Nostalgia and play

This chapter describes an exploration, through the use of semi-structured interview and nostalgia measures, of older generations’ memories and feelings of nostalgia about their own childhood play experiences and compared these with their ideas about children’s play today. Alongside this, children’s own accounts of playing in the same town in the Welsh Valleys were collected and compared with adult memories and beliefs about contemporary conditions for playing. Invoking memories of childhood play is a common technique used by play advocates. This chapter argues that a deeper appreciation of how memory is intricately entwined with affect, emotion and place allows for a more nuanced approach to using memory as an effective advocacy tool. The study was less concerned with the accuracy of memory and more with what memory does in terms of giving meaning to children’s play experiences today.

Co-creating spaces on an adventure playground: using participatory action research as an approach to continuing professional development

Using participatory action research as an approach to reflective playwork practice and continuous professional development this research took place on an Adventure Playground in London. Key themes include co-investigation; reflective playwork practice; dialogue; mapping; story-telling; and working with meaning. The adventure playground team brought a critical and reflective lens to the production of the Adventure Playground, its everyday rhythms, routines and habits, and the ways in which adults and children co-create play spaces. It also brought opportunities to experiment with approaches that could deepen understandings of play and playwork practice in a variety of situations from training courses to conference workshops leading to more relevant and reflective approaches to adults working with children’s play.

Your space or mine? Play in out of school clubs

This chapter uses observation and semi-structured interviews to explores the everyday practices, habits and routines of playworkers in an afterschool club in the northwest of England and how these help shape children’s experiences within the setting. Of key interest is the relationship between espoused playwork intentions for the design of a play environment and what happens in practice. The chapter draws on a number of interrelated concepts drawn from the field of children’s geographies that suggest spaces are not fixed containers for action or a background against which humans carry out their interactions, but are actively produced by the ongoing encounters between adults, children, materials, movements, affects, imaginations and so on. While spaces are always in the process of being produced and are open to all sorts of possibilities, they are also imbued with power relationships, and dominant forces have considerable influence in shaping the possible movements and encounters within the setting. The intention here was to pay closer attention to these entanglements and how they produce environments that might be more or less open to moments of play emerging.

Play and value: determining the values of a nature play setting

The purpose of this study was to examine the ways a play setting within a zoo is understood as a segregated space for both play and learning and the tensions that are created by the stakeholders’ diverse perceptions of value. The analysis was based on semi-structured interviews with the institution’s senior management and questionnaires completed by the institution’s permanent and volunteer staff. The nature play setting was seen as having a mix of instrumental and intrinsic value; however, the overall perceived purpose was to teach children about nature. Developing a better understanding and appreciation of how play is valued within an organization may create a healthier work environment and possible explorations into children’s play opportunities beyond a segregated space for play.

Researching children’s play and contemporary art

The New Children’s Museum is a museum in which each ‘exhibit’ is a conceptual work of art by a contemporary artist, commissioned by the museum as a springboard for playful experiences. Neither a children’s museum, where the focus is on learning through play, nor a standard contemporary art museum, The New Children’s Museum is a hybrid space that calls for new ways of doing research, requiring tools that can go beyond positivist and ethnographic approaches. This review assembles examples of alternative research methodologies, drawn from diverse practices such as performance studies and performance art, that may contribute to mapping the complexities presented by a children’s museum that also actively engages in the production of contemporary art. It includes some experiments with a/r/tography, and in conclusion offers a method assemblage that might be termed ‘ludo-artographic’.

Dancing with strangers: observing play in an English urban square

This is a study of children’s play in an urban square as documented and shared through the lens of a dancer, a writer and a painter. The artists’ diverse modes of observation, perception and description revealed profound differences in how children and adults inhabit space and drew attention to the effect of children’s play on the culture of a public square. Using Ingold’s (2007, 2011) concept of lines of movement, Winnicott’s (1971) theory of transitional phenomena and Massey’s (2005) ideas on public space, these findings are discussed in relation to movement and presence, objects and imagination, co-existence and co-formation. The chapter explores how engaging with creative practitioners in the research process, and paying attention to subjective and embodied ways of knowing, can offer something more to traditional methodologies used to observe and represent play, and how this can add to the debate on the management and design of a child-friendly public realm.

Adventure playgrounds and me: bringing the past into the auto-ethnographic present

This is a personal study aimed at exploring why adventure playgrounds (APGs) have had such a fascination for the author for over 40 years. It weaves a critical and narrative ethnography with an affect-based auto-ethnography, resulting in various voices (author as researcher, narrator, participant) and approaches. The research involved an immersion in the author’s own history with APGs aided by a process of mutual recollection via email with five participants who shared that history; (re)visiting APGs in London, Copenhagen and Berlin; and a process of observation and reflection. This performative and auto-ethnographical approach aims to contribute something new to articulating the significance of APGs. Four themes emerged from this iterative and intuitive process: the mindful audacity of APGs, APGs as places of drama and unspoken narratives, APGs as spaces that are alive in many ways, and the hope that arises from this process of sensemaking. The interplay between these themes offers a socio-cultural view of APGs as symbolic places of heterodoxic and cultural possibility, at odds with a developmental and progressive view of children’s lives.

Children, mobile phones and outdoor play

This chapter examines the affordances (Gibson, 1979; Heft, 1988; Kyttä, 2003) offered by mobile phones for instigating and maintaining play in an adventure playground in south west England. It is influenced by new materialist theories and posthuman geographies that seek to acknowledge the vitality of material things and decentre the human as an organising force apart from ‘nature’. Children are positioned in an assemblage of other human and non-human actants, providing a perspective that offers the qualities of non-human actants (most notably mobile phones) up to more nuanced scrutiny. An ethnographic approach was used to observe and record children’s mobile phone use, and ten instances were recorded, treated as exemplars.

Play, playwork and wellbeing

This chapter presents an overview of the literature on childhood wellbeing which is characterised by large scale, cross-sectional studies. However, Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), states that children have the right to express their own opinion on matters pertaining to them. Participatory research techniques and creative methodologies have the potential to put children’s voices at the centre of enquiries into childhood. Creative methods help children narrate their lived experience. This chapter sets out one element of a twelve month participatory research project in which the authors worked with a group of play rangers. Using drawings and photo elicitation, the play rangers engaged the children attending the play settings in informal discussions regarding their experience of being involved in outdoor play. Consideration was given to how these experiences support and contribute to the domains of wellbeing identified within a developmental assets framework.

Therapeutic playwork: exploring playworkers’ perceptions of therapeutic playwork training and its usefulness in supporting children in afterschool clubs

This study developed from observations that playworkers in after school clubs in a county in the south of England were struggling to respond to what they saw as challenging behaviour. The study used a hybrid of participatory action research and ethnography in order to extend playworkers’ understanding of Sturrock and Else’s (1998) model of therapeutic playwork and explore their perceptions of its usefulness in after school settings. Playworkers attended introductory training on Sturrock and Else’s (2005) model of therapeutic playwork and then reflected on their practice. They articulated a different understanding of challenging behaviour, seeing it as children playing out latent material or strong emotions, expressing transference, or manifesting a breakdown in the play process. Participants believed they became more reflective practitioners, more able to read the play process and more self-aware, and they advocated championing this perspective to other practitioners.