Children's Play, Pretense, and Story

Studies in Culture, Context, and Autism Spectrum Disorder

Susan Douglas, Lesley Stirling, Susan Douglas, Lesley Stirling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781848725447
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317814870
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Psicología del desarrollo

At the heart of this volume is the recognition that children's engagement with play and story are intrinsically and intricately linked. The contributing authors share a passionate interest in the development and well-being of children, in particular through their use of imagination and adaptation of the everyday into play and stories. Following these principles, the volume explores the connections between play, story, and pretense with regard to many cultural and contextual factors that influence the way these elements vary in children's lives. In a departure from earlier collections on play and story, the authors take a particular focus on normative as compared with atypical development.

This collection begins with an approach to understanding the developmental relationship between play and story, which recognizes their similarities while acknowledging their differences. Much of the collection addresses pretend play and story in children with autism spectrum disorder, an understudied but important group for consideration, as these dimensions of their lives and development have often been considered problematic. The volume also includes sections on play and story in classroom settings and play and story across cultures, including non-English-speaking environments such as Israel, Romania, China, and Mexico. It concludes with a discussion of how play differs across sociocultural and economic contexts, making a unifying claim for the importance of play in children's lives but also calling for an understanding of what play means to very different groups of children.

1

Young Children’s Pretend Play and Storytelling as Modes of Narrative Activity

From Complementarity to Cross-Fertilization?

Ageliki Nicolopoulou

How should we think about and study the relationship between young children’s pretend play and narrative? The emergence and transformations of these symbolic activities in early childhood, along with the development of abilities they require and promote, play important roles in children’s experience, development, socialization, and education. It is therefore appropriate that substantial and growing bodies of research have addressed both of these subjects during the past several decades (e.g., Bamberg, 1997; Bruner, 1992; Fireman, McVay, & Flanagan, 2003; McCabe & Bliss, 2003; Nicolopoulou, 1993, 1997a; Roskos & Christie, 2000; Saracho, 2012; Saracho & Spodek, 2003; Singer, Golinkoff, & Hirsh-Pasek, 2006;Tabors, Snow, & Dickinson, 2001). However, there have been fewer efforts to analyze them in an integrated way and to explore the relationship between them concretely and systematically. More systematic examination of the dynamic interplay between pretend play and narrative in development can help enrich both areas of research and, in the process, contribute to our larger understanding of the development of cognition, imagination, language, and socioemotional skills. Along with the other pieces assembled in this volume, the present chapter seeks to contribute to such efforts. It will outline an orienting theoretical approach that may help guide research in this area, illustrate and support it with empirical examples, and suggest some implications for both research and practice. (My discussion will draw on arguments and material from some of my previous publications, particularly Nicolopoulou, 2007.)

Narrative in Play and Story

The lack of sufficient integration between developmental research on pretend play and narrative is both unfortunate and surprising, because theoretical considerations and existing empirical research point toward important affinities and interdependence between them (for one overview, see Kavanaugh & Engel, 1998). A key point of intersection, on which I will focus in this chapter, is that pretend play itself has a crucial narrative dimension, since it centers on the enactment of narrative scenarios. In fact, for a number of purposes it is useful to see children’s pretend play and storytelling as complementary modes of their narrative activity, on a continuum ranging from the discursive exposition of narratives in storytelling to their enactment in pretend play (Nicolopoulou, 1997a, 2002, 2005, 2007). For enactive as well as discursive narrative, children must develop and employ both production and comprehension skills (a point usefully highlighted, in connection with pretend play, by Kavanaugh, 2006b and Kavanaugh & Engel, 1998).¹

It is worth emphasizing that this is a continuum rather than a sharp dichotomy. Between the two analytical poles of purely discursive storytelling and purely enacted pretend play, there are various intermediate and hybrid forms. For example, children can use character figurines in a range of ways that include minimally symbolic physical manipulation as a starting point for rudimentary proto-narratives, prompting and illustrating largely discursive storytelling, or engaging in complex and coherent figurine-centered play. And, in practice, children’s pretend play often tends to combine enacted narrative with elements of discursive narrative; children use the latter to help set up play scenarios, negotiate adjustments and variations, and offer commentary as the action unfolds (for some illustrations of how this happens, see Douglas & Stirling, this volume). As Boyd (2009, p. 177) aptly put it (drawing on Sawyer, 1997), in children’s pretend play, “direction, narration, and enactment flow readily and naturally into one another.” This is especially true of the coordinated activity of social pretend play.

The narrative links and parallels between play and story have not gone entirely unexplored, though there is considerable room for further research. Recognition of the narrative dimension in pretend play informed studies of children’s play narratives and their development (e.g., Eckler & Weininger, 1989; Galda, 1984; Glaubman, Kashi, & Koresh, 2001; Pellegrini, 1985; Sachs, Goldman, & Chaille, 1985; Wolf, Rygh, & Altshuler, 1984). Their guiding premise, summed up by Kavanaugh (2006b, p. 275), was that “there is an implicit narrative structure to the pretend play of young children that bears a striking relationship to their storytelling and story comprehension skill.” There have also been some efforts to directly compare the narrative structures of children’s pretend play and storytelling (Benson, 1993; Ilgaz & Aksu-Koç, 2005). Other work, including some that has not explicitly highlighted the narrative connection between these two symbolic activities, has also helped bring out relevant similarities and affinities. Harris (2000) argued that there are “important continuities” between the cognitive capacities that underpin children’s participation in pretend play and the processing of narrative discourse by children and adults (pp. 51–54, 192–194). Both activities entail trying to accomplish and combine two key functions: creating and transforming an adequately coherent mental model of an imagined world (playworld or storyworld) while also entering into the point of view of the characters being portrayed.

Furthermore, several partly independent, partly intersecting lines of research have helped illuminate another set of similarities between pretend play and storytelling: both represent the union of expressive imagination with rule-governed cultural form in the context of social life, and this helps them serve as key contexts for children’s construction of reality and identity (Nicolopoulou, 1993, 1997a). In both pretend play and storytelling, children are required, encouraged, and increasingly enabled to appropriate the rich array of themes, images, roles, genres, models, and other symbolic resources available in their culture and to use these flexibly and creatively—for the intrinsic satisfactions offered by these activities and, simultaneously, to help make sense of the world and of themselves. In the process, children also use play and story as vehicles for expressing and working over emotionally important themes that preoccupy them and symbolically managing or resolving the concerns they represent. Engaging in either or both of these symbolic activities—as actors, listeners, or storytellers; in solitary forms or in practices shared with adults and peers—offers children opportunities and motivations to use and master the narrative genres and other symbolic resources they embody, to explore and extend their inherent possibilities through performance and experimentation, and to push on to greater range and proficiency. (I am synthesizing arguments, analyses, findings, and implications from a range of sources that include Bruner, 1986; Cohen & MacKeith, 1991; Fein, 1987, 1995; Feldman, Bruner, Kalmar, & Renderer, 1993; Miller, Hengst, Alexander, & Sperry, 2000; Miller, Hoogstra, Mintz, Fung, & Williams, 1993; Nicolopoulou, 1997a, 1997b; Nicolopoulou, Scales, & Weintraub, 1994; Richner & Nicolopoulou, 2001; Rowe, 1998, 2000; Wells, 1986; Wolf & Heath, 1992.) So we should not be surprised by indications that, in significant respects, “[t]he complexity and structure of children’s stories seem to develop in a manner parallel to the development of their dramatic play” (Galda, 1984, p. 28), nor by accumulated evidence that children’s participation in various forms of pretend play can help promote skills necessary for the production and comprehension of stories (Nicolopoulou & Ilgaz, 2013).

The key insights here have perhaps been formulated most vividly by Vivian Paley (1990), who has consistently argued that “play … [is] story in action, just as storytelling is play put into narrative form” (p. 4); that children’s “fantasy play and storytelling are never far apart” (p. 8); and “that this view of play makes play, along with its alter ego, storytelling and acting, the universal learning medium” (p. 10). Following the lead of Paley and others in this respect, I have argued that we should approach children’s pretend play and narrative as closely related and often intertwined forms of socially situated symbolic action—and that one source of valuable theoretical resources for grasping the interplay between the two is Vygotsky’s sociocultural analysis of children’s play (Nicolopoulou, 1997a, 2002; Nicolopoulou, Cortina, Ilgaz, Cates, & de Sá, 2015; Nicolopoulou, de Sá, Ilgaz, & Brockmeyer, 2010; Vygotsky, 1933/1967). Both pretend play and storytelling should be viewed as expressions of children’s symbolic imagination that draw from and reflect back upon the interrelated domains of emotional, intellectual, and social life.

From Complementarity to Convergence?

Now for the other side of the coin. Understanding and appreciating these similarities and interconnections between children’s pretend play and storytelling is an essential starting point. But the two are not identical—which is why they can play complementary and mutually enriching roles in development. Their differences have to do with the intrinsic characteristics of play and story production and comprehension as activities, their roles in children’s social relations and group life, and the kinds of skills and capacities they require and promote. We need theoretical and empirical approaches that can do justice to those developmental and experiential differences as well as the overlaps and similarities.

Building on elements from previous research and my own ongoing studies of preschool children in naturalistic contexts, I have argued (e.g., in Nicolopoulou, 2007) that the active interplay and cross-fertilization between children’s pretend play and storytelling can significantly advance their development in a range of domains but that this active interplay is neither given nor automatic. Rather, they seem to start out as mostly separate and parallel activities, and the potential for fruitful coordination and cross-fertilization between them is a developmental achievement—which then serves as a catalyst for accelerating further development. I thus propose a model that sees young children’s pretend play and storytelling as initially parallel and complementary modes of their narrative activity, with at least partially distinct developmental origins and trajectories, which children are only gradually able to integrate effectively. To put it another way, the relationship between the two moves from complementarity to convergence in the course of development. It is important to add that this convergence is not a once-and-for-all event that can be located at a specific age, but a gradual, complex, and uneven process (with cross-cultural variations, as suggested by Reese, 2013) that we still need to map out and analyze. Broadly speaking, however, the period from roughly 3 to 5 years seems to be especially critical in this respect.

From Initial Disjunction to Growing Cross-Fertilization: Developmental Patterns and Possible Explanations

One type of evidence supporting the model just proposed is a pattern I have consistently observed in preschool classes I have studied over several decades. Toward the beginning of the school year, especially among younger preschoolers and those with weaker narrative skills, there tends to be a significant disjunction between the themes, scenarios, and other symbolic elements that the children use in their pretend play and in their storytelling. Over time, however, there is an increasing integration and cross-fertilization between the two, with similar themes and scenarios used flexibly and effectively in both activities. I offer two contrasting examples to illustrate this pattern.

Thematic Disjunction Versus Overlap and Interchange: Two Snapshots

One example of sharp thematic disjunction comes from a Head Start classroom in a large metropolitan area, a few weeks after I had begun to introduce a storytelling and story-acting practice that will be described later in this chapter.² During one of my visits to this classroom, before taking stories from the children, I was observing a group of them at a waist-high sand table while they played with figurines representing animals, cars, and superheroes. What follows is an excerpt from my field notes (February 28, 2003):

At one moment I was playing with some kids at the sand table. I noticed that the children were rather imaginative in their play, taking on the role of a character/superhero flying around, hitting others, etc. I pretended I did not know what to do with my character and some of the kids were directing me. A regular volunteer in this classroom, an older woman from the community, urged me to take down a story from one of these children, Dasai,³ because she mentioned he was very imaginative. I had noticed his imaginative engagement in the sand table play (that is, having his action hero character perform various stereotypic actions). After he lost interest in the sand table and was looking around for another activity, I asked him whether he wanted to tell me (i.e., dictate) a story. He was eager to do that, and I thought that he would tell me a story that followed (or had some elements of) his sand table play. However, his story just recounted some simple ordinary events and resembled a number of stories I was getting from the children in this and other Head Start classrooms.

Dasai:	Me and my brother played outside. We went to the store.
AN:	[Because he stopped, I asked] What kind of store?
Dasai:	Gumstore. That’s it.

This incident helped bring home to me a phenomenon of which I had gradually become aware—the extent to which some young children, especially during early phases of their preschool years, viewed their pretend play and storytelling as separate and disconnected activities. One manifestation of this disconnection was the minimal or, in this case, nonexistent overlap between the thematic content in their pretend play and storytelling.

For contrast, here is an example from a different preschool classroom serving children from predominantly middle-class families, which illustrates the possibility for children to engage in effective and flexible interchange between their pretend play and storytelling. For several weeks, the teacher had been using a variety of activities to highlight the theme of dinosaurs. Her goal was to build on and enrich the children’s interest in this theme, which was present in a good deal of their pretend play, especially among the boys. But whereas the boys tended to use dinosaurs exclusively in scenarios featuring aggression and violence, she tried to complement this by suggesting that dinosaurs also had families and children and engaged in some nonviolent activities. Over time, the dinosaur theme became prominent in a number of children’s stories as well as their play, and this was especially true for children who had already experienced the storytelling and story-acting practice during the previous year. In the incident I am about to describe, the child storyteller not only used the dinosaur theme in his story but also went a step further and used his story to reflect back on his dinosaur-themed play.

Two children, Mason and Kellen, had been excluding another child, Ben, from their play. The teacher had a discussion with Mason and Kellen in which she expressed her disappointment about this. After their discussion, Mason went to the storytelling corner and composed the following story. It is apparent that he tried to make up with Ben by including him in the activity described in the story and in effect included him in their play as well, since this story was acted out by the children involved:

Once upon a time there was Kellen. Mason and Ben and then Cooper came. And then Mason and Ben and Cooper and Kellen went home to watch TV. And then a dinosaur came and then Mason hopped on the dinosaur that was named Pterodactyl and the dinosaur named Pterodactyl flopped his wings and went up in the air. And then Mason said, “Down for a landing, Pterodactyl!” And he said, “Wait a minute, I forgot Kellen and Ben and Cooper.” And then he flew like this [flops hands] and Cooper, Ben, and Kellen hopped on the pterodactyl and flew off together to Dinosaur Land and then they all went home. The end.

(Mason, 4;5)

In preschool classrooms I have studied, children often displayed this kind of thematic continuity between their pretend play and storytelling. But they rarely did so from the beginning of the school year. The ability and inclination to engage in this flexible interchange took time to develop—and it developed to different degrees, and with different rhythms, for different children.

Making Sense of This Pattern

These and other findings support the idea that young chil...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Young Children's Pretend Play and Storytelling as Modes of Narrative Activity: From Complementarity to Cross-Fertilization?
• Part I Pretense and Storytelling in Autism Spectrum Disorder
• Part II Pretense and Storytelling in the Classroom
• Part III Pretense and Storytelling in Cross-Cultural Development
• Contributors
• Index