A Day Out from Early Years Musical Play: Playwork, Mattering and Meaning
I am fascinated by Play and music education and that is handy because my Youth Music funded work is dependent on Musical Play. I also struggle with accounting for what I do because facilitating musical play is not an "exact science". Last year I attended Gloucestershire University’s Playwork study day “Creative Accounting: Playful Rhythms, relationships and response-abilities”. It was led by Lecturers Wendy Russell and Stuart Lester and post graduate Playwork students as part of a series of seminar days for Playworkers, Urban Planners and assorted University students. Dr. Susan Young, creator of the MA Ed(Early Years Music) at CREC in Birmingham, used to tell us to read outside of our discipline and Playwork, which places itself as complementary to a conventional educational offer whilst not exactly “outside” was, for me at least, conveniently “next door” both conceptually and geographically. “The most important reason for going from one place to another is to see what’s in between, and they took great pleasure in doing just that.” Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
Playwork Principles state that a child’s impulse to play is innate, essential to its health, is self-chosen and self-directed and is a process which Playworkers’ reflective practice strives to foster by creating the right environments for play to flourish. I liked the approach outlined by Lester, “play concerns the child’s wellbeing as ‘being well’ in the moment as opposed to ‘well-becoming’”.
During the day we begrudged the Neoliberal commodification of everything recognising the market as the ethical guide for all action, as Harvey(2005) might say, and sighed about how many of the outcomes we have to report on are not about the core business of play.
So far the day’s thoughts and ideas were familiar. Then the question was asked, “How do we account for Playwork, creatively?” I’m used to accounting for my work through case studies, observations, scales and graphs none of which I would consider particularly creative. Whilst the final full stop on a fat final report affords a brief moment of self-satisfaction it is a requirement and a duty, not a creative expression. Even with my research hat on, writing reports is not as much fun as doing the work that generates the data.
One answer to how Playwork could be accounted for creatively was “through stories” and another was “through experiences”.
One student “captured” affective atmospheres through analysis of players’ and practitioners’ stories collected through interviews, with the aim of sifting out transformational experiences and naming them. The example cited was when Playworker students lay down on the forest floor to look at the sky. Many students recalled that as abhorrent and risky because of insects and mud but fundamentally life-affirming for assorted, personal reasons.
Another student created “A Classroom of Curiosities”. This used many Mosaic Approach techniques as described by Clark and Moss (2011) to present “what happened” during a play project in an after school club to evaluators, parents or council staff. Various aspects of the play that had happened were congruently re-presented to the evaluator as tactile, aural experiential things to press, read or listen to or in other words, to play with. We played in a sand pile, shifted car tyres, read stories about the play that occurred, listened to “buttons” that played back sounds recorded during play and looked at adorably small photos of play captured “in the moment” on a mini polaroid-type camera (Fuji Instax Mini8). The presentation looked like a recreation of a “who dunnit” crime scene being combed over by “forensics” who had to use their skill, judgement and imagination to establish what had happened and what had mattered.
The theorists cited to justify us shifting car tyres and getting excited about stories and little photos were interesting. One was Lenz-Taguchi (2010), a Professor of Education and Child and Youth Studies in Stockholm challenges binary divides such as theory/practice, reality/discourse and highlights the significance of materials and how our sense of being emerges from ongoing, complex intra-actions between the body and materials. Another was Barad (2007), an ex-theoretical physicist turned feminist theorist who influenced Lenz-Taguchi’s thinking and says humans don’t have complete control over everything that happens, reality is not independent of our explorations of it and matter and meaning cannot be dissociated. Also cited was Haraway (1992)who proposed diffraction as an alternative to the well-worn metaphor of reflection. According to Barad (2007, p29), reflection mirrors sameness whilst diffraction attends to patterns of difference and entails the processing of small but consequential differences.
Twenty years in Early Childhood Music and I’m just starting to get to grips with the messy and important business of play and how it matters to post-human, post-qualitative thinking that might describe play as many phenomena expressed as a myriad of complex interactions and intra-actions which are unpredictable, fleeting and are influenced by our observation or measurement of them.
To quote a respected colleague Charlotte Arculus recently on social media: “Why is there this constant shying away from glorious human complexity and this tyranny of reductionist simplistic pie chart scales?” The answer is in our need for simplicity and ideas that are easily “got” so that they can be passed on and shared ideally in the style of “Memes for the Masses”. Thankfully what happens in playful music sessions for the very young is far more complicated and important to be captured in a pie chart.
I’ll try a “Classroom of Curiosities” soon and will let you know how I get on.
Finally, at the end of the seminar day we collaborated in groups to answer “what do we want research to do?” Assorted playful and plausible answers included:
To change the world
To challenge the world
To change the question
To challenge the way we feel about the world
To challenge the way we question the world.
Which again illustrates the point that the simplest of questions cannot be answered simply.
I really valued my day out because it made me read, write, talk and think about what matters in early years music sessions and ask others what matters to them. Being currently troubled by evaluation duties I’m wondering again about how, why and to whom does what matter.
———————————-
Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning, London: Duke University Press.
Clark, A., Moss, P. (2011) Listening to Young Children: The Mosaic Approach, London:NCB.
Haraway, D.(1992)The Promises of Monsters: A regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others. In Cultural Studies ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Teichler, 295-337. New York:Routledge.
Harvey, D. (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism, New York:OUP.
Hughes, B. (2002) A Playworker’s Taxonomy of Play Types, 2nd Edition, London: Playlink.
Juster, N. (1961) The Phantom Tollbooth. London : Harper Collins Children’s Books.
Lenz-Taguchi (2010) Going Beyond the Theory/Practice Divide in Early Childhood Education: Introducing an Intra-Active Pedagogy, London:Routledge
Recording buttons example “Talking Tiles” http://www.talkingproducts.com/educational-resources/talking-tiles-education/talking-tiles-pack6.html
FujiFilm Instax Mini 8 – Camera that shoots (in enough light) fabulous mini instant pictures – https://www.fujifilm.eu/uk/products/instax/p/instax-mini-8#overview