PlayRights Magazine is produced twice annually, in March and in September. It is distributed as a privilege of membership. The recently developed members’ site will include topics for upcoming editions.
Potential contributors should contact the Editor: Cynthia Gentry Cynthia.Gentry@gmail.com.
 *The Magical Park of Aviacion – Full Article* |
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Rusty Keeler
Reviewed by Ric McConaghy
There are times when you can judge a book by its cover. Two imps peering out from behind a moss covered tree trunk suggest that Natural Playspaces ; Creating Outdoor Play Environments for the Soul is going to be a joyous and playful journey of discovery. This is a book about planning for play where the primary focus is the child, and the title refers not to the body but to the soul. Bliss.
The tone from the outset is encouraging and positive. The language is personal and intimate. The style unashamedly undertakes the perspective of the child to whom the playscape will be delivered. It is almost taunting you with the idea that if you don’t like the approach then save us all some time and go and get an equipment catalogue.
This book has humanity at its heart, imagination in its head and play in its soul. The visuals are rich, diverse and almost make the words redundant. Even the paper feels nice. It is all so sensual I found myself wishing that Rusty had really let himself go and had a few scratch and sniff pages (2nd edition maybe).
We are urged to re-connect with what made our own childhoods special. The senses are explored, the imagination engaged and the view of play and its place in the world collaboratively recalibrated. This is not play to burn off energy between boring maths lessons. This is not play to reduce your bmi (body mass index), increase your gms (gross motor skills) or to stimulate your p&ks (proprioceptive and kinaesthetic sensation). This is play because it is great and it gets you out in nature with your friends, no matter what the weather.
The case studies take you through the journeys of others and the challenges they faced. Not every project team will have a handy Rusty to ride with through the inevitable bumps of design to delivery (more’s the pity); so the case studies and workbook resources give you a glimpse, a guide, and a way of going that will assist in many of the pitfalls.
There are simple projects at the back that can be undertaken by groups to bring special elements to any space. Some are seasonal while some are more enduring. So many of the ideas are simple and achievable. This does not mean they lack sophistication, but they certainly lack any unnecessary embellishment, and leave that level of imagining to each new maker.
At times the text can take tangents, but this is the rhythm of Rusty, and this book is clearly his. As such these drift into alternate universes and can be forgiven for their obvious unbridled enthusiasm and inherent interconnectedness. It is much more of a conversation than a dissertation and may I suggest it should be read that way.
No book can be completely comprehensive without being formidably thick. There are technical issues relating to site analysis and design that will require expertise during the process. There are issues that will vary from one country to another and from one region to another where local knowledge will be crucial. But fundamentally at its core this book is about children, about play and about nature – and that is universal.
Free play is one of the few remaining unstructured endeavours left for our over-organised, intensely urbanised children. Nature is nothing if not chaotic and so the synergy with children should be obvious. This book, and its author, celebrate this, encourage this, immerse themselves and the reader in this and so empower communities to deliver this in the spaces they seek to provide for their children to play. I urge you to embrace it.
Ric McConaghy is a designer of children’s environments in NSW, Australia
Tim Gill (2007) London: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation; 94 pages
This review by Martha Driessnack is reproduced with kind permission from the Children,
Youth and Environments Journal. ( Vol. 18 No. 1, 2008)
Anyone interested in childhood and how it is currently being undermined by increasing adult intervention and control will find this book a timely and provocative call to action. Tim Gill, one of Britain’s foremost experts on play, provides unique insights into the changing lives of young children and haunting predictions of the consequences. Focusing on society’s ubiquitous view of the world as increasingly dangerous, he cautions that overly protective adults may actually be denying
the experiential learning opportunities children need to grow and
develop into confident, resilient adults.
The book is compelling. I read it in one sitting and continue to reflect on and share its contents. Of particular note is Gill’s emphasis on redirecting societal energies from regulating existing environments to developing child-friendly communities where children are free to explore and learn. The primary take-home message is the urgency for parents, teachers, and child advocates to develop a more balanced understanding of what childhood is all about. It is not a plea for the total deregulation of childhood, but a call for a thoughtful examination of the types of experiences needed for children to grow and develop. He warns that the current “culture of fear” and “safety first” mentality may actually be producing a sanitized world in which children’s creativity and personal growth are stifled.
Gill’s focus is on children from the beginning of formal education to the onset of adolescence. This age has been referred to as “the years we ignore” often marginalized by theoreticians, clinicians, researchers, and parents who are enjoying the calm before the storm of adolescence and are less interested in listening to children than in having children listen to them. However, Gill reframes these years as pivotal periods in social and personal development. He emphasizes the need for children this age to encounter risk on their own terms and to negotiate risky activity among their peers. He uses a discussion of playgrounds to argue his case. He claims increasing adult restrictions and supervision are decreasing the amount and types of unsupervised activities available with which to accomplish the developmental tasks of childhood.
The book introduces the concept of shrinking horizons of childhood.
While many adults would agree that children today seem to be growing up too fast, Gill explains this impression is primarily due to the blurring of the boundaries between children and adults in terms of dress, activities and behaviours. However, while children appear to be more adult-like, their everyday experience of autonomy, their freedom to negotiate and to act on their own, is shrinking due to growing adult control and supervision. The importance of this is that children now enter adolescence with less confidence in managing and negotiating social relationships that involve teenage pressures to engage in risk activity.
The quandary for parents, teachers and child advocates is in determining how to strike a balance between accepting minor hurts and emotional setbacks on one hand, while identifying real hazards and preventing serious injury and psychological distress on the other. Increasingly, adult riskaverse attitudes prevail, fueled by a culture of fear, despite the fact that children are statistically safer than at any point in human history. The book contends that adult intervention should not be only about protecting children, but also about teaching children the skills they need to protect themselves. Gill proposes that children gain short and long-term benefits from experiencing activities with a degree of risk, whether or not they succeed at them. However, these benefits are not as easily measured as the more easily quantified consequences of risk.
The geographic context for Gill’s narrative is the United Kingdom, where risk aversion may be greater than in other European Union countries. At the same time, the level of risk aversion in the UK may be less than it is in the United States, fueled in part by the fundamental difference in the way the US legal system handles liability. The book acknowledges that children living in developing countries face qualitatively different risks than children in more affluent industrialized countries, but such a discussion was beyond the scope of the book. Nonetheless, Gill does disturb the reader into a new level of consciousness about childhood experiences, not matter what the context.
Using less than a hundred pages, Gill captures the essence of how the spread of risk-averse attitudes restricts children’s play, limits their freedomof movement, corrodes relationships with adults, and constrains exploration of their physical, social, and virtual worlds. It may also be increasing antisocial behaviour, bullying, fear of strangers, and online risks. He emphasizes that by “bubble wrapping” children, we deprive them the opportunity to develop the skills and resilience they need to protect themselves. He identifies a collective failure or shared blame and distributes it between parents and those in loco parentis – incuding schools, settings beyond the school, and the media. Although mot of the legislation and literature he cites are based on changes in the UK, similar changes are also taking place in other industrialized countries and parallel arguments could be made.
Gill shares examples of a few cities that are making efforts to move to child-friendly communities. He highlights that it is often difficult but possible to argue for a shift in policy from the protection of children to their empowerment. Although it makes intuitive sense and is supported by psychologists and child development experts, Gill reminds us that qualitative impressions are often open to methodological challenge: “this asymmetry in the measurability of risks and benefits… may require a radically different style of public debate.” He introduces the idea of seeking input from children and involving them in the debate, encouraging policy makers and researchers to explore participatory methods.
For readers interested in foregrounding children’s voices, Children at Play: An American History (Chudacoff 2007) provides a chronological history of play from the viewpoint of children themselves. It provides a wonderful parallel to Gill’s book. Both authors redirect us to ponder a little less about children’s safety and a little more about our role in changing the landscape in which children grow up today. They both highlight a continued need for society and parental wisdom in the care of their children, yet suggest moving the fulcrum back to the middle, balancing the need to protect children with the need to empower them. This call for a more balanced understanding of childhood is perhaps the most important and timely message for each of us.
Gill reminds us that
‘If our ultimate goal is to ensure that children grow up as engaged, self-confident, responsible, and resilient individuals who feel they have some control over their destinies and are alive to the consequences of their actions, childhood needs to include frequent, unregulated, self-directed contact with people and places beyond the immediate spheres of family and school, and the chance to learn from their mistakes.’
That pretty much says it all!
Sergio M. Pellis and Vivien C. Pellis
Reviewed by Janet Jamieson
The Playful Brain, by play researchers Sergio and Vivian Pellis of the Canadian Centre for Behavioural Neuroscience at the University of Lethbridge (Alberta, Canada) is an erudite exploration of the science and mystery of play. The book is targeted to a general audience – but an educated one – with a strong interest in the adaptive nature of play in human and non-human animals.
The book synthesizes decades of research on animal play, with several chapters devoted to research on mice and rat play, their particular area of study and where the most extensive research exits. The richness of the topic as the complexity of play unfolds is clear, making it difficult to understand why play has not received the systematic and serious attention of research. It is clearly so integral to development – and competence – in so many species.
One of the most engaging aspects of the book, is the Pellis’s clear love for their subject and appreciation of the joy and value of play as they try to untangle its many purposes, evolutionary functions and mechanisms in living creatures. This couple is fascinated by play – at one point telling an anecdote about how they experienced an epiphany while watching children play freely in a Parisian park, the adults present as a secure base but remaining outside the play, underscored the lack of play in children’s oversubscribed, overprotected lives in North America – a theme familiar to early childhood educators.
The authors put forth a ‘layer cake’ model to try to reflect the complexity of information about rat and mouse play reflecting its multifaceted nature. As amazing as the little rodents may be, this reviewer was more engaged by the sections on other species, especially ‘human primates’. Here are some examples of information I found intriguing which provide an admittedly superficial sense of the content:
‘The Playful Brain’ draws on examples from so many species highlighting the complexity of the research findings. The result is a steady affirmation of the importance of juvenile play that is affirming to all of us who cherish children’s play. It’s not an easy read but is very worthwhile.
Janet Jamieson is the Chair of Community Services at Red River College in Winnipeg, where she manages the Early Childhood Education program. Janet was one of the lead authors of ‘The Science of Early Child Development’, an onlinemultimedia educational resource designed to bridge the gap between neurodevelopmental research and front line practice in early childhood.
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