Young Children's Interactions with Objects: Play as Practice and Practice as Play

Objects permeate human culture and saturate the imagination. This duality offers both opportunity and challenge. Here we ask how young human children learn to exploit the immense potential afforded by objects that can exist simultaneously in physical and imaginary realms. To this end, we advance a new framework that integrates the presently siloed literatures on manual skill and play development. We argue that developments in children's real and imagined use of objects are embodied, reciprocal, and intertwined. Advances in one plane of action influence and scaffold advances in the other. Consistent with this unified framework, we show how real and imagined interactions with objects are characterized by developmental parallels in how children ( a) transcend the present to encompass future points in time and space, ( b) extend beyond the self, and ( c) gradually move beyond objects’ designed functions. In addition, we highlight bidirectional influences in children's real and imagined interactions with objects: Play engenders practice and skill in using objects, but just the same, practice using objects engenders advances in play. We close by highlighting the theoretical, empirical, and translational implications of this embodied and integrated account of manual skill and play development. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Developmental Psychology, Volume 3 is December 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Engaging Indigenous Artistic Process through Embodied Practice

This essay explores a variety of questions about embodied approaches to Indigenous storytelling, artistic process, and methodology, and the ways which they are taken up in the creation of new theatre work. By engaging in a discussion with Yolanda Bonnell, creator of the play bug, this article examines some of the implications of embodied storytelling and new play development. The article also considers how new Indigenous theatre works and performances at festivals such as SummerWorks can offer audiences entry points and sites for engaging difficult topics and issues that pertain to Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations. Further, the reader is invited into a discussion that teaches about an artist’s own process and methodology and how these are mobilized and activated through Indigenous storytelling, memory, and embodied practice.