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Revolutions in Play

13 Mar


My experiences over the past four days have added to my optimism that we may well be seeing the emergence of a new progressive movement–one that puts play and performance at the forefront of the fight for a more just and humane world. I’ve been a member of The Association for the Study of Play for almost a decade and I present at their conference every year. It’s always a good experience to spend time with fellow academics that research, value, and proselytize about play. However, this year was especially exciting. The conference took place in Newark, Delaware and was a joint production with the International Play Association (a group that advocates for play for all human beings). While there continues to be a concern that play is under attack in many key societal institutions, there is also a growing interest in and acknowledgement of the innovative ways that play is being used to reinitiate development, to cross ideological boundaries and geographic borders, and to challenge calcified roles and identities.

My colleague Tony Perone and I led a session/conversation titled Revolutions in Play: Advocacy, Research, and Practice, where we introduced participants to a few of the thousands of grass roots projects that are emerging around the world including: The Miracle Project and the Hunter Heartbeat Method, both of which create theatre with people diagnosed with Autism; the Memory Ensemble that does improv comedy with people suffering from dementia and Alzheimer’s; John Bohannon- who began an organization called Dance your PhD; and of course The All Stars Project, which builds environments for inner city youth to develop through play, performance, and pretense. People were particularly excited to hear about the opening of the All Stars new center in Newark, NJ that houses the Institute for the Study of Afterschool Development. The participants were very receptive and appreciative of being introduced to fellow play organizers around the world and it sparked a conversation about how one goes about bringing a movement into being. At this session we met Seniz Yargizi Lemmes, a fellow improviser who lives in Minneapolis and has a website called YesAndParenting.com and Pat Rumbaugh who told me about Let’s Play America.

Of course in addition to introducing people to the work of others, I got to meet and talk with other play organizers.

• Martha Llanos is from Peru and she uses puppets to organize children to become advocates for play and peace.

• Kaboom! is an organization whose mission is to make sure there are safe places to play within walking distance of every child in America. I’ve known of Kaboom’s work for years now, but this week I got to spend time with Danielle Marshall, Director of Community Engagement and Shawn Lin. We talked about how the All Stars and Kaboom! could work together to provide leadership to other advocates and practitioners of play.

• I also saw Joan Almon, a good friend and the founding director of the Alliance for Childhood, and Fran Maniella, the co-chair United States Play Coalition. I continue to be inspired by the commitment of these two women who have spent many decades advocating for the need for our nation to make play a national priority.

All in all the conference was a great experience and, as I said, it confirmed my growing experience that there is a grass roots play revolution brewing and we have to keep organizing it into existence!

 
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Creating the Play Revolution…

11 Nov

When was the last time you played a really good board game? Monopoly, Checkers, Shoots and Ladders. For many of us these games lose much of their appeal once we leave childhood, but what if you had the opportunity to create your own board game?

I just finished teaching a three week Revolutionary Conversation at the East Side Institute called The Play Revolution: Practice, Research and Policy. It was an exciting opportunity to share my passion for play and to explore the growing number of organizations and individuals that are putting play into practice for everything from invigorating classroom practice and bringing innovation into business, to addressing the deprivations of growing up poor. Members of the class took a playful look at the internet and found a wealth of organizations, individuals, and websites that give expression to the ways people are tapping into our human ability to play to challenge some of the alienation and “stuckness” of human life. We marveled at the creativity of John Bohannon who invites academics to replace powerpoints with dance and of 9-year old Caine whose cardboard arcade is inspiring children everywhere to make things. We listened to people all over the world create street music together through an organization called Playing for Change.

One of the characteristics of play that we explored in the class was the ways in which play puts us in touch with our ability to create. When we play, we can break from the seeming scriptedness of adult life, and perform in ways that are less alienated. We practiced this by choosing activities that we normally just “do” in our lives and we played with them. Some people created games to play while riding a crowded subway and others had conversations with their family members that broke from the usual scripted ways of speaking. We had old conversations in new ways. In class we explored the relationship between the small moments of play that we could create and the need for the species as a whole to tap into our ability to be playful with the most challenging of differences.

On the last week of the class we pulled together our conversations and explorations and collectively created a game called The State of Play.

It was a double whammy play experience–the creating of the game was improvisational and creative, and the playing of the game was in many ways a creative imitation of every board game we had ever played. There were rules to the game, but in the style that very young children play; we were constantly bringing new rules into existence at the same time that we were actually playing. The starting line of the game said, “Get everyone who is playing to play a game together that everyone can succeed at.” So, even though we had just spent an hour creating one game, we quickly regrouped and collectively created another game together.

One of the most exciting features of the game is that it is not over. At some point in the evening we each landed on a square that directed us to pick a card. The cards gave directions for continuing the play once we left the room. For example, my card said, “to ask a stranger to create a poem for you.” At the end of the evening one of the participants pointed out that if we kept creating the game wherever we went, eventually play would take over the world.

 
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Afterschool Growth!

30 Oct

On Friday I was in Chicago serving as a panelist in the Afterschool Growth! Conference that was Co-sponsored by the All Stars Project of Chicago and the Institute for the Study of Play, a national All Stars “initiative in progress” to advance the practice and research in Afterschool. The conference was inspiring–it brought together a diversity of participants rarely, if ever, in a room together. This included practitioners (program directors, managers, coordinators and on the ground afterschool workers); innovators–people who are creating or bringing the most cutting edge practices into poor communities; young people who attend these programs; researchers, academics, and doctoral students who are interested in doing research; and funders and individual donors.

The All Stars, with their amazing ability to produce quality in everything they do, put together a day that was informative and provocative–beginning with keynote addresses by three key leaders in the Afterschool arena: Gabrielle Kurlander, President and CEO of the All Stars Project, Dr. Mary Ellen Caron, CEO of After School Matters, and Dr. Lenora Fulani, Co-Founder of the All Stars Project. All three of them talked about the unique role that Afterschool has to play in the lives of children and youth living in poverty, and how important it is for Afterschool to develop an independent location, separate from the schools, where young people’s creativity can be nourished and valued.

The experience of being at this event was that it could be a “game-changer.” I’ve been on the board of the All Stars Project for over a year, and one of my goals as someone who consults with the organization on educational matters is to help dramatically change the conversation about education in the United States.

For decades, schooling has been related to as the means out of poverty for poor children of color. But there is growing evidence that this has been a catastrophic failure when it comes to our poorest communities, and particularly those of color. On the other hand, programs like the All Stars, and the other innovative programs represented by youth and adults at the conference (YOURS Project; Chicago Run; Street-Level Youth Media) are transforming the lives of young people through a diversity of activities ranging from running, to orchestral music, to technology, and talent shows. And they are not doing it through remediation, they are doing it by giving the young people opportunities to be creative, to be part of an ensemble, and to connect to a wider world. As a developmental methodologist I understand this as giving the young people an opportunity to perform ahead of where they are and to develop. Development does not eliminate poverty, but it does create opportunities for human beings and communities to create new things that could impact on poverty.

The conference also gave us an opportunity to highlight another aspect of the All Stars leadership in the arena of Afterschool. For the past year I’ve had the privilege of working closely with Dr. Bonny Gildin, Vice-President for Educational Initiatives at the All Stars, on the Institute for the Study of Play. We are working to create a new kind of partnership between universities, community based organizations, policy makers, and the business community, that would allow a field of Afterschool Development to emerge. Afterschool in this country has always been an afterthought. There are no departments of afterschool or ways for people to be trained in the most up-to-date and creative practices. And there is no real body of research that can help us make discoveries about what we do.

The conference included an afternoon breakout session on research led by Bonny Gildin and myself, where we began a very interesting conversation about what we, the people who are on the frontlines of Afterschool, would want to discover about our work. Joining us in the session was Dr. Robert Halpern, the author of Making Play Work, who shared that while the field of afterschool is old (programs began appearing over 100 years ago), the research agenda in it is very young. And in the 1990’s it “took a wrong turn” and became inextricably linked to school success–making it enormously vulnerable to losing its unique role in the development of children and youth. The over 30 participants in the session then spent the rest of the afternoon collectively creating an emerging research agenda that would support diversity, innovation, creativity, and culture development.

The conversation is just at the beginning, but it is clear that there is a great deal of interest in following the All Stars lead in growing Afterschool to take its place at the center of a movement to transform the lives of poor children and youth in this country.

 
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Playing around with Annie

27 May


When the lights came up at the production of Annie I attended last Monday there was no clapping. Instead, looking around the auditorium of the St Francis de Sales School for the Deaf the parents, fellow students, and guests were waving their hands in the air in the American Sign Language sign for applause. I joined in wholeheartedly. I was so appreciative of the young performers up on stage who had, in 45 minutes, and completely in American Sign Language (with simultaneous translation into English) captured the humor, playfulness, and kid’s rights message of the musical.

This was the second time in as many weeks that I had been to see a theatre production with children labeled as having special needs (see my previous blogpost–) and I’m more convinced than ever of the value of theater for going beyond remediation. The elementary and middle school children adapted the play over 15 weeks during their afterschool program. And what was most striking about the performance was the ways they worked together as an ensemble—to dance and act their way through a streamlined but completely recognizable version of the musical.


My friend, colleague, and mentee Anne Alexis invited me to the performance. Anne, who is a supporter of both the East Side Institute and the All Stars Project, has been a speech therapist at St Francis for 25 years, and she is committed to bringing the most cutting edge approaches to her work. Anne’s been studying social therapeutics with me for years. A few months ago Anne shared a story with me. She was working with a young boy who was constantly in trouble with everyone—his teachers, parents, the principal, and Anne herself. One day they were working together and he was well on his way to having another bad day. He wouldn’t listen to directions; he was touching everything, getting angry. Anne was getting frustrated and finally turned to him and said, “You are looking for trouble.” Then she took a piece of paper and wrote TROUBLE. She told him to wait outside and she quickly hid the piece of paper. They spent the rest of the session looking for “trouble.” They found big TROUBLE and little trouble. The playfulness of this activity delighted me. Rather than trying to fix the boy and the situation, Anne decided to play with it. Its this willingness to play that captivated me on Monday night and that inspires me in the work of educators like Anne.

 
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Performance Works Miracles

17 May

Last night I saw a funny, touching, and creative piece of theater called A Brief History of all Things performed by the Miracle Project Players, a theater group made up of children and teens with autism, special needs, learning disabilities, and their siblings.

Over the course of 20 weeks the young people use techniques from improv theater to write the story, compose the music and lyrics, and choreograph a dance. The resulting 60-minute devised musical theatre production began with the calling to order of a meeting of the Genius Club, a ragtag group of 14 boys and girls who make decisions by expressing their complete disdain for any idea proposed and then going ahead with it anyway. One of the members has found a way to time travel and he cheerfully proposes that the club try it out. The group, which reminded me of my department meetings at Rutgers, meets his suggestion with grumbling, disagreement, and skepticism (and some concern for the disruption of the timeline). However, unlike my academic colleagues and I, the group jumps into a series of adventures that take them back in time to save Abraham Lincoln, hear FDR’s inaugural address, meet and sing with Michael Jackson, and pay tribute to Whitney Huston. As the young people sing in the final song, the time tour was a window into their interests and passions.

As a developmentalist I so appreciated the ways the kids were able to be who they are—they stared off into space, they had small repetitive movements, they spoke under their breath and at the same time they were able to perform as other than who they are—they said their lines, they sang the songs, and most movingly they performed as an ensemble. At times I could literally see them choosing to support the play, to bring it into existence rather than to just do what they “normally” do. That to me is the power of performance—we do not have to stop being ourselves, but we are freed up to be other than ourselves at the same time. Aaron Feinstein, the director of the Miracle Project in NYC (the program was begun in California by Elaine Hall and is featured in an HBO documentary Autism the Musical) and ActionPlay says that he has no interest in “fixing” the kids; he wants to give them an opportunity to create theater as the individuals that they are. I couldn’t agree more. We need more people like Aaron, and Elaine Hall, and my friend and colleague Social Therapist Christine LaCerva who do not let a diagnosis keep them from relating to all young people as being capable of development. On June 8th I will be moderating an event called The Human Cost of Diagnosis with Christine, Lois Holzman, an outspoken critic of the diagnostic model, and sociologist Gil Eyal, author of The Autism Matrix.

 
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08 Apr

I was immensely proud to be a guest speaker at the Development School for Youth (DSY) Orientation in February. Here is a video of the talk:

Carrie Lobman at DSY Orientation

I am a proud member of the Board of Directors of the All Stars Project, the performance based, outside of school youth development project that created DSY and other innovative and incredibly effective programs. The young people of the All Stars inspire me, and I was thrilled to have the opportunity to share with them my passion for, and knowledge about, the importance of play in the lives of everyone!

 
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Serious Play at the Association for Childhood Education International

06 Apr

Last week I was invited by my colleague Debora Winewski, the president of the Association for Childhood Education International, to be an invited speaker at their Global Summit on Childhood in Washington, DC. It was a wonderfully organized conference with over 600 people attending from 70 nations. The conversation was exceptionally rich—with discussions on everything from the impact of poverty, to childhood sex workers, to access to outdoor play spaces, and issues of educational equity. I found the event to be a refreshing change from many of the academic conferences that I attend. Many of the participants were advocates, social-entrepreneurs, or scholar-practitioners, who are finding creative ways to support the healthy growth and development of children all over the world. I was particularly moved, for example, by the youth presenters from the I am Norm campaign—a leadership program where young people with and without special needs decided to take out a campaign that challenges our assumptions about what and who is normal. Rarely have I seen a presentation at an adult conference that is that professional and completely led by youth! Inspiring.

I was one of six presenters on two consecutive panels on Promoting Play in the Lives of Children: A Conversation with Supporters and Advocates. My co-presenters included Fran Maniella, president of the US Play Coalition and the former director of the U.S. Parks Service; Kwame Brown, the founder of Move Theory; Danielle Marshall, director of Community Engagement Programs for Kaboom!; Joan Almon from Alliance for Childhood; and Michael Patte from The Association for the Study of Play. What stood out for me from the panel presentations and the wonderful that discussion that followed with members of the 100+ audience, was the recognition that we are in the midst of a play crisis that is effecting children (and adults) all over the world. Here is an excerpt from what I had to say on that topic:

Poverty has a devastating effect on hope, particularly for young people, in part because it robs them of one of the most developmental and hope-filled activities of childhood–play. Humanity is in the midst of a play crisis. I am obviously and happily not alone among educators and play researchers to say this. In addition to economic, natural, educational, and political crisis, we are in the midst of a play crisis. A recent study of 16 countries, including the United States, India, Vietnam and Pakistan, found that children had fewer opportunities for free play than previous generations (Singer, Singer, D’Agostino & Delong, 2009). In public schools in the United States elementary school aged children are allowed a mere 26 minutes a day for recess and that also includes eating lunch. But this play crisis is not affecting everyone equally. The poorer you are the less time you are given to play. Poor children are twice as likely as middle class children to go to school for a longer day and to have less time for play. And even more critical is the 80% of their lives that are spent outside of school. While more affluent children often spend this time in creative endeavors like dance, or travel, or even one youngster I know who takes classes on inventing, poor children here in the United States are often in programs that attempt to mimic or imitate the school day—leaving even less time for play and children living in poverty the world over spend their time working to survive. Read the rest of this entry »

 
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Heading to The Association for the Study of Play

25 Jan

On February 15-18 I will be attending, and presenting at, the annual meeting of The Association for the Study of Play (TASP) in Albuquerque, New Mexico. TASP is a multi-disciplinary organization that includes researchers and practitioners, a rarity in the siloed world of academics. Members come from the fields of education, psychology, anthropology, biology, history, recreational therapy, playwork, and social work. In my opinion this is how the most interesting ideas get generated, when people who don’t think alike get together. The organization was founded in 195X by, among others, Brian Sutton-Smith, whose influential work on the cultural significance of play in human life, has shaped several generations of researchers (see The Ambiguity of Play (1997) and Play as Emotional Survival (forthcoming) and has helped shape how play is seen by the general public (See The PBS series The Power of Play). Since then its been the intellectual home (and sometimes sanctuary) for a number of influential scholars including Jim Johnson and James Christie whose seminal work on play and child development is required reading for early childhood educators and Dorothy and Jerome Singer who continue to advocate for the importance of dramatic play for literacy development in an age when didactic methods dominate.

My colleagues Tony Perone, Barbara O’Neill, and I have been working to expand the organization even more to include the important and creative playwork being done around the world by people who identify with performance more than play. One of our goals has been to introduce the long established world of play research to the growing and vibrant community of Performing the World. To that end I will be making two presentations at the conference, both in conjunction with my playful colleagues. Barbara O’Neill and I co-edited volume 11 of TASP’s Play and Culture Studies Series on the topic of Play and Performance and we will be presenting the book at the conference with Sally Bailey, Stacey DeZutter, Kristen French, Ruth Harman, and Debora Wisnewski, the authors of several of the chapters. Tony Perone and I will offer a session titled Co-create, Not Negotiate: An Improvisational Approach to Offering and Developing Play that shares how an improvisational “yes and” approach challenges our assumptions about disagreement, conflict, and negotiation.

I’m really looking forward to all the rich dialogues that happen at this conference and I will be sure to keep you posted.

 
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A Year of Revolutionary Conversations

01 Jan

For the past three years I have been the pedagogical director at the East Side Institute, a non-profit research and training center for new approaches to human development and learning. In that role I design and supervise the Revolutionary Conversations series on an array of topics (from creating humor to philosophical discussions on medicine) that highlight the Institute’s developmental and conversational learning approach. In 2012 we offered 28 classes to over 500 participants. As the year draws to a close I’ve been doing some reflecting on what I’ve learned about teaching and learning from helping others to do it.

I see at least two threads weaving their way through the Institute’s offerings this year. The first is a focus on mundane creativity and the joy of making things with other people. As children many of us enjoyed hours with our friends and siblings making stuff for no particular reason—potholders, forts, mud pies, and model airplanes—but as adults we are often so focused on getting things done that we are not able to see or make use of our creative potential. At the Institute this year we offered a number of Revolutionary Conversations that gave people an opportunity to create with others in a relaxed and emergent manner.

In September David Belmont, musical composer and arranger, and Sandy Friedman, the shop foreman of the Castillo Theatre teamed up in How to Make and Play a Guitar where participants (almost none of whom were musicians nor craftsmen) built real guitars and created a musical piece that was produced in a professional recording studio. And in What’s so Funny—All of us! Marian Rich, Mary Fridley and the participants collectively discovered that they could create humor with even their most painful life circumstance. And back in July I teamed up with architects Doug Balder and Alejandro Gonzalez for a three-week conversation called Dreaming New York. We led a diverse group of participants (some were professional architects and designers and others were laypeople) in an exploration of the Flatiron district of New York City that culminated in us collectively improvising a design presentation on our vision for the future of New York City. In Talking to People in Public Cathy Rose Salit, president and CEO of Performance of a Lifetime and Christine Helm, director of the Enterprise Center at the Fashion Institute of Technology gave participants a chance to make and perform their personal, professional, and fantastical stories in ways that allowed them to connect with their audience. And in one of the more interesting examples of creating, in the online seminar, Creating the World, Gwen Lowenheim teamed up with creativity expert Keith Sawyer to engage people in the activity of creating conversation about creativity!

Another growing strength of the teachers at the East Side Institute is our ability to help participants grapple with compelling, provocative, and challenging concepts and material. What I mean by grappling is the collective creating of philosophical, playful, inquisitive conversations that does not rush to conclusion or the making of a point. It is in these spaces that ordinary people with many different life experiences can slowly engage with material that is often left to academics and subject specific experts.

This thought provoking activity is the aim of all of the Institute’s offerings, and is a particular hallmark of four of our most popular Revolutionary Conversations led by the Institute’s leading practitioners, methodologists, and teachers. In The Thought Leadership of Fred Newman, Institute director Lois Holzman, helps participants read and collectively understand the postmodern Marxist philosophy that is the hallmark of the work of her collaborator and mentor the late Fred Newman. And in Breakthroughs in Youth Development and Helping Clients Discover the Other Lenora Fulani and Christine LaCerva respectively take practitioners and others on a journey to explore the enormously successful work at the youth development programs of the All Stars Project and the performance based group therapeutic practice at The Social Therapy Group. And finally, in Where is the Magic in Medicine, medical doctor and educator Susan Massad has begun a critical exploration with healers of all types on whether and how to integrate the remarkable advances of medical science with the vital subjective experiences of providers and patients.

Overall, I am enormously proud of what the Institute has accomplished pedagogically in 2011. We have, in small but significant ways, helped hundreds of people rediscover the joy of learning in ways that lead development. And I can’t wait to discover what we create in 2012. Hope you will join us!

 
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Challenging the Dichotomy of Art and Science

10 Dec

My mentor, the late Fred Newman, once said that if he were to re-design schools he would teach young children nothing but the philosophy of symbolic (mathematical) logic and dance. A provocative idea from a radical guy. But it came to my mind this week when I read an article in Education Week STEAM: Experts Make Case for Adding Arts to STEM by Eric Robelen.

STEM has been a buzz phrase in education for several years—it represents, often in the form of increased funding for research and practice, the push to prepare students for participation in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. More recently however, there have been a number of articles that call for a move from STEM to STEAM—with the “A” representing the inclusion of the Arts. Those advocating for such a change rightfully point out that the creativity and outside-the-box thinking that are the hallmark of the arts are also a key part of scientific discovery.

“There is creativity in STEM itself, super genius in it, … but in arts education, it really is the raison d’etre to be out of the box, to accept the chaos,” said John Maeda, the president of the Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence. Artists and designers, he said, are “risk takers, they can think around corners.” (Harvey Seifter, the director of the Art of Science Learning)

The addition of “A” to STEM is a hopeful sign that people in both arenas are questioning the dichotomy between art and science, a division that serves neither group. That division over the years has led to the teaching of science and math as set of ahistorical truths and to the teaching of the arts (when its done at all) as if there is no rigor required. But what about the enormous creativity and play that was required for the discovery of DNA and the precision and discipline needed to dance in Swan Lake? What is breathtaking and inspirational is that human beings have managed to create the fields of art and science and what would be developmental for students would be to relate to participate in activities where they come to see themselves as capable of such creations.

What seems exciting about a move from STEM to STEAM is that it could help shift the focus in all disciplines towards creativity, play, rigor, and collective imagining… something that is sorely needed in school and beyond.

 
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