Things worth knowing: How I got into researching play
Professor John Potter, University College London
‘The Railway Children,’ by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, evokes a childhood memory of playing by train tracks and watching telegraph poles fading into the far distance, speculating about what they might be. He writes: “We were small / and thought we knew nothing worth knowing.” This is perhaps a reflection of a feeling about shared, partial knowledge of the world, of the ways in which children’s lived experience, can be regarded as half formed, not there yet, not worth knowing. But the theory building which those children in the poem indulge in sees them finding folk-knowledge about raindrops and the “lovely freehand” of the wires. Getting back to these “things worth knowing” about children’s lived experience is what drives me towards ‘play research.’ And if we can find ways to do this which capture children’s own reflections on this, so much the better.
In the ‘Playing the Archive’ project a few years ago, over the course of a 15-minute playtime, my colleague, Kate Cowan, and I watched a cardboard box become different things in the play of three or four children aged about 6. First, they pushed it over their heads and stood inside it. It was a house. Then they pulled the base apart and inverted it and put it back over their heads. Then, squished together, they began to move around the playground. It was a bus; they were the passengers. After this, they tipped it back over their heads and flattened the whole thing. Then they sat around it. It was a picnic table. Then they got up, left it, and ran off. Then some more children approached… And then the bell went, and they all lined up to go back into the classroom.
Simon Nicholson, credited with the invention of “loose parts play,” of which this episode was an example, was an architect and he understood the value of everyday objects with open-ended possibilities being available to children. This school had a few objects lying around for children to engage with during their short recess. And they were very well used. These days we might think of loose parts play as an assemblage of bodies and artefacts. Or we might discuss the ‘affordances’ of these opportunities. We might ‘research’ them in that way. Or we might want to join in!
Certainly, thinking back now, the episode I’ve just described resonates with me having been asked to contemplate how and why I became interested in ‘play’ as a field of research. Leaving aside for the moment the question of getting here via other routes (e.g., digital media, new literacies), I got here, I think, because I remember how I played as a child, and I wonder how that shaped me. And much of that play, now that I come to think of it, was loose parts play. Behind our house there was the backyard of a TV showroom and repair shop. My sister, my friends, and I would climb over and throw back into the garden boxes and bits and pieces of old TV sets. We made spaceships and cardboard houses and played endless games in them all summer. And when we weren’t doing loose parts play, we were in the park over the road, or playing out in the street, or exploring the alleyways and urban passageways nearby. I don’t think I was indoors much of the summer, or after school, or on weekends.
When it comes to play in the house, in addition to playing for hours with Lego (doing loose parts play, not making models from kits), perhaps my earliest experiences of media as play were here. My dad borrowed BBC sound effects records from the library, and we made up stories from them, recording them on his old reel-to-reel tape recorder. I can remember sitting in the back room when it was raining (and the park and loose parts play were not available) and making stories from train sounds, clanking chains, and birdsong. How I wish those recordings were available to me now. Certainly, they are the roots of my tendency to record random sounds on my phone everywhere now, and perhaps these early recordings have led me to make podcasts now. Certainly, when researching children’s play during the pandemic, and in particular, their use of media, I am reminded of these episodes of media making during times when I was playing indoors.
Of course, there were other routes into play research beyond childhood experience. I got here because I trained as a teacher in an era in which children’s experiences, the interests and knowledge they brought with them, were thought to be important in developing skills and dispositions towards learning, and they were encouraged within a playful space. I got into play research via digital media and new literacies precisely because these fields seemed to me to sit within this frame of reference from my teaching days, valuing the productive nature of children’s engagement with play, games, popular culture, texts, and practices of interest, exploring the many ways in which meaning is made between people.
In play, we see affective dimensions of childhood experience; we learn very different things about children when we move beyond standardised assessment tasks and tests involving recall of facts. We go back, perhaps, to the “things worth knowing.” And once we are there, we ascribe value to them, which is not to say they are legitimised by our interest; they are made legitimate and important by the children themselves. We just look differently upon them. They are no longer marginalia. Play moves into the centre of the narrative. We start to position children as experiencing “things worth knowing,” of being expert guides to themselves as ‘being’ and not just ‘becoming,’ evoking the new sociology of childhood (see, for example, Allison James’ work).
My research has taken me further back into the field of play, whilst retaining a connection to all my previous and ongoing work on digital media in education, particularly as it relates to “third spaces” and socio-materiality. Playful and creative use of media has been a constant since I was a primary school teacher. Indeed, there are close parallels between the marginalisation of media in education and the ways in which play somehow came to be regarded as essentially tangential to the main business of learning, by policymakers in my own country.
Fortunately, those in early years and play have a well-researched and developed understanding of how children are in the world and how best to work with them. My knowledge of this is based on a wide variety of sources, not least my partner, Janet Morris, an expert educator of young children, who has co-researched children’s conversations as “things worth knowing” alongside their parents and carers. I learned a lot also from my daughter’s first nursery and reception teacher, Anne O’Connor, who continues to lobby for play as vital in children’s lives. And I had the very great pleasure of meeting and doing a small amount of work with David Whitebread, the internationally known play researcher. Writers who have been important along the way for their foregrounding of children’s play experiences, and what they say about them, have included Brian Sutton-Smith, Michael Rosen, and, of course, the Opies themselves, and in particular, Iona Opie’s ‘People in the Playground’.
More recently, I have benefitted from my experience of working on three projects connected in varying degrees to the work of the Opies, the UK-based ethnographers of children’s games over many decades. This work has led me to generous, expert collaborators who share the belief in the value of children reporting their own play experiences and, further, the need to record and archive these for future generations. I’m thinking of colleagues in the Play Observatory from University College London and from Sheffield University: Kate Cowan, Yinka Olusoga, Julia Bishop, Catherine Bannister, Valerio Signorellli, and Michelle Cannon. Some of these people were also involved in two previous projects, ’Children’s Games in the New Media Age and ‘Playing the Archive’, which were led by Professors Andrew Burn and Jackie Marsh and which were, taken together, really the start of opening the Opie collections of children’s games to current research interest and, ultimately, to the British Academy project which Yinka is directing now, alongside myself and Julia Bishop.
The whole experience has brought the varying elements of my work-in life into alignment, and I am very happy to be thinking of ideas for project collaborations which explore children’s agency, their cultural heritage and which also connect these to media, especially productive and creative digital media. For the Play Observatory project and its partners, including those at the Young V & A, these remain urgent and vital areas which we explored in our joint exhibition.
So what might come next? I am very interested in continuing to work with children’s cultural heritage, with archival collections of children’s own recorded experience of play. At the moment, following the work on children’s pandemic play experiences, this may lead to exploring play in moments of crisis and how recording this can be a way to understand this. My work on media in education feeds directly into this because the things worth knowing about play, its impact on wellbeing and the formation of resilience in moments of crisis, in war zones, and in the face of ecological and natural disaster, can be recorded and represented in many forms, by children themselves. We can do all this and more to bring diversity and wider voices into the archives and internationalise the research by opening up to like-minded global collaborators everywhere we can see that play, and the telling of the stories of play, can make a difference.