All play is local

All my adult life I have watched children play.  Even when I was not in a classroom, I paid attention to children's play whenever I was out and about.   To complement my observations of children's play, I have also read a bit about children's play.  For example, here are five generally agreed upon principles of play from the National Association for the Education of Young Children authored by Marcia L. Nell and Walter F. Drew:

        1) Children make their own decisions.

        2) Children are intrinsically motivated.

        3) Children become immersed in the moment.

        4) Play is spontaneous/non-scripted.

        5) Play is enjoyable.

These "essentials" by no means exhaust the definition of play but are meant to summarize some important characteristics of play.  However, for me, there has always been something lacking in these generally agreed upon characteristics of play. 

I was recently reading an interview with Vivian Gussin Paley in the Fall 2009 edition of the American Journal of Play in which she added a new characteristic of play that struck a chord with me and all she needed was four words: "Play is entirely local..." p. 128.

Let me see if I can explain why those four words add richness to the idea of children's play.  To do that, I will look back on a provocation I would set up every year in the Fall in my sensory table.  I called it the swamp.

The swamp usually consisted of Fall leaves, gourds, sticks, branches, stumps, rocks, pine cones, grass and plastic swamp-dwelling animals such as frogs, snakes and bugs.

I would add about an inch or two of water to the table because it just would not be a swamp without water.  The shelf next to the table offered various containers and kitchen utensils.

 

The child pictured on the left used her hands and eyes to examine one of the logs in the sensory table. What made this local?  First, the log was locally resourced.  I found it at the Mississippi River just a few blocks from my school.  Its shape and smoothness invited the child to handle it. Second, the child brought her own curiosity and desire to know more about this piece of wood that was unique as an object and unique as part of the sensory table.  She would be the only child that week to examine this piece of wood in such a way.  Local for her was her unique way of examining the piece of wood.

 

The child pictured on the right also examined a different piece of wood.  This log, too, was locally sourced: it was a section of a maple tree that I cut down in my front yard.  This child brought a different curiosity and desire to better know this piece of tree.  He wanted to test his strength by attempting to lift the log off the bottom of the table.  For this child what was local was his approach to better understand the physical properties of the log and the limits to his own capabilities in relation to the properties of the log.

 

The child on the left used yet a different piece of wood that came from the tree I cut down in my yard.  He was actually attempting to balance the three-part branch on top of a long log taped between the two sensory tables.  For this child what was local was his attempt to bring two separate pieces of the tree into a balancing relationship. 

The child on the right used smaller sticks across a larger branch to make a home for a bug.  The sticks again came from my walks by the river and the larger branch from the tree I cut down in my yard.  The leaves and grass he used to complete the roof were from my yard.  For this child the local was the knowledge he brought to the encounter around building a home for the bug.  

 

The child on the left used the largest log in the table as a platform to create a frog world.  The log again came from the tree I cut down.  However, the frogs were plastic and not locally resourced; they were bought.  What was local for this child was her ability to use the log as a platform to animate the frogs in a way that utilized her own unique imagination to create novel relationships between objects and herself.

For me, play in the classroom was an extremely complex concept.  In fact, I eschewed trying to define it.  Instead, I spent more time creating the conditions for play.  My own play with the materials, which must be included in the conditions for play, was an invisible part of the children's play.  The properties of the materials themselves offered the children possibilities for play that matched their burgeoning imaginations.  And each child---and combination of children---not only brought imagination to the conditions of play, but they also brought a certain amount of unique knowledge to bear on the conditions of play.  The phrase "all play is local"encompassed all conditions---past, present and future---in the immediacy of each and every moment of play.