Developing Play and Drama in Children with Autistic Spectrum Disorders

Dave Sherratt,Melanie Peter

• Publisher: David Fulton Publishers
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136612060
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Learning through play is a well-established principle that underpins much educational practice, yet it is often overlooked in association with children with autistic spectrum disorders. This book considers the wide-ranging benefits of developing play and taking it into drama with these children. The authors demonstrate how to implement such approaches via a highly practical, structured developmental framework, within which participants may gradually learn to be creative. They also discuss the psychology and pedagogy of autism in relation to play and drama and connect them to everyday learning situations using a wealth of examples. This accessible approach to play and drama can offer a powerful, memorable, integrating way forward for children with autistic spectrum disorders - and enjoyable, fun opportunities for teaching and learning.

Chapter 1

Why Play?

One morning recently, Charlie (the young son of one of the authors) initiated a short play sequence. He opened with a familiar piece of narration, lifted from Teletubbies, the popular children’s TV programme: adopting a theatrical pose, he announced: One day in Teletubbyland, something appeared from far away: it was … a pair of shoes [he threw his mothers shoes in front of him, and cast her a quick knowing smile] … So, Charlie tried on the shoes … They were too big… [he sighed disappointedly] … And so Laa Laa tried on the shoes’ [he reached for one of his Teletubby dolls and put her feet into the shoes]. At this point, Charlie paused; he seemed to realise the need for some kind of resolution to the situation … He resorted to a quick fix’, the familiar format used in the TV programme: ‘Suddenly, the shoes disappeared! [throwing the shoes back over his shoulder] … BIG HUG! [he gathered all four of his Teletubby dolls together] … BIG HUG, Mummy!’ [drawing his mother into the game].

Charlie is just three years old, but already has a clear understanding of symbolism, of narrative structure, and a desire to personalise the experience and share meaning with others. He can invest affective elements (emotion) into his play, incorporate sequences drawn from memory, and flexibility and fluidity in the way he is able to manipulate them (here, varying and adding to the TV story). He uses speech to describe what is happening and to communicate to others, and the whole experience is highly interactive and socially oriented. One of his elder brothers, Jesse, similarly used to engage, seemingly, in make-believe when he was Charlie’s age, and also delighted in lifting familiar themes from television. The difference, however, was that Jesse’s play would become stuck. Jesse would lift chunks of text directly from Postman Pat, strutting about with an immaculately imitated Yorkshire accent, and fingers spread apart in the characteristic Postman Pat walk. However, his play did not develop beyond the memorised extract, and he resisted wildly any gentle attempt from anyone else to enter the make-believe, even though his mother could impersonate the character Mrs Goggins to a tee! Jesse has a diagnosis of autistic spectrum disorder.

So why play? Many parents would probably describe their frustration at not being able to engage their child with autism in purposeful play, and their child’s obsessive interest in items that would not hold conventional intrinsic motivation for the majority – the hours spent twiddling string, for example. Yet those same parents might also mention some exceptions to isolated activity: their child’s enjoyment of rough-and-tumble, chasing games and interest in adults’ clowning around, slapstick, the incongruous and in frippery in general. They might also instance some tantalising glimpses of their child momentarily engaged in play similar to that of children without autism, but point out how this was only fleeting, and how their child seemed to lose interest quickly, and did not seem either to want to keep the activity going or know how to do so.

This book seeks to demonstrate how the worlds (real and imaginary) of children like Jesse and Charlie can be brought closer together. This chapter will provide a rationale for play-drama intervention a structured approach for children with autism that has play at its core, and that seeks not only to expand their repertoire of possibilities, but also to extend their understanding and use of their own play behaviour. It is the development of imagination, make-believe and narrative understanding in shared play contexts, that leads ultimately towards children’s growing social competence. This chapter proposes a multi-factional model for developing play and taking it into educational drama, capitalising on opportunities for unleashing learning potential, possibilities for creativity and intrinsic motivational qualities.

Play and Drama: Unleashing Ability

Arguably, play is at the core of what it is to be human. It is a long-established educational maxim, that children learn through play, however transformed that may become as they mature. Play as a process facilitates discovery of possibilities, allows for exploration and experimentation and offers practice opportunities to enhance and consolidate knowledge, skills and understanding. As such, there is a close association between ‘playfulness’ and a persons essential creativity, with play generally regarded as a fundamental element in the creative process. This notion really needs close probing, especially as children with ‘autism are deemed fundamentally challenged in this area. Indeed, it is the indicators of their rigidity of thought – the very antithesis of creativity – that contribute to a diagnosis of autistic spectrum disorder’, and which underpin the coincidence of related difficulties experienced in communication and social interaction – ‘the triad of impairments’ (Wing 1996).

Vygotsky (1978) claimed that ‘in play a child always behaves beyond his average age [because] play contains all developmental tendencies in a condensed form’ (p. 241). For the majority of children with autism, it would seem that this playfulness’ commonly remains latent: they seem to lack the urge to engage spontaneously in ‘playful’ behaviour in ‘free-play situations, while structured play contexts with an interested adult can reveal indications of their play potential and clear enjoyment of such activities. The tendency of many currently favoured approaches to working with children with autism is to by-pass their apparent shortcomings in play behaviour, and instead appeal to their cognitive, logical strengths, and to work with their tendency to rigidity of thought. Such ‘compensatory’ approaches, for example TEACCH (Teaching and Educating Autistic and Communication impaired Children – Schopler and Olley 1982) tend to be heavily directive, relying on highly explicit, visual structure and predictable organisation to minimise stress. Distinction is made between ‘play’ and ‘work’: children sit at individual ‘work stations’, with tasks presented in a dry, stimulus-free context, with a view to them learning to take greater responsibility for managing themselves, and with the minimum interaction to support successful completion of activities.

However, sometimes this would appear to risk being at the expense of a more holistic approach, not least the latent creative potential of children with autism, and the extent to which their essential playfulness may be compromised. It could be argued that making tasks devoid of interaction, risks children ‘learning equipment’, rather than addressing the potential of learning contexts for developing relationships, and discovering pleasure in human contact. Logic would seem to suggest that children experiencing difficulty in a particular area (in this case, play) should receive more support in it, not less! Ironically, however, a structured approach to teaching children with autism explicitly how to play creatively actually has an overtly cognitive dimension to it.

At the same time, play is essentially affective activity – an aspect of brain functioning that is problematic for children with autism. Children with autism are fundamentally challenged in their ability to encode and decode meaning (Frith 1989); they appear to demonstrate lack of empathy and have difficulty with flexible, lateral thinking, resulting in tendency to literal, logical modes of thought (see Figure 1.1). These difficulties may all stem from under-functioning of that part of the brain concerned with evaluation and affective activity (Damasio and Maurer 1978), which may hamper their ability to see significance and meaning in an experience, as well as undermine their sense of self and consequent awareness of other people (Jordan and Powell 1995). This difficulty with ‘sense of self’ and evaluating affective experience means that they struggle with understanding their own emotional states. It also prevents them from understanding how emotions are related to desires and beliefs, and therefore from empathising with other people’s mental states and expression of intention – ‘theory of mind’ (Baron-Cohen 1993).

Figure 1.1 Autism – the ‘triad of impairments’ (based on Wing, 1996; Jordan and Powell, 1995)

However, activity that is inherently playful tends to generate emotional responses, and so will actually target directly that part of the brain that may be under-functioning in children with autism (Peter 2000b). Such experiences may also be more memorable because they are more highly charged (fun, exciting, pleasurable, intriguing – even annoying or frustrating), and therefore more likely to be etched on the brain due to their emotional quality: research has shown a link between emotional arousal in the mid-brain and cortical operations of thinking and problem-solving (Iveson 1996). Play-based approaches are live, energising and potentially liberating, and so tend to be affirming and reinforce a sense of self, which children with autism otherwise find difficult to achieve. Also, because play-based approaches are invariably multi-sensory, they offer potential points of contact in a range of ways, and so have in-built opportunities to access a shared meaning in an experience. This may be particularly significant for children with autism, who are known to perceive stimuli with heightened sensory awareness, and commonly have a preferred sensory mode.

Some people with autism are renowned for their outstanding artistic ability: the art of Stephen Wiltshire – celebrated for his drawings of buildings, Derek Paravacini’s breathtaking music prowess and the lyrical poetry of the young boy Tito. While there are those (very few) with demonstrated exceptional creative ability, this book proposes that potential in all children with autism may be promoted by actually targeting areas of the brain that may be under-functioning. Through a ‘remedial’ approach that attempts simultaneously to activate areas of the brain associated with emotions and generative thought, it is possible to put children with autism in touch with their latent playfulness and ‘what’s in it for them’, and explicitly teach them how to be creative in play and discover that potential. In other words, use a ‘learning how to do it while doing it’ approach!

Studies into the psychology of children’s pretend play have evidenced the importance of role playing and narrative at the heart of socialisation and learning to be part of a culture. Vygotsky (1978) recognised that play enables children to learn cultural tools (such as turn-taking, queuing and conversational skills) through the facilitation of adults and/or peers. He also recognised how play activities based on real-life and domestic scenarios enable children to internalise socio-cultural conventions and also transcend them as they extend them and make them their own. It is clear that without intervention, impairments experienced by children with autism in communication, social interaction and flexible thinking will undermine their real potential play competence and subsequent development. This is apparent through examining the following research findings cited by Faulkner (1995) and Jordan (1999).

Make Believe

Fein (1984) noted how through make-believe, children in role develop the ability to acknowledge and understand the perspectives of others as well as their own. Sachs et al. (1985) claim that children’s development in creating and sustaining roles and themes in their socio-dramatic play is related to: firstly, their knowledge of scripted events (people engaged in purposeful activity that involves sequences of actions, such as bathing a baby), and secondly, their communicative competence. Research by Nelson (1986) supports this view, with evidence that this script knowledge is acquired through repeated observation and participation in such everyday activities, which becomes more elaborate over time. In order to use this script knowledge effectively however, children have to be able to convey their ideas to one another, negotiate shared meanings, and agree roles, play context and the evolving story line. Children with autism tend not to learn ‘by osmosis’, simply through exposure to situations in their environment: their inability to perceive meaning mitigates against purposeful involvement, both in the real world and in make-believe.

Other psychologists distinguish between children’s socio-dramatic play and themed fantasy play. Corsaro (1986) highlighted how language in themed fantasy play tends to be more creative and flexible; Singer and Singer (1990) also observed how children’s fantasy play is often highly original and imaginative. They contend that themed fantasy play (more than socio-dramatic play) enables children to play out and come to terms with important emotional tensions and themes. They map the distinction between children’s socio-dramatic pretend play and themed fantasy play onto Bruner’s (1986) distinction between different modes of thinking, and propose that the two types of play have different functions in terms of the holistic development of children’s imagination and thought processes. According to this conceptualisation, socio-dramatic play echoes Bruner’s paradigmatic mode of thinking: it is logical, sequential and analytical, involving ordering and categorising of events as children make sense of experience. By contrast, themed fantasy play echoes Bruner’s narrative mode of thought, as it is more creative, expressive and entails construction of real or imagined events.

The implication is that both socio-dramatic and themed fantasy play may contribute to children’s holistic development of social competence, but if children with autism are to access both paradigmatic and narrative modes of thought in this way, then they will need to be explicitly taught. Bruner and Feldman (1993) suggest that the failure of narrative ability and consequent difficulty in ‘cultural framing’ in children with autism, prevents them from organising their experience into forms by which others regulate their sociality, and go as far as to propose this theory as an explanation for autism; Jordan (1999) has highlighted the paucity of research to address this claim.

The studies of Leekam et al. (1997) suggest it is the lack of spontaneous gaze monitoring in autism that accounts for their failure to learn from others: ‘if there is no shared attention, there can be no common topics for elaboration’ (Jordan 1999: 106). Bruner and Feldman (1993) also draw attention to the difficulty experienced by children with autism in mutual imitation with a carer, and how in contrast, early interactions with normally developing children have a familiar characteristic ‘narrative’ shape to them, from which they generalise representations to other contexts. For example, a peek-a-boo game involves:

1. mutual eye-gaze (establishing a play context);
2. carer hides face (deepening involvement, introducing tension – a problem or dilemma);
3. carer reveals face...