Further Perspectives on Researching Play from a Playwork Perspective

Process, Playfulness, Rights-based and Critical Reflection

Pete King, Shelly Newstead, Pete King, Shelly Newstead

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780429685569
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Building on the success of the first volume of Researching Play from a Playwork Perspective, this book further develops the crucial research of playwork as an emerging and unique discipline.

The first volume explored how an understanding of playwork theory and practice can inform research into children's play. From the seven contributors, four common themes to researching play from a playwork perspective were identified: rights-based; process, critical reflection and playfulness. This second volume aims to explore these four factors from two angles. The first considers how four more playworkers have researched play in four different contexts: prison, gender and toys, in Dutch play provision, and in the area of autism. In the second part of the book, the four pillars of playwork research are explored by academics from other disciplines with an interest in playwork research.

This will be of great interest to researchers and upper-level students in the fields of playwork, childcare, early years, education, psychology and children's rights. It will also appeal to practitioners in a wide variety of professional contexts, including childcare and therapy.

1 Playwork in prisons
An exploratory case study

Yvonne Quaintrell

Introduction

My first experience of playwork was as a volunteer at a local church in a deprived area of North Manchester during the late 1990s/early 2000s. There was a strong sense of providing something much needed for a deprived community. Whilst this role was not labelled in any way as playwork at the time, it has since become very clear to me that this is exactly what it was. From my perspective, the emphasis was on children having fun and my role was as a facilitator of that. I tried to listen to children’s suggestions and provide the games, activities and play they requested. I gave them freedom to play, only intervening when asked, or to deal with behaviour problems that arose, which to be honest were few and far between. These were all principles of playwork, although I would not have called myself a playworker then. I was completely unaware of playwork as a field at that time and did not know that my ethos was one that sat very comfortably within that.

During 1998, I started part-time work as a playworker for a local charity. However, my experience of this role was that a playworker was just another form of childcare, and was similar to the experiences I had had as a nursery nurse. So, my first introduction to ‘playwork’ as a concept was one that mirrored the role of a ‘nursery nurse’, and the two were synonymous to me at that time. I also worked for some time as a childminder, but on reflection I feel that it actually had stronger links with concepts of playwork. Children in my care had freedom to play with the toys and games around the house and outdoors. They made dens, created imaginary worlds, built with construction toys and drew pictures. We went on walks, baked cakes, made models out of boxes and by and large had fun! There were no end goals or products for their play. I liked to provide materials and let them do what they wanted without the pressure of meeting some end product. Of course, there were arguments and tantrums as well, but unlike in other childcare environments I had worked, I felt that I had more freedom to give children space to resolve these for themselves. Looking back, I think that this role was particularly influential in developing my playwork ethos, although I did not realise it at the time.

I have spent the last 18 years teaching on a range of childcare, early years, playwork and education courses for potential nursery nurses, childminders, teaching assistants and playworkers, and I have also studied to master’s level in Psychology. It wasn’t until I took on the role of setting up the playwork apprenticeships for a local college that I really began to understand the theoretical concepts of playwork. I read ‘The Foundations of Playwork’ by Fraser Brown (2008) and began to have a light-bulb moment. I was reading about a discourse that sat much more comfortably with me and one that made me aware of other approaches that adulterate play for the purposes of structured education. During this period, I supported students who worked for Partners of Prisoners (POPs) in a prison within Greater Manchester. Having never had direct experience of visiting in prisons, I was not sure what to expect when I got there and was very keen to observe this new phenomenon. I saw children during a standard visit with a play area to one side of the visiting hall. I was inspired by the work that POPs were doing and could see the need for the play area; children were clearly in need of a safe space. Since then I have observed the continued development of such sessions and play areas by POPs and other charities in a number of prisons, where they have offered specific programmes that utilise free play sessions with children and their imprisoned parents. The difference I observed between these and standard visits has been exciting. There is clearly more research needed to fully understand this and develop the practice of playwork in prisons further. Whilst enrolled on a doctoral programme I spent some time considering what it meant to be a playworker and how this might be translated into a research project. This chapter develops an outline research design for such an investigation based on my own understanding of what it means to research play in prisons from a playwork perspective.

Researching from a playwork perspective

For this chapter, I was asked to reflect on how my perspective as a playworker might influence the design of research. The overarching themes of my own practice as a playworker are the four themes of rights-based, playfulness, process and critical reflection (King & Newstead, 2017).

Rights-based

My practice has been very much influenced by the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), in particular, children’s rights to play and their right to be heard (United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), 2018). Playwork professionals are uniquely placed to advocate for children’s play, and their role is in identifying and removing barriers to play (Wragg, 2011). This is very much behind the motivation for any research into playwork that I do. From this rights-based perspective playwork research should really seek to keep the child at the centre of the research process by considering their voice and the impact of the research process on them and their play (Wragg, 2011).

Playfulness and process

Playfulness and the play process are also key elements of both my practice and any research I conduct. I strongly believe that playful approaches can be extremely effective in lots of spheres of life. Understanding of this is developing with the growth of research into the use of play in other areas, for example, within teaching at Higher Education (Nørgård, Toft-Nielsen, & Whitton, 2017). It should also be acknowledged that there are often power imbalances when researching, particularly when working with children, as the researcher is often perceived as the authority figure (Leeson, 2009). This could impact on the child’s space and play as well as the research itself. I am very passionate about protecting children’s play spaces, including within research. By taking a playful and interactive approach we can ensure that children’s participation is voluntary, comfortable and in an environment where power imbalances are addressed (Leeson, 2009).

Critical reflection

The final area of influence on my own playwork perspective is that of critical reflection. Reflection is an essential element of the role of any playworker (Hughes, 2012) and therefore also of the playworker in research. There has been much discussion of the impact of playworkers on the play space and how much playworkers influence children’s play (e.g. Sturrock & Else, 1998). I would be keen to take a reflexive approach (Taylor, 2002) for any research I conduct, particularly research involving children, as this would be vital in acknowledging the impact that my own presence might have not only on the research and how data is gathered, but also in terms of how I might interpret the data.

Planning research from a playwork perspective – a case study example

The following section demonstrates how this playwork perspective can influence the planning of research and in particular how this might be applied to research into playwork in prisons. I am particularly interested in objectives concerned with collecting data on the number of prisons in the UK that use playwork approaches and ascertaining how they use playwork practice. I would also want to explore the impact (if any) of playwork approaches on children and their interactions with their (imprisoned) parent. To do this I feel that an interpretivist, qualitative approach would be most appropriate.

The interpretivist paradigm is concerned with how people interact and get along (Neuman, 2014). Interpretivist approaches take the position that ‘truth’ or knowledge varies and is socially constructed. People are viewed as actors with their own ideas of the world, who attach meaning to what is going on around them. The goal for interpretive researchers is to understand individuals’ experiences and the meaning and value they place on these (Lapan, Quartaroli, & Riemer, 2010; Neuman, 2014) This is pertinent to this research, as exploring the value that individuals and organisations place on play, and their perspective of play and its purpose, is vital in understanding what playwork means within prisons. For this research, I would be interested in understanding the experiences and attitudes towards playwork in prison by different actors within the prison environment such as prisoners, playworkers, prison staff and children.

Two stages to the research would address both the quality and experience of playwork in prisons: first, an environmental scan (Graham, Watch, Evitts, & Thomas-Maclean, 2008) and second case studies (Yin, 2003). The environmental scan would be carried out to ascertain what playwork practice is used within prisons in England and Wales. This would involve scanning prison websites and existing inspection reports and talking to visit organisations to find out whether playwork is used, and how. From this, I would then identify three prisons to study, based on their use of playwork and willingness to participate. Case studies would include observations during visits of playworkers and interviews with playworkers, parents (prisoners), prison staff and children.

Environmental scan

Environmental scans were originally used within management as a means of identifying factors affecting the business and obtaining information to enable decision-making (Graham et al., 2008; Rathi, Shiri, & Cockney, 2017). Rathi et al. (2017) give examples of ways in which environmental scans have been used in non-business settings as a way of identifying issues or challenges. They point out that environmental scanning is of particular importance where there is uncertainty or complexity, and this would certainly be the case with this research. Playwork in prisons is relatively under-researched, and therefore there is no clear data as to what is out there. Equally, playwork in prisons is offered by a range of charities funded via many different means, and so there is no coherent cataloguing of the services provided across the nation. An environmental scan would enable an identification of prisons that offer playwork, and this would enable me to identify a selection of prisons that may be suitable case studies for the research.

Case studies

Case studies are used in a wide variety of fields, and this is an approach that focusses on a specific phenomenon in context (Hammond & Wellington, 2013; Robson, 2002). It is generally accepted that case studies set out to explore with little pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Foreword: on the importance of research in play: sticking to the data
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Playwork in prisons: an exploratory case study
• 2 Using playwork perspectives and ethnographic research to move towards an understanding of autistic play culture
• 3 Techniques and methodologies for undertaking research from a playwork perspective in the subject area of toys and gender
• 4 Developing a playwork perspective from Dutch research experience
• 5 The power of stories: using narrative methods in playwork research
• 6 Imagining playwork using sociological perspectives from Mills, Foucault and Gordon
• 7 Dancing with the devil or a means to fulfil potential?: enumeration and playwork
• Conclusion
• Index