November 2014 Volume 1, Number 1

Privileged Play: The Risky Business of Language in the Primary Classroom

Dr. Jaye Johnson Thiel

University of Tennessee Knoxville

Abstract

This article illustrates the ways in which adults often privilege types of play that fall within white, middle-class assumptions of normality while sanctioning others—particularly those involving uncomfortable language and discourse—by narrating two stories in which educators react to and disallow student play in preschool settings. In addition, I illuminate how these narrative accounts of gatekeeping are closely linked to social class assumptions and hierarchies. This piece builds a conceptual-theoretical argument that invites educators to reexamine the types of play privileged in the classroom and challenge them to open up a pedagogical space for all types of playful experience to occur.

"BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! Uh, oh! Watch out! Here comes the Rent-A-Center truck."

Chunky shaped plastic people scatter across the floor by way of tiny hands as the block-made truck pulls down the center of a make-believe street of uniform-shaped block duplexes built by a group of young African-American males on the classroom carpet. I, a bystander waiting to pick up my own children, watched as the neighborhood boys continue to act out scenes from their daily lives in the afterschool room.

Community scenes.

Beautiful scenes.

Each enacted with brilliance and intellect and pride.

Much like Ellis (2004) and Holman Jones (2005), I draw from my own auto-ethnographic experiences to make sense of teaching and learning in traditional public school early childhood settings. The opening snippet is one such example, taken from an ongoing inquiry on play and schooling. As part of this autoethnographic exploration, I analyzed my personal teaching experiences in traditional public school early childhood settings and the ways power is produced and simultaneously producing within these spaces. I conducted the research represented in this article over the course of an academic year that I spent as a teacher researcher engaged in a study focused on how social and cultural issues significantly influence learning. The data in this study took place at a public elementary school in the southeast, demographically comprised of African-American and Latin@ children and families, with most teachers at the school being middle-class white educators. My research question asked: How can teachers connect learning to student lives and what culturally grounded understandings are needed in order to make these connections? The Rent-A-Center the boys mentioned in the opening narrative is a company that offers furniture, appliances, and electronics on a rent-to-own basis. The company typically serves families that are considered to be economically disadvantaged, have lower credit scores, or do not have access to lines of credit. As a result, the merchandise is borrowed with high interest rates and low payments, often making it difficult to reach a level of ownership. Over time, families often invest well more than the items current value by the time it is paid-in-full. The Rent-A-Center truck was regularly seen among the streets of our city, particularly in working-class and working poor neighborhoods, and was also highlighted in a frequently aired commercial on local television.

Seeing these boys conceptualize and theorize this moment during play was particularly fascinating for me. This group of boys shared such vivid and relevant parts of their lives at school, and having been a visitor in this environment, I felt extremely lucky to witness the kind of play that embodies the transference of community, home, family, and self while working together to act out a shared narrative, the kind of play I would hope to find in any early childhood classroom or afterschool community.

In fact, as an educator I have yet to encounter a teacher who doesn’t desire students to work together, create shared narratives, and build peer relationships just as the group of boys in the vignette. This pedagogical move is considered a part of teaching the whole child and is often marked as a “best practice” during small and whole group learning community work and practice (Wenger, 1998). Consequently, most educators have (on some level) experienced Vivian Paley’s (1993) text, You Can’t Say You Can’t Play. In this book, Paley narrates her attempt to eradicate peer social hierarchies in elementary classrooms through examining and challenging the systematic exclusion of others during play opportunities in a school community. Her analysis was so popular that I often find early childhood settings and elementary schools embracing the philosophy that students must treat each other as equals by enacting the rule Paley (1993) introduced in her classroom, “you can’t say you can’t play.”

However, reflecting on a series of events that took place over several months in several different classrooms during my tenure as a teacher caused me to examine and question the ways in which adults’ privilege and gate-keep this you–can’t-say-you-can’t-play rule, reserving it for student interaction only. Through these reflections, I began to wonder, what happens when teachers are the ones who create social hierarchies through the different kinds of play they allow and disallow in the classroom? In these moments I noticed that one can’t say you can’t play—unless it is someone older and with more power, such as a teacher.

The primary ambition of this article is to illustrate the ways in which adults privilege types of play that fall within a white, middle-class assumption of normality while sanctioning others—particularly those involving uncomfortable language and discourse—by narrating two stories in which educators react to and disallow student play in preschool settings. In addition, I hope to illuminate how these narrative accounts of gatekeeping are closely linked to social class assumptions and hierarchies. In this piece, I build a conceptual-theoretical argument—based on several narratives from my auto-ethnographic research in early childhood classrooms—that invites educators to reexamine the types of play privileged in the classroom and challenge them to open up a pedagogical space for all types of playful experience to occur.

Blue and White Blocks

Hard day at work. I need to pop open my Bud Weiser. GULP. GULP. AAHH!

Short, stubby, brown fingers slam back the blue and white cylindrical block in its grasp. Neighboring students laugh and start popping the tops to their “cans” as well. One student stretches out her feet on the floor space in front of her, crossing them at the ankles, as if she is propping them on a coffee table or ottoman. Everyone in the group smiles as the hard day they have encountered in their pretend play lives melts away. A sublime, but soon to be fleeting, moment at play.

Suddenly, the students jump, their little bodies rigid as a loud voice startles them, quickly approaching the block area.

“WHAT IS GOING ON HERE?”

Confused glances to each other indicate that none of these students is sure what has just happened. Why are they being reprimanded? What could they have possibly done wrong? The teacher, visibly flustered, tosses all the blocks that resemble beer cans into a basket, exclaiming to the students that “we don’t play that in this room”—but what “that” IS, isn’t clear to these four year olds as puzzled looks of shame fill their faces.

Slowly the students move away from each other and find other things to play—this time some are alone, others in pairs—but there is a strange feeling in the room that remains, as if some one has taken some of the joy out of it.

The blocks were packed up and put in a closet—out of reach and out of sight. The students never saw them in the classroom again, as it was decided anything that resembled or could be interpreted as a can of beer was inappropriate for the classroom space.

Now, I will offer another story that happened within weeks of the blue and white blocks incident…

Mixin’ Drinks

“Who else wants a drink while I’m mixin’ ‘em up?” the round-faced girl asks with eyebrows slightly raised and finger pointed to her housekeeping center company.

She is the perfect host as she attends to her guests, tossing things into the Fisher Price blender, even wiping her hands on her apron as she pretends to pour libations into plastic cups. As she wraps her tiny brown hands around the cup and starts to serve her friends, all of whom are sitting around a wooden table, a much larger hand reaches in and the cup is suddenly jerked from her grasp. Brown eyes look up in bewilderment as the teacher shoos the students away and proclaims in an exasperated voice, “the kitchen center is closed for the day.”

The students all scatter and small plastic cups, no longer being held up by four year old hands, fall over and roll across the table onto the floor—abandoned and empty—“spilling” pretend concoctions all over the play center dining room.

That afternoon, the administration and the Pre-Kindergarten teaching team decided with very little debate that the kitchen would be removed from the free play area. Teachers quickly packed up the kitchenette, appliances, and utensils as they explained the story to others in the building. Phrases of judgment such as “can you believe it?” and “these poor kids” and “what kind of parents do they have?” fluttered around the halls.

As an outnumbered onlooker, I sat silent—in shock and wondering if this was really happening—trying to decide how to respond to the story I was being told. But as the administration approached to oversee the classroom “renovation,” I felt there was nothing I could do and remained silent—a silence I often wish I could take back. The decree had been given and there was no turning back. As I retreated to my own classroom with feelings of defeat, I ironically heard someone in the distance say, “When I get home, I need a drink!”

Analysis: What is Going on Here, Indeed?

Mimicking the teacher from the first story I ask, “What is going on here?” The prekindergarten children in these two vignettes were engaged in the kinds of sustained literacy play that is encouraged in both theory and in practice (Dyson, 2003, 2013; Wohlwend, 2013). As educators, we want young children to engage in creating shared narratives, desire young children to experiment with discourse (spoken and written language, gestures, beliefs) and materials (objects, bodies, space), and encourage young children to develop meaningful relationships with peers in collaborative groups. With this in mind, the children in these stories are doing exactly what educators want four-year-olds to do: a) They are playing together and engaging in elaborative creative thinking strategies, b) They are appropriating materials to develop stories, and c) They are engaging in what Anne Dyson (2003) calls “remixing” (p. 25) by using the discourses (and materials) they have available to them to create extraordinary worlds of interactive play and storytelling. Yet, the children in these classrooms are not celebrated for their work. Instead, their work is seen as inappropriate for the classroom space and halted.

The school, a public elementary institution in the Southeast, predominantly serves working class and working poor families of color. Ninety-nine percent of students receive free or reduced lunch and as a result there are particular discourses are producing families in certain ways. In other words, when teachers use phrases like “these poor kids” and “what are these families thinking?” they demonstrate that they see the children at their school as deficient and “needing to be fixed” rather than noticing that moments such as these are actually reflections of intellectual work being created through play. But why?

Social Class and Racial Assumptions as Discursive Practice

In both cases, these educators saw children’s play and discourse as problematic because they have been used to reenact moments of adult-like behaviors—particularly drinking. But why are these actions seen as so troubling? What kinds of assumptions do we as educators make about bodies, families, and the way people live? It is very curious that discourses surrounding alcohol seem particularly problematic when working class children are the ones doing the performances, particularly when those children have black and brown skin. Reading these types of assumptions as socially classed and racially biased ones—particular assumptions about what it means to be a certain type of person from a certain type of family—educators (and educational researchers) must ask where do these assumptions come from?

A reasonable explanation might be the way drinking in the United States is framed differently based on social class and racial stereotypes. One only needs to look as far as their own television to find a few examples of these distinctions. Television shows such as Mad Men and Modern Family use drinking as an everyday social event that is not only accepted as part of the cultural norm but also often expected as part of the lives these television characters lead. Commercials between televised series and movies highlight drinking as a fun past time and make up a significant portion of the advertisements shown during on-air sports events The John Hopkins Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth (2010) reports that “the alcohol industry spent $491.7 million to place 59,461 ads in 2001, $597.3 million to place 80,548 ads in 2002, and $540.8 million to place 90,817 ads on sports programming television in 2003” (p. 3). Most of the time these characters are portrayed as white, middle-class or affluent individuals of power who use drinking as a social and cultural activity.