Re: Play in the classroom

Jay Lemke (JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU)
Fri, 05 Jan 96 15:42:36 EST

Artin's recent note on play and carnivalesque situations in
classrooms, that there is a lot of spillover between the
play and non-play social situations, reminds me also of
Stanton Wortham's work on 'participant examples' in classes
with older students. There hypothetical discussions often
find themselves with doubled meanings, the second (and perhaps
for some participants primary) constituting real or perceived
social relationships and attitudes that may have some analogy
with those of the hypothetical (academic, historical incidents
etc) situation. Stanton is of course on xmca and can describe
this further if people are interested.

What I see in common here is that the sharp division of
reality and fantasy, of real and pretend, of role-play and
role-enactment, imagined and experienced, is itself a work
of effort and culture. I find this often in conversations with
people who are not as comfortably middle-class or over-educated
as most of us, especially younger people. It is _not_, I think,
that they have simply not fully _developed_ a sharp demarcation
of this great cultural divide, but that the divide itself is
very historically and culturally (subculturally) specific, not
universal, not developmentally inevitable, and that it takes a
lot of work to establish and maintain it. Think how often the
lack of such a clear divide has been used to characterize other
cultures, especially those for whom myths continue to be as
real as what counts as real for us, and denigrate them as
'childlike' on this account.

If it is not a deficiency, but a difference, in other cultures,
then it is likewise not to be seen as a sign of immaturity in
our children and youth, but rather again as a sign that they have
not built the divide that we have been taught to build. Their
advantage, among other possibilities, is that the play world
becomes another semiotic stage for the negotiation of 'real-world'
relationships; that what happens there _counts_ 'here' as it were.

This in turn leads to the question of the functions, especially
possible hidden or not-so-nice functions, of our maintaining a
firewall between these domains. We know the usual theory that
play allows more risk-free experimentation, and risk-reduction
through the disavowal 'it was only play'. But does not the divide
also function to create the possibility that some people can
define what counts as 'real' and what does not? and so to create
the possibility of a certain kind of power and possibility of
control of others? Does it not create a 'reality' which seems to
be (and functionally is) much more limited in its range of
possibilities. Where, for example, you may pretend to be of a
different gender, act like it, be treated as it, etc., but you
must still _be_ of only one gender? A realm where socially
unacceptable desires and fantasies can be disavowed? For how many
in 'our' culture is it still sensible that, 'if a man have sinned
in his heart' it is as if he had sinned in deed? And that makes
a link more generally to the thought/deed, word/deed, sign/action
sets of dichotomies that many of us struggle against.

One aspect of carnival is that for one day the wall comes down.
Not the wall between rich and poor, but the wall between meaning
and matter, sign and truth, play and the 'one' real world. Is this
the opposite of education? or the essence of it? JAY.

JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
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