Play and Friendship in Inclusive Autism Education

Supporting learning and development

Carmel Conn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138842120
• eBook ISBN: 9781317553106
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Taking an innovative approach to autism and play, this practical text focuses on the particular form play and friendship takes for children with autism and their peers. Autistic children have clear preferences for play, with sensory-perceptual experience remaining a strong feature as they develop. Play and Friendship in Inclusive Autism Education offers a framework for supporting children's development through play, with step-by-step guidance on how to facilitate the playful engagement of children with autism.

Up to date research findings and relevant theoretical ideas are presented in an accessible and practical way, highlighting what theory means to ordinary practice in schools, whilst focusing on practical knowledge in autism education. Split into five chapters, this book covers some of the main issues surrounding inclusive education and play:

• discourses and definitions of play
• the difference between play and playfulness
• autism, play and the inclusion agenda in education
• the nature of sensory-perceptual experience in children's play cultures
• effective ways of supporting children's friendships.

With practical guidance on how to support children with autism through play, this book will be essential reading for teachers, learning support assistants, SENCos and play workers, as well as professionals working in an advisory capacity. Students studying courses that cover autism will also find Play and Friendship in Inclusive Autism Education a valuable resource.

Chapter 1

What is play?

Focus of this chapter:

• discourses and definitions of play
• the purposes of play, including its importance to the development of the social brain, as participation in socioculture, as physical activity and as a creative space away from real life
• the nature of children’s play, making reference to its significance in terms of child development but also its everyday value in supporting children’s interactions with each other
• categories of children’s play
• difficult issues in relation to play, including play as a context for social exclusion.

Introduction

The word ‘play’ is a deceptively simple term for what is widely acknowledged to be a complex and multifaceted phenomenon. We know that play is carried out by humans and animals, adults and children, and that it takes many different forms, but we do not fully know the purpose of play or why it develops in the way it does. The purpose of play has been described from both evolutionary and socio-historical perspectives, and as a feature of learning and development, as emotional experience and as contributing to the growth of self (Göncü and Gaskins, 2006). Different theories of play have been developed, but often these focus on only one aspect of play rather than take in ‘the whole picture’. The complexity of play reflects the complexity of human behaviour itself, which is determined by multiple influences that are in dynamic and interactive relationship. However, play helps to reveal the fact that understanding human behaviour and development involves understanding our biological materiality as well as and in critical relation to social and cultural processes.

The dominance of developmental psychology in autism theory and practice has meant that a narrow view of autism and play has prevailed. This takes a strongly cognitive view, one that sees the development of play as straightforwardly linked to intellectual development. Forms of play that are seen to be cognitively relevant, most important amongst these being pretend play, are prioritised, whilst other types of play are overlooked. Consistent with this view is that play for the neurotypically developing child is a behaviour that relates to their cognitive development, much more than to – or even in isolation from – the sociocultural world. Within the literature on autism, the development of play has been conceptualized as a set of skills to be learned or a series of actions to be performed, with little sense that play exists as the result of the child’s intrinsic motivation and interactive responses with the world around.

Mastrangelo (2009) amongst other writers has remarked on the oddness of the approach to play in autism, where children’s play is seen to involve adult direction, involuntary action, goal orientation and adult determination of play materials. However, as Sutton-Smith (1997) points out in his definitive work on the meaning of play, this moulding of ideas about play to suit the particular discourse or ‘rhetoric’ of an academic discipline has been a feature of play scholarship since the 1800s. Many theories of play highlight one purpose and focus on this to the exclusion of other features of play, which are dismissed as irrelevant or not ‘proper play’. The cognitive developmental discourse that dominates autism theory is served by a view of play that sees it as contributing to growth and intellectual development in the neurotypical case and a defining ‘deficit skill’ in autism. Such a narrow view results in a diminution in our overall understanding of what play is, how it may exist differentially for people with autism, and how carers and professionals can support play in children’s lives.

In this chapter and in the one that follows, understandings about play, its purpose and the many forms it takes in ordinary contexts will be explored as a way of providing a wide perspective on play. It is hoped that this will serve to provide a useful starting point for thinking about autism and play and how we can support children’s learning and development through play, which are the subjects of the last three chapters in this book.

Definition of play

A comprehensive and widely used definition of play is that found in Caillois’s classic text, Man, Play and Games (1958/2001). According to this definition, behaviour can be described as play if it involves the following criteria:

• it is a free and voluntary act, one that is intrinsically motivated and not externally prompted;
• it involves joy, amusement, absorption and other aspects of positive feeling;
• there is an outcome that is unproductive and cannot be predicted in advance;
• it relates to the time and culture in which the play takes place;
• it involves a duality of the player’s personal style, concerns and interpretations alongside rules and other limitations for certain types of games.

In defining play, Caillois provided four classifications of play to encompass all the different forms and functions of play. He described play as essentially organized into the following: competitions and games of contest, games of chance or luck, play that involves mimicry and imagination, and a special form of locomotor play that Caillois described as ‘dizzy play’. This last classification is interesting because it refers to play that brings a momentary disruption of perception and voluntarily inflicted ‘panic state of mind’ – for example, the experience of play involved in swinging upside down or spinning round and round. Caillois describes dizzy play as ‘without thought’, but it could also be viewed as an unusually non-social, physical form of play in its orientation.

Caillois pointed out that categories of play often exist in combined forms – for example, imaginative role play games that involve a contest, as in playfighting, or sporting activity that involves elements of luck, as in horse racing. He also saw play as something that adults do as well as children, describing sport, physical contest, performance, the arts and many other everyday leisure activities as adult forms of play.

Sutton-Smith’s (1997) more recent and highly influential treatise on play also takes a wide view of play, seeing it as something that describes adult as well as children’s behaviour. He describes play as having wide parameters that encompass a diversity of activity, including mental ‘play’, such as daydreaming, solitary activities, such as reading, the playful behaviour involved in playing tricks on someone, organized social activity, such as playing or watching sport, engaging in performance, celebrations, festivals and contests, and ‘risky activity’, such as extreme sports. Sutton-Smith argues that the diversity of play makes variability its defining characteristic. He sees play as a form of communication that is loaded with adaptive potential and powerfully argues that play probably serves many purposes. For Sutton-Smith, theories of play largely reflect the perspective of the theorist and their particular interests, with no one academic discipline able to fully describe the meaning of play.

The multiple purposes of play

Play has been described according to theories of evolution, development, education, socioculture and anthropology, and as therapeutic support. The intrinsic and voluntary nature of play, taken together with the fact that it is not unique to human beings but also exists in other animal species, has meant that it has been seen as having some evolutionary purpose, though recent theories of play have given this view less prominence (Burghardt, 2005). Behaviours seen in play are often similar to those that exist in real life, and this once led to the belief that play is a form of adaptive behaviour. Play was viewed as a process of trying out actions, interactions and movements, taking risks and making mistakes, and so as a training for life. It was believed that important skills needed for unpredictable or more dangerous situations are rehearsed within a safe play space, where adverse responses and reactions are minimal. Playfighting was seen as a key skill in this respect, human and animal players acting out aggression in ways that feel close to real life whilst being recognized as not actually real (Bateson, 1972).

In recent years, empirical research into play, both animal play and play in human beings, has not supported this idea of play as practice for life. Play behaviour often differs from the way in which humans conduct themselves in real-life situations. For example, play tends to be highly repetitive and dissimilar in this respect to the flexible and constantly changing way in which real-life interaction unfolds. Play often reverses the sequence in which things are done in actuality, fragmenting and punctuating ordinary activity in ways that involve exaggerated gesture, movement and emotion. It is also the case that repetition in play does not reduce as a skill is learned and appears to be done more for the sake of the excitement and pleasure involved. Moreover, some behaviour, such as fighting, exists in species that do not have playfighting in their play repertoire. For other species, it may be the males who carry out the playfighting whilst the females do the real fighting (Sutton-Smith, 1997). There is also no evidence that the amount of play increases the player’s ability to perform a corresponding real-life skill (Lillard et al., 2013). Children who play in only small amounts, for example, are not necessarily less able to use language, be creative or problem-solve in later life.

Consideration of cultural differences in relation to play also casts doubt on the idea of play as having evolutionary purpose. Though much of the research into human play has been carried out in Western societies, it is nevertheless apparent that play does not exist in the same way in different cultures. Play is highly variable and exists unequally in different societies. Some cultures do not recognize or encourage children’s play and may provide much less time for play. Adults within one society view children’s play in different ways too, some seeing value and learning, and others a set of negative or challenging behaviours that require criticism and control.

In current understandings of the purposes of play, the focus of attention has shifted away from notions of play as evolutionary inheritance. The importance of playful interactions to the development of the social brain is recognized, but less as a single trigger for the development of specific cognitive capacities and more as part of a ‘heterogeneous assembly’ of biological and social processes that are closely interlinked and mutually determining (Prout, 2005). Ideas about the developmental purpose of play are complemented by recent interest in play as a form of participation in socioculture, particularly for children, whose playful activity involves making sense of and reproducing social interactions and cultural ideas that relate to the world around. Children’s playful interactions are increasingly seen as an important way in which they engage socially, particularly with each other. Play as a form of physical activity and play as an expression of self are further areas of interest associated with the purpose of play, which are discussed more fully ahead.

Play and the development of mind

Despite extensive research into play and development, it remains uncertain whether there is a direct causal relationship between the child’s ability to play and their development of specific cognitive capacities (Lillard et al., 2013). It appears to be much more the case that play is part of a developmental package, one that involves social sharing, positive emotional states, feelings of safety, self-regulation and quality of care for healthy outcomes. Studies in affective neuroscience and psychobiology suggest that the playful interaction patterns that occur early on in a child’s life serve the vital purpose of building healthy neural development and an architecture of the mind (Hobson, 1990). The extended period of human childhood, that is considerably longer than for other primates, is thought to be for the purpose of lengthening the experience of care for the young infant and therefore time spent in affective interaction with their caregiver. Early social-emotional experiences of relationships, which are characterised by repeated, rhythmic experiences of playful interaction, support the child’s ability to thrive (Panksepp, 2013). Playful engagement takes the form of seeking out enjoyable alignments of face, voice and body, which is not led by the adult nor by the infant, but takes the form of a kind of dance between the two (Stern, 1985). It is thought that these protracted experiences of social sharing and intense relatedness with another person’s mind and body support the development of the capacity to take a thinking stance upon the world, where thought is removed from immediate perceptions and always filtered through a socially driven ‘intersubjective’ awareness (Hobson, 2002).

Certainly, for educational purposes, play is something that educators recognize as having value, experience presented in playful ways producing much greater impact on learning than didactic teaching. In early years education, play is increasingly seen as a critical context for children’s development and a good fit for the highly integrated and affective ways in which children learn. Play supports children to engage with their environment, make sense of experience and express their ideas and feelings. In recent policy statements, most prominent of which is Article 31 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UN General Assembly, 1989), there has been the introduction of a strong agenda of children’s right to play and a recognition of play as an important cultural, artistic and leisure activity for children.

Play and children’s participation in socioculture

Ideas about the developmental purpose of play are complemented by sociological theories of childhood that focus on the here-and-now importance of play in children’s lives. Investigation into children’s spontaneous, everyday social experiences highlights the ways in which play allows them to be active participants in their lives, communicating, cooperating and sharing their ideas and concerns through playful encounters with others and the world around. In play, children bring their knowledge and experience of the world and all their social and cultural understandings, reproducing and transforming these to suit their and others’ interests and concerns (Corsaro, 2011). Engaging in play allows children to function optimally in children’s social worlds. Playing hones children’s social competency and enables them to function better as themselves in the here and now, to present themselves in different ways, engage with other people and be ‘the best they can be as a child’ (Lester and Russell, 2010). In this way, the child’s capacity to participate in play also supports development.

Play suits the ways in which children communicate, which is different from adults and much less verbally based. Children communicate mostly in non-verbal ways, through movement, gesture, sound, posture, facial expression and their use of space. The physical, multimodal and performative forms of communication that are strongly present in children’s play match these natural ways of communicating and allow children maximum agency in their social participation and reproduction of culture. However, it should be remembered that play as a form of participation in socioculture varies, depending on the social and cultural contexts of play. Play must be seen as relating to regional and national influences as well as to structures that exist in relation to gender...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• 1 What is play?
• 2 Playfulness and children’s perspectives on play and friendship
• 3 Autism and play
• 4 Autistic perspectives on play and friendship
• 5 Developing inclusive contexts for play and friendship
• References
• Index