Routledge International Handbook of Play, Therapeutic Play and Play Therapy

Sue Jennings, Clive Holmwood, Sue Jennings, Clive Holmwood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367347017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000228656
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Routledge International Handbook of Play, Therapeutic Play and Play Therapy is the first book of its kind to provide an overview of key aspects of play and play therapy, considering play on a continuum from generic aspects through to more specific applied and therapeutic techniques and as a stand-alone discipline.

Presented in four parts, the book provides a unique overview of, and ascribes equal value to, the fields of play, therapeutic play, play in therapy and play therapy. Chapters by academics, play practitioners, counsellors, arts therapists and play therapists from countries as diverse as Japan, Cameroon, India, the Czech Republic, Israel, USA, Ireland, Turkey, Greece and the UK explore areas of each topic, drawing links and alliances between each. The book includes complex case studies with children, adolescents and adults in therapy with arts and play therapists, research with children on play, work in schools, outdoor play and play therapy, animal-assisted play therapy, work with street children and play in therapeutic communities around the world.

Routledge International Handbook of Play, Therapeutic Play and Play Therapy demonstrates the centrality of play in human development, reminds us of the creative power of play and offers new and innovative applications of research and practical technique. It will be of great interest to academics and students of play, play therapy, child development, education and the therapeutic arts. It will also be a key text for play and creative arts therapists, both in practice and in training, play practitioners, social workers, teachers and anyone working with children.

PART I
Play

Introduction

Primarily Section 1 is interested in play in its most generic form. We bring a range of perspectives from around the world that consider play in its most basic but essential form, its ability to engage with children in a wide range of diverse and culturally appropriate perspectives. From research in play through to a range of uses of play in such places as South America, Africa, India, Malaysia and Japan, you will notice that as we move through this section we move towards a more “applied” use of play within specific contexts, which could be defined as moving towards more of a therapeutic intent at the end of Section 1.

We begin with Jones et al. and their groundbreaking research considering how children play and what goes on within play from a child’s perspective, and the importance for children and young people to have full involvement in “play-based” research. Chapter 2 considers the first of many uses of play within this book, in an educational context in Argentina, asking how play can help teachers teach, and children learn, in the classroom. Our third chapter considers the importance of play from Children First, a specialist mental health centre in Delhi, considering the use of play throughout the context of their organisation, staff down, working with children.

Chapter 4 switches continents and we consider participatory play from a theatrical and social context working with “street children” in the village of Mbalmayo, near Yaoundé, in Cameroon, acknowledging aspects of catharsis and theatrical conventions that relate to play. The following chapter, “The Ness of Being Playful”, reflects from a more philosophical perspective what we mean by playful “ness”. Chapter 6 takes us to Malaysia where we consider a particular perspective, “developmental play”, from a specific cultural and social perspective, working with children who are “differently abled”.

Chapter 7 offers us some practical applications and theoretical orientation towards aspects of play that might be considered to be leaning towards a “therapeutic” context using such notions as Sue Jennings’ Neuro-Dramatic play (NDP) (2011). Whilst the following chapter returns us to India where a whole social and cultural movement has developed in the village of Lilaloka, where play is considered absolutely core to everything they do. Chapter 9, our final chapter in Section 1 considers the complex and culturally and socially sensitive area of working with sick children in Japan, and the experience and struggles of an individual hospital play specialist and the children and families she works with. Matsudaira pleasingly finishes her chapter by mentioning the famous Buddhist priest Ryoukan, who insists on the importance of finding time to simply “play” with children. Something which appears to sum up this first section of the book well.

Reference

Jennings, S. (2011) Healthy Attachments & Neuro-Dramatic-Play. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

1
PLAY AND CHILDHOODS

How are the relationships between researching play and children changing?

Phil Jones, Sandra El Gemayel, Yaspia Salema and Rosie Flewitt

Introduction

Play does not happen in a sealed vacuum, and it is practised in myriad ways across time and cultures. One way of thinking about research in the field is how shifts in culture, politics, policy and environment change how children play and how adults relate to child play. Innovations in play research have been versatile and responsive to the emergent contexts of play: from enquiry that explores the impact of gender or poverty on play, to research that is constructed appropriately to conduct sensitive enquiry into play therapy. This chapter explores and problematises interdisciplinary connections between play, the new sociology of childhood and children’s rights. It examines how this relationship creates questions and new opportunities concerning how children and adults engage in research together. Three examples from contemporary projects illustrate how recent developments are resulting in important changes and innovation in how research, children and play relate to each other. The first concerns a ‘day in the life’ methodology (Gillen et al., 2007; Gillen & Cameron, 2010), the second ‘child conferencing’ (Huser, 2015) and the third a children as researchers approach (Jones et al., 2018).

Research, play, the new sociology of childhood and child rights

Recent literature on research involving children has included the evaluation of a particular ‘phase’ of theory and related enquiry, often described as being informed by the ‘new sociology of childhood’ and by children’s rights (Larkins et al., 2015). As Murray notes, children’s participation in ‘research in matters affecting them has become increasingly articulated. This development aligns closely with Articles 12 and 13 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC, 1989)’ (Murray, 2011, 92). These articles concern state parties assuring children the ‘right to express’ their views ‘freely in all matters affecting’ them and the ‘the right … to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds’ (UNCRC, 1989). Kellett summarises this phase as a ‘paradigm shift’, where children began to be seen as ‘participants’ with rights rather than ‘objects’, and that this is manifested in changed practices, such as children having places on advisory groups to guide research or children being researchers themselves (Kellett, 2010). Kellett describes key aspects of this change:

part of our responsibility in researching with and for children and young people entails developing their capacity for judgment, for communicating their views and agency for action. Good practice aspires to a partnership in which adults, children and young people generate a body of child research knowledge. Here, research with, for and by children and young people are complementarities that inform and interact with each other.

(2010, 4)

This approach is often framed in the literature by concepts such as power, collaboration and control. For example, Fargas-Malet et al. note that the ‘new approach has meant a methodological shift’ which has engaged children as collaborating with adult researchers within the ‘various stages of the research process, such as formulating the research questions, planning the methodology, collecting and/or analysing data, drafting recommendations and disseminating findings’ (2010, 175). They position this as mediated power and control: ‘differing levels of control-sharing and of participation in the research process’ between children and adults (2010, 176). Recent play-related research has begun to reflect this shift in attention and approach, for example, by exploring what children themselves think about play. In Barnett’s (2013) US study, children aged 8–11, identified as Caucasian, African American, Asian American and Hispanic, were invited to define what play meant to them. The research reveals that the children emphasised play as being fun and active, the importance of being able to play in the ways they wanted to, alone or with others, and of having time away from things they were obliged to do (such as school). Other studies have responded to the views of children concerning their play spaces, for example (Burke, 2005), or utilised play based interview methods in work with young children (Koller & San Juan, 2015).

Researchers have begun to problematise the nature of such child involvement in research and the ways in which adults and children participate and collaborate together. Invitations to re-evaluate participation have highlighted particular issues connected to children, adults and research (Flewitt & Ang, 2020; Larkins et al., 2015; McCarry, 2012; Powell et al., 2016). These concern a need to be especially aware of the relationships between the context and any act of participation in order to engage reflectively, rather than to essentialise the process. Larkins et al. (2015), for example, argue that there is a ‘lack of critique’ in much extant literature on participatory ‘rights based’ research. Authors such as Buhler-Niederberger, have warned against the danger of ‘children’s actorship being essentialised rather than analysed and therefore affecting the quality as well as the credibility of research’ (2010, 160). Einsdottir notes the particular ‘complexity’ and diversity of power issues within a research context with children, as ‘unequal power can exist in terms of age, status, competence and experience’ (2007, 204). Gaps in the literature concerning the need to review and evaluate the process and outcomes of participation and collaboration, from both adult and child perspectives, have been identified. Powell et al. (2016, 197) call for ‘a deeper engagement’ with the ways in which children are constructed in and through research, with greater reflexivity and professional dialogue creating ‘improved practice’ through ‘critical engagement’.

Three examples from research

This background illustrates how the interactions between play, rights and the new sociology of childhood offer new perspectives to approach the research process in relation to children’s play. These include how children are seen as participants rather than subjects, how the agendas for research emanate from children’s perspectives, and how the data and findings can be interpreted or responded to by children to enrich any enquiry and to recognize their participation rights.

A cornerstone for these new perspectives concerns how adults and children construct their research relationships with each other. The following research examples illustrate three different ways of working with relationships between researcher and children that are informed by such changed agendas. Rather than essentialising the participation of children in research as a given ‘good’, our presentation of data and analysis responds to the critiques of Buhler-Niederberger (2010) and McCarry (2012) by examining the nature of research conducted in specific contexts, and the particular benefit to participating children. Our approach to each example responds to calls in the literature to address gaps in our understanding of children’s participation by offering insights into the contextual details of the relationships between research, children and play.

Each example illuminates different facets of how researchers develop relationships with children and play:

• In the first example, the researcher creates a relationship with children who are in the complex situation of being ‘temporarily displaced’ (Government of Lebanon and United Nations, 2019, 4) in Lebanon as a result of armed conflict in their birth countries. In this study, a ‘day in the life’ approach is used to generate and share data with children, with a view to empower them to share and reflect on their play.
• The second example involves a researcher working alongside two young children, developing relationships over time to enable each child to work as a co-researcher of their experiences and perceptions of play. The child-researcher interactions explore the development of a ‘child-conferencing’ approach to meaning-making.
• The third example involves adult researchers training and mentoring young children as researchers. This extract illustrates children drawing on play as a data collection method in their research design. It shows the ways in which play can be an empowering method, how adult researchers draw on its potentials in their training of young researchers and how the young researchers reflect on its qualities in their enquiry.

All research was undertaken in concordance with BERA’s Ethical Guidelines for Educational Research (2018) and was approved by University College London Institute of Education’s Ethics Committee. All children and parents or guardians gave consent to for participation and for material to be published in anonymised form, using pseudonyms.

Research example 1: ‘day in the life’, play and children’s perspectives

This research investigated the impact of armed conflict and displacement on the play and childhoods of young Iraqi and Syrian children who were living as ‘temporarily displaced’ persons in Lebanon. The study, funded by the Froebel Trust, explored how armed conflict and displacement shaped the childhoods, play opportunities and constructions of play of young Iraq and Syrian child refugees in Lebanon, and how their opportunities for play could be improved.

The research involved conducting case studies ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• About the editors and contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Play
• Part II Therapeutic play
• Part III Play in therapy
• Part IV Play therapy
• Index