Evolutionary Playwork

Bob Hughes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135258313
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Play is a crucial component in the development of all children. In this fully updated and revised edition of his classic playwork text, Bob Hughes explores the complexities of children's play, its meaning and purpose, and argues that adult-free play is essential for the psychological well-being of the child.

The book is divided into fourteen chapters that together examine the fundamentals of evolutionary play. Firstly, Hughes examines the very earliest ideas of playwork and its impact on brain growth and organization today. He then goes on to explore and explain the key theoretical concepts underlying playwork. These include discussions on free play and creating suitable play environments alongside more thorny issues such as safety and consultation. Finally, the book offers up some of Hughes' most recent research that reveals how his approach to play and playwork in global society has continued to evolve throughout his career to meet new challenges and needs. Throughout this book, Hughes has included his fellow practitioner Mick Conway's vivid observations of children at play to bring the facts and arguments in the text to life.

This revised edition reflects important recent advances in our understanding of the evolutionary history of play and its impact on the development of the brain, of the role play in the development of resilience and of the impact of play deprivation. Evolutionary Playwork is still the only book to combine the reality of playwork practice with the fundamentals of evolutionary and developmental psychology, and it is still essential reading for all playwork students, practitioners and researchers.

Chapter 1

A Short History of the Development of Evolutionary Playwork

Evolutionary Playwork has a development history of over forty years, which has seen it evolve from the point of view of a small number of practitioners to what we call an ‘application’, with a growing theoretical base, and a whole range of different and unique practices.

The following chronology and explanation was originally developed around February 2004 (revised February 2010) as part of the support material being prepared by Gordon Sturrock, Mick Conway and I, for the development of the Playwork Principles. It is included in this text to give the reader a flavour of the ‘main’ events that have occurred during the development of Evolutionary Playwork up until the present day.

It charts my own playwork experiences and as such is a personal view of playwork history; it is an undeniably subjective and partial view and does not pretend to be anything else. On no account should the reader assume that this is a comprehensive account of everything that went on in generic playwork. Individuals, events and publications that they may judge deserving to be prominent features may not even be included.

As I write (March 2010), playwork is moving in several different directions simultaneously. It has become a subject of academic study. It is becoming an arm of government social policy – albeit a rather small arm – immersed to some extent into a new primeval learning soup of working with children – a soup containing all manner of professionals, and where studying playwork will be one of several options. It is becoming part of the explanation of how we should deal with the alienation and illnesses caused by the proliferation of institutions and technologies that dwarf most human beings, and it is seen by a growing number as a potent factor in creating bonds between current and future generations of children and the Earth itself. I have some concerns about the direction some of these developments are taking and the impact they are having on the child’s essential, individual evolutionary drive to freely interact with the world and the universe – a vital component of evolutionary play itself.

I have long stated that for playwork to flourish, a new mindset that is able to see the difference in these global warming times, between bio-evolutionary bases and socio-economic ones, is needed. We have yet to reach the point where the development of our species’ children through adult-free unrestricted play is viewed as our most important social objective.

In the future we may look back and see this as a period of missed opportunity. The problem though is that it has always been a human failing not to see the wood for the trees, and that blindness – that our salvation, our resistance to extinction lies in the child’s world, and not in the adult’s – may be what marks us out as unable, perhaps incapable of resisting the pressures of extinction in the end.

Having said that, whatever else this book is, it is a celebration of childhood and play. I hope the reader will sense that to be an evolutionary playworker is a privilege and an honour. We are members of a fortunate group who, as well as seeing the worst that humanity can throw at its children, have also had the opportunity to re-visit the world of our own childhood, by looking, and sometimes even passing through the mirror, or as it was called in 2009, ‘the wee gap’ (O’Neil) between the world we inhabit and that inhabited by the child.

Tracking the Evolution of our Meaning: A Personal Chronology of the Development of Playwork Consciousness and the Evolution of the Idea of Playwork

1 1969–1979

The genesis of playwork

The playworker as role model

Playwork as manifest¹ objective

Playwork as a generic vocation

The NPFA as the lead organisation, Abernethy and Satterthwaite

APWA, LAPA and Thurrock

It’s Child’s Play

Berg, Goodman, Holt, Illich, Neill and Colin Ward

Joe Benjamin and Jack Lambert

JNCTPL > JNCTP

Notes for Adventure Playworkers

2 1980–1985

Playwork derives its own definition of play.

The ethnicising and genderising of playwork

The playworker as victim

Playwork as manifest² subjective

Playwork as social intervention

Manchester and the health and safety agenda

Talking about play

From Riots to ACPR Ltd and PlayBoard

PlayEd 82, 83, 84, 85

3 1986–1995

Swansea and Blencathra

Playwork as child centred and co-operative

Playwork as ChildCare/PlayCare

Risk as a health and safety issue – birth of the litigious culture

The playworker as facilitator, the child is in control

The playworker as shaman – The genesis of ‘deep’ playwork

Playwork as manifest³

PlayWales, The NCPRU, PlayBoard (NI), Play Scotland, The Sport’s

Council and SPRITO

NVQ/Dip HE in playwork

Leeds Metropolitan University

The PlayMovement

The National Voluntary Council for Children’s Play and National Play

Information Centre

International Play Journal

PlayEd 86, 87, 88, 89, 90

4 1996–1999

Playwork has a scientific rationale

A playworker’s taxonomy of play types

Playwork as compensatory

The playworker as observer, analyst and preparer

Playwork as latent¹

Play is a biological mechanism?

Children’s Play Council

Play as SPNs

The Colorado Paper

The Ambiguity of Play

Play Environments: a question of quality

PlayEd 94, 95, 96, 97, 99A, 99B

5 2000–2004

Play as a neurological architect/animal play

Evolutionary playwork

Therapeutic playwork and psycholudics

Quality playwork – Quality in play

Reflective playwork

Playwork as hermeneutic

Playwork as a ‘transpersonal’ journey

Playwork as latent²

First Claim I & II

Playwork Theory and Practice

PlayEd 2000, 2002, 2003

National Play Information Service

Spirit of adventure play

6 2005–2010

Gordon Burghardt (2005)

Evolutionary Psychiatry

Play rangers

Play England

Distance Learning

PlayEd 2007

More playwork books

Adventure playground criteria

Commercialisation

Blencathra revisited

1 1969–1979

The Genesis of Playwork

Until about 1972, playworkers were called playleaders, and although they worked in play settings, the assumption by employers was that they were rather like the youth leaders of the day. Jess Milne, formerly of Hackney Play Association and now freelance, is probably the longest serving/surviving playworker in the UK. He started work at Ampton Street AP in the Kings Cross area of London in 1966.

The Playworker as Role Model

In the early days, playworkers/leaders saw a large part of their function as providing children with a stereotypical model of socially responsible behaviour. However, that view soon began to change. This was partly due to our evolving perception and understanding of what play was and what play provision was for, and partly due to our intense immersion in the lives of the children we were working with – an immersion that often made our professional expectations unrealistic, when so many had life-chances that were limited by poverty, unemployment and poor health.

Playwork as Manifest¹ Objective

Playwork practice at this time was dominated by predictable reactions to the children’s playing context. A lack of trees, hills and countryside prompted structure building. A lack of the opportunity to engage with new experiences created the justification for community artists and the use of scrap materials. The perceived lack of depth of interest in children in society in general created a desire to advocate for them and to represent them. Playworkers at the time were very objective about what they were observing and what they were doing about it. However, what they saw were the obvious economic and geographical manifestations of life in the 1970s and they and most of their employers and funders reacted to that with a type of play-orientated class analysis, i.e., that play provision was a ‘working-class’ amenity that would cut down truancy, vandalism and crime. There was also, at this time, a developing move by communities themselves to squat on unused land and to develop it as playspace.

Playwork as a Generic Vocation

As a consequence, not only was there an expectation that the playleader/worker would be all things to all people, there was also response from the leader/workers themselves that that was how they expected to be perceived. It was not uncommon for playworkers in the mid 1970s to describe their job as part parent, teacher, social worker, policeman, advocate and so on. This is almost a classic description of a community worker.

The National Playing Fields Association (NPFA) as the Lead Organisation, Abernethy and Satterthwaite

During the 1970s and early 1980s the NPFA was the lead national play organisation in England, providing advice, guidance and some grant aid to voluntary and statutory bodies who made provision for children’s play (although in London and elsewhere, local authorities and charities also provided grants). The NPFA was headed by Lt. Col. R. G. (Bob) Satterthwaite, and its Children and Youth Department (headed by Drummond Abernethy) had a regional staff of eight experienced play people, some of whom are still involved or on the periphery of playwork, including Rob Wheway (freelance), Tony Chilton (retired), Fraser Brown (Leeds Metropolitan University), Bob Hughes (PlayEducation), Paul Eyre (retired), Felicity Sylvester (freelance).

As well as providing a Regional Officer Team and PlayTimes, an authoritative magazine (Peter Heseltine was its editor), the NPFA ran lively playworker meetings all over England. Not only did this give playworkers the chance to debate issues they felt were important, it gave them the opportunity to meet other playworkers, a very important development at a time when playworkers were very isolated.

The NPFA also had a smaller presence in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, but this waned as they developed their own National Organisations. Different forms of play provision, including adventure playgrounds, also existed in different population centres including Belfast, Cardiff and Glasgow.

APWA, LAPA and Thurrock

The Adventure Playworkers Association was also formed in the early 1970s to facilitate the discussion of professional issues. LAPA, the London Adventure Playground Association and precursor to PLAYLINK, was also formed around this time. A Playleadership Course was also operating at Thurrock College, the genesis of the NVQs, Diplomas and Degrees which dominate our current FE/HE educational perspective. It also breathed life into all of the ‘off the shelf’ training in playwork which pervaded the 1980s pre-qualification period.

It’s Child’s Play

In the mid 1970s a new playwork charity arrived called ‘Make Children Happy’, run by the late Ian Fletcher. It produced It’s Child’s Play, a playwork newspaper, and several publications on working with children, including my Notes for Adventure Playworkers.

Berg, Goodman, Holt, Illich, Neill and Colin Ward

Playwork’s early academic roots are not in Bruner and Sylva as one might expect. They are in the more anarchic, libertarian works of the time that extolled creativity, community, educational justice and freedom.

Joe Benjamin and Jack Lambert

Although the late Joe Benjamin’s In Search of Adventure and Lambert and Pearson’s Adventure Playgrounds captured some of the essence of ‘play’, they also acted as a catalyst for the transition from playleaders into playworkers. The books were viewed as romantic and did not reflect the reality that many playworkers were having to deal with in their daily lives. In Search of Adventure is currently being translated into Japanese!

Jnctpl > Jnctp

The playwork politicians had arrived. The Joint National Committee on Training for PlayLeadership was formed and then mutated into The Joint National Committee on Training for Playwork. Later JNCTP was instrumental in creating the PIEG, the precursor to SPRITO (Playwork), which then became SkillsActive.

Notes for Adventure Playworkers

Notes was written by Hughes in 1975 as a ‘warts and all’ exploration of the Adventure Playground ethos at the time.

Commentary

Although many veteran playworkers are as guilty as each other for the generic identity of early playwork (see above), its developmental direction was equally to do with the social and political climate at the time. As now, many of the children early playworkers worked with, experienced repression, abuse, neglect and being misunderstood, and playworkers wanted to show them that they cared about them and advocated for them. It would be some years before a truly play-based analysis for playwork was available. What this early period began to establish was that although part of the root meaning of playwork lay in a genuine affection for the children playworkers worked with – creating an almost parental defensiveness of their right to exist, tinged with a rejection of the kind of society that smothered their creative impulse and corrupted their world with a controlling adult agenda – the driving force of playwork came from the gradual recognition that their ow...