in practice”, as articulated by Vygotsky (Joseph et al., 2014 quoting Vygotsky).

In Vygotsky’s words, “play is memory in action rather than a novel situation” (Vygotsky, 2016, p. 19). Thus, while play exhibits the dynamism of human activity in the world, it might also be a space for meaning making and imagination.

Another construct relating to play that is useful for the purposes of reading these skits is that of remarkable play. Remarkable play is where ‘play coincides with reality’: “Play at what is

in fact true” (Vygotsky, 2016). Here a guiding question is: What is the difference between being a child in the world and playing a child in a game? The answer in some way captures the essence of play. The child playing the child is representing what they have internalised about child behaviour in their social, cultural, historical and material worlds and the child’s relationship to others. Similarly, a child playing mother is representing their internalised understanding of a mother.

5.3.5 Play: A mode of communicating meaning

Play has an important role to play in individual development and the construction of social lives. Vygotsky argued that ‘play leads childhood development’, through enacting will power, passion and where the ‘meaning’ of actions becomes a focus rather than the action itself. (The action is a pretend act of cooking… and because the end does not produce a pot of soup, it is the meaning of the action in the context of play that is the ultimate purpose in the end). As an imaginary space in which meaning subordinates action, play allows children to practise a kind of ‘abstract thought’. This practice is not necessarily logical thought but rather in a ‘method of movement’ that is ‘situational and concrete’ (Vygotsky, 2016, p. 17)⁠. The way I understand this is that in play we not only see actions but understand a bit about the reasons and the consequences of actions in particular situations. Thus, play has an important role to play in the development of children (not because of an essentialised understanding of age but rather because of the prominence of play), which is of consequence here because it describes this as a mode, a language familiar to children as they develop to engage their life- worlds.

The point of delving into the concept of play is to emerge with a nuanced understanding the mode of play. What it is, what is communicates, specifically delving into the developmental theory of play, allows us to understand it in relation to the lives of the children in this research.