Recess Battles: Playing, Fighting, and Storytelling

8. Play and Paradox

127 - 8 PLAYANDPARADOX Theorists have been fighting over what play is and is not as educators dispute what is or is not a worthwhile activity for children. For years, writers have argued that we do not know quite what play is, but we all recognize it when we see it.1 Sadly, this is not the case. But documentation—film, audio, painting, and even recollection— can help grown-ups remember what play is about. Although strong disagreement exists about what play does biologically, socially, and emotionally for children, its characteristics are indeed recognizable: - it is associated with quick, darting movements;2 - it is doubly messaged, an it and a not it, safe but not quite so, a lighthearted yet serious attitude;3 - it is typically a miniature or exaggerated version of the larger reality, whether imitating battle, hunting, courtship, or work;4 - it is impossible to see without its frame—that is, the fight in the fighting ring, the ball game with its boundaries, the rope game within its rope, the hand-clapping game within its circle of friends;5 - it is fundamentally social, even if one is playing solely with one’s alternative self, one’s imagined partner; - it is associated with change, even though games are associated with rules and consistency. One plays a game, in a sense, to break the rules 128 Play and Children’s Culture - Games that have no play are no fun, robotic, repetitive, unimaginative, and sometimes a lot like gym. Above all, play is what children do. It is what they are passionate about, what they think about, talk about, perfect in their spare time. At its best, it makes them happy. In its struggle, it makes them work hard at skill building. The job of adults is to provide children with the opportunity to do what they need to do, the time to do it, and the assurance that they can do it without harming each other. If school is a place for learning what the culture values, then play, with its subtext of cultural change, can be seen as inherently threatening that culture—but only if one has a static vision of education or human growth. Typically, play is least respected in places that have a narrow range of acceptable behaviors, whether it is an elite school with unrealistic expectations of performance or a working-class school with unrealistic expectations of teacher power. But teachers lack the ability to override culture, much as they might wish they had such power. Forcing children to abandon play turns them into contortionists or, worse, leads them to be silent and drains the fire from their eyes. Researchers, theorists, and educators must maintain respect for paradox and avoid letting the strangeness of research turn into tragic irony. In this case, that idea would translate into the removal of the opportunity for play. Play confuses, some argue, so let us be rid of it—sit the children down, medicate them, prevent them from speaking. Instead, it is much better to see what children are trying to tell us as they yell, jump, and clap. Their offerings are childhood’s gifts; in return, they deserve our protection. David Swartz fine-tunes Pierre Bourdieu’s view of fieldwork: “Field analysis, therefore, directs the researcher’s attention to a level of analysis of revealing the integrating logic of competition between opposing viewpoints .”6 Teacher and child, corporation and school, game circle to game circle—the playground asks us to see concentric, overlapping, and con- flicting circles. In essence, it requires us to see the world as sociologists from conflicting schools of sociology—as structural-functionalists and as conflict theorists. There are wholes and tensions, and both are real. With each game played and its corresponding cultural shift, the study of childhood emerges as a study of motion rather than a temporarily fixed 129 Play and Paradox or constant state or stage.7 The paradox of the research lies in its shifting truths: what was once true is no longer necessarily true; some things were never true. In illustrating the multiplicity of truths and their changes over time, I have linked various theorists in larger conceptual pairs and trios. Seeing the playground as the children do requires negotiating these theorists’ ideas, even if the writers themselves do not know each other. Paradoxes acknowledge that opposite truths can simultaneously exist; complexity reveals depth, not necessarily con...